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.