What follows is the fourth part of the article originally written for Audience 2.0. This section tries to carve out a subjectivity that lies neither in "the audience" nor "audience" but somewhere in between.

I also wanted to note that I've written a short piece on a related topic (P2P relationality) for the P2P Foundation wiki.

Of And Within Multiplicities

Recent developments on the web have changed the way people interact with each other and themselves. We are transferring more and more of ourselves into web-based media, effectively creating a distributed cultural archive of identity. In the most explicit ways, we do this through social networking sites, in less explicit ways through stored search queries, tagging, and attention logs. One way to describe our current mode of web-based interaction is to call it self- and social-classification. The root of interaction among these new media has been to classify ourselves and others. Our interactions leave marks on the participants, and these marks are stored and become the basis for future interaction and perception. Web-based media has literalized this to the point where these marks—and their archivization—are the oft-unspoken goal of interaction. As a result, we continually develop our grand and subtle, yet all-encompassing and controlling, cultural archive of identity.

One of the best examples of social classification is a service that many readers probably use every day: del.icio.us. I choose del.icio.us as an example because of its simplicity and its ability to incorporate diverse aspects of a user's web experience. Users interact with one another and data within the same system, often blurring the distinction between the two. For those unfamiliar, del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo!, is a social bookmarking tool. A user can bookmark a web page, “tag” it with terms so he can find it later, and share these tags and pages with other people.

The other day after coming home from work, I looked at my del.icio.us network. One's “network” aggregates the tagged pages of designated users and displays them chronologically along with their tags. I found that my friend had tagged an article in The Economist about economists blogging using the tags “academia” and “blogs.” It seemed interesting so I read it and bookmarked it in my own del.icio.us account. I tagged it with “academic,” “blogs,” and “economics.” I then saw that it had been saved by a few others, looked at who they were, how they described it, and what they tagged it with. Afterward, I navigated to the del.icio.us front page to see what everyone else who uses the service, when aggregated, found bookmark-worthy.

This simple activity of bookmarking and browsing bookmarks demonstrates one of the ways in which we begin to exist on the web and interact through self- and social-classification. First let's look at the ways in which I classified myself. It begins when I chose the user name “swarming.” I chose it to correspond with my blog, Swarming Media. It became a top-level signifier for my presence within the system. I have chained a piece of my identity to the textual production of that blog and its own array of associations. I could have chosen “nlovejoy” or “johnny_cash” just as easily. This choice is an assertive act of self classification, a performance.

Next, there is the choice of the people in my network. Who I add is as assertive as the choice of my name. It creates the content I will be exposed to and associates me with a variety of other interests. By putting someone in my network I am actively tying myself not only to their identity, but to their bookmarks and tags as well. This group of users could be read as a partial surrogate for my own identity. Thirdly, I classify myself through the tags I choose to use. For The Economist's article I chose “academic” over “academia,” “academics,” or even “bullshit.” After applying many tags, they are aggregated into a hierarchy according to frequency. This tag cloud, as a direct result of the terms I chose, also marks me with a particular identity. Finally, and most obviously, there is the choice of pages that I bookmark. The content of my page is filled with this material. Whatever I bookmark is sent out directly to my network and indirectly to the entire del.icio.us system. I am what I see. I mark myself through the pages I find to be worthy of public, associative display.

These items are—to use reflexive terminology—tags of identity. When I bookmark a page, I am tagging myself through my choice of object and tag terms. Other people tag me when they add me to their network, when they bookmark an entry from my blog, or whenever a member of my network uses del.icio.us. My identity here is created collectively and socially. The basic unit of interaction is classification. As I modulate my own identity, I also modulate those of the people whose pages I mark and those who have added me to their network. Identity is no longer fully autonomous nor entirely fluid; I have a great deal of control over the boundaries through self-classification, but other users play a major role in defining my surrogate, online self. Interaction through self- and social-classification leads to porous subjectivities.

While an individual's identity is defined by multiple sources, there exists an emergent identity of the system. As data from every user within del.icio.us is aggregated, categories like popular tags or hot items rise to the top. This begins to influence the tagging activities of users within the system itself. This upper-layer view not only represents the collective tagging actions of the users, but it also starts a process of systemic feedback. Users read the “hot items” and decide to tag it themselves or read a popular tag and work that into their personal taxonomy. Thus the aggregate, emergent entity begins to influence the individual identity just as much as the individual influences the aggregate.

The distinctions between individuals and groups of individuals are at once both more distinct—through increased classification—yet less autonomous—through systemic feedback and social-classification. The member of the crowd no longer loses his identity under the weight of the mass, but at the same time he loses the ability to define this reinstated selfness on his own. We have each come to harbor internal multiplicities, just as we are a unit within an external multiplicity. Put in another way, it is no longer clear whether we’re the audience or giving audience. The unidirectional flow of power between individual and mass that has fueled the two previous conceptions of audience has broken down and shifted to a tension between, and within masses of individuals. These new media have not only enabled a greater connectivity, but questioned the very concept of “the individual.”

Posted by Nathan at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not going to be too lengthy tonight, but I want to get in a thought on Elaine Peterson's essay "Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy" and the subsequent reactions.

Peterson's piece, as can is clear from the title, takes a stand against folksonomy as an effective organizational system. David Weinberger and Thomas Vander Wal both respond to the merits of this alternative system more effectively than I ever could, but I think there is one point that seems to be avoided in the discussion of its value. Critical to the importance of folksonomies is their operability on both the local and global levels: tagging for personal reference contributes to a global referential framework. Items will be sorted as it is useful for personal use at the same time as an individual's organization interacts with that of other individuals creating an emergent, global effect.

This is all well and good if the participants keep to themselves and tag purely on the basis of personal use, but in the types of folksonomies that we see popping-up, this is certainly not what happens - and this is where Peterson slips into the confusion between social-bookmaring and folksonomy. In social-bookmarking, the effect of feedback within the emergent system plays a more central role than it might in a blind folksonomy. Two examples of influential feedback iIn del.icio.us: users are prompted to use common tags when posting something that has already been tagged; and when a user discovers new links through his or her network or through a global aggregation. Effects like these diminish the purity of the folksonomy to be sure and move it away from the solution that Vander Wal suggests - that of a taxonomist taking cues from a (presumably blind) folksonomy. Instead of the Vander Wal solution, the global effect has an increased role as this central arbiter.

Over all, I fall on the side that folksonomies are indeed useful as an organizational tool, but, as I'm sure David and Thomas would both agree, they are certainly not a cure-all for the archive fever that has taken us.

Posted by Nathan at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished reading Jeff Rice's essay, 21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging. In it, he attempts to draw a parallel between new media sociality and urban revitalization - specifically tagging and Detroit. While his ultimate conclusion about the potential for socially-driven new media networks as a tool to reshape an urban environment on more democratic, organic modes, he comes to this resolution through a few assumptions about the relation between archival/network space and physical space.

The root of this faulty connection is rooted in the equation of place and space. I agree with the idea that a folksonomic network results in an implied space, yet this space is definitively non-physical: existing as the aggregation of links and nodes of several varieties. This space is also constructed significantly as determined by time and more affective modes of production. The input of time into the production of this space is discussed in this entry at the P2P Foundation:

"...the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no 'there' there, presented but not with a deep presence. It’s a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves."

Rice jumps from space to place - the latter taken to mean something as tangible as a cafe or park - in an attempt to redraw the idea of the city on the terms of a swarming media network:

"Folksonomy involves a new media organization of space through the meeting of differently arranged, open schemes. Just as the urban city contributed to a sense of public-ness or folk-ness through communal gathering, the café, public squares, stadiums, and other places, folksonomy generates a digital sense of connectedness. It does so, however, not through fixed place but through the open encounter of place in terms of digital, social interaction."

Despite this leap, Rice's suggestion that the concept of a digitally networked folksonomy being used to collectively plan urban renewal is a fascinating one. He essentially proposes something similar to GeoTagThings, a geographically based tagging system through which residents could speak to the significance of a particular place and subsequent efforts at renewal can act as informed by these tags. Though he writes specifcally about Detroit, I can't help but connect this to the urban planning issue in my area: the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. The Forest City Ratner plan envisions a series of sky-scrapers and an arena for the Nets just above the Prospect Heights neighborhood. The overwhelming sentiment in the borough is against this sort of development. I can't help but think what the results would be if a folksonomic approach were taken to Brooklyn, how different areas would be tagged and what this would mean for development. While much of what is now Atlantic Yards is bleak there is surely a social/archival network there that could be reified by such a system.

This idea of reifying otherwise implied networks surrounding physical, non-networked, places is what is most interesting about Rice's essay.

Posted by Nathan at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an article that was originally written as an introductory article the web-magazine Audience 2.0. As a result of circumstances out of anyone's hands, this publication has not yet come into being. In order for this piece not to grow too stale in my My Documents folder, what follows is the complete version of the piece dated retroactively for the originally intended date of publication. I do hope that Audience 2.0 eventually comes into being, but until then, this will have to do.

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 the word 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. The act of 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.

The Audience and Celebrity Culture

The audience is large, the audience is faceless and undifferentiated. It is held together solely through its relationship to the speaker. It is anarchic—it must-be-controlled though outside forces. We need only to look so far as 20th-century celebrity culture to see this at work. Take, for example, Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust. At the very climax of the piece, we find protagonist Tod Hackett lost within, and washed about by a mob of regular folks in LA. Before they morph into an amoral, apolitical mass, these people are neighbors, friends, and the tritely individualized people he encounters on a daily basis. They had all gathered to watch what we would now call a red-carpet procession at a movie premier. Before the stars arrive, people retain a certain amount of individual selfness: they have names and they have faces. Yet at the point when the celebrities arrive, a madness takes over the crowd and their thin shells of identity break—those who once were weak and calm are strong and violent, those who once were neighborly are lecherous, those who were singular have become indistinct.

This shift happens partly in reaction to the perceived concentrated individuality of celebrity. The star is the “speaker” in this case, and LA is the audience. The constituents are powerless in front of the hyper-individual, the faced-one. The crowd of formerly autonomous entities are transformed into an undifferentiated, heaving, yet entirely anticipated multiplicity of violence and amorality—and while their force is great, it is undirected and necessarily the subject of control. As police swoop in to tame the mass, Tod has already lost all autonomous singularity in relation to his surroundings; his interior and exterior are enmeshed. He has difficulty differentiating himself and the siren he hears and his consciousness from his imagined painting.

What West highlights so well is the relationship between the perception of the celebrity hyper-individual and the hypo-individuals who constitute the audience. Celebrity culture represents a low point of the value of audience. The speaker's over-concentrated subjectivity leads to disproportionate power and control over the entities-made-faceless that make up the audience.

There was a time when I would commute into Boston every day through North Station, housed beneath the venue that was then called the Fleet Center. One evening on my way home, I ran into the arrival of several hundred attendants of a Shakira concert. Walking toward my track was particularly difficult, and I missed the train.

While waiting for the next departure, I noticed that a vast majority of the Shakira-attendees were dressed almost identically. They wore puffy hats with brims slightly angled to one side; tight, ornately patterned shirts exposing their midriffs; and mellow-toned skirts and jeans. Their style was not necessarily a common one—not one that I had specifically noticed before—but a mass of young women surrounded me, who had all apparently followed a dress code for the event.

I am hardly in a position to critique another's fashion decisions, but that evening revealed to me the power that the construct of celebrity has over the audience. Shakira's mere presence indicated to the young women that they must wear this set of clothing. The audience was subject to her implicit control. In most cases the outfit might demonstrate a prescribed uniqueness, but when placed next to such concentrated subjectivity as the singer, it stripped them of a faced individuality and transformed them into “the audience.” Celebrity culture breeds this stark gap between those who are allowed an autonomous self and those who are denied one. Even if the celebrity identity is created through a non-autonomous process, the end result, as seen publicly, is this purity of self.

The audience exists only in a relationship with the hyper-individual. On the one side are delicate egg-shell identities waiting to break, and on the other is the solid, impenetrable identity of celebrity. The audience may harbor a potential for action, but demands a measure of exterior control—the police in The Day of the Locust, ushers at the Shakira concert. And when this potential action is unleashed, it is anarchic.

The audience has a sad lot.

Audience and Spectacle

One who gives audience is on the opposite side of the dynamic than West's mob or the Shakira fans; he is not only endowed with an autonomous identity but, more importantly, he remains in control of the interaction. To examine this it might be helpful to take a look at a few key points from a classic text of psychoanalytic, feminist film theory: Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey describes the relationship between the viewer and the figures on screen from a Freudian/Lacanian perspective. Sparing the details of the entire essay—and no doubt over-simplifying it in the process—one particular passage illustrates the relationship between the film audience and the actors (speakers) on screen:

“Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. ... As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”

An example that I'm anxious to bring up is Dirty Harry, the 1971, Clint Eastwood, hard-boiled cop movie. In it, Eastwood's character Harry Calahan hunts down a dangerously deranged, racist, counterculture sniper. Overt and unsubtle political and racial discussions aside, the film rests on the very idea that audience is control. The sniper attempts to control the San Francisco populace by watching (and killing) them with the aid of his scope; in parallel, Harry attempts to control the sniper by getting into a series of predicaments that require him to see the sniper without being seen. In fact, superior vision seems to be what makes Harry such a good cop in the first place. He manages to foil a bank robbery thanks to his keen observation of a suspicious (read: black and smoking) man waiting in a car. With his back turned to this scene, he asks the diner-counter cook if he can see what's going on. He doesn't—while Harry, facing the other direction, does. Eastwood has the omnipotence of universal vision, the perfect example of audience-as-control.

When Harry first manages to subdue the sniper, it is in the middle of a football field just as his partner turns on the flood lights. The sniper falls to the ground in the middle of the expanse, blinded by the light as Eastwood walks slowly toward him armed with full visual capacity. The sniper is defeated, ultimately, by being unable to avoid or return Harry’s gaze. The power construct favors the one able to give audience and belittles the one unable to return it. As the sniper's concept of self fully breaks down under the oppressive weight of Eastwood's visioned subject, he speaks madly and incoherently, while Harry is imbued with a calm and deliberate assurance of self and justice.

Audience has a deadly power.

Multiplicities Of and Within Identity

Recent developments on the web have changed the way people interact with each other and themselves. We are transferring more and more of ourselves into web-based media, effectively creating a distributed cultural archive of identity. In the most explicit ways, we do this through social networking sites, in less explicit ways through stored search queries, tagging, and attention logs. One way to describe our current mode of web-based interaction is to call it self- and social-classification. The root of interaction among these new media has been to classify ourselves and others. Our interactions leave marks on the participants, and these marks are stored and become the basis for future interaction and perception. Web-based media has literalized this to the point where these marks—and their archivization—are the oft-unspoken goal of interaction. As a result, we continually develop our grand and subtle, yet all-encompassing and controlling, cultural archive of identity.

One of the best examples of social classification is a service that many readers probably use every day: del.icio.us. I choose del.icio.us as an example because of its simplicity and its ability to incorporate diverse aspects of a user's web experience. Users interact with one another and data within the same system, often blurring the distinction between the two. For those unfamiliar, del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo!, is a social bookmarking tool. A user can bookmark a web page, “tag” it with terms so he can find it later, and share these tags and pages with other people.

The other day after coming home from work, I looked at my del.icio.us network. One's “network” aggregates the tagged pages of designated users and displays them chronologically along with their tags. I found that my friend had tagged an article in The Economist about economists blogging (http://economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7258939) using the tags “academia” and “blogs.” It seemed interesting so I read it and bookmarked it in my own del.icio.us account. I tagged it with “academic,” “blogs,” and “economics.” I then saw that it had been saved by a few others, looked at who they were, how they described it, and what they tagged it with. Afterward, I navigated to the del.icio.us front page to see what everyone else who uses the service, when aggregated, found bookmark-worthy.

This simple activity of bookmarking and browsing bookmarks demonstrates one of the ways in which we begin to exist on the web and interact through self- and social-classification. First let's look at the ways in which I classified myself. It begins when I chose the user name “swarming.” I chose it to correspond with my blog, Swarming Media. It became a top-level signifier for my presence within the system. I have chained a piece of my identity to the textual production of that blog and its own array of associations. I could have chosen “nlovejoy” or “johnny_cash” just as easily. This choice is an assertive act of self classification, a performance.

Next, there is the choice of the people in my network. Who I add is as assertive as the choice of my name. It creates the content I will be exposed to and associates me with a variety of other interests. By putting someone in my network I am actively tying myself not only to their identity, but to their bookmarks and tags as well. This group of users could be read as a partial surrogate for my own identity. Thirdly, I classify myself through the tags I choose to use. For The Economist's article I chose “academic” over “academia,” “academics,” or even “bullshit.” After applying many tags, they are aggregated into a hierarchy according to frequency. This tag cloud, as a direct result of the terms I chose, also marks me with a particular identity. Finally, and most obviously, there is the choice of pages that I bookmark. The content of my page is filled with this material. Whatever I bookmark is sent out directly to my network and indirectly to the entire del.icio.us system. I am what I see. I mark myself through the pages I find to be worthy of public, associative display.

These items are—to use reflexive terminology—tags of identity. When I bookmark a page, I am tagging myself through my choice of object and tag terms. Other people tag me when they add me to their network, when they bookmark an entry from my blog, or whenever a member of my network uses del.icio.us. My identity here is created collectively and socially. The basic unit of interaction is classification. As I modulate my own identity, I also modulate those of the people whose pages I mark and those who have added me to their network. Identity is no longer fully autonomous nor entirely fluid; I have a great deal of control over the boundaries through self-classification, but other users play a major role in defining my surrogate, online self. Interaction through self- and social-classification leads to porous subjectivities.

While an individual's identity is defined by multiple sources, there exists an emergent identity of the system. As data from every user within del.icio.us is aggregated, categories like popular tags or hot items rise to the top. This begins to influence the tagging activities of users within the system itself. This upper-layer view not only represents the collective tagging actions of the users, but it also starts a process of systemic feedback. Users read the “hot items” and decide to tag it themselves or read a popular tag and work that into their personal taxonomy. Thus the aggregate, emergent entity begins to influence the individual identity just as much as the individual influences the aggregate.

The distinctions between individuals and groups of individuals are at once both more distinct—through increased classification—and less autonomous—through systemic feedback and social-classification. The member of the crowd no longer loses his identity under the weight of the mass, but at the same time he loses the ability to define this reinstated selfness on his own. We have each come to harbor internal multiplicities, just as we are a unit within an external multiplicity. Put in another way, it is no longer clear whether we’re the audience or giving audience. The unidirectional flow of power between individual and mass that has fueled the two previous conceptions of audience has broken down and shifted to a tension between, and within masses of individuals. These new media have not only enabled a greater connectivity, but questioned the very concept of “the individual.”

A New Audience?

And so we come to audience 2.0. "2.0" is generally a tag attached to differentiate software versions, like 'Firefox 1.5.0.6'—except there is no 1.0 as reference nor a 3.0 as destination. The pairing of {word} and 2.0 derives from Web 2.0—to state what must be obvious to anyone reading this. It's a formula that has become all-too-popular in recent months. We can guess at what audience 2.0 means through the immediate association. Where Web 2.0 implies everything from an aesthetic, to a business model, to a philosophy, audience 2.0 implies the other half of that equation. It is the people who use, experience, and interact with one another through whatever it is we may call “Web 2.0.” Audience 2.0 is an internet neologism, and as such its lifespan as a functional term is less important than its cause for existence.

What we're calling “audience 2.0” could perhaps represent a new power relationship, different from those of audience and the audience. Where within the audience, the person on the hearing end of the exchange becomes a subject to the control of the hyper-individual, defined purely in relation to him; and where within audience, the one giving audience holds the privileged position; I propose that we read audience 2.0 as a hybrid exchange within a wider emergent system, holding often contradictory aspects from both earlier readings of (the) audience. If audience implies active consumption on the part of a singular entity privileged with subjectivity, and the audience implies passive consumption on the part of a mass, devoid of identity or autonomy, then audience 2.0 implies a multiplicity that is at once singular and multiple, autonomous and fluid, solid and shattered, local and global, outward-facing and inward-looking: audience 2.0 is a networked subjectivity, it is a swarm.

Imagine hovering in a helicopter, hundreds of feet above a swarm of locusts devouring a field of crops. The locusts seem to move singularly, shifting from one section of the field to another, systematically and efficiently destroying livelihoods. They appear to be a monolithic entity from above. There is a purpose; there is a will. Nothing is anarchic about the locusts from this vantage.

Now imagine the farmer whose crops are being devastated. Naturally, he runs out of his house and tries to kill all the locusts he could manage. Soon he finds himself in the midst of the swarm – locusts going every which way, left, right, up, down, under, over, colliding with and eating everything in sight. How could this be the same phenomenon as was seen from the helicopter? Interior madness, exterior grace; global effect contrasts local action. The swarm is able to both hold anarchy and exude singular purpose—it is an edgeless, centerless multiplicity.

The concept of the swarm does not simply apply to the many users collecting around a system like del.icio.us, it extends to these users’ interiorities. Our interactions through these media have made us swarm-like as a population and as individuals. Audience 2.0, as I propose we conceive it, harbors contradictions and networks of subjectivity on both the level of multiplicity and that of the individual-as-multiple. The distinction has collapsed, the audience has learned to give audience, the tension between hyper- and hypo-individuality has given way to distributed control, and we project ourselves onto the larger cultural archive in ever more nuanced ways.

Audience 2.0: while the term may be short-lived and derivative, the cultural roots from which it has sprung represent a fundamental shift in they way we must think about interaction and subjectivity.

Posted by Nathan at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)

The NSA and MLB have more in common right now than most may realize. They are both engaged in defining our individual and collective relationship to data in an electronically networked world.

The New York Times reports today that Major League Baseball is suing a small, online fantasy baseball company in an attempt to claim that the statistics and names of players are the property of MLB:

"...the Internet arm of Major League Baseball...says that anyone using players' names and performance statistics to operate a fantasy league commercially must purchase a license. The St. Louis company counters that it does not need a license because the players are public figures whose statistics are in the public domain."

Data, especially in an electronically networked environment where our every action is translated to a computational form, is inseperable from identity and individuality and baseball, as a sport, knows this well. Yet, what is MLB stating when they claim that they must be paid fees for use of these data? Part of me wants to say that they are trying to route fan interaction with players (via data) through themselves as an institution. I also have an instinctual reaction to question MLB's insitence that it owns players' individuality. The central thing that seems to be at stake here - and it is something that we will be sure to see arise again and again - is the control of data. This is how power will be, and is, wielded. While trends we have seen seem to imply that this power has become, or is becoming decentralized, the institutions of old are certainly putting up a fight. Though in the case of baseball, I'm not sure MLB ever had control: the sport is much larger than the organization.

The collective control of data, and its relationship to individuals, is also under question with telephone companies releasing all call information to the NSA which aggregates it for broad analysis. Jeff Jarvis covers this topic thoroughly. To extend this baseball comparison, we can see our telephone records as specific statistics that lead back to us as individuals, but also can be aggregate to a much different effect. This process of aggregation is key to Web 2.0-style ideals (think folksonomy here), yet we (myself included) are uncomfortable when this aggregation is in the hands of the NSA. Naturally, this is because the NSA intends to use this aggregate data against (or if you wanted to shift the rhetorical tables: "to protect") us, does not make it public, and does not allow us to opt out. Again, then, the issue here is the control of data, the control of our identity and individuality in a networked world.

Posted by Nathan at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)

In my last entry I briefly wrote about an article in M/C Journal, titled "Transmitting the Body in Online Interaction." As the week progressed I felt the need to expand these thoughts a bit because it seems that Beusch, the writer, is approaching online interaction from an out-dated perspective. We need to move beyond analyses of individual-to-individual interactions toward analyses of projected identities, and swarms.

In his essay Beusch writes:

"...to conceptualise cyberspace as disembodied actually involves a ‘very narrow construction of how we should conceive of this space and the activity that occurs within it’ (Whitty 344). In fact, a central tenet of online interaction rituals is the transmission of the body. The popularity of chat programmes (such as Microsoft Messenger), chat rooms and online dating sites necessitates individuals to construct and transmit the self to others through text. However, drawing on the work of Goffman, this article notes that such transmissions are frequently problematic. In particular, the content of transmission is often subject to ‘framing troubles’, can be purposefully falsified and, as such, may be regarded with suspicion."

Here Beusch, while correct in pointing out the limited conceptualization that "cyberspace" provides for online interaction, does not provide an analysis specific to online interaction. Instead, by focusing on individual interactions via dating sites and instant messaging etc, he is ignoring what makes online interaction unique: its multiplicity and its archival capacity. In fact, it does not matter that there can be "framing troubles" or that transmission can be falsified.

We have to view interaction and identity construction on the Web as an inherently multiple process. Beusch, however, focuses the essay toward isolated and individual interactions. The type of online interaction most under scrutiny in the text is "chatting" in chat rooms and instant messaging. This type of interaction is from one user to another and Beusch is entirely correct in saying that a body is transmitted in these interactions through textual signifiers. But to imply that this can somehow be extended to online interaction as a whole is misleading. Beusch relies on out-dated theories of online interaction to make the point; we have moved beyond the fascination with the chat room. The type of interaction described and analyzed in the essay is now more applicable to a telephone call than it is to online interaction.

Our interactions on the Web do not begin or end in chat rooms. We must include everything from social networking sites to e-mail, from tagging to blogging. We interact not only with other individuals on the web but with the swarm and systems. While e-mail and chat rooms may typify individual-to-individual interaction, social tagging and folksonomies are interactions with a swarm, and an attention tracker is an example of a macro-level interaction with a system. The many different types of interaction all play a role in constructing identities, in constructing bodies online. We are not able to see the entirety of each other's projected identities-as-body at any time, just as we cannot ever be aware of the entirety Foucauldian archive at once. This parallel is not merely circumstantial, because just as the archive is constructed, in a from a series of links between individuals, institutions, and systems, online identity, online bodies, are constructed in a similar series of links between individuals, swarms, and systems.

This is why is does not matter that bodies or identities can be falsified in individual-to-individual interactions. This interaction is merely one of many that makes up the aggregate projected identity. The act of transmitting a differently sexed body to another, must be seen as just that, an act. What is received by the other individual is of little importance to the construction of the transmitter's aggregate body, projected identity. The process of transmitting a false body lends just as much to the overall identity as any other interaction, even if does not line up with physical reality.

Online interaction provides new opportunities for representation certainly, but in analyses of these representations we have to acknowledge their multiplicity and the multiplicity of interaction. Beusch's essay, even in its attempt to explore interaction beyond an idyllic 'cyberspace,' seems to be from a time when we still saw interaction as a singular event. In critical studies of these new media we have to see the plural, the multiple, the aggregate, the swarm, and the macro, and move away from the isolated, the singular, the narrow, and the self-contained individual.

Posted by Nathan at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

In Protocol Alex Galloway uses the concepts in Deleuze's Postscript on Control Societies to examine the mechanisms of control through the the language of code and network protocol. I would like to take the Postscript one step further and apply it to control and interaction within swarming media and the Social Web, especially in relation to my posts about the Social Web as a fragment of th archive, Foucauldian folksonomies (1,2, 3) and projected identity. Deleuze does explicitly mention the computer in this essay, specifically as the archetypal machine for the stage following Foucault's disciplinary society:

"the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses."

There are many ways that the Social Web (and online participatory media in general) reflect Deleuze's observation of a shift from a disciplanary society to a control society, but it seems that the environment in which we currently act lies somewhere between the two and, in some cases, is becoming even more disciplnary. In the more light-hearted MadLibby post below I began to draw connections between what Deleuze recognizes as a shift from institutions to more ephemeral yet constant entities. It is not so much of a stretch to see the blogospheres (plural on purpose) as a parallel to "the corporation" Deleuze describes. The central characteristics that make up this new entity are, generally, modulation (the ability for control mechanisms to adapt to fit new situations), perpertuity (these controls are constant, e.g. education), and competition (the separating and contrasting of two individuals). These are also some of the central characteristics/ideals of the Web 2.0 mode of thought, of the Social Web.

Modulation: Think of del.icio.us; a site is defined by its tags in this system. If the meaning of the site changes due to a change of context, the tags will adapt as more people participate. The emergent "meaning" of the site, as seen through tags, modulates according to the objects context and environment. This can be extended to people since there are very often individuals behind the pages that we tag, and some sites have literally begun tagging people directly (albeit for dating purposes). This is essentially the ephemeral, speedily changing type of control Deleuze writes about. Modularity is also a key aspect of open-source development. One person creates one piece, another creates another, etc, until a community developed, and entirely adaptable, entity arises.

Perpetuity: This can be seen in two areas. The first is in the constant drive for improvement in Social Web/Web2.0 apps. The ultimate goal is user-produced media based on the swarm like intelligence of the mass. It seems unlikely that this goal will be reached despite progress (like trying to walk 5 feet by advancing half the distance with each step) thus this becomes an exercise in perpetuity. "Advancement" cannot end.
This characteristic can also be seen in the very format of a blog. Posts proceed in a chronological order and a blogger is expected to update with reasonable frequency. Blogs have beginnings, but they do not have logical ends as books might.

Competition: This is perhaps the most obvious, but also the least flattering for the Social Web. Since these networks are ideally made up of a large number of autonomous individuals, both collaboration and competition are natural results. The fact that "everyone and their mother has a blog" to quote a phrase I've often heard, shows how we have isolated ourselves from a collective identity into an individual identity (this is not to say singular). This is the exact same process Deleuze describes in the transition from a disciplinary society to a control society. The competition comes in, however, in places like Technorati's blog rankings and "authority" slider. These imply competition despite the collaborative ethos among most bloggers.

So we can see that it's not simply the code and the protocol that demonstrates the beginnings of a shift to a control society, but the development of the Social Web among these swarming media have begun to resemble Deleuze's description. And, I suppose predictably, we are marching down this road not out of fear, or coercion, but because we want to, because it makes our lives easier. This reminds me a little of what Simon Ings wrote in his 1999 science-fiction novel, Headlong: “When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

Except, of course, it is not the machines who are overtaking us. And it's not simply statist, hegemonic power structures either as Deleuze suggests. What we are witnessing is a development of a control society where control, to a large extent, is the emergent result of the collective action of the swarm. Our inherently multiple projected identities, our tagging systems, our social networks, our blogs have the potential to become the ultimate mechanisms of control when aggregated. Just as Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" tracks the actions and deeds of an individual as s/he interacts in a social environment, our interactions in the Social Web, collectively and individually, have emergent results. If the website is defined by its del.icio.us tags, we are defined by our interaction with the archive.

In an interview at Switch Galloway states:

"Many today say that new media technologies are ushering in a new era of enhanced freedom and that technologies of control are waning. This is supposedly due to the bidirectional quality of interactivity. Eugene [Thacker] and I say, on the contrary, that double the communication leads to double the control. Since interactive technologies such as the Internet are based on multidirectional rather than unidirectional command and control, we expect to see an exponential increase in the potential for exploitation and control through such techniques as monitoring, surveillance, biometrics, and gene therapy."

One final point as the clock inches toward 4am. Through this brief analysis I've realized what it is that has been bothering me about the concept of the attention economy and attention trackers: what these trackers essentially do is centralize an otherwise distributed and deterritorialized portion of a projected identity. I can't help but see the connections between this and what Deleuze writes that Guattari imagines in a control society:

"Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation."

Posted by Nathan at 03:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (5)

In continuing the process of revisiting and fleshing out previous entries, I found myself questioning my reference to "the archive" in this entry:

"So what is the reterritorializing pair for the projected identity? It would seem that the natural pairing for this is the database as the deterritorialized archive."

Foucault's concept of the archive moves well beyond the physical collection of cultural products, rather the archive, in his sense, is a network of relationships that construct the terms in which statements are made and continue to exist: "...it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements." This not only bolsters my claim that the individual database is a deterritorialization of the archive, but it shows that the terms on which Foucault analyzes the archive's cultural role can be applied to the social web (Web 2.0 I suppose, though "the social web" is a bit more specific and a bit less buzzy) as a reified fragment of the archive.

How is it that we can see the social web (by this I am including social networking, the blogospheres, and web-based participatory media on the whole) as a reified fragment of the archive? I'm drawing this conclusion largely from their common, unfixed existence on a spectrum between structured elements and a lack-thereof:

"[T]he archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity....but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities..."(129)

To bring this back down to earth, to apply the theory to the practice of the social web, we have to see the construction of our projected identities (for more on this see this entry) as statements. The process of projecting identities is a process of stringing together statements. The MySpace page, the del.icio.us links, the blog, and all the sub-elements that go into their construction are essentially these statements that exist as part of a discourse within the archive as a whole. We cannot make statements outside of the archive, just as we cannot participate in the blogospheres outside of the social web. The social web, controls how and what statements we make at the same time as it is changed by our statements. This is the Web 2.0 ideal, the social web ideal and it reflects our discursive interaction with the Foucauldian archive.

Two further points suggest that the social web can be read as a reified fragment of the archive. First, though he states that we can never know the archive due to our existence within it, he does allow that fragments of the archive can emerge. I am certainly not trying to say that the social web is the archive, that would be irresponsibly reductive. I would like to say, however, that the social web allows a fragment of the archive for us to begin to know before the passage of time increases clarity through difference. Second, the formation of identity within the archive parallels the idea of identity projection. Foucault writes, "[it] does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks."(131) This demonstrates that our projected identity - as a multiplicity - cannot be reduced to a "fact of...identity." In our multiple interactions, in our multiple statements, the traces we leave do not lead to a cohesive center, a singular identity. Rather, identity in interaction within the social web is constructed as a collection of difference. The many tendrils of our projected identities indeed converge, but they do not converge in a singular "self." Instead, they converge onto the difference which ultimately defines us.

The trend that others (like Steve Rubel) have noticed of the expanding social web - beyond simply the blogospheres - ties into this because the further the social web expands, the more ways in which participation is possible, the more like the archive it becomes.

Posted by Nathan at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

I've been trying to get a better grasp of the connection between Foucauldian discipline and 'Web 2.0' systems (I hesitate to use a term so vague and ever-changing). After writing about this in response to a post Matt McAlister made a few weeks ago, I've had some time to give this more thorough thought.

The ideal of cyberspace was once characterized by a cartoon in which a dog at a computer states "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog." The thought that we can erase identity (which, in turn, implies a creation) was the romantic notion that drew people to this new phenomenon. In this conception, our non-Internet identities didn't have to influence our online interaction. This ideal is a rejection of individual classification, a rejection of individuation. We could assign our own disposable identities, leaving them behind at will and without record.

The Web 2.0 ideal takes the opposite approach. The concept of attention (see AttentionTrust for more info on this), the proliferation of social networking sites (AirTroductions, MySpace, Facebook, etc.), and social tagging (especially as tags begin to represent the tagger as much as the tagged) all revolve around the idea that our interactions create value and make the traces we leave through interaction not only explicit but central to our experience. Stephane Lee is more or less correct in saying that Web 2.0 is a larger e-mail form. In aggregate this becomes what I've called our (deterritorialized) projected identity. In Web 2.0 we enage with our technologies primarily through classification, both of ourselves and others. I am classified through these blog entries, through the bands I list on MySpace, through my tag-cloud on del.icio.us, and through my click stream. I am also classified by others when I am "friended," when someone tags a blog entry, and even when someone visits this site. This system of classification is becoming even more explicit and representative through new tools like VisitorVille, which eerily depicts the visitors to a site as Sims-like figures. Web 2.0 interaction, our projected identities, is necessarily classified.

The shift from pre-Web 2.0 (cyberspace seems like an appropriate term for this idealistic period) to what we now call Web 2.0 is essentially a shift from a philosophy of erasure to a philosophy of classification. This is a similar transition to Foucault's concept of a move from monarchical power to a diciplinary power. In the move toward discipline, institutions created individuals, organized bodies into spaces according to their characteristics. This mechanism of power implied the factory just as much as it implied the duality of prison guard/prisoners, boss/workers, the singular and the mass of individuals. Yet where our Web 2.0 system differs is that the act of classification is a collective action. We are no longer classified by institutions but by ourselves and our peers. The top half of the singular/multiple duality has been shaved off. Emergent tags are becoming the prison guards.

Without this split, where we have entirely internalized our discipline, with distributed surveillance, we can see that Deleuze's "society of control" is not so far from the disciplinary society after all. In his "Postscript on Societies of Control," Deleuze claims that we are shifting to control through modulation rather than Foucault's enclosures (home, school, hospital, etc.) due to crises of these interiors. Yet instead of the dissolution of these interiors, perhaps we are witnessing the distributed emergence of control. With increased potential for connectivity, spaces become increasingly irrelevant, thus the institutions that thrived on enclosure now seem like stop-gap solutions: solutions to enact control until the concept of enclosure itself comes into question.

Posted by Nathan at 07:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

There have been several interesting and loosely related posts lately that have caught my eye. HorsePigCow has an entry asking why people tag. The explicit reason for tagging is the organization of material for personal convenience. I tag a photo on Flickr or a site on del.icio.us so I can access it later and have it grouped with similar items I've come across. Yet where tagging becomes more than simply an organizational tool is when we look at the social and emergent aspects. When we become aware of emergent tags, as in del.icio.us, a process of feedback begins. The tagger is suddenly aware of the larger implications of their individual action in relation to other individual action. It is not a stretch to assume that a tagger will be influenced, either positively or negatively, through awareness of emergent tags. Overall, this type of feedback will stabilize the emergent tags, or in extreme cases of imitation the folksonomy becomes more of a traditional taxonomy.

In addition to systemic feedback, the social aspect of tagging that we commonly see will effect the function of tags. In a social context tags organize not simply the items tagged but the taggers themselves. "Social_network" and "blog" are two of my most common del.icio.us tags. Because my tags, and their relative frequency, are displayed in a social context, these tags begin to operat not as tags of the specific pages, but as tags of me. People who visit my del.icio.us page will be able to learn a great deal about me, and the identity I project through my tags. When tagging I am certainly aware that I am doing this in a public situation, that others might try to navigate the information I have otherwise organized simply for myself. The tags, then have to function as self-tags.

A second post I found thought-provoking was Scott Karp's on his blog Publishing 2.0. Scott writes that with Web 2.0's focus on the participation and content-creation of audiences (produsers) we end up with sub-par results stemming from a less intelligent audience than certain old media audiences. To take this approach simplifies the purpose of these systems to a certain extent. Sure the top stories on Digg may not be the most interesting but they, ideally, reflect the network from which they grow. Instead of saying that The New York Times audience would inevitably create a more sophisticated user-created content page and that this implies an inherent failure of Web 2.0 systems, we should look for user-created content in networks that more accurately reflect our interests, what we consider interesting. It is not a problem of the structure but a problem with finding one you fit into.

This ties in with the purpose of tagging question in that we tag (a form of content creation) for different reasons in different contexts. In a fairly narrow network demographically, the drive to create content will be very different than it would be for the same people operating in a different network.

Posted by Nathan at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is a continuation of the connections between new media network interaction and Deleuze & Guattari's concepts in A Thousand Plateaus. That said, while it doesn't directly mention many other topics bouncing around online communities, parts can certainly be extended to conversations on attention (see Alex Barnett and Attention Trust for this) and the personal use of Web 2.0 applications. Also Adam Marsh at EconoMeta addresses a similar issue from an entirely different, yet very interesting, standpoint.
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When interactiing in developing online media (anything from del.icio.us, to OkCupid, to MySpace) we are leaving traces of our identity, of our personality perhaps more accurately, everywhere we go, on everything with which we interact. This is becoming especially true in Web 2.0, and folksonomy-based applications where the process of interaction fundamentally alters the function and output of the interactive system. To speak in specifics, look at your Web-traces. If you're like me, you'll have a blog or two on which you have posted an array of material; you'll have several social network site profiles, one for each site, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc; you'll have Last.FM and Pandora accounts, and so on. At each of these arenas you leave traces of your/a personality. There are the lists of reccomended music, your lists of friends, and any amount of data that we leave behind either intentionally or not through the process of interaction.

In aggregate these traces are our projected identity. It may be the combination of several pseudonymous sets of interaction, it may be bare-bones factual, but this is the sum identity that exists as a result of our movements through and interaction with these applications. The projected identity is inherently multiple. It is a multiplicity. It draws from the many interactions, personalities we take on. David Lat's projected identity draws as much from his former role as "Article III Groupie" as it does from his personal list on 43 Things (if he should have one). Thus the projected identity is made up not only from the different avenues through which we project but also the full spectrum of what we project. This is our own "wolf pack" as D&G would put it, our own swarm. And as much as we lead to this multiplicity, this multiplicity leads to us.

But the projected idenity is not only multiple it is also deterritorialized. Just as the hand and face are the deterritorialized body and the landscape a deterritorialized world, the projected identity is a deterritorialized identity. But like the face it is a more intense deterritorialization than something like the hand because it does so on levels beyond simply movement and boundary and into signification and interaction. We operate through the projected identity, continually adding more tendrils, more avenues as we go along keeping the process of deterritorialization moving as well as repeatedly confirming the multiplicity.

Yet as D&G write, "one never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape." So what is the reterritorializing pair for the projected identity? It would seem that the natural pairing for this is the database as the deterritorialized archive. The database, the list of the traces that make up the individual tendrils of our projected identities, is in a very literal sense, a deterritorialization of the physical, panoptic archive. The relationship between projected identity and database is much like that between hand and tool (use object). The tool exists for the hand, the hand exists for tools, just as the projected identity exists to be in a database (otherwise funcitonality of the specific applications would be lost) and the database exists to store projected identities. We now have our pair, the projected identity reterritorializes on the database.

To draw back a bit from the linguistic mire through which D&G often lead those who follow, the important points to take away from applying their analytical process to new media network interaction are 1) the multiplicity of a projected identity and 2) that this projected identity is deterritorialized from individual personality/identity and reterritorialized on the database. Just as there are the face-landscape, hand-tool systems, there is a projected identity-database system of which we must remain aware. The obvious unwanted social implications extend to surveillance and impersonation, but culturally, we are creating selves outside ourselves. Many-tendriled projections.

Posted by Nathan at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)

Having been made my way through parts of Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, I've been wanting to put some thoughts down on the connection between swarming forms of media and their concept of the rhizome. The reason the concept seems such a natural comparison to the new type of user-media interaction is that the rhizome is based on principles of connectivity and heterogeneity. This type of formation stands in contrast to the hierarchical tree, "any point...can be connected to anything other, and must be." So instead of chains of meaning and power leading from one point to the next we have any node with a potential for connection to any other node within the system. This is the idealized vision of new media network interactivity: universal connection in opposition to uni-directional paths. In this sense, D&G have provided a strong grounding for analysis of such networks.

Is it a problem, however, that this concept is being applied to a network/network-system as proof of its difference from other forms? It seems that D&G are attempting to adapt the way we conceive of almost everything: the creation of meaning, power structures, cities, etc. They are not setting it up in opposition to a non-rhizome, but explaining, rather, that these non-rhizomes indeed operate rhizomatically on some level. So rather than thinking that the concept of the rhizome reifies swarming media, it might be more appropriate to say that swarming media could reify the rhizome.

In many ways this connects with the current and past debates over the relevance of the term "cyberspace." Two posts on The End of Cyberspace describe Dan Hunter and Cory Doctorow's "nominations" for new words to replace this fading term. The essential problem is that "cyberspace" does not seem to reflect the emergent, interactive, and rhizomatic qualities of what we see developing. Is this optimism, or are we witnessing the development of an explicit actualization of D&G's concept; a system that openly aims to thrive in a distributed fashion?

At the same time as this perceived shift from tree to rhizome occurs, it's hard to avoid the occasional story of corporate interests chopping up this root system, blocking access, interaction for the sake of profit and power. This fear represents the idea that corporate entities represent hierarchical systems in their purest and that these systems are a threat to the rhizome. Yet I would think that D&G might argue that the power of these entities comes from their manipulation of the rhizomatic power structure and creation of meaning rather than their internal organization. Perhaps then these horror stories cannot be painted with such broad strokes.

Posted by Nathan at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt McAlister posted a thoughtful response to mine about Foucauldian/disciplinaty implications for tagging individuals (as opposed to objects like websites, though this could be extended to an individual in many cases). Unfortunately I haven't had time to re-respond unitl now.

Matt writes:

"There may be cases where building meaning from collections of tags will give institutions dependent on structuralism some kind of new insight that could be used for power or for classifying people into buckets or something. But those are just fears that should never be used to stop progress."

Posted by Nathan at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Matt McAlister posted a piece called "Lightweight social interactions in a loosely coupled offline world." In it he expresses his desire to be able to tag his acquaintances, and other offline aspects of our lives, as a form of lightweight interaction. While the data that would result from such a system (assuming a flawless offline social interaction tagging system) would surely come in handy and possibly create improved political discourse as McAlister notes, we have to be aware/wary of the implications. The ability to freely tag individuals (I'm imagining a sort of del.icio.us for people) takes Foucault's concept of disciplinary individuality through institutional labelling and observance to a new extreme. An extreme that makes the swarm-the collective action of society-an all-encompassing disciplinary institution. Individuals would become their tags, become as they have been tagged, as they tag themselves.

This can be extended to much of the discussion of attention data, with the idea of attention as a form of self-tagging. It's necessary to explore the darker, less optimistic, sides of folksonomy and tagging. These systems are, without a doubt, useful, dynamic, and soon to be unavoidable, but there's always more to the story.

Posted by Nathan at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Here's the graph I came up with the other day after searching for the appearance of certain words in The New York Times between 1996 and 2005.

What this demonstrates above all is the extension of the "Web 2.0" terminology into old media. There is a very clear moment in the Times when "blog" and "blogger" appeared: with a single article in 2001. For many, old media sources, like The New York Times acted as the initial gatekeeper for new media networks so it is critical to look at the interaction between the two rather than isolate them.

Posted by Nathan at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Here are a couple articles out there worth linking to:

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?
This is a pretty thorough look at folksonomies and touches on a lot of the issues I have written about before. The authors take the stand that folksonomies will benefit from greater regulation in the tagging process and general uniformity in tagging, but they also recognize that there is often a trade-off between the optimizing the global effect and optimizing inidividual interaction. As I wrote about yesterday, a non-invasive way to implement some sort of regulation into a folksonomic system would be to enable a certain amount of feedback. This avoid the problem of a central/centralizing entity telling people how to tag and allows for individuals to tag how they please but with influence from the system as a whole.
An interesting read nonetheless.

Objects that Blog
jbleeker at Networked Publics writes about objects that could blog as the future of content. He uses the example of a little league scoreboard. It's an interesting idea especially given the otherwise personality driven nature of blogs.

Posted by Nathan at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex Wright has an excellent post entitled Probability, Superstition and Ideology in which he uses the fasces - the ancient Roman term for a bundle of sticks that symbolized the strength gained by the collective when the comparatively weak individuals are bound together - as a parallel to emergent technology. This works on a basic level, but also draws a line between fascism and this type of behavior: a bleak comparison for what is most often seen as the democratization of media and technology.

Wright is writing in response to Chris Anderson's argument that instances individual inconvenience in the creation and function of an emergent system matters little when compared to the operation as a whole. What interests me in his, and other similar writing, is this interaction between the individual and the global, the feedback. I touched on this in an earlier post in which I argued that an individual participating in a system like that of del.icio.us cannot avoid inlfuence from the global behavior. In this case it is on a structural level in that del.icio.us suggests certain tags for when the user is classifying an item. Yet in other systems, feedback seems to play a vital role in creating regulation of individual action in an environment otherwise lacking, or with minimal centralized regulation.

This requires the individual to be aware of the global effect s/he is participating in, but the result is a more static global result. Obviously, there is a range of possible action. The global action of system with no possibility for feedback would be able to shift rapidly in response to the interactions of its participants; the global action of a system with no possibility for action other than feedback (if such a system were even possible in the first place) would be completely static, the participants would be unable to react except as the global level dictates - making the impossible for a global action to exist at all.

For many, the ideal system with emergent properties would be one without feedback. Here I'm thinking of Thomasl Vander Wal's comment on the earlier post mentioned before. Yet having some level of feedback acts as a non-invasive and adaptable form of control. The likely result is a more stable global action which, in many cases, would be more useful than an unstable one.

To speak of specifics we could look at the folksonomic properties of del.icio.us or Flickr. Both these systems provide a certain level of feedback on a very basic level by making the participants aware of the global effect stemming from their inter/actions. The result is that the global action becomes a participant in its own making. If I see that most del.icio.us users who have tagged Page X have tagged it with "weblog", I will be more likely to use that tag than something like "blog". The global action has influenced the individual inter/action.

In Six Degrees, Duncan Watts explains that this phenomenon is a demonstration of a system that exhibits "local order":

"As long as A 'knowing' B and A knowing C implies that B and C are, in turn, more likely to know each other than two elements picked at random, then we have local order."

Posted by Nathan at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In preparation for something a bit longer soon to come, here are some point that I've been thinking about concerning identity projection.

-Participating in a social network requires the selective projection of identity.
-What is projected depends on the perceived value within the network.
-This value seems to be determined both by the structure and collective character of the network.
-The most basic message at the heart of any projection is "I am here."

There are a couple posts that deal with related issues:
Fading Waypoints - Tag Along
EconoMeta - Is Attention the Opposite of Anonymity?

Posted by Nathan at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since I posted the entry On Folksonomy, Feedback, and Polysemy, there have been some interesting comments added:

Thomas Vander Wal writes:

"The polysemy problem is with tagging and not with folksonomy (if Wikipedia had a proper definition of folksonomy it would be clear). The folksonomy actually provides a solutions to the problem as people are less likely to reuse the same tag for differing items than the whole of a community. But when the individual does use the tag for more than one definition the other tags they apply to the object normally make it very easy to discern the tag's definition.

This is one major value to people using their own terms in tags, rather than relying on what others call them. But the main reason I find it important for people to tag with terms in their own vocabulary is for their own refindability of the object. When people use the terms of others the refindability drops off quite a bit as it is not the terminology that is most used by them and not familiar enough to use it as a search term for their own items.

The emergent values are also essential, but the prime value is for the tools to work as a tool for recalling their own objects of interest. There has to be inherent value for the people themselves using any social tool for them to continue use of it."

"Thomas, I believe you're making an assumption about the type of apps that use folksonomies (where folksonomies grow?). Yes, Delicious.com was designed primarily to aid individual memory, but it's entirely possible that other apps might be designed to make online resources more findable by others. E.g., a knowledge management well might want to add tagging primarily as a way of making individual discoveries available to an entire organization. In such a case, the folksonomy that organization needs is helped by showing taggers the popular tags as they are in the act of tagging precisely so they won't fall into the "trap" of using tags that are meaningful and memorable to them but not to others.

It seems to me that either type of tagging system can be useful, depending, of course, on the aims of its users."

There are two types of folksonomy being discussed here: one that emerges from blind mass individual action, while not necessarily being the intended goal of the system, and one which emerges as the intended goal of mass individual action/interaction. In the case of del.icio.us I think it would be difficult to say that it is purely a tool for individual use as this would imply that the emergent folksonomy is merely a handy side-effect. The social/public aspect of the site suggests that the intent of the tagging is, partially, to influence the actions of other users in the system. Additionally, the emergent folksonomy is an explicit goal of the system, making it difficult for a user to remain uninfluenced by it.

Personal refindability is certainly a major part of a social bookmarking site but shares the stage with the social aspects which allow for the emergent properties.

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Some recent, related links:
Social Networking Gets Traction
Tag Along

Posted by Nathan at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)