Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding
"...The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding - or allowing the decoding of - the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the otaxher. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves."
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 260)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The rhizomatic nature of the internet allows certain anti-capitalist groups to ward off the capitalist machinery
"The rhizomatic model presents a problem for the dominant systems of capitalism in place in the global economy and the behavior of capitalism in general. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the function of a capitalist system is a schizophrenic behavior which encompasses the 'decoding' and 'deterritorializing flows' of breaking down existing systems of society such as church or family in order to extract the maximum amount of capital and then instigate 'their violent and artificial reterritorialization' through 'ancillary apparatuses' of capitalism such as the government or corporate bureaucracy which reterritorialize grouped elements to extract an even larger share of capital.2 Like any other system within its reach, the capitalist machinery attempts to behave in this schizophrenic manner with regards to the internet. The rhizomatic nature of the internet, however, allows certain anti-capitalist groups to ward off the capitalist machinery on the net due to the particularly advantageous characteristics of the rhizome for these minority factions."
(Amanda Wasielewski)
2). Amanda Wasielewski (2005). 'The Antidote to Capitalist Power: Rhizomatic Networking on the Internet as a Framework for the Success of Anti-Capitalist Minority Groups Against the Schizophrenic Capitalist Machinery'.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
A working definition of computer-mediated communication
"A working definition of CMC that, pragmatically and in light of the rapidly changing nature of communication technologies, does not specify forms, describes it as 'the process by which people create, exchange, and perceive information using networked telecommunications systems that facilitate encoding, transmitting, and decoding messages' (December, 1996). This seems to encompass both the delivery mechanisms, derived from communication theory, and the importance of the interaction of people that the technologies and processes mediate (Naughton, 2000). It also provides for great flexibility in approaches to researching CMC, as 'studies of cmc can view this process from a variety of interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives by focusing on some combination of people, technology, processes, or effects' (December, 1996)."
(Alexander Romiszowski & Robin Mason, 2004, p.398)
1). David H. Jonassen ed. (2004). 'Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0805841458.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
