Michael Zimmer of the Information Society Project at Yale Law has put together an interesting collection of pieces in the most recent edition of First Monday. The articles generally hit on some of my favorite topics, subjectivity, control, and surveillance in new media networks. I was a little disappointed by one of them, however. Not so much because it was wrong any any particular issue, but more because the author made all the right assumptions, but used out of date or out of place examples to make his point.

The piece in question is Anders Albrechtslund's "Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance". I was rather excited to read the piece, if only judging by the title, which sounds similar to many I've written for this very blog. I am a very strong proponent of the idea that interaction occurs via surveillance and for the benefit of surveillance in online social networks. You participate to be simultaneously the object and the observer in the surveillant relationship, creating a culture of perpetual nostalgia for an ever ephemeral present.

Anders himself thinks along the same lines. He makes a point to say that it is futile to try to separate online sociality from "physical" sociality (though I would have liked to see an acknowledgment of the physicality of online media). However in making this point, he references past Web 2.0 buzz terms like 'folksonomy' and seemingly anachronistic - in new media time - services like MyMoSoSo. In the latter the following sentence is used, presumably without irony: "This is a GIF 'screenshot' of My MoSoSo's Splash Screen." It's followed by a GIF image of a very 1997 looking HTML page. I hope that I'm not getting the joke.

It seems very strange to me that in an article that is talking about how contemporary shifts and developments in networked interaction as a result of new technologies and their business/social applications, that the author seems so disconnected from his subject.

Yet he goes on in much the same vein. He is entirely correct in his conclusions: the reification of relationships in corporate servers, the reliance on social surveillance in new media networks, and the Foucauldian disciplinary implications thereof. Yet he gets to these as I might imagine historians will in 20 years' time.

Needless to say I'm conflicted about the article. Overall, however, I'd strongly suggest giving the entire issue a read. Michael Zimmer is certainly one of the folks in academia who really seem to get it when it comes to these issues.

Posted by Nathan at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The stars are not aligning for my blogging habits. I've caught a cold after returning from SXSW. One of these days I'll be able to put up another real entry, but today I only have a string of thematically connected links.

Read these in order and pay special attention to the third. Together they form what might be a typical Swarming Media entry.

• "How Do They Track You? Let Us Count The Ways" - Louise Story
  "What is important here is not the precise numbers, but the overall picture that the biggest Internet companies are accumulating many different ways to collect data about users. Many caveats are needed: Not all of this data is useful; not all of it is retained by the companies with access to it; much of it cannot be traced back to individuals."
• "Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces" - Bruno Latour
  "Subjectivities used to be the inner sanctum where social sciences had to stop and dismount in order to shift to other, less reliable vehicles. It is now possible to follow how the characters of a “reality show” or the finalists of Star Academy have so modified the ways and means with which their viewers speak and think about the world that the social has become, so to speak, continuous with the psychological."
• "'Semiotic Pluralism' and the New Government of Signs" - Maurizio Lazzarato
  "The importance of a-signifying semiotics (money, machinic devices for the production of images, sounds, words, signs, equations, scientific formulae, music, etc.) and the role they play needs to be emphasized. They are ignored by most linguistic and political theories even though they constitute the pivotal point of new forms of capitalist government. It is because of them that a new distribution of discursive and non-discursive is being established."

Posted by Nathan at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's hard to believe that it's already been a calendar year since I last announced this here, but I'll be at the South by Southwest conference/showcase all of next week.

Unfortunately this means that this and next weeks' entries won't be up to snuff. Adding to the lack of a real entry this week was the fact that my del.icio.us network was woefully short of new links. I usually rely on the group of folks I follow through the service to point me to interesting articles, and this week was a little dry.

Regardless, drop me a line if you'll be in Austin, TX next week.

Posted by Nathan at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)