The rental market didn't only cut into my blogging time these past few weeks, but also my reading time. I'm just in the beginning of Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, and already I'm starting to make connections between the concept of the web-as-cultural-archive and the function and flow of reflective nostalgia. Specifically, I find it particularly interesting to think of these swarming media networks as a way that we try to rebel against the concept of an ever-moving time, in the same way that nostalgia operated, in both restorative and reflective cases.

Being not even a quarter of the way through the book yet, I don't want to make too many sweeping comparisons between Boym's writing and the concepts I often write about here just yet. After all, I believe she does eventually get to the topic of the internet and nostalgia. But I think nostalgia - or, perhaps, the anticipation of nostalgia - is a good lens through which to see our actions in web-based media. The socially driven archivization which occurs through all these media could be seen as the prefiguring of an idealized, future past rather than the display of an over-blown present. In other words, identity tendrils are created with the idea that it is for a future self.

Bear with me here, these thoughts are only half-formed. The idea that identity production in an archival/networked environment is a set of actions that anticipate nostalgia meshes with the thought that nostalgia is driven by the desire and inability to recover a selectively remembered past, while nostalgic actions (photos, reenactments, genocides even) are in fact largely struggles against a temporal tyrrany. Tthrough acting in our swarming media networks and creating our distributed identities, what we are actually doing is creating an idealized, future past. I upload photos to Flickr, post interesting webpages to del.icio.us, and describe myself through my connections on any number of social networking sites. We are creating what will become our objects of nostalgia, and what could be used as tools in this struggle against time.

I'll probably finish The Future of Nostalgia sometime in the next few weeks and find myself putting it down on the table, saying to myself, "wow, I was completely wrong about that connection between nostalgia and web-based media!" But until that time, I'll have plenty to think about.

Posted by Nathan at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York vicinity housing market has turned out to be a greater foe for this blog than I'd have ever predicted. I've also been working on my piece for Audience 2.0, which is coming together fairly well. So, in order to not completely vanish from Swarming Media, here's a three sentence excerpt from the upcoming Audience 2.0 piece:

Previously, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience had a high value, there were few hearing and many speaking (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity was the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, the ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end – few to many.

Posted by Nathan at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I broke my self appointed goal to write here once a week, on the weekends, and I'm probably the only one to notice this. Non-blogging life has gotten in they way of blogging-time.

I've been attempting to pull together my thoughts on a topographical analysis of the blogospheres in whatever time I've been able to spare. Hopefully I'll be able to pull something together this week. In the meantime I'll post some links.

In formulating thoughts on web-based topographies I've rediscovered this essay by Mark Nunes: Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace. So if I do manage to get something out tomorrow or the day after, it will most certainly cite this essay. (It's also amusing to read an essay concerning the internet written in 1999, when the popular terminology was so different.)

Secondly, The Economist has an excellent piece on why economists blog. If you have any questions about why academia must begin blogging and why it is to their advantage to do so, read this article. In discussions about academic blogging I'm often asked why one would want to "give away" their ideas "for free" on a blog - essentially it comes down to the fact that academia is not unlike independent music: obscurity is far worse than piracy.

Posted by Nathan at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I write my piece for Michael Pick's upcoming Web-publication, Audience 2.0, I keep running down tangents that, while interesting to me, aren't entirely on-topic. One of these is the issue of the archival properties of networked social media, which could more or less the central question in any analysis of identity and interaction on the Web. How do our interactions become a piece of collective and individual prosthesis memory in these new media? How does this build upon or break from past popular forms of social archivization - from 8mm home movies, to printmaking, to graffiti? These questions naturally lead to discussions of the structure of our socially-enabled media; but in many ways it seems that people in the techsphere of blogs (I don't like the term "blogosphere" very much - hence the awkward rephrasing) often fail to understand the basic flows and processes occurring.

A prime example is Steve Rubel's attempt to map a universe/galaxy/solar system style of metaphorical hierarchy onto his conception of social media. Steve writes:

"* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded - e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs"

To critique his system, let's first look at the basic structure he attempts to invoke. Going from galaxy, to star, to planet the structure envisioned is one of nested hierarchy combined with an illusion of anarchy on - but not between - each individual level. In other words he sees order in the progression from galaxies to solar systems, but essential disorder in these levels themselves. The belief in disorder is highlighted by his categorization of "shooting stars," and "asteroids." For him, these elements disrupt the structured order of progression from one level to another - a "shooting star," is a lower-level member, inappropriately and temporarily above it's natural status.

I won't go into how this metaphor reads astrophysics wrong, because that would miss the point and mostly because I have no grounds to correct anyone on astrophysics. I will however say that to make this systemic comparison is an attempt to read a politics and network structure into social media that is misleading.

Mixing hierarchy and level-specific anarchy in this way takes a narrow view of social media both temporally and physically. At any given time, within a specific sector of social media, this structure may exist, but over time and across the expanse of use and interaction structure is not nearly as hierarchized, centralized, or teleological. YouTube only attracts the like minded as much as a park bench does, Robert Scoble is only an online celebrity as much as Blake Schwarzenbach was a celebrity in the early/mid-nineties proto-pop-punk scene. We must see these networks as ever-modulating, compartmentalized, and interlinked. What we see today is not necessarily true for tomorrow as far as this social hierarchy is concerned.

The most crucial reason why this structure is flawed is that it completely ignores the very bedrock of social media which can be found on MySpace, LiveJournal, the del.icio.us networks among friends, and basically every interactive network of individuals that few pay attention to. If all of Rubel's "stars" and "planets" were to suddenly be gone, these undercurrents would continue to thrive and give birth to new high-points and low-points (to speak in topographical terms - what I see as perhaps a better metaphor). Social media is driven by regular people using these media to interact. I realize very well that on some significant, if unrecognized, level the purpose of interaction is self-reflexively spectacular and celebrity-driven, but this drive occurs within a socially driven network rather than being an inherent property of it.

Steve's post, then, typifies many of the techsphere's attempts at reading structure into what is essentially a process of archivization. It reaffirms the current structure as it is seen without regard to influences of time and expanse and often seems to be a self-congratulatory theory that claims the author's place in the structure is almost divinely ordained - natural - when it is in fact entirely dependent on collective, unpredictably organized interactions.

Posted by Nathan at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)