Things that are right, for the moment at least:

• Fred's old post about Facebook - more right in retrospect than it was at the time.


• The most accurate assessment of the tech blogosphere I've ever read is, "At the beginning of the last century being a Futurist used to be something exciting. Now it's more like being a dentist. Instead of pulling teeth they simply snip platitudes out of the pages of Wired or The Economist and announce them as a fait accompli, preferably three or four times in the same warm breath. Time to get your factoids extracted."


• Antisocial Notworking: can you think of a better way to sum up the application of Italian autonomist thought to online social networks?


• This makes me fondly remember the heady days of Web 2.0 back in '05

Posted by Nathan at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Read about "the social web burn out blog" at JavaMuseum.org. Created an account, logged in, checked out the place. Looks promising for shared, tagged and networked experience. Have not made a network though, not yet.

The social web burn out blog chronicles the exploration of social media services from the perspective of an ingenuous Web 2.0-phile. Martinsson's first few entries demonstrate a wide-eyed awe (and anxiety) about such 2.0 features as tagging, blogging, and "networking":

"Today we would probably say, 'I tag therefore I am,' as a great deal of our social software has become tagged experience. But, I don’t have tags installed here in my [we]blog (I could, but it would cost me a few bucks, or could you help me out here?).

Instead, I’ll have to do with categories. I don’t know if that counts as tagged experience, the drawback being that there are no tag clouds to display… Does the absence of a tag cloud diminish the socially networked experience? Yeah, a question that needs pondering, maybe we’ll see an academic paper in the not too distant future unless there already exists one on this very difficult topic. "

Ultimately Martinsson succeeds in creating a believable and at times charming parody of the naive, navel-gazing, technophilic Web 2.0 blog - check this blog's early entries if you need examples of the object of her parody. She tracks the progress and ultimate frustration of a user attempting to familiarize herself with the speed and much-touted utility of social media technologies. And what better medium than a blog to fully enter this character? Blogs are the stereotypical medium for the techno-ingenue and Martinsson identifies that voice in her entries.

Yet, despite her parodic success, I am left feeling unsatisfied by Martinsson's critique. Naive views on the cultural roles of social media abound and are an all too easy target. Her studied simplicity ends up communicating more of an aloofness than a genuine interest in her subject. Some of the more successful blog art pieces out there revel in their complicity and medium, rather than side-stepping it with parody.

Posted by Nathan at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've often written about the nostalgic streak of networked-archival media. Online social networks function as much as a repository of memory and past-presents as they do a flow of interminably new information. Two stories have arisen recently that underscore this nostalgic impulse, especially as it relates to another bastion of nostalgia: war.

The first is WW1 Experiences of an English Soldier. The blog is run by 59-year old, Bill Lamin, whose grandfather sent regular correspondence from the front lines of World War I. Mr. Lamin posts the letters, occasionally along with scans and non-diegetic commentary, in order and on the correctly corresponding date (albeit 90 years later). The letters themselves are what someone who watches the History Channel might have come to expect from war letters: sending love to the family, descriptions of the horrors of the trenches, and details of the daily life of a soldier.

It is this combination of shifted temporality and documentation of the quotidian that make this blog project an exercise in nostalgia. However, it is not simply nostalgia for the early 20th century and its culture, nor for the lost medium of the hand-written letter - rather, it is a nostalgia that arises from the displacement of the past into the present and an implied future. The medium of blogging assumes a state of constant modulation and addition. Each post is expected to be pushed down by another. There is no concept of "the end" to a blog, it just keeps going. Lamin has taken this chain of correspondence (what we might call an indexical representation of the past) and has displaced it into the ever-future presentness of a blog.

This is a form of nostalgia that is quite different from the restorative cultural nostalgia that has been the seed of many past wars. Instead of using a simulacra of the past as a substitute for the present and future, what we see here is a blunt engagement and juxtaposition of the experienced present and future with the experienced past.

The second blog I want to discuss is the final entry of Andrew Olmsted. This is a very different example of nostalgic new media. Mr. Olmsted was a soldier in Iraq who documented his experience in his blog - the best contemporary comparison to letter writing. The final entry, however, was put up by a friend of his, but was presumably pre-written by Olmsted in the case of his death. The entry itself is loaded with wistful quotes and heart-aching passages of Olmsted's craft. Yet, what I find interesting is the recognition of the blog acting as a surrogate for the blogger himself:

"I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war."

Posted by Nathan at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 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)

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I recently wrote, which I later realized would be an applicable subject here. I've spruced it up a bit to make it something other than a letter, but if you're the recipient of the letter and want me to take this down, let me know and it's gone. It deals with whether or not it is appropriate to speak of a code of ethics for blogs.

When discussing a code of ethics for blogs, one generally thinks of the blogger-as-reporter paradigm. Yet this lays certain traps because it linguistically it refers to a medium, when it intends to refer to a use of a medium. To speak of a universal code of ethics one would have to consider blogs that do not always see their purpose as entirely journalistic, like music blogs, tech blogs, gossip blogs, as well as the socially-localized personal blogs that dominate the medium. In some of these contexts, speaking of a universal code of ethics doesn't make too much sense, since informal, unique codes arise through the interaction between the bloggers within sub-network groups. For instance, a group of high-schoolers with blogs written for consumption by their friends will (and, I would say, should) have a very different code than someone blogging for the New York Times. The problem with this many codes-of-ethics view could be that it leans overly populist or relativist at times, but ultimately any code of ethics is going to be determined through the interaction of bloggers and readers, regardless of other concerns.

That said, any individual blogger who takes themselves reasonably seriously would be able to describe a code that s/he follows or ascribes to - that's simply good (public) writing. I have a different sets of ethical practices for the blog I edit for the day-job, Swarming Media, and the other blogs I've started in the past. These came about largely in relation to the other blogs in the topic-field, the context (corporate, academic, personal, artistic, journalistic etc), and how I expect readers to interact with the blog. In this sense, a code of ethics becomes a socially and collectively determined thing - one that is relevant usually only to the readers and blogs within close network-proximity.

Ultimately, this comes down to the question that always arises in media studies: are we talking about content or medium? When it comes to blogs, there are certain medium-specific properties that differentiate it from other media and are used to great advantage in a number of blogs. At the same time, while these properties are quite worthy of analysis, how they are used, who they are used by, and at whom they are directed will determine a large portion of their cultural, political, and social significance - including ethically.

Posted by Nathan at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple social media course descriptions came up today when I checked my recently-neglected feed reader. Both courses are taught by people whose writing I follow and respect: Trebor Scholz and Fred Stutzman. I thought it might be interesting to look at their respective reading lists to see what these courses are emphasizing in the study of social media.

First up Fred's course, Online Social Networks. These are five of the main texts he chose:

• Albert-Laszlo Barabasi - Linked
  
• Erving Goffmand - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life


• Sherry Turkle - Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet


• danah boyd - "Why Youth (heart) Social Networks" and "None of this is real"


• Clay Shirky - "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality"

• Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks


• Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture


• Jurgen Habermas' writing on the internet and the public sphere


• Michael Hardt - "Affective Labor"


• Nicholas Carr - "Sharecropping and the long tail"


• Jeff Jarvis - "Who Owns the Wisdom of the Crowd? The Crowd."

One of the most apparent similarities between these two courses is their reliance on texts and writers most known or originating in blogs and blog writing. Fred relies on danah boyd and Clay Shirky, while Trebor looks to Nicholas Carr and Jeff Jarvis. These writers have worked out their thoughts in the very environment that these courses are examining and no doubt have been shaped by this factor. It's not just a curious fact, however, but a recognition that a great deal of contemporary scholarship on social media is happening in and between blogs.

The differing approaches (sociological/theoretical) to the topic is also quite interesting - but I'm not entirely sure what to conclude that academic investigation of these media is coming from these two distinct sources. Library scientists, sociologists, and the poststructuralists are all pumping out fascinating work on the subject. Despite my affinity toward what I'm calling the theoretical end (among other things, I would have added Deleuze's "Postscript to Societies of Control" to both syllabi), I would have been pleased to see more intermingling between the two to take advantage of the interdisciplinary play between the different approaches.

Either way, both strike me as interesting courses.

Posted by Nathan at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's been an interesting exchange occurring on the nettime mailing list discussing the merits of subjecting blogging to serious analysis. Though the thread is now a few days old, I've only just had the chance to read it. Before I move into my own take on the issue, I want to point out that I do recognize the irony of blogging a response to a mailing list thread critically analyzing the very same practice. Perhaps I feel more comfortable opining in a medium that is generally viewed as more public.

The question of the legitimacy of the study of blogging was raised when one participant compared a blog to a pen: a mere tool of expression that does not limit or direct its uses. The respondents certainly addressed this well, but to reiterate, it might be more appropriate to compare the keyboard to the pen as opposed to the blog. When we use the term 'blog' we imply far more than simply the conventional structure of an individual webpage lumped into this category. Rather, 'blog' implies a network of writers and readers, with individuals very often playing both roles. This is why we might distinguish between a 'homepage' and a 'blog' - the latter implies an assemblage the former merely implies accessibility. The pen/blog distinction is much like that between newsprint/newspaper. Yes, a newspaper is certainly no more than the physical item of newsprint and ink, but to refer to a 'newspaper' is to reference the institution (the social assemblage) enveloping it.

So, certainly a pen and a blog are different and the study of blogs is more accurately the study of that which surrounds the raw medium - it is 'blog' as metonymy.

Secondly, the initiating article of the thread itself ("The Banality of Blogging") makes a bit of misstep in its narrow view of 'blogging'. While its analysis is insightful and certainly worth a thorough read, its conflation of personal blogging with all of blogging fails to recognize the different types of networks and, ultimately, assemblages that form around blogs of a different purpose. Personal blogs (by which I mean blogs that are used to express the events of the blogger's daily and emotional life) are quite different in function and network structure than business blogs, political blogs, or tech blogs and so on. The ways these different spheres interact within themselves are often quite different and worthy of analysis in their own right.

To sum up, not only are blogs worthy of analysis as a medium, but this analysis must become more nuanced in order to fully examine its impact.

Posted by Nathan at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Two recent entries on danah boyd's blog have gotten me thinking about the relationship between democracy, virtuosity, and narcissism in online social networks. The latter of these two entries addresses the recent flare up over Facebook.com's alleged (and disputed) banning of an "Arban LGBT" group, and the former revisits the connection between narcissism and the generation currently in their teens to mid-twenties (I fall within this range and have written on the topic of narcissism before as well).

Paolo Virno, perhaps best in A Grammar of the Multitude, writes about the concept of virtuosity and its connection to affective labor and a shift toward a new type of politics. Virtuosity, to perhaps over-simplify, is the creation of value in the process of production itself. To draw upon the familiar root of the word as an example, an expert pianist experienced on stage holds a higher value than that same pianist experienced through a CD. The act of performance in this case, is an act of virtuosity. The very same concept can easily be applied to production within online social networks: the value in the act of "friending" someone, for instance, is not in the pixelated real estate it occupies on one's profile, but rather the message this act sends when experienced by others. This can be extended to most aspects of subjective construction within these environments. The page itself hold little or no value, whereas the affect produced in its creation is ultimately the aim of the labor.

Virno and others, such as Ned Rossiter in his book Organized Networks for one, see this type of networked affective/creative labor as implying a new, post-democratic (or, even, a hyper-democratic) politics. Yet, at least within online environments, has this shift not been made possible by this alleged, rampant narcissism? If the users of social networks like Facebook were not so focused on the careful construction of their online personae, we would likely not see them flourish - with the maligned LGBT group as an example of their success. It seems that perhaps Virno's idea of virtuosity has found an ally in my generation's supposed masturbatory self-interest. Inflated self-esteem has perhaps led to a world in which affective labor and subjective production have gained increased status in relation to tradtional forms of labor.

Collaborative or navel-gazing? Masturbatory or communal? Perhaps these are no loinger disparate concepts in a space reaching toward a post-democratic, virtuosic politics.

Posted by Nathan at 09:26 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)

Before I launch into this post, I want to note a couple things: First of all I'm going to be at South by Southwest all of next week for both the interactive and music portions. If you're interested in meeting up, drop me a line at swarming - at - gmail.

Secondly, an excellent new curatorial blog called New Climates has just started up. New Climates is investigating the intersection of art, climate change, and network culture and it has a seriously top-notch line-up of artists contributing. I strongly suggest that you check it out.

I'm in the middle of reading Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude - a blissfully short and refreshingly pithy text. In the very beginning pages, he makes a keen observation connecting the concept of the multitude with a sense of dislocation, a "not feeling at home":

"The people are one, because the substantial community collaborates in order to sedate the fears which spring from circumscribed dangers. The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from 'not feeling at home,' from being exposed omnilaterally to the world."

The linkages between feelings of dislocation and web-based interaction have been documented from the internet's earliest days. This has been commonly seen as a medium which collapses distance and makes regional or national identity inconsequential (I would argue that this isn't necessarily the case and that it has just as much ability to strengthen regional networks as it does global ones, but that is for another entry). While this perceived erasure provides a certain type of freedom, it also results in explicit dislocation. This is especially true with the rise of archived social media, in which our identities are projected and retained within the network, because after we sign off, our projected identity retains its interactive ability. Simply put: when you're asleep, people can still interact with your MySpace page. This is true with blogs and any other networked medium that archives its content. As a result, our dislocation as users becomes constant - it has not been relegated to our times of active participation as it might be with a chatroom or even a telephone call. So at the same time as our labor practices have become less secure, more mobile, more modular, our very subjectivity has been imbued with a sense of "not feeling at home" as Virno puts it.

This "not feeling at home" is concurrently the driving impulse of nostalgia which has the ability to provide a brief, if false, connection to this home. Svetlana Boym makes the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia - the former leading to nativist action and a sense of cultural superiority, the former resulting in a sense of melancholy and creative production. Within the context of web-based interaction, however, this distinction nostalgia is expressed in the formation and defense of new identity-groups and cultural practices divorced from regional identity. Blogging has become the nostalgic act of this generation, an implicit lament for times of imagined past when social life revolved around the town square/market/green, or even for the time when we all read the same papers and watched I Love Lucy.

These new forms of distributed, networked, and archived interaction have lead us to a widespread state of nostalgia. A nostalgia for the territorialized self resulting in the search for various forms of affective and subjective relocation.

Posted by Nathan at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michel's post over at P2P Foundation today pointed me to Kenneth Rufo's critique of a binary view of social interaction in digital media environments: "...the assumption is that the virtual connections of the digital world either replace or compliment the connections in the real world. ... Neither is correct; the virtual is a supplement in the Derridean sense, in that it takes the form of an addition, but ends up reconfiguring the original to which it has been added." Even more intriguingly he promises further analysis in a future post, questioning the real/virtual binary from the perspectives of Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Derrida. Needless to say, I'm quite interested to read this.

I would like to throw one more view into the mix here, one that does not rely on a real/virtual distinction. It's important to move away from this binary as it becomes clear that the boundaries between digital and physical selves are becoming quite thin and porous. An good way to view digital interaction and socialization is through the lens provided by Hardt and Negri in Empire and Multitude - as a form of immaterial labor. While Hardt and Negri write about immaterial labor in a much more expansive application, I think applying this same perspective to social networks demonstrates the political, cultural, and social roles of these media.

Immaterial labor is that which produces affect, knowledge, ideas, etc. as opposed to physical goods. While this form of labor is, in some ways, the post-outsourcing American vision, it also occurs on much lower, light-weight levels through real-world networks. Yet these smaller levels of production are far from insignificant, their networks forming H&N's concept of a new biopolitical conception of social subjects: the multitude. We can look at web-based social networks as metonymous in relation to the larger phenomena (albeit an elite, monied metonym). If web-based social networks are networks of immaterial labor, then their product is a multiple, swarming subjectivity.

Instead of viewing these media as surrogates or complements for real-world interaction, we can see them as increasingly organic prostheses of interaction that aid and demonstrate the production of a new subjectivity that trancends both the crowd and the individual.

Posted by Nathan at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)

I broke my self appointed goal to write here once a week, on the weekends, and I'm probably the only one to notice this. Non-blogging life has gotten in they way of blogging-time.

I've been attempting to pull together my thoughts on a topographical analysis of the blogospheres in whatever time I've been able to spare. Hopefully I'll be able to pull something together this week. In the meantime I'll post some links.

In formulating thoughts on web-based topographies I've rediscovered this essay by Mark Nunes: Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace. So if I do manage to get something out tomorrow or the day after, it will most certainly cite this essay. (It's also amusing to read an essay concerning the internet written in 1999, when the popular terminology was so different.)

Secondly, The Economist has an excellent piece on why economists blog. If you have any questions about why academia must begin blogging and why it is to their advantage to do so, read this article. In discussions about academic blogging I'm often asked why one would want to "give away" their ideas "for free" on a blog - essentially it comes down to the fact that academia is not unlike independent music: obscurity is far worse than piracy.

Posted by Nathan at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I write my piece for Michael Pick's upcoming Web-publication, Audience 2.0, I keep running down tangents that, while interesting to me, aren't entirely on-topic. One of these is the issue of the archival properties of networked social media, which could more or less the central question in any analysis of identity and interaction on the Web. How do our interactions become a piece of collective and individual prosthesis memory in these new media? How does this build upon or break from past popular forms of social archivization - from 8mm home movies, to printmaking, to graffiti? These questions naturally lead to discussions of the structure of our socially-enabled media; but in many ways it seems that people in the techsphere of blogs (I don't like the term "blogosphere" very much - hence the awkward rephrasing) often fail to understand the basic flows and processes occurring.

A prime example is Steve Rubel's attempt to map a universe/galaxy/solar system style of metaphorical hierarchy onto his conception of social media. Steve writes:

"* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded - e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs"

To critique his system, let's first look at the basic structure he attempts to invoke. Going from galaxy, to star, to planet the structure envisioned is one of nested hierarchy combined with an illusion of anarchy on - but not between - each individual level. In other words he sees order in the progression from galaxies to solar systems, but essential disorder in these levels themselves. The belief in disorder is highlighted by his categorization of "shooting stars," and "asteroids." For him, these elements disrupt the structured order of progression from one level to another - a "shooting star," is a lower-level member, inappropriately and temporarily above it's natural status.

I won't go into how this metaphor reads astrophysics wrong, because that would miss the point and mostly because I have no grounds to correct anyone on astrophysics. I will however say that to make this systemic comparison is an attempt to read a politics and network structure into social media that is misleading.

Mixing hierarchy and level-specific anarchy in this way takes a narrow view of social media both temporally and physically. At any given time, within a specific sector of social media, this structure may exist, but over time and across the expanse of use and interaction structure is not nearly as hierarchized, centralized, or teleological. YouTube only attracts the like minded as much as a park bench does, Robert Scoble is only an online celebrity as much as Blake Schwarzenbach was a celebrity in the early/mid-nineties proto-pop-punk scene. We must see these networks as ever-modulating, compartmentalized, and interlinked. What we see today is not necessarily true for tomorrow as far as this social hierarchy is concerned.

The most crucial reason why this structure is flawed is that it completely ignores the very bedrock of social media which can be found on MySpace, LiveJournal, the del.icio.us networks among friends, and basically every interactive network of individuals that few pay attention to. If all of Rubel's "stars" and "planets" were to suddenly be gone, these undercurrents would continue to thrive and give birth to new high-points and low-points (to speak in topographical terms - what I see as perhaps a better metaphor). Social media is driven by regular people using these media to interact. I realize very well that on some significant, if unrecognized, level the purpose of interaction is self-reflexively spectacular and celebrity-driven, but this drive occurs within a socially driven network rather than being an inherent property of it.

Steve's post, then, typifies many of the techsphere's attempts at reading structure into what is essentially a process of archivization. It reaffirms the current structure as it is seen without regard to influences of time and expanse and often seems to be a self-congratulatory theory that claims the author's place in the structure is almost divinely ordained - natural - when it is in fact entirely dependent on collective, unpredictably organized interactions.

Posted by Nathan at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been more reluctant lately to jump into debates circulating around the tech bloggers. Perhaps this is a fear fo repeating myself, or maybe it's a lack of a drive to be on techmeme. On Friday, however, I found myself becoming interested in the furor over Steve Rubel's entry "The Underground Blogosphere."

Steve complains about the amount of e-mails that he receives every day that essentially ask him to post a link to another blog. Many others in the techsphere got all worked up proclaiming that it is an unimportant subject. Yet what fascinated me by this idea is the operation of a parallel, low-impact network that has physical consequences in the higher-impact network of blogs. I suppose I'm a little slow on noticing this, but keep in mind that Swarming Media is merely the 188,421th most linked-to blog, compared to Rubel's 59th, so I have never received nor sent any e-mails with the intent that a link would follow.

This second network is not as explicitly traceable as the blog/link-network. It is archived in less public/searchable areas such as message histories, inboxes, and sent-items. The resulting network is, then, largely blind beyond the links from one node to another: Steve Rubel knows who sent him this mail, but I sure don't. Yet despite the separate archival/reifying system, this network has to potential to shift the explicit blog-network through the link that connects subject-node to blog-node. Fred Stutzman has a good entry further describing the interaction between these two networks:

"As the blogosphere is scale-free, the types of traffic that hubs see doesn't scale linearly (or log linearly) through the network. If Reubel receives 100 pitches in a day, it is not a safe assumption that the 1000th Technorati blog receives 98 pitches a day, and the 10,000th receives 90 (and so on, reflecting a power law based on 37MM blogs). In fact, due to Reubel's position in the network, the amount of pitch traffic he sees may be vastly disproportionate to the rest of the blogosphere."

"In network science, the "unavoidable consequence" of networks often resembles something like neoliberal democracy, but a democracy which naturally emerges according to the "power law" of decentralized networks. Like so, their fates are twisted together."

Perhaps then, my reluctance to jump in on these hotly-linked subjects is my reluctance to blindly subscribe to the scale-free ideology. Yet, the very fact that I've written this entry shows my complicity.

Posted by Nathan at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our internet service has been out for the last couple of days, throwing a brick in the gears of my online reading project and blog posting ability (praise free wireless cafes; curse short battery life). So while un-internetted I wrote this reaction to an event last Wednesday evening:

This past week I met with a number of other bloggers at a Manhattan bar. This was an interesting experience; these people who usually exist simply as a personality expressed through writing are suddenly playing trivia, just a step away. The meeting made me think about the several personalities that operate under the heading of my own name. The "Nathan" emanating from this blog differs from his counterpart on the blog I keep for my company, which, in turn, is different from the personality behind my del.icio.us account or MySpace profile.

On the Web we often live in the illusion that these different selves, which all of us express in varying ways, can remain separate. This is the ideology behind "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" cartoon - the ideology that has driven much thought on networked interaction in the past. It's the idea that we can erase aspects of identity in the creation of another self. Switching from one self to another becomes an act of continual erasure and creation. This ideology states that once you switch off the computer you are withdrawn from the network.

Yet this couldn't be further from the truth. Our multiple selves overlap, intersect, and interact in ways that are much messier. Erasure is not an acceptable ideology - every interaction, every mouse-click, every blog entry becomes a new piece in our larger distributed, networked identity. Swarming Media's Nathan cannot be separate from the Nathan that wrote his first blog while studying in Scotland, despite the fact that these two selves differ greatly.

So when I met with those bloggers over trivia and beer - which inexplicably came with free pizza - and as they have reported on our get-together, my own networked existence is molded and poked. They add to, and adapt how I exist on the Web and within the greater cultural archive of which we're all a part.

Posted by Nathan at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In his more annoying moments he comes across as delightedly plugging his buddies at Amazon.com and Raphsody, in his more interesting he has his readers questioning why they would even consider going to a real-world store again. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail comes as no surprise for anyone who has immersed themselves in the world of blogs and Web 2.0 hype. If you, like me, fall into this category will find his explanation of the new structure of Web-driven business...well...old business.

It is this very fact - that his observations are already old in their native territory - that perfectly describes the specific environment. Any blogger will know that the freshness of your writing is of utmost importance, anything over 72 hours old is well past its prime and will not receive much attention. Books, then, are in an awkward position to be providing cultural critique for a subject that partially defines itself on a rapid pace of change. Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are among those who have already began to experiment with the medium and I'm surprised The Long Tail did not follow in their footsteps. Yet, while Anderson focuses on books to a great degree in his text, he deals with them entirely as commodities and seems to have overlooked the role of the medium's role as cultural dialogue.

Perhaps this is the central point that troubled me about The Long Tail. It is a thorough business analysis (at least as far as this untrained writer can tell) but it is an utter failure in critically examining the cultural importance of these phenomena. Yes, the fact that masses of consumers are now able to tag mechandise will result in greater sales, but this fact changes more than entrepreneurs' incomes - it changes the fundamental interaction between individuals, others, commodities, and themselves.

I found myself asking why he bothered to publish this book when it, to me, said nothing new. Anderson sent this book out to bloggers - in exchange for a review - to build up buzz presumably, but he should have sent it out to the editors of small local newspapers, to start-up indie labels, to that gift shop I live above at the moment. These are the people who would most benefit from reading The Long Tail - not bloggers. We already know this stuff, we already have been reading the Long Tail blog and throwing around the term for months.

Bloggers have already taken advantage of the filter and aggregation techniques he details to find his work; we all would have bought it, or read it, eventually anyway - even though we're moving on. He should have targeted other segments of our larger society's long tail. The ones that this book was written for anyway.

Posted by Nathan at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just received an advance copy of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail in the mail as part of his campaign to build buzz for his book within the long tail itself. This has coincided with my effort to gradually, actually read everything on my del.icio.us links with a "READTHIS" tag. So while this entry will be loosely centered on Michael Hardt's essay "Affective Labor," I've noticed that a lot of what Hardt covers is directly applicable to Anderson's topic (at least as far as I can tell having read the book's blog). So hopefully next weekend, when I review The Long Tail, I'll be able to bring in some of what I'll be writing below.

The reasons I tagged this essay with the intention of reading it later is fairly clear. Hardt discusses the shift from modern to postmodern forms of production as being that of the shift from the "Fordist" model to the cleverly titled "Toyotist" model. In other words, the new dominance of immaterial labor within our economy:

"Toyotism is based on an inversion of the Fordist structure of communication between production and consumption. Ideally, according to this model, the production planning will communicate with markets constantly and immediately."

Hardt also acknowledges this social/network aspect by highlighting the social in affective labor itself:

"[...] in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and "elevated" to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital. [...] In the production and reproduction of affects, in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital."

Yet one place where I part from Hardt is the specificities of the significance of the physical medium of the computer, the web, and the internet as the locations for this affective labor. He includes a reference or two to "the computer" making his piece relevant to the context in which it was published, but seems to dodge meaty analysis. What he avoids is acknowleding the reifying effect these media have on these networks of affective labor. While it is the data, the information, the affect that is important - these necessarily immaterial units - our new/swarming media networks have the ability to reflect and map the immaterial. I think it's this key interplay between the immaterial and its effects that are intriguing here.

In some ways this ever-so quotable line from the piece demonstrates this gap:

"Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves."

Posted by Nathan at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The combination of aggregation and individual inspection is the key to our new, networked media. In this frenzy of hype and actual innovation that we've been witnessing under the banner of "Web 2.0", the major development is not just that the individual has been empowered to create his/her own content - theoretically, the individual has always been capable of this - but that any individual is now able to connect to, alter, and interact with any other individual's content as well as the aggregate effects of the collective body of content.

Whereas web interaction at one point was centered on media such as the chatroom, in which real-time, text-based interaction - a more ephemeral sort of contact, in that, to a greater extent, leaving the chatroom implies an erasure of identity - was the norm, now we see more permanent outlets for the self-as-spectacle. Posting on a blog, creating a profile, editing a wiki, these all leave traces of identity that are more public that previous modes of networked interaction. Our lines in the network-sand are deeper and more rigid, while simultaneously becoming more distributed. We literally transfer ourselves onto the network both actively and passively (passively through automated natural language readers applied to public record documents, for instance) such that we might even be perceived to exist long after our physical life has ended.

One of the major drives of this constant creation and storage of the data that make up our networked, distributed identities is - rather than any sort of utility - the classic dual desire of seeing/being-seen. We desire to be seen by others - through blogging, through social networks, through bookmarking, etc. - and this goes hand-in-hand with the urge to make a spectacle of others as we do ourselves. Yet this does not occur simply on an individual-to-individual level, we also see it on a individual-to-mass level. It is collective action that brings a blog post to the top of Digg or Memeorandum and this is then experienced on an individual level creating waves of feedback from the emergent system, back to the component parts.

From this we have to look at where these cultural changes around us are leading. For one, they are leading to legitimate worries of security over our the data that make up our deterritorialized selves. The issue over ownership of these data, who gets to see its aggregate and individual effects in the end lead to the questions of who controls our networked, distributed selves and how do these data enact control on their own part.

Posted by Nathan at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Two posts I've read over the past week demonstrate the development of a more control-based society developing with the help of new media. Chartreuse writes about the increased focus on the individual in new business, that large business must shrink to adapt to this new landscape and that "mass is dead." This is all very true, especially in relation to social-networking sites. As participants in these new media, we are constantly defining ourselves, narrowing ourselves down to multiple hyper-specific identities. My del.icio.us links, my MySpace profile, the OPML of my feeds, each alone represent an identity I have carved out on the web, an identity that fits me into one of these new individualized markets/categories.

Except this process of individualization doesn't simply happen isolation, just as I delineate the boundaries of myself, others take a hand in it as well. This is where social-classification comes in. When someone comments on a post, tags my MySpace page, or places the feed from this blog among a group of other feeds, I have been classified by someone else. Thus the progression from mass to (multiple) individual takes place both internally, from the subject him/herself, as well as externally, from the individuals around him/her.

Deleuze noted this process back in 1990 in his Postscript on Societies of Contol. In describing the shift from a disciplinary to a control society, he noted that rather than being dealt with as masses by large institutions, we are becoming viewed as these "dividuals," broken into modular, multiple categories by ever smaller, ever more fluid entities he calls "corporations." Yet where we differ at this specific cultural moment in new media, is that we are our own modulating entity; we are defining ourselves, but, more importantly, each other.

The second post I want to react to is The End Of Cyberspace's "More of the Meme." In this post Alex correctly notes that the ideology of anonymity is quickly disappearing among online social media. He states that there are fewer and fewer times during online interaction when it is appropriate (or possible, I'd say) to remain anonymous. This is the natural result of the social-classification and increasing 'control' aspects of our current moment. When the point of my interactions with new media has become to define myself and to define others, the concept of anonymity becomes completely irrelevant and impossible. To attempt to remain anonymous is to not actually participate in these media.

Posted by Nathan at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a little late in the analysis game on the BBC's push toward a more participatory mode, but I think that's just as much a reflection of the speed of these new media as it is the circumstances in my own schedule.

On April 25th, the BBC announced that they will be, in the next six years, attempting to integrate new aspects of on-demand content and audience participation in their otherwise broadcast-centric approach:

"The plans build on opportunities created by new and emerging digital technologies and confront the challenges of seismic shifts in public expectations, lifestyle and behaviours and on building new relationships with audiences and individual households.

Ten teams have, for the past year, been exploring what the world may be like in 2012, what audiences may need and want and what the BBC needs to do about it."

What I have found most interesting, however, is the political, social, and economic relationships this move is revealing between private and state-funded industry. The AP reported that Murdoch and his underlings are raising a stink over this due to the fact that the BBC is funded by public money. This view draws from the ideology of deregulatory period in British broadcasting that saw the rise of ITV and the like. This perspective sees private entities as necessary competitors to the public entity, able to provide programming that would otherwise not be available, and able to benefit from a less rigid market structure. Thus when Murdoch thinks it isn't fair that the BBC can make this move on the back of TV license fees, he is saying that the BBC, and by extension the government, is becoming anti-competetive.

I would disagree with this view; if anything, the BBC is proving that it has benefitted from degregulation by becoming an innovator itself. Rather than stagnating in older modes of content delivery (TV, radio, low-participatory web) the BBC is taking the step that many other competetive entities - Google and Yahoo come to mind immediately - are taking. Would Murdoch call out "unfair" if it were ITV who unveiled this "Creative Future" initiative? Certainly ITV would have to raise money at the expense of its viewers through the sale of more airtime/webspace just as the BBC has to raise money at the expense of its viewers through sustenance of the licsense fee (something Britons, as I experienced in my brief few months there, are not too fond of).

So what does this really mean? People are beginning to question the public role in new web/online development. This can only be a good thing. The philosophy of these new media idealize as democratic, accessible, and user-friendly. Shouldn't more public institutions be like this? Putting public funds into the BBC to innovate should be seen along the lines of putting public funds into the DMV to innovate, become a better run organization. And though Murdoch, I'm sure, has never experienced it, those lines are no fun.

Posted by Nathan at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Economist has printed an entire seciton on new media that I just finished reading moments ago. In general it seems they spoke to all the right people (Weinberger, Jarvis, Sifry, and - yes, I'll say it - Murdoch) and covered the right topics in an open-minded, yet thorough manner. One theme that rose to the surface for me in immediate reaction to the collection of articles was one of referring to all these developments within media as "democratic."

This is by no means an inaccurate or uncommon description; broad participation is the lifeblood of these media as is, it seems, the dissolution of centralized/centralizing institutions. To write "dissolution" is as much literal as it is figurative: as The Economist notes, newspapers are quickly trimming sections, like stock quotes, from their pages in a move that may improve profits right now, but also might be read as the physical process of dismantling this mode of mass media. Here we are then, at the brink of sweeping change, apparently about to take the step into a kind of hyper-democracy where participation - in the sense dervied from 'participatory media' - is more than a right, but the dominant mode of interaction. In the hyper-democracy we, within our multiple levels of social-involvement, create our own news articles, music, television, and encyclopedias. In the hyper-democracy, kids hang out on MySpace, our blogs become our reputations, and our OPMLs and attention data our social/political prosthetic. In the hyper-democracy, we look left and right at our peers, rather than up at our institutions.

Yet The Economist places "democracy" opposite "monarchy," and thus in an entirely rosy light. In political terms this is perfectly fine, yet the kind of hyper-democracy that is forming seems to be one that involves the dislocation of active participation as much as it encourages it. The issues of political prosthesis, control, and discipline that I have frequently touched upon in this blog all seem to point to the not-so-rosy sides of this "revolution," as the final article puts it. They point to the idea that the result of this completely distributed structure of social, cultural, and political involvement is the formation of a kind of modular, hugely over-arching, swarm institution. Where masses of individuals take up the roles of domination once held by the few, where data speaks louder than words.

So yes, these new media are moving us toward a democratic participation never before seen. No, we should not halt this "revolution" in the name of the security provided by the familiar. But, we should be aware that "democracy" does not imply utopia, and distributed and open participation may not always mean the liberation of the individual.

Posted by Nathan at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week has proven quite busy, so I apologize for the lack of updates.

I will however refer you to Alex Wright who has posted parts of his presentation at the Information Architecture Summit.

"On the Web, much of the activity seems to hew closely to oral cultures - e.g., blogs, email and IM - modes of interaction that are fluid and constantly shifting, lacking the epistemological fixity of traditional print culture. If we look around the Web today, we can see these two cultures of spoken and written words negotiating an uneasy embrace."

Posted by Nathan at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I seem to find myself referencing a Scott Karp post once again. This time it's a piece from a few days ago, "Web 2.0 vs. Privacy." I've written frequently in this blog about the issues of distributed identity and distributed control in these new media and about Web 2.0 enacting a philosophy of classification rather than the modes of erasue seen in earlier social media. In his post, Scott comes to similar conclusions that I have, essentially that what we have come to call Web 2.0 is founded on a basis of mass-self-surveillance:

"Web 2.0 only works if we’re willing to cede any grasp on privacy by sharing everything we do online — even everything we think, through tagging, commenting, voting, etc."

Kathy Sierra takes a more amusing look at this desire for visibility.

I discovered a blog today (thanks Marisa Olson's wonderful del.icio.us bookmarks - an advantage to all this visibilty and sharing) that seems like it could be very interesting. It's called Ten-sided and seems to be an attempt at exploring new modes of creativity via blogging. I'll spend more time writing on this in the next few days but for right now I'll just put down a few quick notes about my initial reaction to a section of their "About" page:

"...attempts to use the blog as a directly creative medium can be challenging, because the blog is a tool that downplays the role of the individual author. Instead, bloggers place themselves within a dense web of interlinking authors, and the act of blogging is more like participating in a conversation than giving a rehearsed speech. This stands in stark opposition to the standard model of artistic authorship, in which an individual or tightly coordinated group creates an artwork for a passive audience."