Geert Lovink posted a review of Nick Carr's new book to he nettime list the other day. The book sounds reasonably interesting and Lovink clearly thinks highly of the author, but the closing sentences of his review stick out for me:

"This is the risk of criticism as a genre when it disconnects from progressive movements and locks itself up in an elitist hide-out. However messy the situation, we have to promote the Internet as a tool for global mass education[...] Sinking prices for storage, traffic and data processing result in data centres and new monopolies, but these developments are only a result of much broader policies—and it is time a new generation of net critics to situate the medium into the techno-social context it now operates in."

Posted by Nathan at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The issue of personal data on the in a networked, archived environment is one that arises time and time again. It's not too strange that this is the case, since most forms of interaction, entertainment, business, and publishing via the web involve the exchange of personal information more often than not. At the same time, the exchange of personal data is nothing new to western society, but most living generations are used to doing it with pen, paper, and stamps rather than browsers, servers, and fiber optic cables.

Leaving trails of data through our everyday business on the web - search history, social networking profiles, credit card transactions, blog posts, instant messages, e-mail, and so on - is the easiest way to see the ways a networked environment acts as a simultaneously individualizing and multiplying subjective force. We are at once going through a process of individuation in our ceaseless stream of archived data, yet wit every step forward we leave another footprint behind. This footprint does not cease to signify once your foot leaves it however, in fact, in the case of social network profiles especially they continue to signify as something of a subjective prosthesis. It is the tendrils of these multiple paths we wear that ultimately serve to individuate and deindividuate us.

So what are we to do about personal data archived in a networked environment? Should we legislate our problems away as Bruce Schneier suggests in his article on Wired.com? This seems to be a flaccid solution at best; one that has been debunked time and time again by hacktivists, pranksters, and criminals alike.

Perhaps we should make like China and some aspects of the loss of control and use our constant stream of data in our favor? A more friendly example of this is TrackMeNot, the Firefox extension that provides a degree of privacy through the creation of random meaningless data. How might such a thing affect the implicit indivuating processes involved in online interaction?

I suppose the answer might shake out over the next few years, but I'd say it's more likely that the issue of personal data on the web will be a perpetual battleground.

Posted by Nathan at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been putting some thought into a longer piece concerning faciality and swarming in networked environments, but wasn't able to pound out a coherent piece for the blog. Instead, here are a few pieces that are related to similar threads:

• "Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux" - Unit Structures. Specifically, take a look at Fred's bullet points about imagined identity and constant flux.


• "A framework for sustaining user labor across the web" - userlabor.org. It is good to see people are approaching this issue in interesting ways.


• "Unraveling Identity" - CTheory. Pivoting on memory, forgetting, and identity.

Posted by Nathan at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was planning on writing about the reasons behind the recent decline in Facebook platform developers, but there's another story that I've been mulling over for a little while for it's absurdity.

In his 20s, Guy Debord began to develop what would end up being an elaborate, chess-like war simulation game. The late 70s saw this game released in limited quantities, with a book following a decade later. As non sequitur as this may at first seem coming from the author of The Society of the Spectace, it does go hand in hand with that text's inherent longing for a simpler epoch.

Regardless, Alex Galloway - who teaches at NYU and whose work I've written about a number of times on this blog - created an online version of the game called Kriegspiel in an effort with the Radical Software Group. Galloway has been looking into real-time strategy games such as Starcraft for some time now as an expression of - if not metaphor for - network culture, so such a move on his part would seem largely academic in nature.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that Galloway and NYU received a threat of a IP infringement lawsuit from Debord's widow. Surely she sees the absurdity in taking such a strict stance in defending the intellectual property rights of a seminal member of the Situationist International? If not that, then she at least could recognize that Galloway's repositioning of her dead husband's game can only serve to nurture its success - at least as much as a game heralded for its opaque complexity can be judged so.

Then again what more bitingly appropriate way to remember Debord than for both sides to conjure multiple signifying representations of the deceased thinker.

Posted by Nathan at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)