Fred has a good post up on Unit Structures responding to MoveOn.org's recent e-mail barrage about Facebook and privacy. Despite its purpose of defending the intelligence of the body of Facebook users, Fred hits on two key points that people would do well to learn when considering developments in online social network, in any case.

"The brand entity of Facebook is governmental; the only time one interacts with Facebook as entity is when they are being controlled or punished. Facebook as brand represents surveillance and domination."

Control and surveillance. These two concepts are central to the existence of online social networks, and increasingly to networked interaction in general. Except control and surveillance occur at more points than simply the juncture between user and brand as Fred writes. We socialize with one another through these methods, watching for updates from friends, tagging pictures, and writing comments. At the same time we expect to be the subject of surveillance and control in our tweaking of our profiles and conscious and unconscious performances. Facebook - and other online social networking brands for that matter - certainly plays a role in this, but that role is, first, recognizing the new interactive protocols and, second, providing ever better tools through which we can enact them.

Fred's second general point that people should pay attention to comes up here:

"When I joined Facebook, I cared that I could find my friend's address and see his or her pictures. However, I don't care when my friend buys something or superpokes someone else. Since I'm getting less of that good information, Facebook is trying to stave off the what's netxt problem by flooding me with "constructed" information. In making Facebook's useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases."

Online social networking sites depend solely on the manipulation and distribution of personal information. That's it. It's from this manipulation and distribution of personal information that the protocols of control and surveillance thrive. What Fred is getting at here is central to the dangerous territory Facebook is entering as it grows - the less personal its information gets and the more its ability to distribute that information becomes difficult, the more Facebook is vulnerable to exodus.

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

A November 17th article in the Brisbane Times about workplace productivity, "All the same to new white-collar intelligentsia", in fact brings to light an interesting connection between one of the Italian autonomists' favored form of protests - refusal of work - and Facebook, the popular social networking site.

The article correctly acknowledges that younger workers today do not spend all of their hours at the office engaged in job-related activity. They spend time reading blogs, making personal appointments, IMing with friends, or checking non-work e-mail. Speaking as a young worker myself, I can confirm this. Yet the piece's author, Lisa Pryor, frames this type of activity as a conscious action on behalf of the young white-collar worker, who is now expected to be available for work in near perpetuity. With instant, ubiquitous, and increasingly mobile access to the contemporary tools of the job (a web browser and a phone), employees almost seamlessly enter and exit states of work and non-work. We're likely and often required to send a work e-mail, or make a work-related call from home. In reaction to this, Pryor suggests, young workers take personal time out of their work hours.

Italian autonomist thinkers like Antonio Negri endorsed similar forms of social action, as refusal of work. This was in reaction to the increasingly modular, precarious, and fluid labor conditions that young Italian workers faced in the 70s and 80s - a broader labor condition when a full-scale strike might not have the same effect. Refusal of work meant sleeping on the job, working at a deliberately slow pace, but in a more general way, showing up but not really working. This was a way of questioning the value of labor, its measurement in hours, and the worker's relation to labor.

Are we in a situation today when refusal of work has become the assumed natural reaction to the expanding modularity and perpetuity of work? If so, does that dilute the weight of the ontological and social questions that are raised in the autonomists' vision(s)?

I'm guessing that Lisa Pryor may not have missed this connection, seeing as she quotes Adorno at the end of the article, but clearly this deserves more thought than a blog entry (not written on work hours) can put forth.

Posted by Nathan at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps I'm a bit negligent in not writing about pieces in the recent release of the social network focused issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, but tonight a different text caught my eye: the abstract for a January 26, 2007 panel, designed by Michael Zimmer entitled "Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0: Surveillance, Discipline, Labor". In a broad view, these are some of the most pertinent aspects to consider in our increasingly networked culture. Surveillance as interaction, the shift from a disciplinary society to a control society, and the changing positions and definitions of labor.

Though only an abstract is made available for each panelist, I particularly enjoyed that of Anders Albrechtslund, called "Surveillance as social play". He writes:

"Traditionally, students of surveillance have been occupied with the negative and worrying aspects of monitoring practices in society, and concepts such as Big Brother and Panopticon have dominated the literature as the metaphorical framework. ... However, as surveillance studies has grown to be a broader field of research, the positive and caring aspects has come into consideration as well ... Furthermore, it has been suggested that surveillance studies should embrace the contexts of entertainment, play and leisure, and in this way, surveillance is studied as a social practice."

This is one point that we as a networked society grapple with on a near daily basis. Should we trust Google with all of our information if it leads to better service? Will the RIAA sue me if I use a peer-to-peer network in a manner that is not to their liking? Are teens being to liberal with their personal information on social networks? These are questions that arise with some frequency and all point to our simultaneous unease and growing dependence on surveillance - as a service, as social interaction, and as a threat.

Surveillance is a service for Google. We let them look at our e-mail, web site traffic, feeds, and soon phone activity in return for more relevant, unobtrusive ads and powerful, free applications. What's important to note here is that this kind of surveillance is, for the most part, voluntary. We willingly hand over our data - though possibly without realizing its inherent value.

Surveillance is social interaction on social networking sites. The Facebook news feed is an excellent distillation of this concept. We alter our performed, online identity with the knowledge that this addition of data will be seen by our friends. We want to be the subject of surveillance - that is they essential point of a social networking profile. At the same time, we want to be the on the other end of that relationship at the same time when looking at other people's data. A good way to describe surveillance as interaction would be distributed surveillance, which then leads to distributed control and modulation.

Surveillance as a threat hardly needs to be explained. It is the way we have always perceived surveillance - at least as long as we are its subject. The UK's CCTV ubiquity is an example of the unidirectional surveillance that partially defines a network culture.

It's clear then that surveillance isn't just Big Brother anymore.

Or, at least we are all Big Brothers in our own little ways nowadays.

Posted by Nathan at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex Pang's recent entry at The End of Cyberspace, "A thought about the future of memory", brings up what I think is a crucial issue to consider in our networked-archival lives. Alex begins by remarking that he remembers very few - if any at all - phone numbers anymore. Just like the rest of us, they exist in his cell phone, listed by name, and sorted alphabetically. This phenomenon is not limited to cell phones however, we see this offloading of memory in the increasing ease of photography and its networked storage, blogging, birthdays, and so on. Who needs to remember birthdays when we have Facebook to remind us?

A natural reactionary criticism of this shift is that it represents a larger cultural deficiency - that our natural memory has failed as a result of being so overly outsourced. Certainly if we rely on devices and services to remember facts for us, we have no need to commit them to memory. Yet to imply that that this represents a cultural or even generational loss of memory misses the mark. The rote memorization of facts indeed may be off-loaded, but that hardly represents memory as a cultural force. This latter form of memory takes the form of nostalgia, tradition, and history - each of which is heightened in different ways by these same networked-archival entities that have become our outsourced memories.

I return to this often here, but the phenomenon of mourning on social networks is fascinating. From the profiles of the deceased on MySpace to dedicated networks like Respectance, the argument that networked-archival environments diminish memory on any large scale is clearly off. If anything these technologies/devices/services/etc have allowed us to revel and wallow in memory. We are faced with an abundance of memory and if there is a crisis, it is a crisis of nostalgia waiting to happen.

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