Temporary Hiatus
This blog is on a temporary hiatus as I participate in institutional festivities, oral surgery, and moving. Expect me back in June, full strength.
Critical analysis of swarming media's cultural roles.
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May 27, 2006
May 18, 2006
Housekeeping Note: Updated Blogroll
I've updated the blogroll to more accurately reflect what I've been reading in relation to this blog.
May 16, 2006
Baseball and the NSA: Control of Data as Identity
The NSA and MLB have more in common right now than most may realize. They are both engaged in defining our individual and collective relationship to data in an electronically networked world.
The New York Times reports today that Major League Baseball is suing a small, online fantasy baseball company in an attempt to claim that the statistics and names of players are the property of MLB:
"...the Internet arm of Major League Baseball...says that anyone using players' names and performance statistics to operate a fantasy league commercially must purchase a license. The St. Louis company counters that it does not need a license because the players are public figures whose statistics are in the public domain."At first glance this might seem to have nothing to do with what I usually write about in this blog, but at the core this is about the relationship between data and identity, and who owns either. To say that David Ortiz (as of 6:30 5-16) has twelve home runs is very similar to saying that one of my recent entries had 2 comments (though far less impressive). These are statitistical data, yet behind the numbers lie an implied individuality. That number of home runs would mean something very different were they to have come from Mark Loretta; if some A-list blogger were to get a mere 2 comments, they would surely be annoyed, whereas for me, that is far more than usual.
Data, especially in an electronically networked environment where our every action is translated to a computational form, is inseperable from identity and individuality and baseball, as a sport, knows this well. Yet, what is MLB stating when they claim that they must be paid fees for use of these data? Part of me wants to say that they are trying to route fan interaction with players (via data) through themselves as an institution. I also have an instinctual reaction to question MLB's insitence that it owns players' individuality. The central thing that seems to be at stake here - and it is something that we will be sure to see arise again and again - is the control of data. This is how power will be, and is, wielded. While trends we have seen seem to imply that this power has become, or is becoming decentralized, the institutions of old are certainly putting up a fight. Though in the case of baseball, I'm not sure MLB ever had control: the sport is much larger than the organization.
The collective control of data, and its relationship to individuals, is also under question with telephone companies releasing all call information to the NSA which aggregates it for broad analysis. Jeff Jarvis covers this topic thoroughly. To extend this baseball comparison, we can see our telephone records as specific statistics that lead back to us as individuals, but also can be aggregate to a much different effect. This process of aggregation is key to Web 2.0-style ideals (think folksonomy here), yet we (myself included) are uncomfortable when this aggregation is in the hands of the NSA. Naturally, this is because the NSA intends to use this aggregate data against (or if you wanted to shift the rhetorical tables: "to protect") us, does not make it public, and does not allow us to opt out. Again, then, the issue here is the control of data, the control of our identity and individuality in a networked world.
May 09, 2006
Social-Classification and the Ideology of Anonymity
Two posts I've read over the past week demonstrate the development of a more control-based society developing with the help of new media. Chartreuse writes about the increased focus on the individual in new business, that large business must shrink to adapt to this new landscape and that "mass is dead." This is all very true, especially in relation to social-networking sites. As participants in these new media, we are constantly defining ourselves, narrowing ourselves down to multiple hyper-specific identities. My del.icio.us links, my MySpace profile, the OPML of my feeds, each alone represent an identity I have carved out on the web, an identity that fits me into one of these new individualized markets/categories.
Except this process of individualization doesn't simply happen isolation, just as I delineate the boundaries of myself, others take a hand in it as well. This is where social-classification comes in. When someone comments on a post, tags my MySpace page, or places the feed from this blog among a group of other feeds, I have been classified by someone else. Thus the progression from mass to (multiple) individual takes place both internally, from the subject him/herself, as well as externally, from the individuals around him/her.
Deleuze noted this process back in 1990 in his Postscript on Societies of Contol. In describing the shift from a disciplinary to a control society, he noted that rather than being dealt with as masses by large institutions, we are becoming viewed as these "dividuals," broken into modular, multiple categories by ever smaller, ever more fluid entities he calls "corporations." Yet where we differ at this specific cultural moment in new media, is that we are our own modulating entity; we are defining ourselves, but, more importantly, each other.
The second post I want to react to is The End Of Cyberspace's "More of the Meme." In this post Alex correctly notes that the ideology of anonymity is quickly disappearing among online social media. He states that there are fewer and fewer times during online interaction when it is appropriate (or possible, I'd say) to remain anonymous. This is the natural result of the social-classification and increasing 'control' aspects of our current moment. When the point of my interactions with new media has become to define myself and to define others, the concept of anonymity becomes completely irrelevant and impossible. To attempt to remain anonymous is to not actually participate in these media.
May 02, 2006
Public Funds in New Media Development: Late on the BBC
I'm a little late in the analysis game on the BBC's push toward a more participatory mode, but I think that's just as much a reflection of the speed of these new media as it is the circumstances in my own schedule.
On April 25th, the BBC announced that they will be, in the next six years, attempting to integrate new aspects of on-demand content and audience participation in their otherwise broadcast-centric approach:
"The plans build on opportunities created by new and emerging digital technologies and confront the challenges of seismic shifts in public expectations, lifestyle and behaviours and on building new relationships with audiences and individual households.To get more immediate reactions to this, I'll point you to Alex Barnett and Richard McManus, who both were much quicker on the uptake than I.Ten teams have, for the past year, been exploring what the world may be like in 2012, what audiences may need and want and what the BBC needs to do about it."
What I have found most interesting, however, is the political, social, and economic relationships this move is revealing between private and state-funded industry. The AP reported that Murdoch and his underlings are raising a stink over this due to the fact that the BBC is funded by public money. This view draws from the ideology of deregulatory period in British broadcasting that saw the rise of ITV and the like. This perspective sees private entities as necessary competitors to the public entity, able to provide programming that would otherwise not be available, and able to benefit from a less rigid market structure. Thus when Murdoch thinks it isn't fair that the BBC can make this move on the back of TV license fees, he is saying that the BBC, and by extension the government, is becoming anti-competetive.
I would disagree with this view; if anything, the BBC is proving that it has benefitted from degregulation by becoming an innovator itself. Rather than stagnating in older modes of content delivery (TV, radio, low-participatory web) the BBC is taking the step that many other competetive entities - Google and Yahoo come to mind immediately - are taking. Would Murdoch call out "unfair" if it were ITV who unveiled this "Creative Future" initiative? Certainly ITV would have to raise money at the expense of its viewers through the sale of more airtime/webspace just as the BBC has to raise money at the expense of its viewers through sustenance of the licsense fee (something Britons, as I experienced in my brief few months there, are not too fond of).
So what does this really mean? People are beginning to question the public role in new web/online development. This can only be a good thing. The philosophy of these new media idealize as democratic, accessible, and user-friendly. Shouldn't more public institutions be like this? Putting public funds into the BBC to innovate should be seen along the lines of putting public funds into the DMV to innovate, become a better run organization. And though Murdoch, I'm sure, has never experienced it, those lines are no fun.