In the past few days I received a lot of e-mails with links to articles about danah boyd's essay, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace." The essay discusses class divisions between Facebook users and MySpace users - concluding that the "good" (i.e. wealthy and educated) flock to Facebook, while the "bad" (i.e. working class and not college-bound) are drawn to MySpace. Danah makes relevant points, most importantly that this division stems from the two sites respective histories. Facebook began as a gated community for elite college students, whereas MySpace cut its teeth on flashy design, openness, and city-based entertainment ("urban" carries too much baggage unfortunately).

What I have found interesting, however, are two specific responses to her essay: the BBC's article and Umair from Bubblegeneration's post. Each takes somewhat of an extreme (mis?)reading, but in different directions.

The BBC piece suffers from over simplification:

"The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college."

While her essay does state this, it is in the context of tracing the history of Facebook. In fact this point logically follows when one knows that the network began at Harvard then expanded to other elite schools before opening up to all college students. The essay is not so simplistic as to suggest that cold milk has probably been refrigerated. The BBC's summary glosses over the more nuanced (though far from rigorous) discussion of the expression of class in American teenagers.

Umair's response takes a negative view:

"She almost sounds as if she pities Myspace kids. Why the whiff of elitism?"

I'm not sure what he is reading in the essay that pities MySpace users, rather she seems to identify with them over Facebook users. She refers to her labeled "sub-altern" group as having their "heads screwed on tighter" than the "hegemonic teens," and even very explicitly pities the Facebook users for presumably coming from a restrictive, misleading environment. That said, I'm glad that I read Umair's negative reaction before reading danah's essay because I could then go into it with a more critical eye.

My main criticism with the essay lies in the fact that she takes the present state of these networks as static. If we have learned anything in these years of socially networked environments, it is that the sites are in constant flux. Who joins is dependent on the social relationship of one generation of user to another certainly, but it is also possible that this is a negative relationship as much as a positive one. This is all excluding the effect of the social networking site management - danah herself has partially blamed Friendster's management for its eventual demise. Much like Mark Twain described the weather in New England, if you don't like the weather in social networking sites now, wait five minutes.

Posted by Nathan at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wired put up a gallery of a variety of steampunk creations the other day. The gallery itself is great, especially considering that most of the designs are individually created projects. I'm not sure how instructive it is to compare steampunk to 8-bit revisitations and such however:

"Retro-futurism is all the rage these days: antique computers, 8-bit game art, classic cases for modern gear, anything to make the onslaught of new technology less disposable. The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk."

While the beautifully styled "antique" computers are a an aestheticized vision of a past-future overlaid onto future technologies, the 8-bit renaissance is nostalgic vision of past-presents still socially imaginable. Steampunk versus technostalgia.

Posted by Nathan at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of days ago Eric Kluitenberg sent to the nettime list the text of talk he gave at the INFOWARROOM series in Amsterdam last week. He makes a number of good points in the text relating to the rise of user-generated media and its effects on subjectivity. I couldn't help but bristle at one section of the piece:

"The current explosion of self-publication in countless weblogs, on community websites, self-video portals, in on-line diaries, web fora and a plethora of individual websites is only the visible sign of an undercurrent that was already for many years transforming 'the public' into an amalgamation of increasingly unrelated subjectivities and singular interest groups."

This sentence begins with an observation that is not made often enough in new media analysis - that what we see in the form of blogs and other forms of social media is merely the visible effects of a larger cultural and subjective current, or at best the enabling vehicle. The blog is not what is fascinating, but what leads people to read them, write them, and socialize with them. The action is a product of a slow revelation of a relational mode of subjectification, predicated on and in many ways exacerbating a reliance on multiplicity.

The second half of the sentence, however, does not strike the same chord of approval in my thinking. The idea of "increasingly unrelated subjectivities and singular interest groups" specifically strikes me as out of line given the rest of piece. The many-year transformation of which he speaks might (and appropriately) refer to the rise of the ever more precise marketing data that has been collected over the past few decades, which to a large extent acts as a precursor to new media business models. Yet just as blogs and social media merely provide the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the larger currents, such marketing-based specificity is merely a surface in itself, hiding another reality. Despite the appearance of more and more interest groups, demographic divisions, or socialities, this does not imply neat social and subjective divisions, but, in fact, the opposite. With increasing outlets for identification, and single one becomes inadequate for all but the rarest of folk. Indeed the very plethora of identifying possibilities stretches the process of subjectification to the point that multiplicity and relationality are the only options.

This stretching of the subject then finds an outlet in the hyper-individuality expressed in many examples of social media, which - as the author knows, judging by the first half of this sentence - is just the visual surface for much larger motion. This hyper-individuality belies its multiple, relational constitution.

Posted by Nathan at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just read an interesting piece by Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer of the Piratbyran in Sweden that the latter sent to the Nettime mailing list (as well as posting here). In it, Eriksson and Fleischer reiterate their call for an end to the debate on copyright as we know it, but more interestingly they lay out their vision of the music industry as it stands. While reading their perspective, I couldn't help but think of the similarities between what they are describing and the shifts in the labor economy that Paolo Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude.

"Let's try to define what a live performance is: Something that happens in real-time, a specific time and place. Something establishing an [sic] relation between different people sharing a similar taste for something. An experience you are part of creating. These features can also be observed in the actual uses of recorded music; in the domains where people share music, meta-data, tags, ratings and stories."

This focus on the production of affect over any physical entity - though metadata, tags, etc. all blur these distinctions to a large degree - is similar to Virno's description of praxis replacing poesis; virtuosity becoming the central element of production. In these situations, presence, experience, and narrative supersede the physical commodity in economic importance.

The example Eriksson and Fleischer use to illustrate this also highlights the role of metadata as a means to convey affect:

"Think about sharing musical taste with Last.fm. The most significant effect it has on us, is that it suddenly makes listening to MP3's a two-way activity: While music is streaming from our loudspeakers, metadata are sent back to a central server, continually building on your personal profile, which you know will be used not only by the system for calibrating you personal radio, but also by other humans to judge you. In short, that makes listening to MP3's a performative act. Listening overtakes traits from artistic performance, to some extent."

Metadata has become the medium for virtuosic labor in this circumstance. Performative consumption is conveyed in the layering of data upon data that is then translated into a social environment. It doesn't take the place of affect, then, which is produced through the act of listening, but it signifies affect in an archived state. In other words, it shifts the temporality of affective production from singular presentness to repeated, multiple presents.

Temporality is an important distinction to make when discussing affective or virtuosic labor in archival contexts. Much of the concept of virtuosic production relies on singular experience, but within these new environments, what conceptual changes must we make?

Posted by Nathan at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)