I got around to catching up with my non-work blog reading today and of the pieces that jumped out to me, most focused on the distribution of power over web-based social networks (in the broader sense). I'm referring here to control of resources as well as political influence, as opposed to more Foucaultian senses or Deleuzian control. How, in an environment for which standard practices around privacy, ownership, and identity are still being forged, do we allocate or support mechanisms of sociality and quasi-governance?

The piece that set me down this line of thought tonight was a brief article in Tech Confidential from last week about Digg's decision to alter its practices to block the influence of certain uber-Diggers, who have come to wield large amounts of influence over what makes it to the front page. These Diggers have made their way to such a position by being able to convince large numbers of other users to vote a particular entry up or down. This sets up a situation in which the normally laissez-faire overseeing body, Digg-the-company, sees an effective inequality between users and a global lessening of diversity through the influence of a relative few members. In this view, these members lead to a social context that promotes bandwagonism and unduly favors early entrants to the system.

Sure, it could be argued that actions limiting the ability of these uber-users from influencing the actions of "average" users promotes diversity - after all, with less persuasion, won't everyone just vote how they feel they should, not what anyone else thinks they should? But on the other side of the coin, I think that such informal, and indeed formal, associations between uber-users and average users is unavoidable in any sort of reasonably large sociality. For example, I'm one who believes that labor unions are a natural result of the economic conditions which place a large number of similar people, in similar situations, together. It is the same basic social and effect of unicyclists forming a unicycle club. On Digg, like in ay unicycle club, there will be some members who are more engaged than others and act as eyes and ears for those who can not or do not want to be more engaged. To imply that such forms of association, however informal, are somehow working against the larger community seems odd as it is the natural result of community. It is also quite futile to fight it. Whatever limitations Digg puts in place, there will be ways for these sub-associations, informal sub-networks - or whatever you wish to call them - to exist and function as they have up until now.

This type of sub-network formation seems natural to any web service with ambitions to mimic or enhance non-web social interaction. Concurrently, so does the formation of a hierarchy within these subnetworks between those with different levels of engagement.

The line of thought stemming from this seems to head toward a Gladwellian conclusion that there is some subset of influential folks who are responsible for each and every trend sweeping over society. This brings me to the (infallible, of course)Fast Company article on Duncan Watts, which describes Watts' strong opposition to this particular view of social network-based communication. A particular section from the article gets to Watts' alternative view:

Watts believes ... a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. ...

'If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can,' Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an 'accidental Influential.'

Watts describes that in a number of models he set up to pattern the spread of information among a heterogeneously socially-connected group, the cascade of information that defines a sweeping trend was more often started by a node that had only average connections. However, a highly connected node was able to spread it faster and further.

If we take this view and apply it to highly-engaged vs. less-engaged users of a web based social networking service, then it seems that the uber-users are not so much responsible for seeding trends, but in some cases can be responsible for furthering them. According to Watts, the average Digg user has as much influence as the uber-Digger.

One thing I would be curious to see Watts look into would be the effect of the formalization of the union like sub-networks within social networks like Digg. Does effective institutionalization of influence effect the spread of information? Or does it merely mask its origin and development?

On top of all this is the issue of ownership of the data through which all this communication is expressed. It is vitally important to address the implications of ownership, especially as we witness self-declared non-evil companies absorbing more and more of our personal data every day. This may be done through providing useful and entertaining services and products, but really that's just another way of saying "enslavement with a smile" - with a hefty dose of melodrama, of course. Axel Bruns addressed this issue of ownership in what he calls 'produsage' in Re-Public.

All in all, Terrell Russell (in a largely unrelated post) puts it well when he writes:

"We sometimes forget we’re in uncharted territory. We are playing with the new shiny toys of the internet and not necessarily understanding the implications. These tools provide great power across the board. Users gain abilities to connect, find, sort, and publish in ways never before available. Conversely, companies gain abilities to monitor, gather, and sell more personal information than ever before. Additionally, third party observers gain the ability to observe at a distance and in numbers never possible in the physical world."

Posted by Nathan at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Read about "the social web burn out blog" at JavaMuseum.org. Created an account, logged in, checked out the place. Looks promising for shared, tagged and networked experience. Have not made a network though, not yet.

So go most of the posts at Yvonne Martinsson's blog art piece "the social web burn out blog." The piece was part of the JavaMuseum.org's art+blog=blogart? (a+b=ba?) blog-based exhibition last summer, which brought together a number of net.art works with the medium of blogs as their focus and method.

The social web burn out blog chronicles the exploration of social media services from the perspective of an ingenuous Web 2.0-phile. Martinsson's first few entries demonstrate a wide-eyed awe (and anxiety) about such 2.0 features as tagging, blogging, and "networking":

"Today we would probably say, 'I tag therefore I am,' as a great deal of our social software has become tagged experience. But, I don’t have tags installed here in my [we]blog (I could, but it would cost me a few bucks, or could you help me out here?).

Instead, I’ll have to do with categories. I don’t know if that counts as tagged experience, the drawback being that there are no tag clouds to display… Does the absence of a tag cloud diminish the socially networked experience? Yeah, a question that needs pondering, maybe we’ll see an academic paper in the not too distant future unless there already exists one on this very difficult topic. "

She goes on throughout the summer documenting her experiences signing up for new services and testing them out. A majority of these entries revolve around the format of this entry's opening paragraph. At the end of July 2007, the blogging abruptly ends with an entry with the words "SYSTEM OFFLINE." Surrounding these entries are awkward examples of the familiar Web 2.0 doo-dads, Flickr badges, Google ads, RSS feed links, PayPal "donate" links, "Share This!" links, etc.

Ultimately Martinsson succeeds in creating a believable and at times charming parody of the naive, navel-gazing, technophilic Web 2.0 blog - check this blog's early entries if you need examples of the object of her parody. She tracks the progress and ultimate frustration of a user attempting to familiarize herself with the speed and much-touted utility of social media technologies. And what better medium than a blog to fully enter this character? Blogs are the stereotypical medium for the techno-ingenue and Martinsson identifies that voice in her entries.

Yet, despite her parodic success, I am left feeling unsatisfied by Martinsson's critique. Naive views on the cultural roles of social media abound and are an all too easy target. Her studied simplicity ends up communicating more of an aloofness than a genuine interest in her subject. Some of the more successful blog art pieces out there revel in their complicity and medium, rather than side-stepping it with parody.

Posted by Nathan at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a long entry that was getting more and more complicated, all centered on Eugene Thacker's article in CTheory.net, "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" (part 2), from back in 2004. It wasn't so much a critique or response, but a recognition of the similarity that he and I have in our approaches to political ontology in networked environments. Sadly, it became so long-winded and disorganized (even in comparison to my usual entries here!) that I had to shelve it for possible later use.

That said, I strongly suggest that the few of you reading this blog go and read this essay. Thacker, whose recent book with Alex Galloway - The Exploit - is one of my favorites from 2007, covers the basics of his use of the titular terms. More importantly, he provides a strong basis for reading networked environments in a way that moves beyond the thinking of the writers traditions he cites.

Posted by Nathan at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've often written about the nostalgic streak of networked-archival media. Online social networks function as much as a repository of memory and past-presents as they do a flow of interminably new information. Two stories have arisen recently that underscore this nostalgic impulse, especially as it relates to another bastion of nostalgia: war.

The first is WW1 Experiences of an English Soldier. The blog is run by 59-year old, Bill Lamin, whose grandfather sent regular correspondence from the front lines of World War I. Mr. Lamin posts the letters, occasionally along with scans and non-diegetic commentary, in order and on the correctly corresponding date (albeit 90 years later). The letters themselves are what someone who watches the History Channel might have come to expect from war letters: sending love to the family, descriptions of the horrors of the trenches, and details of the daily life of a soldier.

It is this combination of shifted temporality and documentation of the quotidian that make this blog project an exercise in nostalgia. However, it is not simply nostalgia for the early 20th century and its culture, nor for the lost medium of the hand-written letter - rather, it is a nostalgia that arises from the displacement of the past into the present and an implied future. The medium of blogging assumes a state of constant modulation and addition. Each post is expected to be pushed down by another. There is no concept of "the end" to a blog, it just keeps going. Lamin has taken this chain of correspondence (what we might call an indexical representation of the past) and has displaced it into the ever-future presentness of a blog.

This is a form of nostalgia that is quite different from the restorative cultural nostalgia that has been the seed of many past wars. Instead of using a simulacra of the past as a substitute for the present and future, what we see here is a blunt engagement and juxtaposition of the experienced present and future with the experienced past.

The second blog I want to discuss is the final entry of Andrew Olmsted. This is a very different example of nostalgic new media. Mr. Olmsted was a soldier in Iraq who documented his experience in his blog - the best contemporary comparison to letter writing. The final entry, however, was put up by a friend of his, but was presumably pre-written by Olmsted in the case of his death. The entry itself is loaded with wistful quotes and heart-aching passages of Olmsted's craft. Yet, what I find interesting is the recognition of the blog acting as a surrogate for the blogger himself:

"I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war."

The entry perhaps sheds light on one of the most nostalgic elements of blogging. It is a medium that exudes the present in the past and implies the future in the present. We read entries in terms of speech (note the common use of "rant" in many bloggers' self-descriptions) that we are engaging with in real time. Thus an entry like this is exploiting the continuous present-tense of the medium to fulfill the nostalgic's mission: envision or recreate a past that has the ability to act in the present and future. Readers are going to Olmsted's blog now as a memorial and memory archive, as well as to experience him as they might in the present.

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

This blog has been in existence for just over two years now and one of the most common themes I cover and encounter in my reading for these entries has been privacy. There is an essential conflict at the center of recent web-based services and technologies over privacy and the public display of data. On the one hand, we (as someone speaking from a North American perspective) value privacy in a variety of senses - ranging from property laws, to surveillance, to women's rights. Privacy has become an important piece of a capitalist society. On the other hand, many of the new web-based and new media technologies and services thrive on the unshrouding of previously private information. We display versions of our selves through online social networks, we allow our shops to track our purchases, and we freely enter information about ourselves into many a survey.

What are we to make of this? Should we be afraid of the exploitation of the data we hand over, or should we be grateful for the better service it results in? How can we determine which entities are worthy of our trust, or should we simply throw caution to the wind and deceive through openness?

These types of discussions have gone back and forth for years now. I tend to fall on the side that notions of privacy are changing to allow for a greater level of surveillance in exchange for greater return value - with the critical provision that both parties in the exchange are aware and buy-in to the transaction. This is clearly an idealistic vision, but it's interesting to look at how privacy/exhibitionism (or how one acts as the other) is dealt with in coverage of new media. These are a few articles I've come across recently:

• "5 Tracking Apps to Help You Out in 2008" - MakeUseOf.com. This entry is a good example of the full embrace of the value-for-data exchange. Users of the applications the author suggests hand over personal data and they receive targeted and personalized service. Implicit in this is the trust of the service provider.


• "Sears: Come see the softer side of spyware" - ars technica. Despite the chuckle-inducing title, this article is interesting because it demonstrates the boundaries of our exhibitionism. Many people will gladly install things like the Yahoo toolbar or RescueTime (as mentioned in the previous item) and allow their attention data to be tracked - but when it comes to Sears? No way. I don't mean to belittle the threat of spyware, it's a serious issue and shouldn't be tolerated, but much of this criticism seems to stem from the fact that this is a major corporation doing the surveillance rather than a cute little Web 2.0 start up. Really, both can do serious damage with that information.


• "The 2007 International Privacy Ranking" - Privacy International. This graphic ranks different countries' respective protection of privacy. The only country that ranks even reasonably well is Greece. I'm curious what Privacy International would think of a distributed panoptic society in which the surveillance is occurring in a peer-to-peer fashion instead of top-down.


• "Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty in Some Artists' Eyes" - Andrew La Valee for WSJ.com. I'm linking to a Rhizome page since I can't find the article on WSJ.com. I too have been fascinated by "boring" blogs, or the blogs that make up the lifeblood of the medium. At one point last year, I started a meta-boring blog called Welcome to the Dog Show. Low-traffic personal blogs are why the medium exists and why it is a significant cultural entity. At the core of these "boring" blogs is the willing and joyful abandonment of privacy. These small, personal blogs demonstrate our newfound love for exhibitionism.

What's interesting to note is where we draw boundaries. Sears and K-Mart using attention data to improve market awareness: not OK; Mint using personal financial information to suggest better services: OK. Top-down surveillance societies: not OK; Boring Blogs (i.e. exhibitionism on a mass scale): OK.

I don't believe there will ever be a consensus over what level of privacy or surveillance is acceptable/possible in these new media environments. I do believe, however, that the exhibitionism of these media is not going anywhere, and if for that reason alone, our notions of privacy will necessarily adapt.

Posted by Nathan at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)