Contemporary digital networks increasingly function as infrastructures that organize communication, cultural production, collectivity, and the production of meaning. At the same time, the traditional Western model of intelligence and subjectivity, grounded in the Enlightenment conception of the autonomous rational subject, has become increasingly inadequate for explaining forms of thought and sociality that emerge from complex relations among humans, technologies, and information flows. Despite the development of theories of planetary intelligence and distributed cognition, the question remains: how are these transformations articulated within specific cultural contexts, and what alternative forms of networked organization may emerge within an increasingly centralized digital infrastructure? This thesis examines how contemporary digital networks reshape understandings of intelligence, subjectivity, and collectivity, and how Japanese cyberculture produces alternative models of networked sociality. The research is based on theoretical and qualitative analysis of philosophical, media, and cultural sources, combined with interpretive analysis of selected examples from Japanese popular culture and online communities. The analysis is structured around a transition from theories of the noosphere, planetary intelligence, and technodiversity toward the study of concrete media phenomena. Digital networks are approached not merely as technical systems of information exchange, but as infrastructures through which new forms of collective intelligence, subjectivity, and cultural production emerge. Japanese cyberculture reveals specific forms of networked imagination, in which the internet becomes a space of participation, memetic circulation, collective identity construction, and fictional production. In this context, Remilia Corporation points toward possible alternative futures of internet sociality beyond the increasingly homogenized and centralized platform internet, contributing to a broader understanding of networkedness as a technical, cultural, and epistemological condition of contemporary social life.
|
