My attempt to actually read everything I've tagged with "READTHIS" on del.icio.us continues with Daniel Palmer's The Paradox of User Control. In the essay, Palmer constructs a critique of the popular notion of an increasingly active media user by citing a handful of past critics from Raymond Williams to Lev Manovich. Through these citations, he builds an opposition between a mediasphere that empowers users through customized production and a mediasphere that operates as a mode of capitalist social control through isolation and modulation. In the end, for him, the utopian views of multiple subjectivities are merely illusions, and recent changes in media-interaction are hung with a dark cloud of the capitalist mode of production.

While he hits all the right points, and without a doubt consults the right sources, I don't agree with his essential separation of a society of control and a mediasphere enabling of multiple subjectivities. These two points are not at all in opposition within new media networks. In fact, the distribution and archivization of subjectivity furthers the tools of a society of control. The paradox of user control is not a paradox at all: the tools that empower the user, simultaneously and unconflictingly contribute to a socially-driven, modular discipline/control.

There's one critical aspect that Paradox does not adequately cover (granted, it's a four page piece): flow of data/media in relation to identity and subjectivity in a networked archival environment. Palmer only seems to discuss the user as a consumer and a producer and doesn't point out that the user is also the material from which that which is consumed, is produced. This is overwhelmingly clear in social networking sites where the constant honing of the profile page is one of the main activities. The user is not just controlling what media s/he experiences or interacts with, s/he is customizing him/herself for the the consumtion of others. What this shows is that we can't separate ourselves onto the two ends of an economic exchange, but we are inextricably woven into that exchange as the good - as the media - itself.

This further complicates when we see that we are not the only ones modulating our identities. As I've often written about here, the very protocol of interaction in these social media is classification. We modulate each others' subjectivities through a wide variety of means. One simple example here might be in del.icio.us where the actions of a user within another's 'network' determine not only what the user will see but how he is seen by others through their tagging activity.

Thus the control that Palmer talks about still does occur, but it occurs not solely from some capitalist ubergeist, but from ourselves, our multiple tendrils of identity, and the emergent effects of the resulting network. Our very participation in the new economy of mass customization makes us complcit in the modular control of (in)dividuals within our larger society. Nor are we over individualized as a result, but increasingly interconnected not as singular entities but through criss-crossing archived subjectivities.