Network Stories

Proponents of cultural environmentalism, then, need to tackle the normative theory: to formulate a theory of "the network" as a whole that explains what makes it good. Here, Cohen asserts that what makes a network good can only be defined by generating richly detailed ethnographies of the experiences the network enables and the activities it supports, and articulating a normative theory to explain what is good, and worth preserving, about those experiences and activities. Furthermore, generating a normative theory of the open network requires more than a theory of intellectual property or telecommunications, and "doing the science" of cultural environmentalism requires more than appropriation of the environmental metaphor.