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because it was wrong any any particular issue, but more because the author made all the right assumptions, but used out of date or out of place examples to make his point.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.