> The Rise of the Network Architecture

8 july 2009 - Henrik van Leeuwen | The project The Netbook and The Library is based on a worst case scenario: the end of the central public library. In this case the most important question would be how to still access public knowledge. So in this scenario we are looking for the condition of the library (providing publicness of information—e.g. books), not for its institutional form. We are looking for ways in which, in spite of its physical disappearance, something of a library may still exist by means of networks.

In our scenario, public knowledge is accessible through the Netbook. Netbooks are not physical books, nor are they e-books, nor are they low budget laptops computers known under that name. We propose that the Netbook describes how a single book exists over the net, distributed and fragmented in various incarnations and forms. Netbooks are decentralized, but coherent networks of knowledge.

Without having to purchase the book or even enregister, we attempt to scrape content from publicly available sources in order to make the netbook physically exist. Published books exist as incomplete netbooks; parts are available via the limited access of Google Books and Amazon. People may have spoken about them or posted citations from them on the internet. How does the Netbook materialize?

Case study: Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000

We will describe The Rise of the Network Society as a Netbook in the three following ways:

• The ‘Netbook as a book' is a reconstruction of The Rise of the Network. Society as it exists in fragments. This netbook contains snippets of the book collected from different sources.

• The ‘Netbook about the Book', enables one to get to know The Rise of the Network Society without reading the actual book itself. This Netbook reproduces the core thesis of the real book through references, links, descriptions and citations, and represents the impressions and myths as they are built around the title. In this Netbook the original book is reconstructed through different types of information and media: text, image, audio and video.

• The ‘Netbook as a Public Space’ combines the different public spaces around the book and registers the physical architecture of the decentralized public library.

The project team members: Daniel van der Velden, Femke Herregraven, Henrik van Leeuwen, Kees de Klein, Nina Støttrup Larsen, Rozemarijn Koopmans.

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