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.