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.