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."