In catching up with my long list of texts I've tagged with the imperative "READTHIS," I just finished Antonio Negri's piece, "Towards and Ontological Definition of the Multitude." There are a few points which struck some familiar chords that tend to lead to entries on this blog for me - namely the way in which he describes the relationship between multitudes, individuals, and identity. Much of what he outlines can be extended to contemporary phenomena on the web.

"When we consider bodies, we not only perceive that we are faced with a multitude of bodies, but we also understand that each body is a multitude. Intersecting the multitude, crossing multitude with multitude, bodies become blended, mongrel, hybrid, transformed; they are like sea waves, in perennial movement and reciprocal transformation. The metaphysics of individuality (and/or of personhood) constitute a dreadful mystification of the multitude of bodies. There is no possibility for a body to be alone. It could not even be imagined. When man is defined as individual, when he is considered as autonomous source of rights and property, he is made alone. But one's own does not exist outside of the relation with an other."

This section fits particularly well with my thoughts on the operation of identity in these swarming media networks. Our interactions in these networks hinges on the same basic tension that Negri notices in his multitudes: that subjects - just like the multitudes, masses they make up - are at once singularities and multiplicities. Through our web-based interactions we cannot help but to create distributed, deterritorialized tendrils of identity. As I've written many times before on this site, these tendrils include everything from one's blog and del.icio.us links, to credit card transactions and clickstreams. They overflow from an imagined center that is our perceived selfness and are reified in the electronic database. One's tendrils intersect, come to sudden ends, and weave contradictory paths much in the same way that Negri envisions identity occurring in his singularities (I avoid using "individual" here as Negri seems to associate the term with a more sovreign conception of self).

So we exist both as multitudes and within multitudes, and this could not be seen any clearer than in this whole Web 2.0 business. This makes me ask, then, if attempts to centralize identity are not attempts to recreate Negri's sovreign individuality - thus avoiding the socially beneficial aspects of multitudes. The benefits he describes are worded in uncharacteristically glowing terms:

"[...] of the theories of labour where the relationship of command can be demonstrated (immanently) as groundless (insussistente): immaterial and intellectual labour, in other words knowledge does not require command in order to be cooperative and to have universal effects. [...] the power of the multitude can be exposed on the terrain of the politics of postmodernity, by showing how no conditions for a free society to exist and reproduce itself are given without the spread of knowledge and the emergence of the common. In fact, freedom, as liberation from command, is materially given only by the development of the multitude and its self constitution as a social body of singularities."

He places the multitude as nothing less than a precondition for freedom (in a Marxist sense, I suppose). I would never go so far as to claim that Web 2.0 is a precondition for some totalizing freedom - mostly because the parallel between the multitude and current phenomena is far from one-to-one - but the similarities imply that some cultural benefit lies in supporting the social structures we see developing in this area.

The attempts at centralization I'm speaking of that may work in an opposite direction from this development of a multitude are things like MicroID - and similar identity centralizers/verifiers - and attention trackers, which record and archive one's web activity. I certainly support the sentiment that drives the creation of these things, and respect the people championing them, there is always a hint of wariness while reaidng about them. Perhaps Negri's declaration that the distributed identities that make up both the multitude and the singularities within the multitude are the key to "freedom," explains my hesitation. I see the central cultural and social change that these swarming media networks are enabling is the creation of a platform for the reification of these distributed, networked identities. To pull this trend back toward centralization and what Negri might call the "lonely individual," would be to negate whatever benefit may come from these new social structures.

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[Eamonn over at MobFilms has made an interesting short video dealing with similar themes]

Posted by Nathan at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The combination of aggregation and individual inspection is the key to our new, networked media. In this frenzy of hype and actual innovation that we've been witnessing under the banner of "Web 2.0", the major development is not just that the individual has been empowered to create his/her own content - theoretically, the individual has always been capable of this - but that any individual is now able to connect to, alter, and interact with any other individual's content as well as the aggregate effects of the collective body of content.

Whereas web interaction at one point was centered on media such as the chatroom, in which real-time, text-based interaction - a more ephemeral sort of contact, in that, to a greater extent, leaving the chatroom implies an erasure of identity - was the norm, now we see more permanent outlets for the self-as-spectacle. Posting on a blog, creating a profile, editing a wiki, these all leave traces of identity that are more public that previous modes of networked interaction. Our lines in the network-sand are deeper and more rigid, while simultaneously becoming more distributed. We literally transfer ourselves onto the network both actively and passively (passively through automated natural language readers applied to public record documents, for instance) such that we might even be perceived to exist long after our physical life has ended.

One of the major drives of this constant creation and storage of the data that make up our networked, distributed identities is - rather than any sort of utility - the classic dual desire of seeing/being-seen. We desire to be seen by others - through blogging, through social networks, through bookmarking, etc. - and this goes hand-in-hand with the urge to make a spectacle of others as we do ourselves. Yet this does not occur simply on an individual-to-individual level, we also see it on a individual-to-mass level. It is collective action that brings a blog post to the top of Digg or Memeorandum and this is then experienced on an individual level creating waves of feedback from the emergent system, back to the component parts.

From this we have to look at where these cultural changes around us are leading. For one, they are leading to legitimate worries of security over our the data that make up our deterritorialized selves. The issue over ownership of these data, who gets to see its aggregate and individual effects in the end lead to the questions of who controls our networked, distributed selves and how do these data enact control on their own part.

Posted by Nathan at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written a few entries here concerning our changing relationship with data and identity as we increasingly engage in these swarming media networks. As our interactions become centered around self- and social-classification we construct inherently multiple, deterritorialized identities. The attention movement, social networking services, and the growing role of RSS feeds in our everyday web experience all consciously contribute to this projected identity. The point of our interactions - of many of our experiences online today - is to classify, is to project these tendrils of identity and develop this vast, interwoven web of data.

Both danah boyd and Scott Karp posted yesterday on the NSA's exploitation of this network of identity (both in response to this article). danah explains this examination of our deterritorialized identities and the nonchalance surrounding our collective reaction as a result of the technology:

"Networked technologies not only make this easier, but they also make the snoop invisible. Problematically, people don't sweat the invasion so much because they can't see it."

Scott, meanwhile, predicts a backlash within social networking media:

"There is a privacy backlash coming that is going to throw cold water on MySpace, Web 2.0, and all the related frothing over anything with the word 'social.'"

While both these writers certainly hold ten times the web-cred I could hope to have, I'm not sure if I'm entirely satisfied with either the technological-nonchalance explaination or the backlash theory. It seems to me that the reason many are not fired up about this and the reason there won't be a backlash is that surveillance has become so integrated into the very basis, the very language of interaction among these media.

Surveillance and social-classification are the mode through which one person engages with another. Log onto MySpace, check your friends' profiles, leave a comment or two, move people around your "Top 8" - this might be a typical session on the site. We will not stop posting personal information as long as these data holds social and interactive value. Surveillance and identity modulation has become the vehicle of these media, and, increasingly, our networked lives. While I in no way condone the actions of the NSA, I am in no way surprised by it. It is not our technologically enabled invisibility at work, but rather our technologically enabled spectacularity. And as long as surveillance and classification is our interactive protocol, we will see no backlash.

[update: NYTimes.com just put up an article related to this]

Posted by Nathan at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

Upon launching One Small Step: A MySpace Luv Story, a new browser window opens and fills the screen with bright, flashing, provocative, and twitchy one-inch square tiled boxes, refreshing with a new image every five seconds. The experience is nothing if not overwhelming, the viewer is bombarded with animated GIF after animated GIF, each one expressing some form of the lust, hatred, love or angst, so natural to the turbulent teenage social life. We shift suddenly from a vaguely familiar, mohawked pop-punk singer frozen in mid-scream as the words "I hate everything about you" blink next to him in a jagged font, to a flashing close-up of a cherry and the words "pop me." Before we can attempt to make sense of this juxtaposition, however, we are told in the next image to "hey, shut the fuck up" and accosted by the zombie-like girl from The Ring.

Anyone who has visited MySpace lately and clicked around has surely encountered many of these little "badges" which users post on their own profiles, or on others' through comments. They are used to grab attention, make a profile unique, and, ultimately, as a tool of self and social-classification. Each of the images displayed in One Small Step can be seen as a modular, reified emotion. The user can take their heartbreak and move it around their page, marking themselves - or, rather, their page as one of many facets of networked identity - with a physical sign of emotion. They can copy and paste their angst and loneliness. As with any of our other numerous tools of online social interaction, a MySpace page is but one tendril of our larger, multiple projected identity. We use it to interact within a specific environment, with specific people, for specific purposes, and we shape it accordingly. We do so through a process of self- and social-classification. I list my interests, you comment. One teen posts the "cutie with a bootie" badge, another professes love in the form of PHP. All this is a process of fitting ourselves into a number of socially defined classifications: I am a student, I am a fan of this band, I am in love, etc. This is done all the time in everyday life through clothes we wear, how we speak, where we hang-out and more; what makes MySpace and all of our 'Web 2.0' fanciness interesting is that it adds the social-classification aspect. Now we classify not only ourselves, but we let ourselves be classified by others to a degree not before present. As danah boyd has written, part of the point of interaction through MySpace for teens is to leave comments for each other, giving rise to a hierarchy of who leaves what for who. Did Shelly post that "bite me" badge on Tammy's page? Uh oh. It looks like Mike has a lot more friends than Sam. These are only some of the ways that classification has become increasingly social through these new media, and FlawedArt's One Small Step is beginning to touch upon the issues of spectacle and identity that work into it.

The piece draws from a database made up of these badges from MySpace, specifically ones dealing with these over-blown emotions. The fast pace of change from one image to another and the tiling try mimic the actions of these emotions among the teenage users. Rapidly shifting from lust to love, then to hatred and frustration, these images fill the screen as they no doubt fill the minds of the piece's subjects. They exist to grab attention, to make the tagged user stand out among many, to become a spectacle, yet it does so through these repeated and frequently re-used, copied images. Individuality through mildly modulated conformity. All this is very clearly communicated through the piece, and, while interesting, it is by no means a difficult conclusion to come to through a quick browse through a series of profiles. My criticism of this piece, though, lies in its misunderstanding of the users' interaction with these badges as modular, reified emotion.

The typical teen MySpace user who would post these badges does not interact with them in such a linear, monocular way. By essentially enlarging these small badges in the attempt to mimic the emotional impact of the expressed emotion, the artists have removed the key characteristics of these objects. These badges are important to the teens because they can be changed, moved, deleted, and combined with any amount of other data. FlawedArt's presentation of the objects makes the badges the center of spectacularity rather than the user, thus erases the interactivity that these badges imply within the context of a MySpace profile. It is significant that they are referred to as badges. Badges exist, one among many, on a piece of clothing to express a unit of information, changing meaning among different contexts, badges. When these items are endowed with a self- and social-classificatory trajectory, to make them into an overpowering force, as they are in One Small Step, fundamentally misreads their use and importance.

Overall, the FlawedArt piece is brave enough to approach this largely ignored territory for net art. MySpace and other arenas for creative social interaction have the potential to be fertile ground for the interaction between art, artist, and participant that so much net and electronic art has strove for in the past. Artists have only begun to take steps into this area, but as they do it is necessary to keep in mind the aspects that make these networks unique, what makes them operate.

[found thanks to networked_performance]

Posted by Nathan at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)