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.