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

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• The first declaration of the passing of Web 2.0 that I can really get behind.
• I'd say the next thing might not be 'next' at all in some respects.
• It might also be where opportunism and work collide.

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

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


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


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

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The stars are not aligning for my blogging habits. I've caught a cold after returning from SXSW. One of these days I'll be able to put up another real entry, but today I only have a string of thematically connected links.

Read these in order and pay special attention to the third. Together they form what might be a typical Swarming Media entry.

• "How Do They Track You? Let Us Count The Ways" - Louise Story
  "What is important here is not the precise numbers, but the overall picture that the biggest Internet companies are accumulating many different ways to collect data about users. Many caveats are needed: Not all of this data is useful; not all of it is retained by the companies with access to it; much of it cannot be traced back to individuals."
• "Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces" - Bruno Latour
  "Subjectivities used to be the inner sanctum where social sciences had to stop and dismount in order to shift to other, less reliable vehicles. It is now possible to follow how the characters of a “reality show” or the finalists of Star Academy have so modified the ways and means with which their viewers speak and think about the world that the social has become, so to speak, continuous with the psychological."
• "'Semiotic Pluralism' and the New Government of Signs" - Maurizio Lazzarato
  "The importance of a-signifying semiotics (money, machinic devices for the production of images, sounds, words, signs, equations, scientific formulae, music, etc.) and the role they play needs to be emphasized. They are ignored by most linguistic and political theories even though they constitute the pivotal point of new forms of capitalist government. It is because of them that a new distribution of discursive and non-discursive is being established."

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Ah, it's the eve of that date that rolls around every year, reminding me to add another hash mark into the age column. It is not a time conducive to blogging.

Here are a few interesting pieces from elsewhere, however:

• "A Google Horror Story: What happens when you are disappeared" - It seems everyone has been passing this entry around. It re-raises some critical issues for those of us watching subjectivity dislocating more and more into archival-networked environments. It asks what happens when their are failures in the process?


• "All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses" - Murphy's Law, I suppose: it seems that Mute Magazine comes out with a series of interesting articles in the issue after I let my subscription lapse. This one ties together relational aesthetics, technology, and distributed labor - rarely a bad thing in my view.


• "Public Intellectuals, Inc." - A genuinely interesting look at the decline in status of public intellectuals in America. Strangely, the writer avoids talking about the influence of the blogospheres.

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There has been so much happening this week that it seems impossible to write about anything else. As I write this entry, the "super Tuesday" results in the primaries are rolling in, but earlier in the week, a certain sports team brought disappointment to my doorstep and Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!. At least the first and third topics would be fair game for this blog, but the first and second have occupied much of my mind. Two items that have caught my eye this week, however, have been:

• Lauren Cornell's review of Bad Beuys Entertainment on Rhizome.org: On the one hand, I enjoyed this review because of its subject rather than its substance - the clever name, the pointed use of video, and the approach of the collective (criticism through embrace). Yet the reason I cite the review rather than the collective is Cornell's brief observation that "[l]ong before the onset of video-sharing platforms, the [late 90s video work of the collective] would be an amazing Youtube find: an amateur homage to the culture industry that winds up as a critique not only of media's power, but our own consumption of it." In a way, an observation like this provides a glimmer of hope for a culture that increasingly looks to its YouTubes. These tools do indeed make it easier for more people to engage in cultural critique - knowingly or otherwise. Yet it is only through a type of nostalgia that we can see exactly what we are experiencing now.


• Jean Babtiste Bayle's MyOWNspace: admittedly, I did find this thanks to the previous item, but it is worthy of its own mention. MySpace is nothing if not an easy target for cultural and artistic criticism. There is an unrefined, raw, unselfconscious air about the site and its users' pages that lend themselves easily to parody and theoretical target practice. The site sports sorely dated designs in a design conscious Web 2.0 net-world, and relies on crude markups and hacks for users to personalize their little corners. MySpace is technostalgia alive and well. MyOWNspace serves as a particularly clever parody. The creator has fun in sending up every little detail, from the premise, to the Google ads. It is parody as it should be, fun yet insightful.

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I got around to catching up with my non-work blog reading today and of the pieces that jumped out to me, most focused on the distribution of power over web-based social networks (in the broader sense). I'm referring here to control of resources as well as political influence, as opposed to more Foucaultian senses or Deleuzian control. How, in an environment for which standard practices around privacy, ownership, and identity are still being forged, do we allocate or support mechanisms of sociality and quasi-governance?

The piece that set me down this line of thought tonight was a brief article in Tech Confidential from last week about Digg's decision to alter its practices to block the influence of certain uber-Diggers, who have come to wield large amounts of influence over what makes it to the front page. These Diggers have made their way to such a position by being able to convince large numbers of other users to vote a particular entry up or down. This sets up a situation in which the normally laissez-faire overseeing body, Digg-the-company, sees an effective inequality between users and a global lessening of diversity through the influence of a relative few members. In this view, these members lead to a social context that promotes bandwagonism and unduly favors early entrants to the system.

Sure, it could be argued that actions limiting the ability of these uber-users from influencing the actions of "average" users promotes diversity - after all, with less persuasion, won't everyone just vote how they feel they should, not what anyone else thinks they should? But on the other side of the coin, I think that such informal, and indeed formal, associations between uber-users and average users is unavoidable in any sort of reasonably large sociality. For example, I'm one who believes that labor unions are a natural result of the economic conditions which place a large number of similar people, in similar situations, together. It is the same basic social and effect of unicyclists forming a unicycle club. On Digg, like in ay unicycle club, there will be some members who are more engaged than others and act as eyes and ears for those who can not or do not want to be more engaged. To imply that such forms of association, however informal, are somehow working against the larger community seems odd as it is the natural result of community. It is also quite futile to fight it. Whatever limitations Digg puts in place, there will be ways for these sub-associations, informal sub-networks - or whatever you wish to call them - to exist and function as they have up until now.

This type of sub-network formation seems natural to any web service with ambitions to mimic or enhance non-web social interaction. Concurrently, so does the formation of a hierarchy within these subnetworks between those with different levels of engagement.

The line of thought stemming from this seems to head toward a Gladwellian conclusion that there is some subset of influential folks who are responsible for each and every trend sweeping over society. This brings me to the (infallible, of course)Fast Company article on Duncan Watts, which describes Watts' strong opposition to this particular view of social network-based communication. A particular section from the article gets to Watts' alternative view:

Watts believes ... a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. ...

'If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can,' Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an 'accidental Influential.'

If we take this view and apply it to highly-engaged vs. less-engaged users of a web based social networking service, then it seems that the uber-users are not so much responsible for seeding trends, but in some cases can be responsible for furthering them. According to Watts, the average Digg user has as much influence as the uber-Digger.

One thing I would be curious to see Watts look into would be the effect of the formalization of the union like sub-networks within social networks like Digg. Does effective institutionalization of influence effect the spread of information? Or does it merely mask its origin and development?

On top of all this is the issue of ownership of the data through which all this communication is expressed. It is vitally important to address the implications of ownership, especially as we witness self-declared non-evil companies absorbing more and more of our personal data every day. This may be done through providing useful and entertaining services and products, but really that's just another way of saying "enslavement with a smile" - with a hefty dose of melodrama, of course. Axel Bruns addressed this issue of ownership in what he calls 'produsage' in Re-Public.

All in all, Terrell Russell (in a largely unrelated post) puts it well when he writes:

"We sometimes forget we’re in uncharted territory. We are playing with the new shiny toys of the internet and not necessarily understanding the implications. These tools provide great power across the board. Users gain abilities to connect, find, sort, and publish in ways never before available. Conversely, companies gain abilities to monitor, gather, and sell more personal information than ever before. Additionally, third party observers gain the ability to observe at a distance and in numbers never possible in the physical world."

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Apologies for the blog silence of late. I've been working on a couple time-consuming projects that have severely limited my free time. So in the tradition of my "I'm sorry I haven't posted" posts, here are a few links to some interesting pieces around the web:

• Jeff Jarvis on shifting perceptions and realities of friendship in the age of online social networks.


• Larval Subjects has a good entry on Deleuze and individuation.


• On a less serious, but more depressing note, here is what others have accomplished by the time they were your age.

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Too busy to write a real entry this week. I might get to it in the next few days, though.

In the meantime, here are some interesting things I've been reading (or intending to) lately:

• Manuel Castells on Neo-Anarchism
• Anna Munster & Geerty Lovink on Network Aesthetics
• What in the hell... on a biopolitical stage of capitalism

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Wired put up a gallery of a variety of steampunk creations the other day. The gallery itself is great, especially considering that most of the designs are individually created projects. I'm not sure how instructive it is to compare steampunk to 8-bit revisitations and such however:

"Retro-futurism is all the rage these days: antique computers, 8-bit game art, classic cases for modern gear, anything to make the onslaught of new technology less disposable. The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk."

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EMI announced today that they will begin selling non-DRM MP3s in the iTunes store, starting this May. This is a step forward that as recently as two days ago I was claiming would take six months or more. I see this as an admission that centralized control (as exemplified by DRM) is no longer necessarily the best route for industry to take. DRM is insisted upon by the major record labels as a tool to prevent what they see as inappropriate uses of recorded works - sharing over P2P networks, multiple copies, recontextualization, etc. Yet the cultural perception of a recorded work changed when suddenly these works became non-scarce and increasingly ingrained into an experience of social interaction.

I don't mean to down play the economic shift that occurs when the cost of distribution and promotion plummeted, undercutting what the major record labels had grounded their business models on. This alters how any player in the industry has to interact within it, but not enough attention is focused on how digitization tweaked the interactive experience of recorded works in such a way that is completely in accordance with wider cultural, subjective, and economic shifts in a post-Fordist world.

The move to digitization in the music industry, and the correlative decrease in scarcity that comes with the ability to quickly and efficiently copy a digital file, can be read as a shift in importance from poiesis to praxis in the music industry along the terms that Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude. The production of the recorded work as a physical commodity (poiesis) is no longer holds the central role for a song that it once did. Increasingly - and for some artists, almost completely - the purpose of the recorded work is an affective one, a form of praxis designed to lure the listener into the experience of the music/musician.

In an interview with Virno, Branden W. Joseph poses John Cage as a comparison the Virno's use of Glenn Gould in the role of the musician as commodity-producing laborer. This is a particularly limpid comparison because Cage relies so heavily on what Virno refers to as virtuosity - direct affective production. A John Cage recording is far from a commodity in the sense of a Glenn Gould recording - it exists merely as an affective and often incomplete surrogate for the creator himself. It takes the role of praxis-at-a-distance, rather than the poiesis embodied by Gould, who refused to perform live. This is not happening solely in music, economies are increasingly reliant on affective labor and virtuosity rather than the physical production of commodities. In truth, as a profession, musical production was an entirely affective one until recording devices became prevalent - introducing scarcity and poiesis over praxis.

EMI is acknowledging that the freedom to copy, share, and recontextualize has pushed the music industry into affective production. Allowing a digital file this freedom de-commoditizes what really hasn't been a commodity for years. The entities that focus on the production of the experience over the production of the commodity will ultimately be the ones that survive these steps into a post-Fordist world.

Disclosure: I work for Lime Wire, a company increasingly involved in this space. What I write here has absolutely no official relationship with the company and should not be attributed to anyone but me, independent of my other associations.

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This month of March has proven to be anything but an amenable time for reading and writing. There are a few others who have been up to some interesting things however and you should take a look at them:

Ghost in the Wire: Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2
The second piece on this blog stemming from the prominent theorist's death. "B&H, 2" covers the subjective and the technological, with a smattering of Lacanian influenced thought throughout. If I had the time I'd write a response to this tying it with some examples found among the web, but perhaps that's for another time.

apophenia: web 1-2-3
In this post danah points out the increasing importance of localization in an otherwise globalizing medium. While I agree that place is gaining in importance in web-based interaction, I think that this is not at the expense of other catalysts for collective identities. She is certainly correct, though, in reaffirming that blogs and online social networks re-map existing "real-world" networks, just as effectively as they reify non-geolocated networks.

Canal Street Station, by 31 Down radio theater and free103point9 transmission arts.
Maybe I'm a sucker for the use of out-moded technology as a means for space-specific art work, but this piece is fascinating to me. It encourages the exploration of the Canal St. station - an over-used, under-appreciated interior. It attempts to fill this utilitarian-yet-quirky, maze-like, and often downright foul-smelling place with narrative to reconfigure an inhabitant's experience. I've yet to actually participate in the piece itself, but I hope to soon.

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I somehow wasn't able to find time to post last week, so for that I apologize. However, in that time I did come across a few items on the web that I wanted to remark on. When going back over them, I realized that a common explicit theme in each one is control within social/media networks. It, then, seems appropriate that I go over each one and look at how the concept of control:

Fred at Unit Structures: "Facebook Gifts: Pushing the limits of rationality"
In this entry, Fred - who closely and thoughtfully follows developments within and around the Facebook network - writes about the recent addition of Facebook "gifts," little icons that users can give to eachother for a $1 price. He touches on the issue of control beginning here:

"In Cyworld and SL, virtual commodities are persistent and explicitly tied to identity. In SL, if you buy a cool shirt, you get to wear it. In Cyworld, if you buy neat wallpaper for your minihome, it stays there and makes your house look better. In Facebook, the value tied to the transaction is less identity-centric. First, you are explicitly buying the gift for another person, and this gift simply shows up in their profile as a received gift."

These media thrive not just on a unidirectional surveillance, but a distributed surveillance in which our actions, explicit and implicit, serve as a means of social control. So while this is not exactly the Panopticon, it is neither exactly the Society of Control, which equally relies on a more centralized construction of modulation and socialization.

The second item I was hoping to comment on was FreeYourID, a site which uses OpenID to provide identity management services, including e-mail, homepage, etc. I've often been wary of such services in the past. My thoughts are no different on FreeYourID. While I respect and agree with the goal of the service - to create a tool to better manage the connection between meat-space and networked selves - the rhetoric of centralization and control seem to go against the grain of the potential for the medium in which they are working. Services like this really do point to a Deleuzian-control future, where subjects each carry ID cards that let them through some doors but not others based on predetermined data. The most interesting thing going on in the space of identity and subjectivity is not individual control, but network control over subjectivity. In these networks the individual is composed of many, not one. My Facebook gift to you becomes a part of your subjective reality; to try to develop a system which denies this reality is one that makes me uncomfortable.

The next web-tidbit I'm going to talk about takes a different approach to control than FreeYourID. The entry "Control vs. Communication" on the 37Signals blog, tackles the dilemma of control head-on. The writer, Jason, advocates an approach to control that rests on the strength of the network surrounding a project rather than a set of built-in permissions:

"It is our belief that when you collaborate with trusted parties it’s important for people to be able to communicate any way they see fit. Preventing someone from saying or doing something often breaks these free flowing communication channels and introduces miscommunication or silence—two cancers of collaboration."

I had a few more items I'd wanted to write about (including the amazing Botanicalls, check it out), but these three seem to get my point across. We are increasingly participating a in a networked, multiple subjectivity through our archived, web-based interactions. Our approaches to control and identity are going to have to take this into account whether that means repricing a toilet-paper icon on Facebook, rethinking our relationship to our online-selves, or collaborating in a distributed environment.

Posted by Nathan at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It looks like Slate has picked up on something I've often written about on this blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

It's interesting to compare two recent posts by danah boyd and Ed Batista atAttentionTrust.org. Ed argues for the democratic potential of metadata, stating that our aggregate information traces can be used as a kind of partial surrogate for a directly stated opinion. It might be more accurate to describe his argument as being in favor of a functional prosthetic for participation - that our data can interact on our behalf without the need for (though he stresses that it should not replace) direct interference. Though he is speaking of data created with the knowledge of the user, the process of metadata creation is a process of personal classification and we have to be aware that this process is not always as much in our control as we might like.

The data surrounding us goes well beyond our attention and, to follow Ed's example, explicitly stated movie preferences. We may have a control over the permission to collect this data, but the removal of the individual from his/her identity traces, letting these traces act on their own, is worrying. This becomes exacerbated when you realize that these identity traces are not as much in our control as we might think. This is where danah's entry comes in. She writes about the many inaccuracies in the Wikipedia entry for her and her inability to correct them. This is a perfect, very clear example of a way in which we do not have control over many tendrils of our identities online. We must see danah's Wikipedia entry essentially as metadata in the same vein as Ed's taste in movies; it has the same power of classification and the same potential to remotely speak for its subject.

Perhaps all this is harmless when extended to movies, music, and the like, but to extend the voice of deterritorialized identities into a political arena, to democracy, seems a bit irresponsible. Among my favorite films are Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, but I would probably not like my enjoyment of these westerns to determine anything beyond an Amazon recommendation e-mail.

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

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."

A second issue I have with this section of the "About" page is the authors' insistence on tying blogging with speech acts: "conversation" and "rehearsed speech." It is limiting to view this medium as an extention of speech especially when their goal is to explore creative avenues of blogging. While the style of writing that has developed among blogs has some similarities to speech acts (as much as bloggers using the terms "ranting" and "musing" annoys me), it is textual and has far different semiotic significance than speech. This is especially true when we shift back out again to the aggregate.

That said, I'm very interested to see where this blog goes.

Posted by Nathan at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a few posts/texts I encountered today and yesterday that I found interesting and would like to respond to but they are not related enough to tie together in a coherent post. I'll start with Scott Karp's post "Blogs are institutions..."

Scott points out that blogs are publications inherently separate from the bloggers who create them, entities with a separate identity. I think this is critical to realize especially for type 1 blogs which tend to resemble broadcast outlets. Where I disagree is in extending this to all blogs. As I've written about in the past, there are several elements that distinguish the process of blogging from any other sort of writing or medium. These elements include: the connection to the personal (ego), existence in a networked environment, the potential for participation, and the physical organization. It seems that most people simply define blogging based on this last element, the design/structure, rather than recognizing the interplay between all of them. In a type 3 network of blogs the personal connection and participation might outweigh the structural and networked environment aspects since the readership and blogroll will probably mirror a non-Web social network. When blogs become institutions, as Scott notes, it becomes more important than the individual blogger(s). In this light I might go so far as to say that when the blog overcomes the blogger, that it is no longer a blog at all. The ego behind the blog has become dissociated from the blogger. I see this personal connection element as one of the more important elements, so when it is reduced to such a degree, hasn't the blog developed into something very un-bloglike?

Stemming from this, we have to question, then, how much "blogjects" are actually blogs if they completely lack the connection to the personal. Is an Aibo blog a blog? That specific example does have a strong ego element behind it, but if solely a robotic dog is imitating the personal element of blog-writing, why is it not simply a periodically updated site?

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The second text I'd like to respond to is an article titled "Transmitting the Body in Online Interaction" in M/C Journal. I was referred to this article through the blog networked_performance.

The article is a strong analysis of online interaction but it has, from my perspective, some critical holes in it. The largest of these extends throughout the entire piece. The author approached the analysis from the concept that a singular identity, is created through online interaction. This is not to say that s/he does not recognize the potential to play different roles in different contexts, but s/he assumes that once one is through with "an" identity that it is finished, erased. While in our interactions via the Social Web, in these swarming media, we might shift which portion of our projected identity we are interacting with, the structure of the network and the potential for archival memory makes it impossible to shift identities like so many masks. In this environment we cannot take off our masks, they will always stick to us to an extent, be made apparent through our traces.

It is entirely correct and accurate to say that we create textual and visual signifiers for bodies in our interactions, and that different communities have different semiotic systems with in the larger network. It is dangerous and misleading, however, to imply that the Social Web is a place without memory. It is the multiple tendrils of our projected identities--pointing inward at an implied, but non-existent central point--that determine our interactions, that exist within the archival fragment, that create the emergent effects of this network structure. In considering online interaction we have to look at the social/cultural/technological functions of the whole rather than focusing on individual interactions.

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Thirdly, and actually related to the previous section, is an AttentionTrust post titled "Attention as Backup Identity." They propose that attention trackers could be used as a backup identity in the case of data loss through hardware/software failure. All I can say is that they are right, but that this doesn't exactly mean good things.

Posted by Nathan at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Smith has an amusing and intriguing post about the surveillant potential of attention trackers. I briefly covered this in my last post on the new control society but it was a little buried in the entry. I think it is widely going unnoticed, with all the Web 2.0 optimism and the drive to develop new, profitable business models, that we are gradually collecting the traces of our projected identity we leave around the Social Web and neatly packaging them. This is the essential nature of attention trackers. These tools track your comings and goings in a way that is certainly not a new phenomenon for the Web; what is new is that we are doing this voluntarily, for our economic benefit. This isn't simply happening in the attention on attention, but this self-tracking has become a staple of interaction in these social media networks. Andy Beal has an entire post about the best ways to track your identity (or company, or product) on the Web, and Platial allows users to visually map their lives. While not as explicit as Root Vaults, this kind of self-tracking (which I do with embarrassing frequency) is the same process of beginning to concretize, reify, commodify, or centralize one's inherently multiple projected identity. I say "beginning" because many independent databases run by many different independent entities is very different from the same effect in a singular database.

To look at this in terms of power and control, this is a process of internalizing the new kind of distributed control that has grown around these media. It is not a Big Brother type that keeps tabs on us and gives us our cards (here, referencing Guattari's vision of the access card driven control society), because we are doing it ourselves. Where this does begin to resemble a dystopian scenario is when Foucauldian-style institutions begin to form around these packages of volunteered data. What I am wondering, however, is to what extent is it significant that we are largely able to define ourselves? Is the creation of a concretized, singular identity itself as much as problem as an externally originated, exploitative one? I am tempted to say "yes" but am by no means sold.

There is a balance here, a balance between "harnessing" (though I think "interpreting" might be a less invasive term for the implied action) the wisdom of the swarm (Nicholas Carr has a good post related to this) and exploiting it, controlling it.

Posted by Nathan at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)