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)

A couple pieces I was reading this week brought up some interesting thoughts surrounding the politics and economics of networked interaction.

First, there's Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider's "New Rules of the New Actonomy", which lays out the authors' thoughts on the direction and purpose of activism in an age of networked interaction. It is a piece that tries a bit too hard to reflect its own philosophy of quick and symbolic action, but there are many pithy phrases and important points buried within it - not to mention that it was written in 2001! One of these poignant moments arises here:

"Laws of semiotic guerilla: hit and run, draw and withdraw, code and delete. ... The goal is obviously not so much to gain institutional political power, rather to change the way how things are moving- -and why. The principle aim is to make power ridiculous, unveil its corrupt nature in the most powerful, beautiful and aggressive symbolic language, then step back in order to make space for changes to set in. Let others do that job, if they wish so."

Essentially what they are espousing is a perpetual disruptive force in opposition to stagnating power. The disruptive force takes a specifically anti-institutional, ephemeral, and multiple form, leaving the victim unsure of who has hit them, but quite sure that they've been hit. What is important, however, is that they state the goal of networked activism should not be to gain institutional power, but to knock it off its feet and let something similar (yet better) take its place, presumably to be knocked down eventually in turn. This type of distributed action without presumption of aspiration allows for more participants (since competence at the target's job is not required), as well as more ideologically grounded participants (since success does not imply taking on the role of the defeated). As a result, Lovink and Schneider are able to assert:

"Read as many business literature as possible and don't be afraid it may effect you. It will. Having enough ethics in your guts you can deal with that bit of ideology. Remember that activism and entrepreneurial spirit have a remarkably lot in common."

I find this quote irresistibly attractive. Their encouragement of activists to become intimate with the subject of their activity meshes well with their belief that successful disruptive action does not imply an assent to power. Ultimately, they paint a picture of not a singular figure acting against a faceless power, but a faceless/many-faced figure acting against overly-familiar institutions.

Along similar lines is the second piece, Michel Bauwens' "The social web and its social contracts: Some notes on social antagonism in netarchical capitalism". In this essay, Michel outlines his vision for the relation between monetization of attention and sharing. Simply (and perhaps reductively) put, he posits that social media users allow the monetization of their attention in exchange for the ability to share freely. In a broad sense, this type of arrangement seems to be becoming standard practice. The part that stuck out to me as being particularly relevant to the first piece was this, however:

"It is more interesting therefore to think in terms of how peer production, which we believe will be the core of social innovation and the creation of value, will intersect with the world of physical production of scarce products. Or in other words, how will the commons, or how should the commons, relate to the market, once the market is divorced from the capitalist logic of infinite growth?"

What Michel is suggesting here is that capitalism isn't going much of anywhere, anytime soon, but that it is facing a crisis based on the idea that infinite growth is not possible. Thus he is framing peer production and the commons in a disruptive but constitutive relation with stagnant capitalism. Needless to say, this is a very similar type of relationship that Lovink and Schneider outline in their essay.

It seems then that we might be arriving at a state where there is acceptance of established power, so long as there are distributed, disruptive forces present to check its unwanted growth or stagnation. This disruption can and will take many forms that networked interaction will enable - be this activism or or a peer production economy.

Posted by Nathan at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A November 17th article in the Brisbane Times about workplace productivity, "All the same to new white-collar intelligentsia", in fact brings to light an interesting connection between one of the Italian autonomists' favored form of protests - refusal of work - and Facebook, the popular social networking site.

The article correctly acknowledges that younger workers today do not spend all of their hours at the office engaged in job-related activity. They spend time reading blogs, making personal appointments, IMing with friends, or checking non-work e-mail. Speaking as a young worker myself, I can confirm this. Yet the piece's author, Lisa Pryor, frames this type of activity as a conscious action on behalf of the young white-collar worker, who is now expected to be available for work in near perpetuity. With instant, ubiquitous, and increasingly mobile access to the contemporary tools of the job (a web browser and a phone), employees almost seamlessly enter and exit states of work and non-work. We're likely and often required to send a work e-mail, or make a work-related call from home. In reaction to this, Pryor suggests, young workers take personal time out of their work hours.

Italian autonomist thinkers like Antonio Negri endorsed similar forms of social action, as refusal of work. This was in reaction to the increasingly modular, precarious, and fluid labor conditions that young Italian workers faced in the 70s and 80s - a broader labor condition when a full-scale strike might not have the same effect. Refusal of work meant sleeping on the job, working at a deliberately slow pace, but in a more general way, showing up but not really working. This was a way of questioning the value of labor, its measurement in hours, and the worker's relation to labor.

Are we in a situation today when refusal of work has become the assumed natural reaction to the expanding modularity and perpetuity of work? If so, does that dilute the weight of the ontological and social questions that are raised in the autonomists' vision(s)?

I'm guessing that Lisa Pryor may not have missed this connection, seeing as she quotes Adorno at the end of the article, but clearly this deserves more thought than a blog entry (not written on work hours) can put forth.

Posted by Nathan at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just read an entry on Autonomy & Solidarity by Gary [last name not given], entitled "Holloway on Negri -- Going in the Wrong Direction or Mephistopheles: Not Saint Francis of Assisi". I read largely because of my growing interest in Italian autonomism, but I think a few of his points about the danger of using paradigms to describe cultural shifts have particular resonance in the tech and blogging worlds - or, really, the tech blogging world. So as much as I might like to address his critique of Empire, it won't be here.

One of Gary's central dissatisfactions with Hardt and Negri's Empire is their reliance on the idea of a paradigm shift, e.g. modernity to post-modernity, Fordism to post-Fordism, or discipline to control. He sees this reliance as a method that only serves to divorce cultural phenomena from real, potential revolutionary action. The reliance on paradigms does, indeed, lead one to imply fantastic/phantasmal periods of stasis in contrast with periods of movement; though I'd doubt that anyone employing such devices as seeing them as anything but relative.

As much as Gary witmesses this in this resurgence of positive autonomism, we can also see the over-use of dual paradigms in tech blogs, especially during the heat of "Web 2.0" speculation. This is not only because these writers genuinely believe that we have moved from "vertical to horizontal" orgainization (or "mountainous to flat" or anyother such shift). The rhetorics of the blogosphere have amplified the reliance on paradigm creation. In an environment where blog entry titles count for a majority of the content the declaration that one era/moment/product has died and another as taken its place is far more appealing than a declaration that things are far less simple than we would like to believe. It seemed that as soon as I began to read references to "Web 2.0" I also began to read calls for its systematic evisceration. The rhetoric of the blogosphere relies heavily on the constant creation of hyperbolic paradigm tectonics - largely as a result of its structurally implied politics as opposed to its individual actors.

Yet beyond merely creating a more palatable cognitive landscape, perhaps the proliferation of paradigmatic tectonics also has a beneficial effect. When players are operating within a context driven by paradigms - such as the tech blogosphere or, apparently, contemporary autonomism - they are operating within the neat framework provided to them. When the cultural trajectory is painted in such clean theoretical lines, this may encourage experimentation that might otherwise not be taken by realists. A good example of this in the tech world is perhaps Attention Trust, about whom I've written before. AT - to grossly over-simplify - is operating under the understanding that we will soon be shifting from a world of feral online identity to one of a cultivated and individually controlled identity. In anticipation of this paradigmatic shift what they have come up with is a tool that allows every individual to track their every web-movement - recognizing the value in these ebbs and flows. Without the aid of paradigmatic shifts as a guide for development, they might not be experimenting in this area; we might as easily say that without the paradigm of the shift from a state of nature to a regulated social existence to spur intellectual experimentation, political philosophy would find itself in less of an advanced state.

So, while I do indeed see the danger in reliance on paradigms to describe ongoing cultural tectonics, it is also important to recognize paradigm creation as a necessary vehicle for cultural and intellectual experimentation toward the goal of larger change.

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

Today the Boston Globe has an article about a rise in narcissism among America's youth. It seems that the researchers were careful to construct a broad study (it lasted from 1982 through 2006), but they could not resist referencing (I don't want to go so far, nor do I think that the researchers would, as to say "blaming") the rise of online social networks when interviewed:

"'Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism,' Twenge said. 'By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.'"

Before digging into this, I have to again stress that the focus of this research was far broader than narcissism as applied to online social networks, if it included such study at all. Perhaps it was merely the reporter who pressed Twenge to make a remark on these media, which have been such a hot topic lately, but, on very basic terms, she's right. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, even blogs, wikis, and collaborative filtering technologies are intimately entwined with narcissism. This goes beyond the linguistic conntection Twenge points out with "You" and "My". One of the central attractions of these media is the ability to construct, project, and promote yourself, or a self that you envision within the context.

Yet what such cursory analyses of online social networks - especially in relation to matters of subjectivity and identity - often overlook is that this narcissism is taking place in a network of other entities also trying to assert themselves in a self-serving way. Logically, this should not make sense, any sort of system where actors are entirely self-interested and unconcerned with others would quickly fail (and, perhaps, this is a reason for the short lives of many online social networks). This networked narcissism, however, requires more than simply a mirror. Narcissims takes place in a social context in these media. Narcissus wasted away alone, staring at his image in the river until one day he found himself to be a flower, yet our contemporary networked Narcissuses thrive as much as looking at others as they do at themselves.

This is not exactly exhibitionism, because that too often implies a unidirectional gaze and these new media thrive on a reciprocated objectifying gaze. Users act out roles on both sides of this relationship, but one might see the seed that keeps this cycle going as narcissim. One has to believe that he is worthy of a generalized cultural gaze in order to participate, but at the same time one also has to acknowledge the generalized worthiness of others to sustain participation.

Posted by Nathan at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Following in the footsteps of Michel at the P2P Foundation, I'm going to be posting sections of the piece I wrote for the inaugrural issue of Audience 2.0. I'm looking forward to the web-publication's launch, but I wanted to give this article some air after the time of writing in August. So expect, over the next week or so, to see the serialized version, the full version appearing on its own page sometime in the near future.

(The) Audience (2.0):
How Shakira, Dirty Harry, and del.icio.us have come to define interactive identity.

Like many, I am skeptical of internet neologisms. I've always given cyberspace a sidelong glance and blogosphere the hairy eyeball. This is not to say that these words are not important—they most certainly are—but rather to stress that their importance lies, not in the terms themselves, but in the cultural contexts that produce a need for them

We pulled cyberspace from the world of science fiction in order to conceptualize a medium that defied any previous notions of communication. We felt more at home in a space—something we can touch, explore, or “surf”—than in a disembodied interconnected network spewing packets of data in all directions. Blogosphere, in turn, has allowed us to envision a topography and politics for a field of social and textual interaction.

Now I have the opportunity to dissect audience 2.0. This is an internet neologism if there ever was one. Any discussion of audience 2.0 must begin, however, by putting audience under the microscope.

The Value of Audience

Adopted directly from the French, audience came into English around 1374 meaning “the action of hearing,” as in “to give audience”(Oxford English Dictionary). Originally derived from the Latin verb audire, audience implied the effort of paying aural attention. Notice that this first English usage pairs give with audience. Giving requires consent and control by the one committing the action and a relatively passive receiver. When I gave my friend a cupcake on his birthday, he was more or less a non-actor in the process, having only to be present when the interaction became, for him, reception. The one giving owns this process of transference. Back in 1374 then, it was the person using his aural capacities that was in control; he gave his audience. The capacity to hear is a bit like the cupcake: a commodity, an object that has some value to be transferred.

Yet hearing abilities are not entirely like a cupcake. For one, the ability to hear is generally not decreased in the act of giving audience, whereas when I gave my roommate the cupcake, I was one cupcake poorer (fortunately, I saw this coming and had purchased one for myself). In economic terms, audience is non-rival. Secondly, my sweet, frosted gift was a one-way exchange. I received nothing for it except a smile, a thank you, and feelings of friendship. When one gives audience, however, the qualities of the exchange are distinct: aural capacities in exchange for sound. Audience, on a very basic level, implicitly delineates an economic relationship between the one hearing and the one speaking. Value is exchanged in the form of hearing abilities and sound—and it depends on both the speaker and listener to actively participate, while the listener holds the upper hand.

The value of aural capacity was perhaps at a high when the Church of England's Arches Court—an ecclesiastical court—was originally called the Court of Audience. The participant giving audience in this court held disproportionately greater power and control in the transaction than the speaker. Members of the Church come to court so they can be heard by the Dean of Arches. Even in our civil and criminal courts, judges “hear” cases, yet maintain control and power over the encounter. To look at this, again, as an economic exchange, audience holds a far higher value than that of speaking. Another example of this uneven power relationship is the psychotherapist and his patient. Here, the value of audience is valued so far above the value of speaking that the gap must be made up through a cash exchange.

The value of the aural commodity—audience—however, has competed with a slightly later definition over the years. Within this competition, ever-changing power relations are at play; the exchange between speaker and listener shifts its balance from one participant in the exchange to the other. The competing meaning that has become the counter-weight to audience in this continual modulation of power arrived around 1407, and meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The persons within hearing; an assembly of listeners, an auditory.” Quite different from the 1347 meaning: a decrease in the value of aural capacity. Instead of the listener “giving” his senses, he is passively “within hearing,” merely able to sense the speaker. The value of giving is greatly diminished under this usage. Here, it is the speaker that disproportionately controls the exchange, so much so that one's audience can be taken without consent—it becomes a non-excludable commodity provided one is physically able to hear a sound. In this relation, the one who was once “giving” audience is now “the” audience, the singular multiple—he is disenfranchised.

In the pre-internet era, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience has a high value, there are few hearers and many speakers (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity is the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, an ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end—few to many.

It's clear then, that the terms audience and the audience are quite different. Words with the suffix -ence denote the raw ability to perform an action; for example sapience (derived from the Latin verb meaning “to know”) implies “knowingness,” the pure ability to retain knowledge—therefore we could read audience as “hearingness.” Hearingness is a commodity; it has value; it is a part of an inherent exchange. The audience differs in modern usage by referring to the mass of disenfranchised participants where one's audience has a very low value.

Audience and the audience: same root, essentially the same word, opposite implications when speaking of interaction.

Posted by Nathan at 01:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently read Philip Dawdy's entry "Love American Style: Web 2.0 And Narcissism" over at his blog Furious Seasons. I suppose that many of my differences with his thoughts on the issue stem from our different theoretical backgrounds, but I did have a few.

To begin, I strongly agree with him that much of what we've grown accustomed to calling Web 2.0 is fueled by a particular narcissism. Another term that I've used in the past for this is spectacle - of ourselves for the viewing of others - in something of a modification of the implicit power relations described by Laura Mulvey in relation to cinema in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (excerpt). We make ourselves, knowingly and unknowingly through our web-based, inherently archival interactions. Yet in these Web 2.0 media (I'll use social networks as the central example here) the process of interaction has become a process of developing explicit representations of identity - and in most circumstances, many. This could definitely be described as a narcissistic act on some level. It requires hard thought how one wants to be perceived and delicate negotiations of complex social relations.

Yet I diverge from Dawdy somewhere around this sentence:

"This state of affairs cannot be especially healthy for our souls, our psychology and, hell, our brains because none of it is real."

He presumes that we, as a networked society, are becoming increasingly isolated from "real" interaction and that the end result of this narcissistic endeavor is ultimately meaningless. First of all, to claim that interaction, as expressed through a constructed identity (which, it's important to note, is not a closed process and involves the participation of others if only though comments and imitation) is less "real" than a conversation on the street is to place flesh-and-blood in the position of determining reality. To extend that, clothing itself impedes reality - nude conversations being the fullest exposure of this key to reality. While this is supported in metaphor ("Tom Cruise bares it all in this revealing interview"), we have to recognize that any interaction takes place through the specific cultural, social, political, etc, contexts in which it is happening. When good friends meet on the street unexpectedly, the identities through which they interact is quite different than those they would use for a stranger in a coffee shop. "Reality" is not a term that can be comfortably applied to identity. Teens may indeed be more comfortable and "themselves" over IM than in person. So we cannot fault these new media for watering down human interaction.

Secondly, while I agree that participation in these media often require a hefty dose of narcissism, this does not mean that this leads to socially detrimental ends. There are two sides to the narcissistic equation, which is why I prefer spectacle: the seen and the one seeing. No self-respecting narcissist would use a social-network that didn't let users see his profile. And instead of seeing a class of seen and another of those seeing, every participant plays both roles. They see and are seen. We enact both ends of spectacle - though not always simultaneously. And it is in these roles that we primarily interact through these media. It may be very light-weight interaction to merely view a profile, but that is what makes it worth it for anyone to participate in the first place.

Now we can start to imagine all these singular interactions adding up to a multiple whole, in an essentially emergent process. Millions of otherwise insignificant local interactions add up to a greater, global effect. On very concrete terms we see this expressed through collaborative filtering, but more importantly it allows for the creation of a multiple, networked subjectivity. The singularities continue to exist and interact, yet at the same time contribute to and shape this global effect, very close to what Hardt and Negri term the Multitude. This is a biopolitical conception that is exciting in its potentiality. What Dawdy may see as insignificant interactions and a frivolous use of time, turns out to be - on the scale of the multiple - of quite some interest indeed.

Dawdy writes largely on psychopharmacological topics, where as I was eager to drop that reference to the Multitude in the last paragraph (even if it meant doing so awkwardly). We're approaching this topic from different perspectives. We did have one further point of agreement though in his entry. This came when he recounted an argument at a bar with a cocky Google employee over how his company was helping content creators or merely greedily grabbing at cash:

"I asked him how much he made. He declined to tell me. At that point, a Web 2.0 creature would crumple and link to some report on the Net—which they have no way of knowing the validity of—purporting to show how much one of these algorithm assholes actually makes. Within five minutes, I had cracked the genius and he 'fessed up that he made $210,000 a year. At the time, I made one-fifth of that. ... I told him that he either needed to buy me a shot of Remy (he could afford to upgrade my Maker's Mark) or he could get the hell away from my table. He didn't come back."

As someone who is in a pay-grade probably even lower than Dawdy's and still working in the web business like the cocky Googler, I too would like a whisky - neat.

Posted by Nathan at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Though the goal of reading everything in my "READTHIS" category on del.icio.us is more or less futile given the rate at which I tag pages with that particular string of letters, the tagging date and the reading date are getting closer. I've just finished an excellent essay on CTheory.net by Mark Winokur called "The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace." It's a well prepared and thorough piece, but also a lengthy and though-provoking one, so I'm going to limit my reactions to the section on the gaze as it relates to the panopticon as a conceptual structure for the internet.

First of all, it's key to note that the essay was written over three years ago, before many of the subjects of this blog (social media, etc) became major topics of discussion. I think that the popularization of all things we like to slap with the label "social" these days on the web has given us a wealth of examples of how the gaze and surveillance over the internet can be viewed. Winokur likes to contrast the internet-optimists (hypertext theorists most noticeably) with the more fatalistic critics, always taking the side of the fatalists who aim to reveal the power structures of larger institutions and ideologies. When discussing the gaze he pits those who see/once-saw the internet as the ideal anti-institutional method of communication against the idea that the physical architecture shatters any notion that the internet could be something other than a tool of late-capitalism. He specifically cites the client-server model as the reason why we are not in such a great new era: we still essentially have centralized control with overbearing power compared to those residing at the ends.

My issue with this is not in his conclusion: I would whole-heartedly agree that these unnamed idealists are wrong to think that the internet has that particular revolutionary potential. I've always fallen on the side of the debate that especially developments in the social web are ideal tools of control, augmenting and replacing outmoded apparatuses. Where I disagree with him is that I wouldn't say that these social media are effective tools of control because they follow a centralized system, but precisely because we've found ways to perfect their controlling capabilities through less centralized ways. We need only to look at distributed peer-to-peer networks to see that not all of "the internet" is a glorified hub-spoke network.

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

Blogs are perhaps the best example here. A common stereotype of the blogger is the lonely teen who "rants" on his/her LiveJournal which no one probably reads. The imagined audience that the act of blogging implies is conceptualized along similar lines as the ficitive guard in the panopticon: a regulating, normative force. But at the same time, this lonely teen probably reads one or two other blogs by kindred spirits and thus is taking on the role of the guard him/herself. This can be extended to most actions within social media. Through every step of interaction, we are placed simultaneously in the position of the one watching and the one being watched.

To bring it back around to Winokur's piece, my main point is that I agree with him: the internet is a particularly effective tool of control. Where I differ is in how it achieves this end. Rather than imitating older models, it reshapes them creating a more idealized self-regulating subject.

Posted by Nathan at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

To pick up again, my effort to read everything under my "READTHIS" tag on del.icio.us, I tackled Fragile Psychosphere by Franco Berardi. Before I begin with my critique, however, I think it's important to note that this piece was published online at link-a, "Eleven art works around contemporary affectivity and its technological mediation," produces by MediaLabMadrid. I'm noting this because I've critiqued a few pieces on this blog from there and would strongly reccomend it to anyone who regularly reads Swarming Media.

Berardi covers a lot of ground in this essay, much of which I agree with, but there are a few particular aspects of his argument that I differ on - not the least of which are his frequent lines drawn between theory and physiology, but I won't discuss that here. He makes the distinction between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberpace he sees as the physical and implied media network, extending, presumably, beyond simply digital media but focusing on such. This vision of cyberspace embodies the Virilio-esque rapidity of information and expansion of the "infosphere." With the predominance of this "infosphere," Berardi claims that our identities - as connected to memory - are less singular, but also somehow lesser and shallow:

"The thickening of the infospheric crust and the increase in quantity and intensity of the incoming informational material thus produces the effect of a reduction of the sphere of singular memory. The things that an individual remembers (images, etc.) work towards the construction of an impersonal memory, homogenised, uniformly assimilated and thinly elaborated because the time of exposure is so fast it doesn’t allow for a deep personalisation"

I entirely agree that we are less singular as a result of our increasingly networked lives/"infosphere." The trails, or tendrils, that we leave behind in our digitally networked environments create multiple paths of identity that only proliferate as we continue to experience and interact with media networks. Yet to say that the result of this process is somehow impersonal of homogenized, does not take into account the altered perception of time that we have gained as a result of interaction within these swarming media networks.

Berardi views digitally networked identity according to linear time. To take a momentary slice of a multiply networked identity, yes, it would seem shallow and homogenized. At any given time we are likely discussing the same events, experiencing the same media - a phenomenon, which on 9/11 needs no explanation. Yet when we recognize that networked digital media and identities exist within an expansive archival system, our conception of time stretches beyond the momentary. We not only experience media in a networked, speedy space, our movements and interactions in this network are marked, controlled, and archived. This process expands how we must view time. Just as we are no longer singular as Berardi notes, nor are our experiences and interactions as a result of the increased archivization. Memory - as his key to identity - is not decreased with an increased flow of in formation, it is increased through the databased identity, the networked identity.

Berardi seems to recognize this criticism and tries to head it off by claiming that our cognitive abilities were arrested sometime in the seventeenth century:

"No matter how the universe of texts continues to expand on an immense scale in the sphere of network information, the human mind continues to read according to sequential models, and therefore it continues to record, memorise, catalogue and select at a pace that was formed in the time in which the printed text was alphabetically predominant."

It seems strangely and willfully ignorant to say that our cognitive capacity has not changed with the help of the increased archivization, the result of the same process that allows us to experience media in this wildly sped-up "infosphere." It is the same process by which our memory is extended that our experiences are shortened, heading off his point that identity has been cheapened in the networked environment. We are not more shallow as a result, simply more distributed.

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

In catching up with my long list of texts I've tagged with the imperative "READTHIS," I just finished Antonio Negri's piece, "Towards and Ontological Definition of the Multitude." There are a few points which struck some familiar chords that tend to lead to entries on this blog for me - namely the way in which he describes the relationship between multitudes, individuals, and identity. Much of what he outlines can be extended to contemporary phenomena on the web.

"When we consider bodies, we not only perceive that we are faced with a multitude of bodies, but we also understand that each body is a multitude. Intersecting the multitude, crossing multitude with multitude, bodies become blended, mongrel, hybrid, transformed; they are like sea waves, in perennial movement and reciprocal transformation. The metaphysics of individuality (and/or of personhood) constitute a dreadful mystification of the multitude of bodies. There is no possibility for a body to be alone. It could not even be imagined. When man is defined as individual, when he is considered as autonomous source of rights and property, he is made alone. But one's own does not exist outside of the relation with an other."

This section fits particularly well with my thoughts on the operation of identity in these swarming media networks. Our interactions in these networks hinges on the same basic tension that Negri notices in his multitudes: that subjects - just like the multitudes, masses they make up - are at once singularities and multiplicities. Through our web-based interactions we cannot help but to create distributed, deterritorialized tendrils of identity. As I've written many times before on this site, these tendrils include everything from one's blog and del.icio.us links, to credit card transactions and clickstreams. They overflow from an imagined center that is our perceived selfness and are reified in the electronic database. One's tendrils intersect, come to sudden ends, and weave contradictory paths much in the same way that Negri envisions identity occurring in his singularities (I avoid using "individual" here as Negri seems to associate the term with a more sovreign conception of self).

So we exist both as multitudes and within multitudes, and this could not be seen any clearer than in this whole Web 2.0 business. This makes me ask, then, if attempts to centralize identity are not attempts to recreate Negri's sovreign individuality - thus avoiding the socially beneficial aspects of multitudes. The benefits he describes are worded in uncharacteristically glowing terms:

"[...] of the theories of labour where the relationship of command can be demonstrated (immanently) as groundless (insussistente): immaterial and intellectual labour, in other words knowledge does not require command in order to be cooperative and to have universal effects. [...] the power of the multitude can be exposed on the terrain of the politics of postmodernity, by showing how no conditions for a free society to exist and reproduce itself are given without the spread of knowledge and the emergence of the common. In fact, freedom, as liberation from command, is materially given only by the development of the multitude and its self constitution as a social body of singularities."

He places the multitude as nothing less than a precondition for freedom (in a Marxist sense, I suppose). I would never go so far as to claim that Web 2.0 is a precondition for some totalizing freedom - mostly because the parallel between the multitude and current phenomena is far from one-to-one - but the similarities imply that some cultural benefit lies in supporting the social structures we see developing in this area.

The attempts at centralization I'm speaking of that may work in an opposite direction from this development of a multitude are things like MicroID - and similar identity centralizers/verifiers - and attention trackers, which record and archive one's web activity. I certainly support the sentiment that drives the creation of these things, and respect the people championing them, there is always a hint of wariness while reaidng about them. Perhaps Negri's declaration that the distributed identities that make up both the multitude and the singularities within the multitude are the key to "freedom," explains my hesitation. I see the central cultural and social change that these swarming media networks are enabling is the creation of a platform for the reification of these distributed, networked identities. To pull this trend back toward centralization and what Negri might call the "lonely individual," would be to negate whatever benefit may come from these new social structures.

---
[Eamonn over at MobFilms has made an interesting short video dealing with similar themes]

Posted by Nathan at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)