I finally got around to reading Nick Spencer's review of Hardt and Negri's Empire and Multitude, "The Machinic Multitude." Yes, it was published nearly two and a half years ago and I marked it as something to read about six months ago, but things don't always happen in time.

I was originally intrigued by the title, expecting the review to look at the formation of machine-based collective subjectivities. Instead, Spencer succinctly highlighted H&N's dual description of the general intellect. For them the term at once applies to the process of pushing machines toward subjectivity through autonomy, as well as the movement of the collective, socialized worker toward a machinic state. He draws this point as part of his larger purpose of calling for academics to defetishize the technological aspect of multitude and instead focus on the centrality of labor.

Where Spencer's analysis starts to rub me the wrong way is in his fixation on H&N's discussion of the cyborg. He argues that their use of the cyborg as a concept points to a failure to move beyond workerist sentiments that have since become irrelevant - and which the two texts are supposed to step beyond. Yet, at least in Multitude, I find that their discussion of the cyborg is used less to underscore the technological or machinc aspects, but to discuss the worker as an essentially network form.

And perhaps that point shows where my opinion differs from Spencer's. I do not see academics' focus on the role of the technological in the potentialities of the multitude as a distraction from its core. Rather, the subjectively-aware machine, or network enabling technology more broadly, should be seen as an influence that enables and catalyzes the formation of pre- and post-individual subject formation on the ontological level.

Posted by Nathan at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a long entry that was getting more and more complicated, all centered on Eugene Thacker's article in CTheory.net, "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" (part 2), from back in 2004. It wasn't so much a critique or response, but a recognition of the similarity that he and I have in our approaches to political ontology in networked environments. Sadly, it became so long-winded and disorganized (even in comparison to my usual entries here!) that I had to shelve it for possible later use.

That said, I strongly suggest that the few of you reading this blog go and read this essay. Thacker, whose recent book with Alex Galloway - The Exploit - is one of my favorites from 2007, covers the basics of his use of the titular terms. More importantly, he provides a strong basis for reading networked environments in a way that moves beyond the thinking of the writers traditions he cites.

Posted by Nathan at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week has seen the arrival of a new banjo, and the realization that I'm behind in some other tasks, but nonetheless, I did notice that a new article on CTheory has more than a little to do with a The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly.

The former, "The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies," by William Bogard covers the physical-sensory elements of control stemming from Deleuze's "Postscript to Societies of Control." Though the term "haptic space" has always seemed largely unnecessary and more obfuscating than clarifying, Bogard produces a good piece that applies his through read of the Postscript in some interesting ways.

The Technology Quarterly articles - specifically "The ultimate game gear" and "The trouble with computers" - also deal with ideas of physical-sensory control of the technology user. In the first article of the two, the writer describes complex chairs and media systems designed to manipulate a video-gamer's body in various ways. These new devices are all designed to sever the gamer's connection to non-game experiences just as much as they are to sever connection to experiences that are a bit too game like (such as the nasty aftermath of a drag race gone wrong). This suddenly echoes Bogards phrasing in "Coils":

"Borges's haptic world in which 'everything touches everything' becomes an engineering project to produce digital environments that have exactly the 'right feel' and can command the body directly."

The designers of the video game accoutrements have as their central purpose to create this "right feel" - which may or may not reflect reality.

The second article in the Technology Quarterly that deals with physical-sensory control asks what innovations could make computers easier to use, much as the mouse did once. On the surface, this might seem like a question of a user's "control" over an interface. In fact - and this is essentially what eny discussion of interface is about - it is a question of interface designers of how to control the user. The article focuses, in part, on gesture-based graphical interaction with computers, but really the logical end for interface designers is a product which reads the mind of the user and displays when s/he wants without command. This is essentially the downfall of a physical-sensory control in favor of the more data-driven control that Deleuze writes about in the Postscript. No longer would technology users be required to touch or simulate touch (as a mouse "pointer" does), but the system would know best what to display and not to display.

All in all, these are three interesting pieces to read together, though they wouldn't seem immediately applicable to each other.

Posted by Nathan at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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."

Fred is spot-on in pointing out how these icons relate to the expression of identity, people are paying not to alter their own web-manifestation, but rather to mark another's. Yet, while I agree with his point that $1 is probably more than most college students will be willing to pay, we have to be careful not to underestimate the significance of social-classification within these media. For many users on Facebook and other similar services, one of the main purposes is not just to develop an identity within the network, but almost equally to alter the identities of others. If I were to give a gift to a friend on the service his/her expression of identity would be affected in a very real manner. It is the same basic process that happens through leaving messages on "the wall" or posting pictures of friends tagged with their name.

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."

It is up to the constituent elements of the network to determine its interactive protocol. This is exactly what occurs in less-regulated networked environments anyway, but Jason is wrong to think that this approach is the antithesis to control. In fact, it is merely a different expression of it - one more appropriate for the environment.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can guess by the sudden uptick of visitors to this blog that the new issue of Fast Company has come out. Welcome, and I apologize in advance for the typos that nefariously populate my archives. I often write fast and neglect to edit, but I'll do my best in this entry.

In my continuing attempt to actually read everything I tag with "READTHIS" in del.icio.us, I recently read Jaron Lanier's piece "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" in Edge. This came out back in May and all the big-shots have already responded to it, but I'm going to work out a point that struck me while reading it.

Lanier covers a lot in the article so I'm not going to attempt to react to every piece of it, rather I'm going to focus on a single point that continued throughout his piece. The central claim to the article is that we should not be so trusting in peer-production models as we have shown ourselves to be lately in the whole social-network, Web 2.0 frenzy. Overall, I agree with his conclusion that not everything in our world should be governed collectively, but that doesn't imply that networked, affective production is somehow not worthy of a place in society. The issue I'm going to write about, however, is the manner in which Lanier separates the individual and the multiple (the collective). Really I have an issue with the fact that he separates them so cleanly at all.

This false separation first shows itself in the introduction when he writes:

"... it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality"

What he is saying here is that the individual author imbues his text with personality - an identity - and that the peer-produced text lacks any such identity as it is presumably muddled by a mass of self-styled editors. I would agree that an individual author gives his text an identity of its own, separate from the author himself. Yet when writing, we bring in many different influences, references, and citations; no work is created in isolation and the name of the author on some level merely conveys a surface identity for what is really large array of input, however indirect. So, yes, the text has an identity of its own, and yes the individual author bestows it, but it is hard to say that this identity is at all individual.

The same applies to our own identity and subjectivity as it exists in a networked world. We can understand this when we take some basic concepts of multiplicity and subjectivity from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. As we interact on, and use social networking sites, blogs, wikis, search engines, etc, we create multiple tendrils of subjectivity that intersect and contradict with each other and with those of our peers. I think the best example for this is on del.icio.us. I bookmark and tag a site for my own future reference. This then becomes visible to my "network" and anyone that would like to see it. By tagging this site, the work perhaps of another individual, I am indirectly tagging this creator's identity, adding meaning to it. At the same time, I have also managed to tag my own identity in the process by revealing to my network that this was a site that I thought worthy of remembering. This is a very basic example of how networked interaction scrapes away at the notion of autonomy and individuality on the web.

To bring this back to the article, Lanier laments the loss of individual, meaningful, one-on-one production. The process I just described in the above paragraph involved at least two one-on-one interactions. Me with the site and me with someone in my "network" looking at what I had tagged. I'd say that these one-on-one aspects are the central reason for the utility of del.icio.us. Yet, at the same time there is the popular global level of del.icio.us where the bookmarked pages and tags are aggregated, some rising to the top, other mired in single tag obscurity. Lanier's approach is flawed because he laments the global effect without acknowledging that it is the emergent effect of many, meaningful local actions. To extend this to Wikipedia, about which he writes, a change in the article in some cases could be seen as the global effect of local actions on the discussion page. Wikipedians often argue in that behind-the-scenes area about the content of the article, eventually changing th text itself. This is a bit of a stretch, I admit, but we have to look at both the local action and global effect together rather than simply take the global effect as something that as magically appeared.

[For the Fast Company readers, I suggest you check out the archives, but here are a few suggestions (again, apologies for the typos): The Network of Identity and the New Interactive Protocol, The Control Society and The Social Web, and The Social Web as the Reified Archive.]

Posted by Nathan at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I read Luciano Floridi's piece in TidBITS and was generally agreed with him on most point about his idea of "the infosphere." To take a broad view, for Luciano, our culture is moving more and more into a state where data is perceived on equal ground as matter. In other words, interaction with digital/informational objects will not only hold as much siginificance as physical objects, but also hold as much conceptual significance in our every day actions. He predicts, more or less, a merging of this "infosphere" with the non-informational world. One of the best real-world examples he gives of this is RFID technology which will quite blatantly bind physical and informational spheres.

Before I get into my complaint with the piece, let me first point out one section which I very much agree with:

"By remolding the infosphere, digital information and communication technologies have brought to light the intrinsically informational nature of human agents. This is not equivalent to saying that people have digital alter egos, some Messrs. Hyde represented by their @s, blogs, and https. This trivial point only encourages us to mistake digital ICTs for merely enhancing technologies. The informational nature of agents should not be confused with a "data shadow" either. The more radical change, brought about by the reshaping of the infosphere, will be the realization of human agents as interconnected, informational organisms among other informational organisms and agents."

In understanding the operation of identity and subjectivity within these new media or - to be more expansive - informational networks, we have to move away from the idea that our interactions with and within these networks cannot be separated from our larger subjectivities. We may be able to close the browser window and ignore the tendrils of identity emanating from our implied center, but they continue to exist within the larger network. This informational network is an archive, and those are the terms through which we must view identity and subjectivity. By archive I don't mean some dusty room in the basement of a library, but the expansive network consisting of individuals and social institutions & constructions. And it is this point - that subjectivity flows through and throughout our networked world - that brings me to my complaint with Floridi - however minor.

The article approaches this shift into an informationally driven and networked world as the sudden change that new technology will bring. Essentially taking the techologically determinist position. It is critical to recognize that this prediction is not so radical as many might see it. (Though I don't believe Floridi saw it as overly radical - he began the piece with the wonderful quote: "They say there are only two kinds of predictions: wrong and lucky.") There are two particular texts to look at as precursors to Floridi's "infosphere." They are Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and Deleuze's essay Postscript on Societies of Control - 1982 and 1990 respectively.

Archaeology outlines the author's concept of the archive as the expansive, all inclusive network containing multiple and heterogeneous aspects of our society. Where Foucault says "knowledge," Floridi might say "information," very similar terms when taken within their own contexts of degreed digitally networked spheres. What this shows is that the idea of an "infosphere" has existed even before the technology that will supposedly bring it to life. The infosphere in Fiordi's piece seems merely to be a reifying step in a larger teleology. As for Postscript, this essay begins to deal with technology in a more direct way while at the same time reacting to and modifying the Foucaultian notion of discipline. Where Deleuze writes about a more modular form of control, Fiordi writes about the idea that ignorance of information becomes no longer and excuse. Both express the larger concept that our subjectivities are the result of interaction with this larger archival network. We cannot separate ourselves from this ever creeping infosphere, just as we cannot sever our ties to the modular ideals of the corporation.

Overall then, it is a small complaint. I agree with Fiordi's general concepts, but wish that he would have contextualized it to a further extent, framing it less as a prediction than as an observation of a lager, continual trend.

Posted by Nathan at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My attempt to actually read everything I've tagged with "READTHIS" on del.icio.us continues with Daniel Palmer's The Paradox of User Control. In the essay, Palmer constructs a critique of the popular notion of an increasingly active media user by citing a handful of past critics from Raymond Williams to Lev Manovich. Through these citations, he builds an opposition between a mediasphere that empowers users through customized production and a mediasphere that operates as a mode of capitalist social control through isolation and modulation. In the end, for him, the utopian views of multiple subjectivities are merely illusions, and recent changes in media-interaction are hung with a dark cloud of the capitalist mode of production.

While he hits all the right points, and without a doubt consults the right sources, I don't agree with his essential separation of a society of control and a mediasphere enabling of multiple subjectivities. These two points are not at all in opposition within new media networks. In fact, the distribution and archivization of subjectivity furthers the tools of a society of control. The paradox of user control is not a paradox at all: the tools that empower the user, simultaneously and unconflictingly contribute to a socially-driven, modular discipline/control.

There's one critical aspect that Paradox does not adequately cover (granted, it's a four page piece): flow of data/media in relation to identity and subjectivity in a networked archival environment. Palmer only seems to discuss the user as a consumer and a producer and doesn't point out that the user is also the material from which that which is consumed, is produced. This is overwhelmingly clear in social networking sites where the constant honing of the profile page is one of the main activities. The user is not just controlling what media s/he experiences or interacts with, s/he is customizing him/herself for the the consumtion of others. What this shows is that we can't separate ourselves onto the two ends of an economic exchange, but we are inextricably woven into that exchange as the good - as the media - itself.

This further complicates when we see that we are not the only ones modulating our identities. As I've often written about here, the very protocol of interaction in these social media is classification. We modulate each others' subjectivities through a wide variety of means. One simple example here might be in del.icio.us where the actions of a user within another's 'network' determine not only what the user will see but how he is seen by others through their tagging activity.

Thus the control that Palmer talks about still does occur, but it occurs not solely from some capitalist ubergeist, but from ourselves, our multiple tendrils of identity, and the emergent effects of the resulting network. Our very participation in the new economy of mass customization makes us complcit in the modular control of (in)dividuals within our larger society. Nor are we over individualized as a result, but increasingly interconnected not as singular entities but through criss-crossing archived subjectivities.

Posted by Nathan at 01:43 AM | 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."

The result is a space that is exists conceptually - yet with very non-conceptual consequence - not physically. It is an affective space, it is an archival space, it is a network space.

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."

This is much like saying that del.icio.us, the application, is the result of the folksonomy rather than its enabler. The "gathering" that he speaks of is what makes cafes, squares, and stadiums into spaces, not the physical edifice.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rental market didn't only cut into my blogging time these past few weeks, but also my reading time. I'm just in the beginning of Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, and already I'm starting to make connections between the concept of the web-as-cultural-archive and the function and flow of reflective nostalgia. Specifically, I find it particularly interesting to think of these swarming media networks as a way that we try to rebel against the concept of an ever-moving time, in the same way that nostalgia operated, in both restorative and reflective cases.

Being not even a quarter of the way through the book yet, I don't want to make too many sweeping comparisons between Boym's writing and the concepts I often write about here just yet. After all, I believe she does eventually get to the topic of the internet and nostalgia. But I think nostalgia - or, perhaps, the anticipation of nostalgia - is a good lens through which to see our actions in web-based media. The socially driven archivization which occurs through all these media could be seen as the prefiguring of an idealized, future past rather than the display of an over-blown present. In other words, identity tendrils are created with the idea that it is for a future self.

Bear with me here, these thoughts are only half-formed. The idea that identity production in an archival/networked environment is a set of actions that anticipate nostalgia meshes with the thought that nostalgia is driven by the desire and inability to recover a selectively remembered past, while nostalgic actions (photos, reenactments, genocides even) are in fact largely struggles against a temporal tyrrany. Tthrough acting in our swarming media networks and creating our distributed identities, what we are actually doing is creating an idealized, future past. I upload photos to Flickr, post interesting webpages to del.icio.us, and describe myself through my connections on any number of social networking sites. We are creating what will become our objects of nostalgia, and what could be used as tools in this struggle against time.

I'll probably finish The Future of Nostalgia sometime in the next few weeks and find myself putting it down on the table, saying to myself, "wow, I was completely wrong about that connection between nostalgia and web-based media!" But until that time, I'll have plenty to think about.

Posted by Nathan at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my continuing - and increasingly futile - effort to read everything I've marked with "READTHIS" on del.icio.us, the following is my response to a piece written just over two years ago, Data Doubles:Surveillance of Subjects Without Substance by Joshua Nichols, which, in turn, begins with a response to a lecture given fourteen years ago.

Nichols is pretty much spot on with his observations on the development of Foucauldian discipline in an age where the electronic database is central. There are a few points that I hope to expand from his text to apply to our current, increasingly social interaction with these data and the implications for control that flow from it. Nichols does not quite address data in a networked environment, though at times his thoughts hint strongly at such. He speaks mostly of "the computer" and its ability to store large amounts of information and of "video-infographic machines" with their ability to separate the examiner from the examined. From this constant and remote collection of information a "data-double" is formed - a concept very close to what I've been calling the projected/deterritorialized identity. Yet the difference is that the data-double, despite the constant flow of information, remains comparatively static when compared to its equivalent within our current consumer-friendly networked environment.

One of the central differences between the projected identity and the data-double is the process of creation of constituent information. Nichols writes:

"It is at the point at which the knowledge extracted from the various analogical procedures of the carceral disciplinary apparatus is digitized that the possibility of a virtual surveillance assemblage becomes possible in which the site of data extraction (the intimacy of the situated/territorialized human body) can be completely deterritorialized."

Currently, however, it is not simply the extraction of data from older carceral modes that play a role in our new environment of control, it is the data created as a result of what has become our interactive protocol on the Web. We willingly and joyfully participate in the aggregation of data when we sign up for MySpace or add a picture to Flickr. One's OPML, the READTHIS list from which I'm currently drawing inspiration, the text on this blog: these are all data which imply a digital self. Instead of a centralizing institution gathering the information, we now supply it ourselves after having set up new social arenas where interaction is predicated on the sharing of data.

But in addition to sharing our own data - in multiple tendrils with multiple trajectories - we also are engaged in modulating eachothers data in the new protocol. We tag; we add photos; we comment. We alter how our peers are perceived as data through many basic choices. While the results of this form of open disciplinarity can be used by the more traditional disciplinary institutions, they are more effective in creating a free-flowing (and thus entirely modular) type of control - one that is not localizable by any measurement. Thus we have to expand what Nichols writes to apply to this social protocol of open networked data:

"The shift in population control strategies from corporeal techniques to hyperreal constructs is a product of what Foucault referred to as governmentality in that disciplinary power structures generate a knowledge [...] of the corporeal individual that seeks to totalize (and thus necessarily abstracts) its identity in order to construct a set of categories and quantifying tools that are used in the post-disciplinary age to simulate criminogenic patterns and tendencies within a given population data set."

The individual is not necessarily totalized by a disciplinary power so much as the aggregate abstraction that is the projected identity (networked, social-infused data-double) creates the disciplinary power on the same pivot of the hyperreal subject that Nichols outlines.

Needless to say I found this piece particularly interesting and ready to updated for all these Web 2.0 goings-on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immediately this struck me as a parallel to Deleuze's point in Postscript that modern societies of control are centered around, among other qualities, modulation. I've often discussed here how modulation is also central to these new media networks we find ourselves in: blogging is reliant on quick reaction to the actions and reactions of others within the network, social networks thrive on the idea that identity can be presented in a modular fashion, etc. This sort of modulation we see occurs not from a central point, or even decentralized points, but in a distributed, social manner. We modulate according to and under the pressure of the network(s).

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

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

Affective labor takes place within and produces these distributed networks and plays a significant role in creating subjectivity. Again, it is not hard to extend this to new media, this blog has slowly become fixated on networked subjectivity in a way.

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

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

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

We can't necessarily see these networks as merely prostheses, instead they have become something more similar to repositories and factories of subjectivity. Also, notice that he uses the term "lens." This implies an explicitly visual approach in the analysis to the concept of selfhood within the network. Yet the networked subjectivities, which are the most valuable product of modern affective labor in these media, is most important in its non-visual points of interaction and cross-over with other tendrils of identity. To couch a discussion of postmodern subjectivity in language ruled by the ocular is brushing over significance of topic itself. The visual aspects are merely side effects of immaterial production. But in using language invoking the visual - albeit creating an eminently quotable line in the process - Hardt side-steps the sharpness of the rest of the essay and his key observation: that there are reifying aspects to networks of immaterial labor, especially as this new phase of labor applies to swarming media networks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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