Rettberg states that the forms of network writing he detailed all share one thing in common- that through their self-reflexive nature they “encourage audiences to reconsider the situation of the human in the contemporary network apparatus.” Rettberg also states that the works all “provide us with opportunities to defamiliarize and rethink the ways that we engage with the network”, but what if instead, the works provided us with opportunities to defamiliarize and rethink the ways in which the network engages with us? From challenging corporate control of the internet to confusing the NSA, all of these products seem more interested in messing with the system rather than making us think about why the system needs to be messed with in the first place.
Network Effect, on the other hand, immediately makes me think about how I, and the human race as a whole, interact with the network. Opening with the message that
“YOUR TIME HERE IS LIMITED
From your IP address, we see you live in The United States, where the average life expectancy is 78.4 years — so after 7.84 minutes (7:50), your access will be blocked for a day, so you can get back to your life.”
serves to open the conversation by making a user wonder how the webpage can get that information before they have even seen the website. With words such as grieve, meditate, laugh, play, puke, smile, eat, cry, destroy, and fly displayed in alphabetical order, the project uses a wide variety of verbs both positively and negatively associated. Including metrics such as the dominant gender that partakes in the verb and the percentage of male or females that partake in the said verb, a graph detailing the action’s rise through the years, changing headlines pertaining to the verb, the number of people who are currently doing the verb and people interacting with the verb to some capacity on social media, as well as video footage of people interacting in some way with the verb, as well as being superimposed over the sound of a heartbeat continually grounds the user and reminds them of their humanity and the humanity of those they are watching throughout the experience. Network Effect ends with
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” —Carl Jung
LEARN MORE
To see more, please wait”,
and then a countdown begins at 24 hours- a lasting message left for a user to ponder both what lais inside their own heart and what happens after the 24 hours is done.
Once the 24 hours is up, a user simply returns to the starting page of the experience. Is this a statement about the endless cycle of interaction with the internet we find ourselves in today?