Last night I read Luciano Floridi's piece in TidBITS and was generally agreed with him on most point about his idea of "the infosphere." To take a broad view, for Luciano, our culture is moving more and more into a state where data is perceived on equal ground as matter. In other words, interaction with digital/informational objects will not only hold as much siginificance as physical objects, but also hold as much conceptual significance in our every day actions. He predicts, more or less, a merging of this "infosphere" with the non-informational world. One of the best real-world examples he gives of this is RFID technology which will quite blatantly bind physical and informational spheres.

Before I get into my complaint with the piece, let me first point out one section which I very much agree with:

"By remolding the infosphere, digital information and communication technologies have brought to light the intrinsically informational nature of human agents. This is not equivalent to saying that people have digital alter egos, some Messrs. Hyde represented by their @s, blogs, and https. This trivial point only encourages us to mistake digital ICTs for merely enhancing technologies. The informational nature of agents should not be confused with a "data shadow" either. The more radical change, brought about by the reshaping of the infosphere, will be the realization of human agents as interconnected, informational organisms among other informational organisms and agents."

In understanding the operation of identity and subjectivity within these new media or - to be more expansive - informational networks, we have to move away from the idea that our interactions with and within these networks cannot be separated from our larger subjectivities. We may be able to close the browser window and ignore the tendrils of identity emanating from our implied center, but they continue to exist within the larger network. This informational network is an archive, and those are the terms through which we must view identity and subjectivity. By archive I don't mean some dusty room in the basement of a library, but the expansive network consisting of individuals and social institutions & constructions. And it is this point - that subjectivity flows through and throughout our networked world - that brings me to my complaint with Floridi - however minor.

The article approaches this shift into an informationally driven and networked world as the sudden change that new technology will bring. Essentially taking the techologically determinist position. It is critical to recognize that this prediction is not so radical as many might see it. (Though I don't believe Floridi saw it as overly radical - he began the piece with the wonderful quote: "They say there are only two kinds of predictions: wrong and lucky.") There are two particular texts to look at as precursors to Floridi's "infosphere." They are Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and Deleuze's essay Postscript on Societies of Control - 1982 and 1990 respectively.

Archaeology outlines the author's concept of the archive as the expansive, all inclusive network containing multiple and heterogeneous aspects of our society. Where Foucault says "knowledge," Floridi might say "information," very similar terms when taken within their own contexts of degreed digitally networked spheres. What this shows is that the idea of an "infosphere" has existed even before the technology that will supposedly bring it to life. The infosphere in Fiordi's piece seems merely to be a reifying step in a larger teleology. As for Postscript, this essay begins to deal with technology in a more direct way while at the same time reacting to and modifying the Foucaultian notion of discipline. Where Deleuze writes about a more modular form of control, Fiordi writes about the idea that ignorance of information becomes no longer and excuse. Both express the larger concept that our subjectivities are the result of interaction with this larger archival network. We cannot separate ourselves from this ever creeping infosphere, just as we cannot sever our ties to the modular ideals of the corporation.

Overall then, it is a small complaint. I agree with Fiordi's general concepts, but wish that he would have contextualized it to a further extent, framing it less as a prediction than as an observation of a lager, continual trend.