I've been more reluctant lately to jump into debates circulating around the tech bloggers. Perhaps this is a fear fo repeating myself, or maybe it's a lack of a drive to be on techmeme. On Friday, however, I found myself becoming interested in the furor over Steve Rubel's entry "The Underground Blogosphere."

Steve complains about the amount of e-mails that he receives every day that essentially ask him to post a link to another blog. Many others in the techsphere got all worked up proclaiming that it is an unimportant subject. Yet what fascinated me by this idea is the operation of a parallel, low-impact network that has physical consequences in the higher-impact network of blogs. I suppose I'm a little slow on noticing this, but keep in mind that Swarming Media is merely the 188,421th most linked-to blog, compared to Rubel's 59th, so I have never received nor sent any e-mails with the intent that a link would follow.

This second network is not as explicitly traceable as the blog/link-network. It is archived in less public/searchable areas such as message histories, inboxes, and sent-items. The resulting network is, then, largely blind beyond the links from one node to another: Steve Rubel knows who sent him this mail, but I sure don't. Yet despite the separate archival/reifying system, this network has to potential to shift the explicit blog-network through the link that connects subject-node to blog-node. Fred Stutzman has a good entry further describing the interaction between these two networks:

"As the blogosphere is scale-free, the types of traffic that hubs see doesn't scale linearly (or log linearly) through the network. If Reubel receives 100 pitches in a day, it is not a safe assumption that the 1000th Technorati blog receives 98 pitches a day, and the 10,000th receives 90 (and so on, reflecting a power law based on 37MM blogs). In fact, due to Reubel's position in the network, the amount of pitch traffic he sees may be vastly disproportionate to the rest of the blogosphere."

What might be useful to add to this subject is how the political is at work. Scale-free networks, and the observation that the blog-networks operate on this model, have seemingly inherent political results. As Galloway and Thacker write in their article The Ghost in the Network:

"In network science, the "unavoidable consequence" of networks often resembles something like neoliberal democracy, but a democracy which naturally emerges according to the "power law" of decentralized networks. Like so, their fates are twisted together."

Woven into the scale-free model, then, seems to be a particular ideology and politics. Thus Rubel's posturing in his phrase, "...when I started this blog I was one of the most prolific members of the Underground Blogosphere. I sent my links to everyone. However, over a year ago I kicked this habit. Today I use it sparingly," is an explicit demonstration of his success within - and knowledge of - this scale-free ideology. Rubel finds himself the beneficiary of these politics on which he is really writing. Yet to apply this model, or even to participate in the various blogospheres is to enter into these politics and enact the ideology that these power-relations are the "natural" result of the network structure.

Perhaps then, my reluctance to jump in on these hotly-linked subjects is my reluctance to blindly subscribe to the scale-free ideology. Yet, the very fact that I've written this entry shows my complicity.

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Our internet service has been out for the last couple of days, throwing a brick in the gears of my online reading project and blog posting ability (praise free wireless cafes; curse short battery life). So while un-internetted I wrote this reaction to an event last Wednesday evening:

This past week I met with a number of other bloggers at a Manhattan bar. This was an interesting experience; these people who usually exist simply as a personality expressed through writing are suddenly playing trivia, just a step away. The meeting made me think about the several personalities that operate under the heading of my own name. The "Nathan" emanating from this blog differs from his counterpart on the blog I keep for my company, which, in turn, is different from the personality behind my del.icio.us account or MySpace profile.

On the Web we often live in the illusion that these different selves, which all of us express in varying ways, can remain separate. This is the ideology behind "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" cartoon - the ideology that has driven much thought on networked interaction in the past. It's the idea that we can erase aspects of identity in the creation of another self. Switching from one self to another becomes an act of continual erasure and creation. This ideology states that once you switch off the computer you are withdrawn from the network.

Yet this couldn't be further from the truth. Our multiple selves overlap, intersect, and interact in ways that are much messier. Erasure is not an acceptable ideology - every interaction, every mouse-click, every blog entry becomes a new piece in our larger distributed, networked identity. Swarming Media's Nathan cannot be separate from the Nathan that wrote his first blog while studying in Scotland, despite the fact that these two selves differ greatly.

So when I met with those bloggers over trivia and beer - which inexplicably came with free pizza - and as they have reported on our get-together, my own networked existence is molded and poked. They add to, and adapt how I exist on the Web and within the greater cultural archive of which we're all a part.

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In my continuing - and increasingly futile - effort to read everything I've marked with "READTHIS" on del.icio.us, the following is my response to a piece written just over two years ago, Data Doubles:Surveillance of Subjects Without Substance by Joshua Nichols, which, in turn, begins with a response to a lecture given fourteen years ago.

Nichols is pretty much spot on with his observations on the development of Foucauldian discipline in an age where the electronic database is central. There are a few points that I hope to expand from his text to apply to our current, increasingly social interaction with these data and the implications for control that flow from it. Nichols does not quite address data in a networked environment, though at times his thoughts hint strongly at such. He speaks mostly of "the computer" and its ability to store large amounts of information and of "video-infographic machines" with their ability to separate the examiner from the examined. From this constant and remote collection of information a "data-double" is formed - a concept very close to what I've been calling the projected/deterritorialized identity. Yet the difference is that the data-double, despite the constant flow of information, remains comparatively static when compared to its equivalent within our current consumer-friendly networked environment.

One of the central differences between the projected identity and the data-double is the process of creation of constituent information. Nichols writes:

"It is at the point at which the knowledge extracted from the various analogical procedures of the carceral disciplinary apparatus is digitized that the possibility of a virtual surveillance assemblage becomes possible in which the site of data extraction (the intimacy of the situated/territorialized human body) can be completely deterritorialized."

Currently, however, it is not simply the extraction of data from older carceral modes that play a role in our new environment of control, it is the data created as a result of what has become our interactive protocol on the Web. We willingly and joyfully participate in the aggregation of data when we sign up for MySpace or add a picture to Flickr. One's OPML, the READTHIS list from which I'm currently drawing inspiration, the text on this blog: these are all data which imply a digital self. Instead of a centralizing institution gathering the information, we now supply it ourselves after having set up new social arenas where interaction is predicated on the sharing of data.

But in addition to sharing our own data - in multiple tendrils with multiple trajectories - we also are engaged in modulating eachothers data in the new protocol. We tag; we add photos; we comment. We alter how our peers are perceived as data through many basic choices. While the results of this form of open disciplinarity can be used by the more traditional disciplinary institutions, they are more effective in creating a free-flowing (and thus entirely modular) type of control - one that is not localizable by any measurement. Thus we have to expand what Nichols writes to apply to this social protocol of open networked data:

"The shift in population control strategies from corporeal techniques to hyperreal constructs is a product of what Foucault referred to as governmentality in that disciplinary power structures generate a knowledge [...] of the corporeal individual that seeks to totalize (and thus necessarily abstracts) its identity in order to construct a set of categories and quantifying tools that are used in the post-disciplinary age to simulate criminogenic patterns and tendencies within a given population data set."

The individual is not necessarily totalized by a disciplinary power so much as the aggregate abstraction that is the projected identity (networked, social-infused data-double) creates the disciplinary power on the same pivot of the hyperreal subject that Nichols outlines.

Needless to say I found this piece particularly interesting and ready to updated for all these Web 2.0 goings-on.

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In his more annoying moments he comes across as delightedly plugging his buddies at Amazon.com and Raphsody, in his more interesting he has his readers questioning why they would even consider going to a real-world store again. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail comes as no surprise for anyone who has immersed themselves in the world of blogs and Web 2.0 hype. If you, like me, fall into this category will find his explanation of the new structure of Web-driven business...well...old business.

It is this very fact - that his observations are already old in their native territory - that perfectly describes the specific environment. Any blogger will know that the freshness of your writing is of utmost importance, anything over 72 hours old is well past its prime and will not receive much attention. Books, then, are in an awkward position to be providing cultural critique for a subject that partially defines itself on a rapid pace of change. Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are among those who have already began to experiment with the medium and I'm surprised The Long Tail did not follow in their footsteps. Yet, while Anderson focuses on books to a great degree in his text, he deals with them entirely as commodities and seems to have overlooked the role of the medium's role as cultural dialogue.

Perhaps this is the central point that troubled me about The Long Tail. It is a thorough business analysis (at least as far as this untrained writer can tell) but it is an utter failure in critically examining the cultural importance of these phenomena. Yes, the fact that masses of consumers are now able to tag mechandise will result in greater sales, but this fact changes more than entrepreneurs' incomes - it changes the fundamental interaction between individuals, others, commodities, and themselves.

I found myself asking why he bothered to publish this book when it, to me, said nothing new. Anderson sent this book out to bloggers - in exchange for a review - to build up buzz presumably, but he should have sent it out to the editors of small local newspapers, to start-up indie labels, to that gift shop I live above at the moment. These are the people who would most benefit from reading The Long Tail - not bloggers. We already know this stuff, we already have been reading the Long Tail blog and throwing around the term for months.

Bloggers have already taken advantage of the filter and aggregation techniques he details to find his work; we all would have bought it, or read it, eventually anyway - even though we're moving on. He should have targeted other segments of our larger society's long tail. The ones that this book was written for anyway.

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I just received an advance copy of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail in the mail as part of his campaign to build buzz for his book within the long tail itself. This has coincided with my effort to gradually, actually read everything on my del.icio.us links with a "READTHIS" tag. So while this entry will be loosely centered on Michael Hardt's essay "Affective Labor," I've noticed that a lot of what Hardt covers is directly applicable to Anderson's topic (at least as far as I can tell having read the book's blog). So hopefully next weekend, when I review The Long Tail, I'll be able to bring in some of what I'll be writing below.

The reasons I tagged this essay with the intention of reading it later is fairly clear. Hardt discusses the shift from modern to postmodern forms of production as being that of the shift from the "Fordist" model to the cleverly titled "Toyotist" model. In other words, the new dominance of immaterial labor within our economy:

"Toyotism is based on an inversion of the Fordist structure of communication between production and consumption. Ideally, according to this model, the production planning will communicate with markets constantly and immediately."

Immediately this struck me as a parallel to Deleuze's point in Postscript that modern societies of control are centered around, among other qualities, modulation. I've often discussed here how modulation is also central to these new media networks we find ourselves in: blogging is reliant on quick reaction to the actions and reactions of others within the network, social networks thrive on the idea that identity can be presented in a modular fashion, etc. This sort of modulation we see occurs not from a central point, or even decentralized points, but in a distributed, social manner. We modulate according to and under the pressure of the network(s).

Hardt also acknowledges this social/network aspect by highlighting the social in affective labor itself:

"[...] in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and "elevated" to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital. [...] In the production and reproduction of affects, in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital."

Affective labor takes place within and produces these distributed networks and plays a significant role in creating subjectivity. Again, it is not hard to extend this to new media, this blog has slowly become fixated on networked subjectivity in a way.

Yet one place where I part from Hardt is the specificities of the significance of the physical medium of the computer, the web, and the internet as the locations for this affective labor. He includes a reference or two to "the computer" making his piece relevant to the context in which it was published, but seems to dodge meaty analysis. What he avoids is acknowleding the reifying effect these media have on these networks of affective labor. While it is the data, the information, the affect that is important - these necessarily immaterial units - our new/swarming media networks have the ability to reflect and map the immaterial. I think it's this key interplay between the immaterial and its effects that are intriguing here.

In some ways this ever-so quotable line from the piece demonstrates this gap:

"Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves."

We can't necessarily see these networks as merely prostheses, instead they have become something more similar to repositories and factories of subjectivity. Also, notice that he uses the term "lens." This implies an explicitly visual approach in the analysis to the concept of selfhood within the network. Yet the networked subjectivities, which are the most valuable product of modern affective labor in these media, is most important in its non-visual points of interaction and cross-over with other tendrils of identity. To couch a discussion of postmodern subjectivity in language ruled by the ocular is brushing over significance of topic itself. The visual aspects are merely side effects of immaterial production. But in using language invoking the visual - albeit creating an eminently quotable line in the process - Hardt side-steps the sharpness of the rest of the essay and his key observation: that there are reifying aspects to networks of immaterial labor, especially as this new phase of labor applies to swarming media networks.

Posted by Nathan at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)