What follows is the fourth part of the article originally written for Audience 2.0. This section tries to carve out a subjectivity that lies neither in "the audience" nor "audience" but somewhere in between.

I also wanted to note that I've written a short piece on a related topic (P2P relationality) for the P2P Foundation wiki.

Of And Within Multiplicities

Recent developments on the web have changed the way people interact with each other and themselves. We are transferring more and more of ourselves into web-based media, effectively creating a distributed cultural archive of identity. In the most explicit ways, we do this through social networking sites, in less explicit ways through stored search queries, tagging, and attention logs. One way to describe our current mode of web-based interaction is to call it self- and social-classification. The root of interaction among these new media has been to classify ourselves and others. Our interactions leave marks on the participants, and these marks are stored and become the basis for future interaction and perception. Web-based media has literalized this to the point where these marks—and their archivization—are the oft-unspoken goal of interaction. As a result, we continually develop our grand and subtle, yet all-encompassing and controlling, cultural archive of identity.

One of the best examples of social classification is a service that many readers probably use every day: del.icio.us. I choose del.icio.us as an example because of its simplicity and its ability to incorporate diverse aspects of a user's web experience. Users interact with one another and data within the same system, often blurring the distinction between the two. For those unfamiliar, del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo!, is a social bookmarking tool. A user can bookmark a web page, “tag” it with terms so he can find it later, and share these tags and pages with other people.

The other day after coming home from work, I looked at my del.icio.us network. One's “network” aggregates the tagged pages of designated users and displays them chronologically along with their tags. I found that my friend had tagged an article in The Economist about economists blogging using the tags “academia” and “blogs.” It seemed interesting so I read it and bookmarked it in my own del.icio.us account. I tagged it with “academic,” “blogs,” and “economics.” I then saw that it had been saved by a few others, looked at who they were, how they described it, and what they tagged it with. Afterward, I navigated to the del.icio.us front page to see what everyone else who uses the service, when aggregated, found bookmark-worthy.

This simple activity of bookmarking and browsing bookmarks demonstrates one of the ways in which we begin to exist on the web and interact through self- and social-classification. First let's look at the ways in which I classified myself. It begins when I chose the user name “swarming.” I chose it to correspond with my blog, Swarming Media. It became a top-level signifier for my presence within the system. I have chained a piece of my identity to the textual production of that blog and its own array of associations. I could have chosen “nlovejoy” or “johnny_cash” just as easily. This choice is an assertive act of self classification, a performance.

Next, there is the choice of the people in my network. Who I add is as assertive as the choice of my name. It creates the content I will be exposed to and associates me with a variety of other interests. By putting someone in my network I am actively tying myself not only to their identity, but to their bookmarks and tags as well. This group of users could be read as a partial surrogate for my own identity. Thirdly, I classify myself through the tags I choose to use. For The Economist's article I chose “academic” over “academia,” “academics,” or even “bullshit.” After applying many tags, they are aggregated into a hierarchy according to frequency. This tag cloud, as a direct result of the terms I chose, also marks me with a particular identity. Finally, and most obviously, there is the choice of pages that I bookmark. The content of my page is filled with this material. Whatever I bookmark is sent out directly to my network and indirectly to the entire del.icio.us system. I am what I see. I mark myself through the pages I find to be worthy of public, associative display.

These items are—to use reflexive terminology—tags of identity. When I bookmark a page, I am tagging myself through my choice of object and tag terms. Other people tag me when they add me to their network, when they bookmark an entry from my blog, or whenever a member of my network uses del.icio.us. My identity here is created collectively and socially. The basic unit of interaction is classification. As I modulate my own identity, I also modulate those of the people whose pages I mark and those who have added me to their network. Identity is no longer fully autonomous nor entirely fluid; I have a great deal of control over the boundaries through self-classification, but other users play a major role in defining my surrogate, online self. Interaction through self- and social-classification leads to porous subjectivities.

While an individual's identity is defined by multiple sources, there exists an emergent identity of the system. As data from every user within del.icio.us is aggregated, categories like popular tags or hot items rise to the top. This begins to influence the tagging activities of users within the system itself. This upper-layer view not only represents the collective tagging actions of the users, but it also starts a process of systemic feedback. Users read the “hot items” and decide to tag it themselves or read a popular tag and work that into their personal taxonomy. Thus the aggregate, emergent entity begins to influence the individual identity just as much as the individual influences the aggregate.

The distinctions between individuals and groups of individuals are at once both more distinct—through increased classification—yet less autonomous—through systemic feedback and social-classification. The member of the crowd no longer loses his identity under the weight of the mass, but at the same time he loses the ability to define this reinstated selfness on his own. We have each come to harbor internal multiplicities, just as we are a unit within an external multiplicity. Put in another way, it is no longer clear whether we’re the audience or giving audience. The unidirectional flow of power between individual and mass that has fueled the two previous conceptions of audience has broken down and shifted to a tension between, and within masses of individuals. These new media have not only enabled a greater connectivity, but questioned the very concept of “the individual.”