The Economist has printed an entire seciton on new media that I just finished reading moments ago. In general it seems they spoke to all the right people (Weinberger, Jarvis, Sifry, and - yes, I'll say it - Murdoch) and covered the right topics in an open-minded, yet thorough manner. One theme that rose to the surface for me in immediate reaction to the collection of articles was one of referring to all these developments within media as "democratic."

This is by no means an inaccurate or uncommon description; broad participation is the lifeblood of these media as is, it seems, the dissolution of centralized/centralizing institutions. To write "dissolution" is as much literal as it is figurative: as The Economist notes, newspapers are quickly trimming sections, like stock quotes, from their pages in a move that may improve profits right now, but also might be read as the physical process of dismantling this mode of mass media. Here we are then, at the brink of sweeping change, apparently about to take the step into a kind of hyper-democracy where participation - in the sense dervied from 'participatory media' - is more than a right, but the dominant mode of interaction. In the hyper-democracy we, within our multiple levels of social-involvement, create our own news articles, music, television, and encyclopedias. In the hyper-democracy, kids hang out on MySpace, our blogs become our reputations, and our OPMLs and attention data our social/political prosthetic. In the hyper-democracy, we look left and right at our peers, rather than up at our institutions.

Yet The Economist places "democracy" opposite "monarchy," and thus in an entirely rosy light. In political terms this is perfectly fine, yet the kind of hyper-democracy that is forming seems to be one that involves the dislocation of active participation as much as it encourages it. The issues of political prosthesis, control, and discipline that I have frequently touched upon in this blog all seem to point to the not-so-rosy sides of this "revolution," as the final article puts it. They point to the idea that the result of this completely distributed structure of social, cultural, and political involvement is the formation of a kind of modular, hugely over-arching, swarm institution. Where masses of individuals take up the roles of domination once held by the few, where data speaks louder than words.

So yes, these new media are moving us toward a democratic participation never before seen. No, we should not halt this "revolution" in the name of the security provided by the familiar. But, we should be aware that "democracy" does not imply utopia, and distributed and open participation may not always mean the liberation of the individual.

Posted by Nathan at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's interesting to compare two recent posts by danah boyd and Ed Batista atAttentionTrust.org. Ed argues for the democratic potential of metadata, stating that our aggregate information traces can be used as a kind of partial surrogate for a directly stated opinion. It might be more accurate to describe his argument as being in favor of a functional prosthetic for participation - that our data can interact on our behalf without the need for (though he stresses that it should not replace) direct interference. Though he is speaking of data created with the knowledge of the user, the process of metadata creation is a process of personal classification and we have to be aware that this process is not always as much in our control as we might like.

The data surrounding us goes well beyond our attention and, to follow Ed's example, explicitly stated movie preferences. We may have a control over the permission to collect this data, but the removal of the individual from his/her identity traces, letting these traces act on their own, is worrying. This becomes exacerbated when you realize that these identity traces are not as much in our control as we might think. This is where danah's entry comes in. She writes about the many inaccuracies in the Wikipedia entry for her and her inability to correct them. This is a perfect, very clear example of a way in which we do not have control over many tendrils of our identities online. We must see danah's Wikipedia entry essentially as metadata in the same vein as Ed's taste in movies; it has the same power of classification and the same potential to remotely speak for its subject.

Perhaps all this is harmless when extended to movies, music, and the like, but to extend the voice of deterritorialized identities into a political arena, to democracy, seems a bit irresponsible. Among my favorite films are Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, but I would probably not like my enjoyment of these westerns to determine anything beyond an Amazon recommendation e-mail.

Posted by Nathan at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Nadav at antenna has hit on a phrase I particularly enjoy:

"We have to find ways of inserting our personality into the cracks of the data structures."

He goes on to mention that our interactions online are increasingly based on the "voice of our online behavior." It's this kind of interaction - interaction based on a personality emerging from seemingly neutral data structures - that defines our experiences online. Just about every aspect of our new swarming media, of Web 2.0 applications, is centered on the idea that our data has meaning beyond the level of code. The data we enter on MySpace, when given in the context of a census, has no inherent value: age, location, gender, etc. Yet when we suddenly shove it into a social arena and make these neutral data interact with others' it becomed loaded with meaning.

We are not just inserting personality into the cracks of data structures, we are taking these data structures and making them into personality. We can even view blogging as a form of data entry: bloggers enter narratives from their day, reviews of products and services, and more. Google recognizes that this type of content as data with their "targeted" ads, and they are entirely correct. By blogging we are creating databases of personality, databases of identity, to be searched, scanned, and input. The extention to social bookmarking and any other Web 2.0 system can be easily seen.

We categorize ourselves and each other, but not only that, this categorization has become the very purpose of these media. This is classification-as-interaction. This is turning data into the personal in a way it has never been before. This is a process of dividing ourselves into ever smaller, searchable bits, then making these bits go out and bounce off others'.

Posted by Nathan at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Well I've finally found some time to sit down and write here. I've been thinking lately about the layers of information production that occur in Web 2.0 applications. The many media and applications that would fit into this very broad category tend to revolve around a few central principles of interaction, but the central one seems to be one of sharing or generosity. What does this really mean, this 'generosity'? 'Generosity' in Web 2.0 is the equivalent of self-classification.

When we create media on YouTube, write a blog entry, and especially when we update social networking profiles, we are placing ourselves in a series of categories. We cross-reference ourselves according to these terms/tags/links within the grand Web 2.0 database, even the archive on the whole. This happens with such frequency (just think how much you do on the Web each day that is recorded - just about everything) and at such a fast pace that the sheer volume of data that is collected hourly is incomprehensible. This data is stored, occasionally erased, altered, and sold. Yet, more importantly, it creates a network around both the individuals who leave these data behind them, as well as the media that collect it. It's this data network that creates value for the users of these participatory media on the individual and the collective levels.

I'm interested in what happens to these data networks. Surely many are lost, but there is so much replication of data occurring that when one piece is lost, it is not unlikely that one could find it again. Over time, these data accumulate like dust or sediment, records of our past interactions, of our projected identities. This comes to such a point that we are left with a kind of network archaeology, in the same way Foucualt uses the term in The Archaeology of Knowledge, but also in the literal sense of the word.

This sense of permanence conflicts with the ideals of 'cyberspace' (as a term for a dying epoch), the ideals of emphemeral interaction, unbounded data flowing freely from person to person. We now have to recognize that what we do in these environments leaves a path. Some of this path might blow away in the wind over time, but much of it will be buried, only to be found by some adventurous digger.

Posted by Nathan at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)