To pick up again, my effort to read everything under my "READTHIS" tag on del.icio.us, I tackled Fragile Psychosphere by Franco Berardi. Before I begin with my critique, however, I think it's important to note that this piece was published online at link-a, "Eleven art works around contemporary affectivity and its technological mediation," produces by MediaLabMadrid. I'm noting this because I've critiqued a few pieces on this blog from there and would strongly reccomend it to anyone who regularly reads Swarming Media.

Berardi covers a lot of ground in this essay, much of which I agree with, but there are a few particular aspects of his argument that I differ on - not the least of which are his frequent lines drawn between theory and physiology, but I won't discuss that here. He makes the distinction between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberpace he sees as the physical and implied media network, extending, presumably, beyond simply digital media but focusing on such. This vision of cyberspace embodies the Virilio-esque rapidity of information and expansion of the "infosphere." With the predominance of this "infosphere," Berardi claims that our identities - as connected to memory - are less singular, but also somehow lesser and shallow:

"The thickening of the infospheric crust and the increase in quantity and intensity of the incoming informational material thus produces the effect of a reduction of the sphere of singular memory. The things that an individual remembers (images, etc.) work towards the construction of an impersonal memory, homogenised, uniformly assimilated and thinly elaborated because the time of exposure is so fast it doesn’t allow for a deep personalisation"

I entirely agree that we are less singular as a result of our increasingly networked lives/"infosphere." The trails, or tendrils, that we leave behind in our digitally networked environments create multiple paths of identity that only proliferate as we continue to experience and interact with media networks. Yet to say that the result of this process is somehow impersonal of homogenized, does not take into account the altered perception of time that we have gained as a result of interaction within these swarming media networks.

Berardi views digitally networked identity according to linear time. To take a momentary slice of a multiply networked identity, yes, it would seem shallow and homogenized. At any given time we are likely discussing the same events, experiencing the same media - a phenomenon, which on 9/11 needs no explanation. Yet when we recognize that networked digital media and identities exist within an expansive archival system, our conception of time stretches beyond the momentary. We not only experience media in a networked, speedy space, our movements and interactions in this network are marked, controlled, and archived. This process expands how we must view time. Just as we are no longer singular as Berardi notes, nor are our experiences and interactions as a result of the increased archivization. Memory - as his key to identity - is not decreased with an increased flow of in formation, it is increased through the databased identity, the networked identity.

Berardi seems to recognize this criticism and tries to head it off by claiming that our cognitive abilities were arrested sometime in the seventeenth century:

"No matter how the universe of texts continues to expand on an immense scale in the sphere of network information, the human mind continues to read according to sequential models, and therefore it continues to record, memorise, catalogue and select at a pace that was formed in the time in which the printed text was alphabetically predominant."

It seems strangely and willfully ignorant to say that our cognitive capacity has not changed with the help of the increased archivization, the result of the same process that allows us to experience media in this wildly sped-up "infosphere." It is the same process by which our memory is extended that our experiences are shortened, heading off his point that identity has been cheapened in the networked environment. We are not more shallow as a result, simply more distributed.