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.