I've been trying to get a better grasp of the connection between Foucauldian discipline and 'Web 2.0' systems (I hesitate to use a term so vague and ever-changing). After writing about this in response to a post Matt McAlister made a few weeks ago, I've had some time to give this more thorough thought.

The ideal of cyberspace was once characterized by a cartoon in which a dog at a computer states "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog." The thought that we can erase identity (which, in turn, implies a creation) was the romantic notion that drew people to this new phenomenon. In this conception, our non-Internet identities didn't have to influence our online interaction. This ideal is a rejection of individual classification, a rejection of individuation. We could assign our own disposable identities, leaving them behind at will and without record.

The Web 2.0 ideal takes the opposite approach. The concept of attention (see AttentionTrust for more info on this), the proliferation of social networking sites (AirTroductions, MySpace, Facebook, etc.), and social tagging (especially as tags begin to represent the tagger as much as the tagged) all revolve around the idea that our interactions create value and make the traces we leave through interaction not only explicit but central to our experience. Stephane Lee is more or less correct in saying that Web 2.0 is a larger e-mail form. In aggregate this becomes what I've called our (deterritorialized) projected identity. In Web 2.0 we enage with our technologies primarily through classification, both of ourselves and others. I am classified through these blog entries, through the bands I list on MySpace, through my tag-cloud on del.icio.us, and through my click stream. I am also classified by others when I am "friended," when someone tags a blog entry, and even when someone visits this site. This system of classification is becoming even more explicit and representative through new tools like VisitorVille, which eerily depicts the visitors to a site as Sims-like figures. Web 2.0 interaction, our projected identities, is necessarily classified.

The shift from pre-Web 2.0 (cyberspace seems like an appropriate term for this idealistic period) to what we now call Web 2.0 is essentially a shift from a philosophy of erasure to a philosophy of classification. This is a similar transition to Foucault's concept of a move from monarchical power to a diciplinary power. In the move toward discipline, institutions created individuals, organized bodies into spaces according to their characteristics. This mechanism of power implied the factory just as much as it implied the duality of prison guard/prisoners, boss/workers, the singular and the mass of individuals. Yet where our Web 2.0 system differs is that the act of classification is a collective action. We are no longer classified by institutions but by ourselves and our peers. The top half of the singular/multiple duality has been shaved off. Emergent tags are becoming the prison guards.

Without this split, where we have entirely internalized our discipline, with distributed surveillance, we can see that Deleuze's "society of control" is not so far from the disciplinary society after all. In his "Postscript on Societies of Control," Deleuze claims that we are shifting to control through modulation rather than Foucault's enclosures (home, school, hospital, etc.) due to crises of these interiors. Yet instead of the dissolution of these interiors, perhaps we are witnessing the distributed emergence of control. With increased potential for connectivity, spaces become increasingly irrelevant, thus the institutions that thrived on enclosure now seem like stop-gap solutions: solutions to enact control until the concept of enclosure itself comes into question.

Posted by Nathan at 07:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

There have been several interesting and loosely related posts lately that have caught my eye. HorsePigCow has an entry asking why people tag. The explicit reason for tagging is the organization of material for personal convenience. I tag a photo on Flickr or a site on del.icio.us so I can access it later and have it grouped with similar items I've come across. Yet where tagging becomes more than simply an organizational tool is when we look at the social and emergent aspects. When we become aware of emergent tags, as in del.icio.us, a process of feedback begins. The tagger is suddenly aware of the larger implications of their individual action in relation to other individual action. It is not a stretch to assume that a tagger will be influenced, either positively or negatively, through awareness of emergent tags. Overall, this type of feedback will stabilize the emergent tags, or in extreme cases of imitation the folksonomy becomes more of a traditional taxonomy.

In addition to systemic feedback, the social aspect of tagging that we commonly see will effect the function of tags. In a social context tags organize not simply the items tagged but the taggers themselves. "Social_network" and "blog" are two of my most common del.icio.us tags. Because my tags, and their relative frequency, are displayed in a social context, these tags begin to operat not as tags of the specific pages, but as tags of me. People who visit my del.icio.us page will be able to learn a great deal about me, and the identity I project through my tags. When tagging I am certainly aware that I am doing this in a public situation, that others might try to navigate the information I have otherwise organized simply for myself. The tags, then have to function as self-tags.

A second post I found thought-provoking was Scott Karp's on his blog Publishing 2.0. Scott writes that with Web 2.0's focus on the participation and content-creation of audiences (produsers) we end up with sub-par results stemming from a less intelligent audience than certain old media audiences. To take this approach simplifies the purpose of these systems to a certain extent. Sure the top stories on Digg may not be the most interesting but they, ideally, reflect the network from which they grow. Instead of saying that The New York Times audience would inevitably create a more sophisticated user-created content page and that this implies an inherent failure of Web 2.0 systems, we should look for user-created content in networks that more accurately reflect our interests, what we consider interesting. It is not a problem of the structure but a problem with finding one you fit into.

This ties in with the purpose of tagging question in that we tag (a form of content creation) for different reasons in different contexts. In a fairly narrow network demographically, the drive to create content will be very different than it would be for the same people operating in a different network.

Posted by Nathan at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Kent Newsome wrote yesterday about the hardships of blogging. I've seen many blog posts about this in the past, after all what do bloggers know better than their own medium? But where Rubel's post struck a chord was in this section:

"Some of your readers will become your friends. This part of blogging is really a cross-blog social networking thing that is, as I have said before, the natural evolution of the internet message board. We trade ideas, comment on each other's post and generally carry on a conversation.

That's a wonderful thing and it's one of the main reasons I keep doing this.

But the other 98% of your readers don't know you from Adam's housecat. To them you are just a name in an RSS reader with a post or two to be scanned. They won't keep reading because they like you. To the contrary, they may stop by once or twice, but if they don't affirmatively like what they see, they'll move on."

More than that however is his point that he considers some people in his blog-neighborhood as "friends." I'm assuming here that he means friends in a non-blog sort of way; if blogging were to stop, these relationships would continue. If this is the case, what is happening is that bloggers' social networks are beginning to mirror their blog-network. Network structures are flowing from type 2 to type1. Previously, I had associated the three network structures I outlined with the three main sections of the power-law continuum of the "long tail." (The long-tailers as type 1, the magic-middle/big-butt as type 2, and the A-listers as type 3.) That the middle-residents are becoming more like the long-tailers implies an aging social network. Perhaps the type 2 structure, and hence the structure of the middle of the power-law curve in blogging, is an unstable state. Blogs in the middle will either tend upward in the curve, becoming more like broadcast entities, or, after remaining in the middle for a while, come to resemble the network structure of the long-tail, where one's social network is increasingly reflected in the blog-network.

Perhaps, then, the predictions that the middle-blogs are the future of blogging are off. With increasingly insular and closed networks (as type 1 networks are) the myth of a unified "blogosphere" becomes even further from the truth. We need to start focusing on the long-tailers as the meat of blog-networks. How can they operate in a socially beneficial manner? Are bloggers doomed to always be preaching to their choir as their choir preaches right back?

Posted by Nathan at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I have had a problem with the widespread use of the term "the blogosphere" for a little while now. While I certainly use it frequently in casual conversation, it doesn't seem to accurately describe its subject. The term glosses over the multiple nature of the network and network interactions.

"The blogosphere" is actually made up of multiple networks, to refer to it as a singular entity ignores the different types of interaction that go on. A personal blog in which a person writes about their daily events is likely part of a network that mirrors that person's social network. The blogger will link to and read his or her friends' blogs; there may be a visitor or two from the outside but the system in which they interact is essentially closed and reflected. Interaction on the blog-network occurs parallel to, and in conjunction with, interaction in the non-Web social network.

In the crude illustration below, the red lines represent the non-Web social network links, the green lines the interaction between blogger and blog, and the blue represent linking between blogs.

Interest-focused blogs operate in a different manner, on a different style of network. Rather than being a reflection of an outside network, the bloggers are interacting using their blogs as intermediaries. For example, I write in Swarming Media and link to Matt McAlister, who then may link to me. We are interacting through our blogs and have created a network connection. As this process multiplies across a number of blogs a neighborhood arises, a group of comparatively closely interlinked blogs. This is what forms what is commonly referred to as the echo chamber. It is this second type of network interaction that makes up the "big butt" or "magic middle" of the long tail.

Again, the crude illustration below demonstrates that interaction in this second type of network happens solely along the blue lines.

A more interesting implication of this second type of blog network is the role that the blog plays as substitute for the blogger. The writing, the design, the links become a surrogate for the blogger, it becomes one face of his or identity. Others will interact with me through my blog, thus my blog has become one of my main signifying entities within the network. (for more on projected/deterritorialized identity within a network see this post)

A third type of blog-network interaction is done among blogs that act more as broadcast entities. These are often the "A-listers" or the blogs that are more unidirectional and less reactive than either of the previous forms. PBS' MediaShift is an example of this. It is an interesting blog that covers pertinent issues thoroughly, but it remains largely unreactive to interaction in a sort of neighborhood that interaction in the second type implies. The process of interacting with MediaShift is similar to interaction with PBS itself. A network of viewers can form and there is the possibility of reaction on the part of content creation, but for the most part it is a unidirectional hub/spoke system.

In this crude illustration the yellow lines represent the directed interaction between blog and reader.

These are just three types of interaction within blog-networks, I'm sure there are many more variations. Additionally, breaking up these networks into separate categories doesn't demonstrate that these networks are often interlinked, but they importantly show the neighborhoods in which interaction chiefly occurs. Over all, the existence of these very different modes of network-based interaction shows that to refer to all of these with the singularizing term "blogosphere" is reductive. It implies a unity that goes against the very nature of what it is trying to describe. We interact in multiple networks, with an inherently multiple, deterritorialized identity. Perhaps a remedy for this would simply be to pluralize the word: to speak of "blogospheres" rather than the blogosphere.

Posted by Nathan at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Blogging is a process of writing in an explicitly networked environment. Yet unlike other explicitly networked writing (most academic writing is explicitly networked through citations) when writing for a blog, links become a substantive element of the writing. In large part this is because the availability of blog-writing is almost directly proportional to the number of links to it; linking has become the structuring fiber of writing in blogs. How has this changed the process of writing and the relationship of the author to the work?

Alex Wright posted a piece yesterday that asks wether this system of substantive links (a supposedly meritocratic system) actually ends up burying significant works. He compares this possibility with the point that Einstein's theory of general relativity is rarely cited in scientific papers. Thus in this other explicitly networked writing environment, where value is often based on aggregation of links, an enormously valuable work does not measure up. But what happens now that out-going and incoming links are part of the substance of writing, when not-linked implies not-read?

Networked writing becomes even more complicated with blogging given the connection to personal identity and ego. When the writing product is so often linked to the inner thoughts and emotions of the blogger (think of the frequency of words like "musing" and "ranting" to describe the blogging process) the process of linked writing becomes a process of linked identity. This is what Doctorow's "whuffie" and "egoboo" are all about. When our product becomes our person, the "success" of the product will be indistinguishable from the "success" of the person. An explicit example are the many blogs that are titled with the author's name; if I search for the links leading to Alex Barnett, David Weinberger, or Matt McAlister's blogs, I will be informed of their personal "rank" if only for the fact that their writing and their being are labeled the same. That "success" has come to be defined by links leads to even greater reliance on linking as the substance of writing. The less-linked blogs will attempt to receive links from the highly-linked.

We have come to a point now, where ego, links, and writing have become inextricably combined in the form of blogging. If you take one of these three aspects out of the equation, you are left with a newspaper article, an opinion piece, or some ephemeral combination of ego and links (perhaps a social networking profile?).

Posted by Nathan at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is a continuation of the connections between new media network interaction and Deleuze & Guattari's concepts in A Thousand Plateaus. That said, while it doesn't directly mention many other topics bouncing around online communities, parts can certainly be extended to conversations on attention (see Alex Barnett and Attention Trust for this) and the personal use of Web 2.0 applications. Also Adam Marsh at EconoMeta addresses a similar issue from an entirely different, yet very interesting, standpoint.
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When interactiing in developing online media (anything from del.icio.us, to OkCupid, to MySpace) we are leaving traces of our identity, of our personality perhaps more accurately, everywhere we go, on everything with which we interact. This is becoming especially true in Web 2.0, and folksonomy-based applications where the process of interaction fundamentally alters the function and output of the interactive system. To speak in specifics, look at your Web-traces. If you're like me, you'll have a blog or two on which you have posted an array of material; you'll have several social network site profiles, one for each site, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc; you'll have Last.FM and Pandora accounts, and so on. At each of these arenas you leave traces of your/a personality. There are the lists of reccomended music, your lists of friends, and any amount of data that we leave behind either intentionally or not through the process of interaction.

In aggregate these traces are our projected identity. It may be the combination of several pseudonymous sets of interaction, it may be bare-bones factual, but this is the sum identity that exists as a result of our movements through and interaction with these applications. The projected identity is inherently multiple. It is a multiplicity. It draws from the many interactions, personalities we take on. David Lat's projected identity draws as much from his former role as "Article III Groupie" as it does from his personal list on 43 Things (if he should have one). Thus the projected identity is made up not only from the different avenues through which we project but also the full spectrum of what we project. This is our own "wolf pack" as D&G would put it, our own swarm. And as much as we lead to this multiplicity, this multiplicity leads to us.

But the projected idenity is not only multiple it is also deterritorialized. Just as the hand and face are the deterritorialized body and the landscape a deterritorialized world, the projected identity is a deterritorialized identity. But like the face it is a more intense deterritorialization than something like the hand because it does so on levels beyond simply movement and boundary and into signification and interaction. We operate through the projected identity, continually adding more tendrils, more avenues as we go along keeping the process of deterritorialization moving as well as repeatedly confirming the multiplicity.

Yet as D&G write, "one never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape." So what is the reterritorializing pair for the projected identity? It would seem that the natural pairing for this is the database as the deterritorialized archive. The database, the list of the traces that make up the individual tendrils of our projected identities, is in a very literal sense, a deterritorialization of the physical, panoptic archive. The relationship between projected identity and database is much like that between hand and tool (use object). The tool exists for the hand, the hand exists for tools, just as the projected identity exists to be in a database (otherwise funcitonality of the specific applications would be lost) and the database exists to store projected identities. We now have our pair, the projected identity reterritorializes on the database.

To draw back a bit from the linguistic mire through which D&G often lead those who follow, the important points to take away from applying their analytical process to new media network interaction are 1) the multiplicity of a projected identity and 2) that this projected identity is deterritorialized from individual personality/identity and reterritorialized on the database. Just as there are the face-landscape, hand-tool systems, there is a projected identity-database system of which we must remain aware. The obvious unwanted social implications extend to surveillance and impersonation, but culturally, we are creating selves outside ourselves. Many-tendriled projections.

Posted by Nathan at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)

With the recent blog-related controversies at The Washington Post over the shut down of comments on subsidiary blogs and subsequent, reactionary "blog rage" as well as with The Wall Street Journal's accusation of poor ethics among bloggers who do not fully disclose connections to companies they are writing about, the question arises of what role a blogger takes/should take in society, what exactly a blogger is.

Jeff Jarvis has written about this very question and has come to a similar conclusion as I have: that bloggers cannot be considered journalists in the same sense as a reporter for a newspaper. In fact I would go even further to say that the very nature of blogging is a completely different mode of discourse than journalism. This essential difference stems from the basic property of blogging as we know it that blogs are a vehicle for the projection of identity rather than the erasure of identity implied by journalistic standards of objectivity. This combined with the ease of publishing makes blogs essentially the ground for highly personal material of interest to a small number of people. Take any random blog on Blogger as an example, you're more likely encounter a 16-25 year old recounting daily events than an expose intended to take down the powerful. It's these small blogs that demonstrate the basic operations in blogging. Perhaps some bloggers see themselves as journalists, and many when they reach a point of popularity do begin to resemble more hierarchical forms of broadcast media, but beneath the veneer, they are still operating in a network that thrives on individual projection followed by collective, yet largely unorganized, action.

The problem is that pre-Web media seem to want to create blogs, bloggers, and "the blogosphere" (a reductive term implying a singularity not representative of the diversity) in its own image. This is very clear in Jim Brady's response to the vicious attacks on his character on blogs.

"Blogs are at odds with each other just as often as they're at odds with the media. Similarly, there are thousands of traditional media organizations in this country -- newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and magazines, most with their own Web sites. And anyone who has ever worked at one of them can testify that the media is not one big happy family. We're extremely opinionated about what our fellow journalists do. And it's impossible to say that either blogs or the mainstream media share one philosophy."

Let's compare the process of Brady's piece with the process of this entry. Surely the process that lead to Brady's piece being published involved a variety of editors, conversations, and discussions before it was printed. What you are reading at the moment, however, I may read over once or twice before I push the "publish" button, but is essentially an entirely individual endeavor. Then comes the network aspect. Brady's piece was published in print and online; readers have the option to tear the paper up or frame it, but the level of interactivity is relatively low. My piece here, however, is connected to other blogs via trackbacks and links, it is an attempt (the success of this attempt is not important at this stage) to engage in the network of surrounding blogs. All in all then, opposite paths have been struck between these two. Brady's article was subject to a very limited public (WP editors etc.) before becoming isolated through hierarchical distribution. This entry begins as an isolated unit, then is subject to a degree by a public after it has been published due to the distributed construction of the network.

Scott Karp's recent entry "Is the Long Tail a Lit Fuse?" also raised the question for me of just who bloggers are. Karp writes, and correctly so, that while starting a blog is easy and cheap, keeping it going is not. This I've learned in my attempt to keep this thing going. He suggests that unless we find economic models to compensate blogger's time, the number of non-spam blogs will shrink. While I completely agree with him as far as this applies to blogs and bloggers like him, who put care and effort into what he publishes, I think, like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post (though to a lesser extent) Scott is ignoring the large section of bloggers who make up the meat of the blogging network. These people may occasionally post something with careful thought behind it, meant to have wide effect, but generally they post about their lunch last Tuesday, or that sweet party they went to last night. Perhaps instead of seeing a widespread decline in blogging, we will see a strengthening of these more relaxed blogs.

And if we get to the point where these relaxed bloggers, collectively, are the hubs of interaction, will The Journal demand that they form a code of ethics?

Posted by Nathan at 08:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ran into two articles today that seem to miss a mark. In These Times has a piece entitled "Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?". The article covers the perceived rise in blogs and blogging as sites of political action. Overall it is generally right-on, recognizing the structure of the medium. However, she, like Michael Cornfield (Cornfield seems to see new media networks simply as fundraising apparatus for established party leadership) who she heavily quotes, don't seem to recognize that in order to understand the potential of blogs as a political medium, it would be helpful to look at the small blogs rather than the A-listers like DailyKos. DailyKos, and other highly-trafficked blogs, have essentially become broadcast media outlets. To take them as representative of politically minded bloggers as a whole would be a mistake. The author does recognize this but proceeds to only analyze the A-listers. See Chris Anderson's Long Tail for more on the importance of the little guys. They're the ones that make up the structure of the "netroots" (an interesting word choice for it's rhizome connection) by linking and engaging in conversation.

The second piece I encountered was actually on a political blog of the type I mention above: Personal Democracy Forum. Their post entitled "The Dark Side of the Smartmob" starts with this: "Whoever figured that mobile phone / text-messages were always a "good thing" for 21st century political organizing might consider this..." It then continues to describe how smartmobby technology helped organize attacks on Danish embassies and the like (in response to the recent publishing of a cartoon featuring Muhammad). Is this supposed to surprise us? Convince us that this is a technology that should be univerally decried for its use in violent acts? Distributed networks, around which smartmob technololgy is based have long been used for the purpose of terror and violence. If anything, this should prove the power of these networks and make it all that much clearer that we as people without violent intent should get started and use these mediums for our own purposes.

Both these articles address the power of new media as a tool for organization on an essentially politcal level. In the first case it is for peaceful and electoral purposes, in the second it is violent and non-electoral, but no less political. What can be said, though is that the use of new network structures to create violence has proven the ability of these networks to mobilize a connected and passionate population. Perhaps Democratic political blogs will prove electorally useful (and my guess is that they will though in as of yet unpredictable ways, simultaneously being hyper-localized to individuals and collapsing physical distance places into question the devotion of resources) or perhaps after the 2006 elections, blogs will have proved to be lacking either the connectivity or the inherent passion necessary to mobilize the network.

Posted by Nathan at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having been made my way through parts of Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, I've been wanting to put some thoughts down on the connection between swarming forms of media and their concept of the rhizome. The reason the concept seems such a natural comparison to the new type of user-media interaction is that the rhizome is based on principles of connectivity and heterogeneity. This type of formation stands in contrast to the hierarchical tree, "any point...can be connected to anything other, and must be." So instead of chains of meaning and power leading from one point to the next we have any node with a potential for connection to any other node within the system. This is the idealized vision of new media network interactivity: universal connection in opposition to uni-directional paths. In this sense, D&G have provided a strong grounding for analysis of such networks.

Is it a problem, however, that this concept is being applied to a network/network-system as proof of its difference from other forms? It seems that D&G are attempting to adapt the way we conceive of almost everything: the creation of meaning, power structures, cities, etc. They are not setting it up in opposition to a non-rhizome, but explaining, rather, that these non-rhizomes indeed operate rhizomatically on some level. So rather than thinking that the concept of the rhizome reifies swarming media, it might be more appropriate to say that swarming media could reify the rhizome.

In many ways this connects with the current and past debates over the relevance of the term "cyberspace." Two posts on The End of Cyberspace describe Dan Hunter and Cory Doctorow's "nominations" for new words to replace this fading term. The essential problem is that "cyberspace" does not seem to reflect the emergent, interactive, and rhizomatic qualities of what we see developing. Is this optimism, or are we witnessing the development of an explicit actualization of D&G's concept; a system that openly aims to thrive in a distributed fashion?

At the same time as this perceived shift from tree to rhizome occurs, it's hard to avoid the occasional story of corporate interests chopping up this root system, blocking access, interaction for the sake of profit and power. This fear represents the idea that corporate entities represent hierarchical systems in their purest and that these systems are a threat to the rhizome. Yet I would think that D&G might argue that the power of these entities comes from their manipulation of the rhizomatic power structure and creation of meaning rather than their internal organization. Perhaps then these horror stories cannot be painted with such broad strokes.

Posted by Nathan at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt McAlister posted a thoughtful response to mine about Foucauldian/disciplinaty implications for tagging individuals (as opposed to objects like websites, though this could be extended to an individual in many cases). Unfortunately I haven't had time to re-respond unitl now.

Matt writes:

"There may be cases where building meaning from collections of tags will give institutions dependent on structuralism some kind of new insight that could be used for power or for classifying people into buckets or something. But those are just fears that should never be used to stop progress."

Posted by Nathan at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)