Don’t just sit there shouting at the television, get up and change the channel

a networked model of communication in the cultural politics of debt

Abstract

Understanding political communication using a networked model is not simply a case of opposing linear with nonlinear communication, of mainstream media with social media, or television with the internet. Rather it is about seeing the whole of the communication system as complex, unstable and indeterminate. Networked communication includes within it both broadcast and dialogue but does not separate them out. Each part of the system has the capacity to determine the potential of the other, with meaning a product of the change they effect on the system as a whole. Understanding broadcast as existing within a networked model reopens the potential for invention that the statistical model of information must foreclose in order to function.