I've just been reading an entry at Media Studies 2.0 entitled "MySpace and Legendary Psychasthenia" and while I generally like his blog quite a bit, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of what William was writing and his methods of argument. Essentially, the essay bemoans a loss of "individuality" in our subjective immigration to online social networks. This is an argument that has been heard before, and one that does have some valuable claims, but ultimately the entry fails to properly account for the multiplicity of subjective interaction and archivization via online social networks. And by thus mistaking the global for the local and vice-versa, it's tough to give the point much weight.

The piece begins by setting up a spuriously dichotomous thesis: "I want to suggest that Myspace, Facebook and their ilk represent, not a flowering of self and individuality but its psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." In this situation online social networks can have one of two effects: a "flowering of self and individuality" or "psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." Defining these as the two subjective potentialities for these new media is almost ridiculous. Should anyone take seriously claims that these media could do either? Generally, I dismiss both the most dire and the most optimistic assessments of online social networks for what they are: hyperbole.

Secondly, neither in the thesis nor in the body of the essay is "individuality" properly defined or contextualized. Is it merely the difference of definable characteristics between individual subjects? Must actions of social conformity be viewed as undesirable? Do they not allow us to have a functional society in the first place? To use the term "individuality" in such a decontextualized, more-is-better manner is really to ascribe to a vague and misleading ideology of personal gratification, fueled by a healthy dose of egotism.

The body of the essay often refers to users of MySpace and Facebook as though they use one and only one of these services at the exclusion of the other and any other socio-archival web-based media. Despite citing Sherry Turkle's cogent and convincing defense of a multiple and distributed online self, William goes on to ignore it an focus entirely on a user's individual profile on one of the two major online social networks, and thus drawing questionable conclusions about online subjectivity: "The self is set free as a profile, fixed to another point – to a non-space existing only as proprietal code within an electronic network – and subsequently lost to us."

Within this sentence the following assumptions are made: (1) subjective tendrils, once created, are entirely divorced from their creator; (2) online social networks are a "non-space"; and that (3) our online self is thus "lost to us." The first assumption falls into the trap that many writing about online identity fall into - the idea that when we turn off our computer that we have severed ties to the actions we have just performed. We interact on these networks long after we cease to alter our profiles, just look at the phenomenon of online graveyards and death-centric social networks. Yes these are simulacra, but they continue to signify as subjective proxies for us after we have moved on in one way or another. A profile has not been "set-free" but retains as much a connection to its creator as anything we create does if not more so on account of its personal-representational mode. Just because it exists on a server somewhere does not imply that we have somehow lost ownership or subjective links.

The second assumption, that online social networks are a "non-space," requires quite a leap. The idea that online social networks should be considered within the realm of "space" at all is merely a rhetorical and metaphorical construction to begin with. This is the familiar ideology of "cyberspace" - which is actually used several times in the essay - an ideology that began in science fiction novels and has been used to conceptualize a series of new media that did not fit easily into any other boxes we might have. On top of this, the term is used in an inexplicably derogatory manner. Even if this was a non-space, the reason why this serves to divorce or homogenize networked subjectivity goes unexplained.

The third assumption is merely the result of the first two. Certainly if we were to actually be setting little chunks of our identity "free" in a "non-space," we'd be at a loss. The fact is however that we never manage to lose our subjective tendrils online, and when you consider (as William does not) the multiplicity of venues for subjective in/dividuation and construction and the fact that many of these tendrils continue to exist and thrive in a networked-archival environment - it seem like we actually are seeing exactly what Turkle describes.

That said, the essay does hit on some key points, and William's analysis of interaction through online social networks as perpetual semiotic (or affective, I might suggest) labor is spot on - even if he doesn't apply it to a multiple-subjective environment. For these reasons - and for the sake of debate - I do recommend this essay.

Posted by Nathan at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I recently wrote, which I later realized would be an applicable subject here. I've spruced it up a bit to make it something other than a letter, but if you're the recipient of the letter and want me to take this down, let me know and it's gone. It deals with whether or not it is appropriate to speak of a code of ethics for blogs.

When discussing a code of ethics for blogs, one generally thinks of the blogger-as-reporter paradigm. Yet this lays certain traps because it linguistically it refers to a medium, when it intends to refer to a use of a medium. To speak of a universal code of ethics one would have to consider blogs that do not always see their purpose as entirely journalistic, like music blogs, tech blogs, gossip blogs, as well as the socially-localized personal blogs that dominate the medium. In some of these contexts, speaking of a universal code of ethics doesn't make too much sense, since informal, unique codes arise through the interaction between the bloggers within sub-network groups. For instance, a group of high-schoolers with blogs written for consumption by their friends will (and, I would say, should) have a very different code than someone blogging for the New York Times. The problem with this many codes-of-ethics view could be that it leans overly populist or relativist at times, but ultimately any code of ethics is going to be determined through the interaction of bloggers and readers, regardless of other concerns.

That said, any individual blogger who takes themselves reasonably seriously would be able to describe a code that s/he follows or ascribes to - that's simply good (public) writing. I have a different sets of ethical practices for the blog I edit for the day-job, Swarming Media, and the other blogs I've started in the past. These came about largely in relation to the other blogs in the topic-field, the context (corporate, academic, personal, artistic, journalistic etc), and how I expect readers to interact with the blog. In this sense, a code of ethics becomes a socially and collectively determined thing - one that is relevant usually only to the readers and blogs within close network-proximity.

Ultimately, this comes down to the question that always arises in media studies: are we talking about content or medium? When it comes to blogs, there are certain medium-specific properties that differentiate it from other media and are used to great advantage in a number of blogs. At the same time, while these properties are quite worthy of analysis, how they are used, who they are used by, and at whom they are directed will determine a large portion of their cultural, political, and social significance - including ethically.

Posted by Nathan at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week has seen the arrival of a new banjo, and the realization that I'm behind in some other tasks, but nonetheless, I did notice that a new article on CTheory has more than a little to do with a The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly.

The former, "The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies," by William Bogard covers the physical-sensory elements of control stemming from Deleuze's "Postscript to Societies of Control." Though the term "haptic space" has always seemed largely unnecessary and more obfuscating than clarifying, Bogard produces a good piece that applies his through read of the Postscript in some interesting ways.

The Technology Quarterly articles - specifically "The ultimate game gear" and "The trouble with computers" - also deal with ideas of physical-sensory control of the technology user. In the first article of the two, the writer describes complex chairs and media systems designed to manipulate a video-gamer's body in various ways. These new devices are all designed to sever the gamer's connection to non-game experiences just as much as they are to sever connection to experiences that are a bit too game like (such as the nasty aftermath of a drag race gone wrong). This suddenly echoes Bogards phrasing in "Coils":

"Borges's haptic world in which 'everything touches everything' becomes an engineering project to produce digital environments that have exactly the 'right feel' and can command the body directly."

The second article in the Technology Quarterly that deals with physical-sensory control asks what innovations could make computers easier to use, much as the mouse did once. On the surface, this might seem like a question of a user's "control" over an interface. In fact - and this is essentially what eny discussion of interface is about - it is a question of interface designers of how to control the user. The article focuses, in part, on gesture-based graphical interaction with computers, but really the logical end for interface designers is a product which reads the mind of the user and displays when s/he wants without command. This is essentially the downfall of a physical-sensory control in favor of the more data-driven control that Deleuze writes about in the Postscript. No longer would technology users be required to touch or simulate touch (as a mouse "pointer" does), but the system would know best what to display and not to display.

All in all, these are three interesting pieces to read together, though they wouldn't seem immediately applicable to each other.

Posted by Nathan at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in the Rhizome Artbase I cam across a couple of interesting pieces by Martin John Callanan: I am Still Alive and I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. The works play with the notion of immediacy - on the web and in text message communication respectively.

News brings together (or at least claims to) thumbnail images of the front pages of every national, daily newspaper from around the world. The web page is filled with the evenly spaced images and interrupted only by a small text box in the top right of the viewer's browser stating "I Wanted to See All of the News From Today: [today's date], Martin John Callanan." Alive, on the other hand, claims to involve a device that searches local wireless networks for open, connected devices like PDAs or cell phones, and when it finds one, sends the message "I am still alive" - translated appropriately for the country of course.

What I enjoy about both pieces are their direct and simple nature. News presents nothing more than "the news" in the form of its most prominent signifier, the national daily paper. Alive does not discriminate between phones more than it has to for delivery and presents the surprised recipient with a message that states a simple, if slightly bewildering statement.

Where News succeeds is in its critique of online news and news aggregators. The project earnestly, ingenuously, and almost feyly approaches its stated goal - one it shares with Google, CNN.com, and of course the New York Times own "All the News..." claim. Yet in doing so, it points out the quixotic and ultimately sisyphean task it really is. In this way, News also parodies the larger project of the socially networked internet: totalizing archivization and the myth that "everything is at your fingertips." The work shows that in fact, when everything is at you fingertips - it's actually just a bit too much and perhaps what we're looking for after all is a different sort of archive. Thus Callanan successfully mocks the major online news outlets' earnestness at the same time as he nods to the enormity of their common project.

What I enjoy about Alive is how it plays with the notion of immediacy in media like text messages or social networks. In these media, users/participants are constantly engaged in a project of updating and enhancing. MySpace users continually fiddle with their profiles to convey just the right message for the moment - Twitter users somehow find the need to update friends and followers with minutiae (and these friends and followers find the need to pay attention). These are media of archivization of the present, where a steady stream of information implies life and a cessation of the flow signals death. This is not only corporeal death - as that certainly is evidenced in suddenly static texts and profiles - but also a halting of participation, which is the equivalent of death in these media.

So in choosing "I am still alive" as the message sent to unwitting participants, Callanan has brilliantly honed the basic sentiment in every message that we send or profile update we make. Every message may as well say "I am still alive" since that message is the function of all such communication. Not just an odd phrase to rouse curiosity, the message is crafted to make the recipients aware of the medium itself.

I really was impressed by these two works and their deadly simple, yet pithy delivery. I strongly suggest that readers take a look.

Posted by Nathan at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)