I seem to find myself referencing a Scott Karp post once again. This time it's a piece from a few days ago, "Web 2.0 vs. Privacy." I've written frequently in this blog about the issues of distributed identity and distributed control in these new media and about Web 2.0 enacting a philosophy of classification rather than the modes of erasue seen in earlier social media. In his post, Scott comes to similar conclusions that I have, essentially that what we have come to call Web 2.0 is founded on a basis of mass-self-surveillance:

"Web 2.0 only works if we’re willing to cede any grasp on privacy by sharing everything we do online — even everything we think, through tagging, commenting, voting, etc."

It's this process of "sharing" that leads to the new structure of control that has emerged in these media. It is a decentralized, distributed control, springing from our multiple links, tags, profiles, and projected identity tendrils. By making all of this visible - but more by making visibility the point of these interactions - we experience control not from singular institutions but from eachother.

Kathy Sierra takes a more amusing look at this desire for visibility.

I discovered a blog today (thanks Marisa Olson's wonderful del.icio.us bookmarks - an advantage to all this visibilty and sharing) that seems like it could be very interesting. It's called Ten-sided and seems to be an attempt at exploring new modes of creativity via blogging. I'll spend more time writing on this in the next few days but for right now I'll just put down a few quick notes about my initial reaction to a section of their "About" page:

"...attempts to use the blog as a directly creative medium can be challenging, because the blog is a tool that downplays the role of the individual author. Instead, bloggers place themselves within a dense web of interlinking authors, and the act of blogging is more like participating in a conversation than giving a rehearsed speech. This stands in stark opposition to the standard model of artistic authorship, in which an individual or tightly coordinated group creates an artwork for a passive audience."

They are correct in noting that blogging takes place in a heavily networked environment, but I'm not sure I agree that blogs downplay the individual. With these new media, including blogs, its often necessary to simultaneously take two analytical approaches, on that focuses on the aggregate and one that focuses on the singular. We cannot understand online identity without accounting for its multiplicity, but at the same time we have to look at the singluar-to-singular interactions that make up the multiple. To say that blogging downplays the individual is simply not true when a blog is viewed in the singular, it is entirely of the individual. Yet it is true that the individual is downplayed when we view blogging in aggregate.

A second issue I have with this section of the "About" page is the authors' insistence on tying blogging with speech acts: "conversation" and "rehearsed speech." It is limiting to view this medium as an extention of speech especially when their goal is to explore creative avenues of blogging. While the style of writing that has developed among blogs has some similarities to speech acts (as much as bloggers using the terms "ranting" and "musing" annoys me), it is textual and has far different semiotic significance than speech. This is especially true when we shift back out again to the aggregate.

That said, I'm very interested to see where this blog goes.