I somehow wasn't able to find time to post last week, so for that I apologize. However, in that time I did come across a few items on the web that I wanted to remark on. When going back over them, I realized that a common explicit theme in each one is control within social/media networks. It, then, seems appropriate that I go over each one and look at how the concept of control:

Fred at Unit Structures: "Facebook Gifts: Pushing the limits of rationality"
In this entry, Fred - who closely and thoughtfully follows developments within and around the Facebook network - writes about the recent addition of Facebook "gifts," little icons that users can give to eachother for a $1 price. He touches on the issue of control beginning here:

"In Cyworld and SL, virtual commodities are persistent and explicitly tied to identity. In SL, if you buy a cool shirt, you get to wear it. In Cyworld, if you buy neat wallpaper for your minihome, it stays there and makes your house look better. In Facebook, the value tied to the transaction is less identity-centric. First, you are explicitly buying the gift for another person, and this gift simply shows up in their profile as a received gift."

Fred is spot-on in pointing out how these icons relate to the expression of identity, people are paying not to alter their own web-manifestation, but rather to mark another's. Yet, while I agree with his point that $1 is probably more than most college students will be willing to pay, we have to be careful not to underestimate the significance of social-classification within these media. For many users on Facebook and other similar services, one of the main purposes is not just to develop an identity within the network, but almost equally to alter the identities of others. If I were to give a gift to a friend on the service his/her expression of identity would be affected in a very real manner. It is the same basic process that happens through leaving messages on "the wall" or posting pictures of friends tagged with their name.

These media thrive not just on a unidirectional surveillance, but a distributed surveillance in which our actions, explicit and implicit, serve as a means of social control. So while this is not exactly the Panopticon, it is neither exactly the Society of Control, which equally relies on a more centralized construction of modulation and socialization.

The second item I was hoping to comment on was FreeYourID, a site which uses OpenID to provide identity management services, including e-mail, homepage, etc. I've often been wary of such services in the past. My thoughts are no different on FreeYourID. While I respect and agree with the goal of the service - to create a tool to better manage the connection between meat-space and networked selves - the rhetoric of centralization and control seem to go against the grain of the potential for the medium in which they are working. Services like this really do point to a Deleuzian-control future, where subjects each carry ID cards that let them through some doors but not others based on predetermined data. The most interesting thing going on in the space of identity and subjectivity is not individual control, but network control over subjectivity. In these networks the individual is composed of many, not one. My Facebook gift to you becomes a part of your subjective reality; to try to develop a system which denies this reality is one that makes me uncomfortable.

The next web-tidbit I'm going to talk about takes a different approach to control than FreeYourID. The entry "Control vs. Communication" on the 37Signals blog, tackles the dilemma of control head-on. The writer, Jason, advocates an approach to control that rests on the strength of the network surrounding a project rather than a set of built-in permissions:

"It is our belief that when you collaborate with trusted parties it’s important for people to be able to communicate any way they see fit. Preventing someone from saying or doing something often breaks these free flowing communication channels and introduces miscommunication or silence—two cancers of collaboration."

It is up to the constituent elements of the network to determine its interactive protocol. This is exactly what occurs in less-regulated networked environments anyway, but Jason is wrong to think that this approach is the antithesis to control. In fact, it is merely a different expression of it - one more appropriate for the environment.

I had a few more items I'd wanted to write about (including the amazing Botanicalls, check it out), but these three seem to get my point across. We are increasingly participating a in a networked, multiple subjectivity through our archived, web-based interactions. Our approaches to control and identity are going to have to take this into account whether that means repricing a toilet-paper icon on Facebook, rethinking our relationship to our online-selves, or collaborating in a distributed environment.