Michael Zimmer of the Information Society Project at Yale Law has put together an interesting collection of pieces in the most recent edition of First Monday. The articles generally hit on some of my favorite topics, subjectivity, control, and surveillance in new media networks. I was a little disappointed by one of them, however. Not so much because it was wrong any any particular issue, but more because the author made all the right assumptions, but used out of date or out of place examples to make his point.

The piece in question is Anders Albrechtslund's "Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance". I was rather excited to read the piece, if only judging by the title, which sounds similar to many I've written for this very blog. I am a very strong proponent of the idea that interaction occurs via surveillance and for the benefit of surveillance in online social networks. You participate to be simultaneously the object and the observer in the surveillant relationship, creating a culture of perpetual nostalgia for an ever ephemeral present.

Anders himself thinks along the same lines. He makes a point to say that it is futile to try to separate online sociality from "physical" sociality (though I would have liked to see an acknowledgment of the physicality of online media). However in making this point, he references past Web 2.0 buzz terms like 'folksonomy' and seemingly anachronistic - in new media time - services like MyMoSoSo. In the latter the following sentence is used, presumably without irony: "This is a GIF 'screenshot' of My MoSoSo's Splash Screen." It's followed by a GIF image of a very 1997 looking HTML page. I hope that I'm not getting the joke.

It seems very strange to me that in an article that is talking about how contemporary shifts and developments in networked interaction as a result of new technologies and their business/social applications, that the author seems so disconnected from his subject.

Yet he goes on in much the same vein. He is entirely correct in his conclusions: the reification of relationships in corporate servers, the reliance on social surveillance in new media networks, and the Foucauldian disciplinary implications thereof. Yet he gets to these as I might imagine historians will in 20 years' time.

Needless to say I'm conflicted about the article. Overall, however, I'd strongly suggest giving the entire issue a read. Michael Zimmer is certainly one of the folks in academia who really seem to get it when it comes to these issues.

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

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.

Posted by Nathan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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."

Posted by Nathan at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This blog has been in existence for just over two years now and one of the most common themes I cover and encounter in my reading for these entries has been privacy. There is an essential conflict at the center of recent web-based services and technologies over privacy and the public display of data. On the one hand, we (as someone speaking from a North American perspective) value privacy in a variety of senses - ranging from property laws, to surveillance, to women's rights. Privacy has become an important piece of a capitalist society. On the other hand, many of the new web-based and new media technologies and services thrive on the unshrouding of previously private information. We display versions of our selves through online social networks, we allow our shops to track our purchases, and we freely enter information about ourselves into many a survey.

What are we to make of this? Should we be afraid of the exploitation of the data we hand over, or should we be grateful for the better service it results in? How can we determine which entities are worthy of our trust, or should we simply throw caution to the wind and deceive through openness?

These types of discussions have gone back and forth for years now. I tend to fall on the side that notions of privacy are changing to allow for a greater level of surveillance in exchange for greater return value - with the critical provision that both parties in the exchange are aware and buy-in to the transaction. This is clearly an idealistic vision, but it's interesting to look at how privacy/exhibitionism (or how one acts as the other) is dealt with in coverage of new media. These are a few articles I've come across recently:

• "5 Tracking Apps to Help You Out in 2008" - MakeUseOf.com. This entry is a good example of the full embrace of the value-for-data exchange. Users of the applications the author suggests hand over personal data and they receive targeted and personalized service. Implicit in this is the trust of the service provider.


• "Sears: Come see the softer side of spyware" - ars technica. Despite the chuckle-inducing title, this article is interesting because it demonstrates the boundaries of our exhibitionism. Many people will gladly install things like the Yahoo toolbar or RescueTime (as mentioned in the previous item) and allow their attention data to be tracked - but when it comes to Sears? No way. I don't mean to belittle the threat of spyware, it's a serious issue and shouldn't be tolerated, but much of this criticism seems to stem from the fact that this is a major corporation doing the surveillance rather than a cute little Web 2.0 start up. Really, both can do serious damage with that information.


• "The 2007 International Privacy Ranking" - Privacy International. This graphic ranks different countries' respective protection of privacy. The only country that ranks even reasonably well is Greece. I'm curious what Privacy International would think of a distributed panoptic society in which the surveillance is occurring in a peer-to-peer fashion instead of top-down.


• "Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty in Some Artists' Eyes" - Andrew La Valee for WSJ.com. I'm linking to a Rhizome page since I can't find the article on WSJ.com. I too have been fascinated by "boring" blogs, or the blogs that make up the lifeblood of the medium. At one point last year, I started a meta-boring blog called Welcome to the Dog Show. Low-traffic personal blogs are why the medium exists and why it is a significant cultural entity. At the core of these "boring" blogs is the willing and joyful abandonment of privacy. These small, personal blogs demonstrate our newfound love for exhibitionism.

What's interesting to note is where we draw boundaries. Sears and K-Mart using attention data to improve market awareness: not OK; Mint using personal financial information to suggest better services: OK. Top-down surveillance societies: not OK; Boring Blogs (i.e. exhibitionism on a mass scale): OK.

I don't believe there will ever be a consensus over what level of privacy or surveillance is acceptable/possible in these new media environments. I do believe, however, that the exhibitionism of these media is not going anywhere, and if for that reason alone, our notions of privacy will necessarily adapt.

Posted by Nathan at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A 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.

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

Fred has a good post up on Unit Structures responding to MoveOn.org's recent e-mail barrage about Facebook and privacy. Despite its purpose of defending the intelligence of the body of Facebook users, Fred hits on two key points that people would do well to learn when considering developments in online social network, in any case.

"The brand entity of Facebook is governmental; the only time one interacts with Facebook as entity is when they are being controlled or punished. Facebook as brand represents surveillance and domination."

Fred's second general point that people should pay attention to comes up here:

"When I joined Facebook, I cared that I could find my friend's address and see his or her pictures. However, I don't care when my friend buys something or superpokes someone else. Since I'm getting less of that good information, Facebook is trying to stave off the what's netxt problem by flooding me with "constructed" information. In making Facebook's useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases."

Posted by Nathan at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps I'm a bit negligent in not writing about pieces in the recent release of the social network focused issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, but tonight a different text caught my eye: the abstract for a January 26, 2007 panel, designed by Michael Zimmer entitled "Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0: Surveillance, Discipline, Labor". In a broad view, these are some of the most pertinent aspects to consider in our increasingly networked culture. Surveillance as interaction, the shift from a disciplinary society to a control society, and the changing positions and definitions of labor.

Though only an abstract is made available for each panelist, I particularly enjoyed that of Anders Albrechtslund, called "Surveillance as social play". He writes:

"Traditionally, students of surveillance have been occupied with the negative and worrying aspects of monitoring practices in society, and concepts such as Big Brother and Panopticon have dominated the literature as the metaphorical framework. ... However, as surveillance studies has grown to be a broader field of research, the positive and caring aspects has come into consideration as well ... Furthermore, it has been suggested that surveillance studies should embrace the contexts of entertainment, play and leisure, and in this way, surveillance is studied as a social practice."

Surveillance is a service for Google. We let them look at our e-mail, web site traffic, feeds, and soon phone activity in return for more relevant, unobtrusive ads and powerful, free applications. What's important to note here is that this kind of surveillance is, for the most part, voluntary. We willingly hand over our data - though possibly without realizing its inherent value.

Surveillance is social interaction on social networking sites. The Facebook news feed is an excellent distillation of this concept. We alter our performed, online identity with the knowledge that this addition of data will be seen by our friends. We want to be the subject of surveillance - that is they essential point of a social networking profile. At the same time, we want to be the on the other end of that relationship at the same time when looking at other people's data. A good way to describe surveillance as interaction would be distributed surveillance, which then leads to distributed control and modulation.

Surveillance as a threat hardly needs to be explained. It is the way we have always perceived surveillance - at least as long as we are its subject. The UK's CCTV ubiquity is an example of the unidirectional surveillance that partially defines a network culture.

It's clear then that surveillance isn't just Big Brother anymore.

Or, at least we are all Big Brothers in our own little ways nowadays.

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

Alex Pang's recent entry at The End of Cyberspace, "A thought about the future of memory", brings up what I think is a crucial issue to consider in our networked-archival lives. Alex begins by remarking that he remembers very few - if any at all - phone numbers anymore. Just like the rest of us, they exist in his cell phone, listed by name, and sorted alphabetically. This phenomenon is not limited to cell phones however, we see this offloading of memory in the increasing ease of photography and its networked storage, blogging, birthdays, and so on. Who needs to remember birthdays when we have Facebook to remind us?

A natural reactionary criticism of this shift is that it represents a larger cultural deficiency - that our natural memory has failed as a result of being so overly outsourced. Certainly if we rely on devices and services to remember facts for us, we have no need to commit them to memory. Yet to imply that that this represents a cultural or even generational loss of memory misses the mark. The rote memorization of facts indeed may be off-loaded, but that hardly represents memory as a cultural force. This latter form of memory takes the form of nostalgia, tradition, and history - each of which is heightened in different ways by these same networked-archival entities that have become our outsourced memories.

I return to this often here, but the phenomenon of mourning on social networks is fascinating. From the profiles of the deceased on MySpace to dedicated networks like Respectance, the argument that networked-archival environments diminish memory on any large scale is clearly off. If anything these technologies/devices/services/etc have allowed us to revel and wallow in memory. We are faced with an abundance of memory and if there is a crisis, it is a crisis of nostalgia waiting to happen.

Posted by Nathan at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it seems that I was a tad ill-timed in declaring widespread praise for Facebook last week. Over the past few days, bloggers have been making a stink over Facebook employees defacing and deleting profiles at will on nothing more than a personal grudge. Of course, Valleywag has been all over this of late - but they aren't the only ones. This is nothing all that new, as I realized when they began taking a harsh line toward fake/tribute profiles, but it is also nothing new in a broader perspective.

Much of the criticism of Facebook in these privacy scandals has centered around an assumed standard of web-based interaction, in which a user on a social network can trust that his/her profile will not be deleted unless s/he is a spam profile or seriously abusing it - so much so that it is commonly assumed that these services are rife with pedophiles. So how is it that all of a sudden, the Facebook criticism meme centers on it being overly strict?

Facebook is suffering from the perception that is has a degree of power that it does not actually have. It - like any other online social network - depends solely and entirely on its users. So far it has done a good job of wooing them: first college students (the popularity among whom the tech 'sphere seemed to miss entirely...), then Web 2.0 types (after the Facebook Platform). But here we are in the downturn of the hype cycle, right after everyone has finished gushing over how awesome it is. The Web 2.0/Valley hype built up Facebook to a point where it has seemed all powerful (not to mention valued at $15 billion) - it's the future of advertising! That's worth several small countries, right?

Facebook - and all popular online social networks - are socially, culturally, and subjectively significant. There's no denying that, especially in an era when most of our personal and professional lives interact with the web. Yet the hype and its resulting over-valuation (yes, it is over valued) have made people somehow believe that we are locked into it. Haven't we learned from Friendster? Haven't we learned from basic market economics? If Facebook continues violating what we view as basic tenets, its user-base is as good as gone, and it becomes another social network graveyard like Friendster (in the US at least).

We, as users, have a choice here. Personally, I don't particularly like the idea that Facebook has essentially sold 1.6% of my profile to Microsoft - but as long as the social relations that it allows remain more valuable than any other service, I will continue to use it. And when Facebook finally overwhelms me with inane 3rd party application requests and breaches of trust and privacy? Well, that's when I'm off to the next service, whatever my social network might collectively decide that is.

Subjectively, we are tied to Facebook more than we like to acknowledge, but when it comes to their business model, that's where we can hurt them. Facebook is still the emperor who is trying to convince us he has clothes on - and they're doing a fine job - but unless they get some clothes on soon, users should really just see them for what they are.

Posted by Nathan at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just been reading an entry at Media Studies 2.0 entitled "MySpace and Legendary Psychasthenia" and while I generally like his blog quite a bit, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of what William was writing and his methods of argument. Essentially, the essay bemoans a loss of "individuality" in our subjective immigration to online social networks. This is an argument that has been heard before, and one that does have some valuable claims, but ultimately the entry fails to properly account for the multiplicity of subjective interaction and archivization via online social networks. And by thus mistaking the global for the local and vice-versa, it's tough to give the point much weight.

The piece begins by setting up a spuriously dichotomous thesis: "I want to suggest that Myspace, Facebook and their ilk represent, not a flowering of self and individuality but its psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." In this situation online social networks can have one of two effects: a "flowering of self and individuality" or "psychasthenic absorption, renunciation and loss." Defining these as the two subjective potentialities for these new media is almost ridiculous. Should anyone take seriously claims that these media could do either? Generally, I dismiss both the most dire and the most optimistic assessments of online social networks for what they are: hyperbole.

Secondly, neither in the thesis nor in the body of the essay is "individuality" properly defined or contextualized. Is it merely the difference of definable characteristics between individual subjects? Must actions of social conformity be viewed as undesirable? Do they not allow us to have a functional society in the first place? To use the term "individuality" in such a decontextualized, more-is-better manner is really to ascribe to a vague and misleading ideology of personal gratification, fueled by a healthy dose of egotism.

The body of the essay often refers to users of MySpace and Facebook as though they use one and only one of these services at the exclusion of the other and any other socio-archival web-based media. Despite citing Sherry Turkle's cogent and convincing defense of a multiple and distributed online self, William goes on to ignore it an focus entirely on a user's individual profile on one of the two major online social networks, and thus drawing questionable conclusions about online subjectivity: "The self is set free as a profile, fixed to another point – to a non-space existing only as proprietal code within an electronic network – and subsequently lost to us."

Within this sentence the following assumptions are made: (1) subjective tendrils, once created, are entirely divorced from their creator; (2) online social networks are a "non-space"; and that (3) our online self is thus "lost to us." The first assumption falls into the trap that many writing about online identity fall into - the idea that when we turn off our computer that we have severed ties to the actions we have just performed. We interact on these networks long after we cease to alter our profiles, just look at the phenomenon of online graveyards and death-centric social networks. Yes these are simulacra, but they continue to signify as subjective proxies for us after we have moved on in one way or another. A profile has not been "set-free" but retains as much a connection to its creator as anything we create does if not more so on account of its personal-representational mode. Just because it exists on a server somewhere does not imply that we have somehow lost ownership or subjective links.

The second assumption, that online social networks are a "non-space," requires quite a leap. The idea that online social networks should be considered within the realm of "space" at all is merely a rhetorical and metaphorical construction to begin with. This is the familiar ideology of "cyberspace" - which is actually used several times in the essay - an ideology that began in science fiction novels and has been used to conceptualize a series of new media that did not fit easily into any other boxes we might have. On top of this, the term is used in an inexplicably derogatory manner. Even if this was a non-space, the reason why this serves to divorce or homogenize networked subjectivity goes unexplained.

The third assumption is merely the result of the first two. Certainly if we were to actually be setting little chunks of our identity "free" in a "non-space," we'd be at a loss. The fact is however that we never manage to lose our subjective tendrils online, and when you consider (as William does not) the multiplicity of venues for subjective in/dividuation and construction and the fact that many of these tendrils continue to exist and thrive in a networked-archival environment - it seem like we actually are seeing exactly what Turkle describes.

That said, the essay does hit on some key points, and William's analysis of interaction through online social networks as perpetual semiotic (or affective, I might suggest) labor is spot on - even if he doesn't apply it to a multiple-subjective environment. For these reasons - and for the sake of debate - I do recommend this essay.

Posted by Nathan at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in the Rhizome Artbase I cam across a couple of interesting pieces by Martin John Callanan: I am Still Alive and I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. The works play with the notion of immediacy - on the web and in text message communication respectively.

News brings together (or at least claims to) thumbnail images of the front pages of every national, daily newspaper from around the world. The web page is filled with the evenly spaced images and interrupted only by a small text box in the top right of the viewer's browser stating "I Wanted to See All of the News From Today: [today's date], Martin John Callanan." Alive, on the other hand, claims to involve a device that searches local wireless networks for open, connected devices like PDAs or cell phones, and when it finds one, sends the message "I am still alive" - translated appropriately for the country of course.

What I enjoy about both pieces are their direct and simple nature. News presents nothing more than "the news" in the form of its most prominent signifier, the national daily paper. Alive does not discriminate between phones more than it has to for delivery and presents the surprised recipient with a message that states a simple, if slightly bewildering statement.

Where News succeeds is in its critique of online news and news aggregators. The project earnestly, ingenuously, and almost feyly approaches its stated goal - one it shares with Google, CNN.com, and of course the New York Times own "All the News..." claim. Yet in doing so, it points out the quixotic and ultimately sisyphean task it really is. In this way, News also parodies the larger project of the socially networked internet: totalizing archivization and the myth that "everything is at your fingertips." The work shows that in fact, when everything is at you fingertips - it's actually just a bit too much and perhaps what we're looking for after all is a different sort of archive. Thus Callanan successfully mocks the major online news outlets' earnestness at the same time as he nods to the enormity of their common project.

What I enjoy about Alive is how it plays with the notion of immediacy in media like text messages or social networks. In these media, users/participants are constantly engaged in a project of updating and enhancing. MySpace users continually fiddle with their profiles to convey just the right message for the moment - Twitter users somehow find the need to update friends and followers with minutiae (and these friends and followers find the need to pay attention). These are media of archivization of the present, where a steady stream of information implies life and a cessation of the flow signals death. This is not only corporeal death - as that certainly is evidenced in suddenly static texts and profiles - but also a halting of participation, which is the equivalent of death in these media.

So in choosing "I am still alive" as the message sent to unwitting participants, Callanan has brilliantly honed the basic sentiment in every message that we send or profile update we make. Every message may as well say "I am still alive" since that message is the function of all such communication. Not just an odd phrase to rouse curiosity, the message is crafted to make the recipients aware of the medium itself.

I really was impressed by these two works and their deadly simple, yet pithy delivery. I strongly suggest that readers take a look.

Posted by Nathan at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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


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


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


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

• Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks


• Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture


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


• Michael Hardt - "Affective Labor"


• Nicholas Carr - "Sharecropping and the long tail"


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

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

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

Either way, both strike me as interesting courses.

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

On this blog I've often written about death and nostalgia in the context of online social networks. It's a theme one sees expressed throughout the web as it becomes a medium for our projected and distributed subjectivities. From Elliott Malkin's thoughtful piece, Cemetery 2.0, to MySpace pages acting as informal memorial sites as well as embodiments of/surrogates for the deceased (many collected at MyDeathSpace), it's clear that online social networks' archival purpose serves a nostalgic impulse for both the past and the present. Profiles are created and edited to reflect an idealized, nostalgized present vision of the individual - and if this person passes away, their presence (or, presents) remain.

So I was intrigued when I saw TechCrunch's post about Respectance, which is a well designed online memorial site billed as a social network for the deceased. In some aspects it resembles a very slick version of FindAGrave - which allows visitors to leave virtual flowers at the gravestone and personalized notes - but it also seems to imply a presentness usually reserved for the living or the living online spaces of the deceased (a MySpace page for an expired teen, for example). Each dead person has associated media such as videos and photos and even allowing them to have "friends."

While I can't say that such developments as Respectance or FindAGrave's social aspects are all that surprising, they do feel a bit forced. The developers have clearly caught on to the same sense of nostalgia that surrounds social networks and is seen most strongly around profiles of the deceased, but these pages come across as more of a false and shallow nostalgia compared to the ad-hoc memorial one sees on Facebook or MySpace. On these latter sites, the dead walk among the living as though they have not departed at all, where as Respectance seeks to segregate the dead.

Several years ago, when Facebook had just recently launched, I created a profile for Johnny Cash, a short time before he died (if I remember correctly). While at the time I had no high-minded purpose, it was simply an expression of my admiration and a test of the limits of the then-new service, the profile became an informal memorial for the singer after his death. He had hundreds of friends at schools across the country and many users would leave messages on his birthday every year. I tried to respect visitors' use of the profile as a space for remembrance by accepting all friends, pictures, and comments.

Slightly less than a year ago, the Facebook administrators deleted the Johnny Cash profile I made (there are still several up, but I proudly claimed to be the first). I sent and e-mail to an administrator stating my curatorial purpose with the profile, and in the response I received was this sentence:

"...one of Facebook's main goals is to facilitate meaningful relationships between living people. We do not want to have a number of profiles of deceased celebrities intermingling with living users."

The Johnny Cash profile was a successful memorial exactly because he was intermingling with living users. This is something that the people at Facebook and Repectance both fail to see.

Posted by Nathan at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past few days I received a lot of e-mails with links to articles about danah boyd's essay, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace." The essay discusses class divisions between Facebook users and MySpace users - concluding that the "good" (i.e. wealthy and educated) flock to Facebook, while the "bad" (i.e. working class and not college-bound) are drawn to MySpace. Danah makes relevant points, most importantly that this division stems from the two sites respective histories. Facebook began as a gated community for elite college students, whereas MySpace cut its teeth on flashy design, openness, and city-based entertainment ("urban" carries too much baggage unfortunately).

What I have found interesting, however, are two specific responses to her essay: the BBC's article and Umair from Bubblegeneration's post. Each takes somewhat of an extreme (mis?)reading, but in different directions.

The BBC piece suffers from over simplification:

"The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college."

Umair's response takes a negative view:

"She almost sounds as if she pities Myspace kids. Why the whiff of elitism?"

My main criticism with the essay lies in the fact that she takes the present state of these networks as static. If we have learned anything in these years of socially networked environments, it is that the sites are in constant flux. Who joins is dependent on the social relationship of one generation of user to another certainly, but it is also possible that this is a negative relationship as much as a positive one. This is all excluding the effect of the social networking site management - danah herself has partially blamed Friendster's management for its eventual demise. Much like Mark Twain described the weather in New England, if you don't like the weather in social networking sites now, wait five minutes.

Posted by Nathan at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of days ago Eric Kluitenberg sent to the nettime list the text of talk he gave at the INFOWARROOM series in Amsterdam last week. He makes a number of good points in the text relating to the rise of user-generated media and its effects on subjectivity. I couldn't help but bristle at one section of the piece:

"The current explosion of self-publication in countless weblogs, on community websites, self-video portals, in on-line diaries, web fora and a plethora of individual websites is only the visible sign of an undercurrent that was already for many years transforming 'the public' into an amalgamation of increasingly unrelated subjectivities and singular interest groups."

The second half of the sentence, however, does not strike the same chord of approval in my thinking. The idea of "increasingly unrelated subjectivities and singular interest groups" specifically strikes me as out of line given the rest of piece. The many-year transformation of which he speaks might (and appropriately) refer to the rise of the ever more precise marketing data that has been collected over the past few decades, which to a large extent acts as a precursor to new media business models. Yet just as blogs and social media merely provide the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the larger currents, such marketing-based specificity is merely a surface in itself, hiding another reality. Despite the appearance of more and more interest groups, demographic divisions, or socialities, this does not imply neat social and subjective divisions, but, in fact, the opposite. With increasing outlets for identification, and single one becomes inadequate for all but the rarest of folk. Indeed the very plethora of identifying possibilities stretches the process of subjectification to the point that multiplicity and relationality are the only options.

This stretching of the subject then finds an outlet in the hyper-individuality expressed in many examples of social media, which - as the author knows, judging by the first half of this sentence - is just the visual surface for much larger motion. This hyper-individuality belies its multiple, relational constitution.

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

I've just read "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" by Trebor Scholz, which I'd been meaning to do for some time now. What led me to the essay was Leisure Art's use of it as citation in a larger critique of the concept of immaterial labor as it is applied in contemporary contexts. I had originally intended to respond to this response, arguing against the notion that we should be creating new theoretical frameworks for each new media/socio-political environment we find ourselves in, but I found myself reacting more strongly to Scholz's suggesting that users of networked social media are the subject of exploitation.

Scholz is by no means the first to take this position, nor does he do it from any unreasonable perspective. In fact, his analysis is spot-on despite my disagreement with his conclusion. I found this quote to be a pithy way to phrase things:

"After the gruesome dotcom experiences, such massive investments would not be placed without predictable return. Certainly, the two examples of MySpace and YouTube are extremes but they are also the platforms where most people currently contribute online content. Networked sociality is the product."

I use del.icio.us on a daily basis. My participation adds value to the site and was part of the aggregate participation that made it an attractive buy for Yahoo!. I use it to find interesting articles, pictures, and videos that interesting people in my network post. There is a great amount of value in this for me. I'm not about to call up strangers and ask them what they've been reading, then, if I like it, call them up every day to find out what's new. If what I give Yahoo! in exchange for exposing me to such texts as this very article is that shred of virtuosity, which in aggregate made del.icio.us valuable to a large corporation - I'm fine with that. I'd hardly think I've been duped.

One benefit of corporate dependence on network sociality is that it means there will always be space for creative and critical intervention. As soon as MySpace starts cracking down in a serious way on people bending its rules with such purposes, its value as a venue for network sociality diminishes.

Posted by Nathan at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today capital can no longer exploit the worker; it can only exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst laborers. -Antonio Negri, Pisa 2003

I have no doubt that this quote from one of the authors of Empire and Italian political activist will strike any Web 2.0 disciples as familiar. The tension between exploitation and power comes up frequently in writing on networked social media. A good example is in discussions of Digg that have come up in the past and recently, after the HD-DVD key dust-up. I've often read stories of Digg's exploitation of users; how without the users the site would be nothing, using the tireless efforts of thousands of un-remunerated individuals to build a collaborative linking behemoth. At the same time, however, moments like the HD-DVD code posting frenzy, the ultimate power and control of the user has never been more apparent than on a site like Digg. This is similar to the tension Negri sees, and has long seen, in national and global labor movements.

Another recent blog post reminded me of this Negri quote: Jeff Jarvis' praise of CBS Interactive's new media strategy. Jarvis notes that CBS executive Quincy Smith's realization that they cannot expect users to "come to" them is the correct way to approach new and networked media. It seems then, that Mr. Smith has been reading up on his Italian autonomists. Instead of direct exploitation in the form of forcing viewers to watch ads or pay for content, CBS has apparently decided to exploit the potential inherent in letting viewers interact using CBS media as a vehicle. While I'm sure that such a situation was far from Negri's mind when he was speaking in Pisa that day in 2003, it has been a tough road for media companies to see (and I might even say exploit) what he has seen in larger socio-political arenas.

Posted by Nathan at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

Posted by Nathan at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is a review of the net art piece, The Last Tag Show, orginally written for furtherfield.org.

The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users' music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM's technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow's profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM's data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.

Yet while this was a particularly clever subversion of Last.FM's intended use, judging by their own description of the piece, it seems that the artists failed to fully think through the conceptual implications of their performance. The very idea of a “net performance” is immediately suspect especially when in the context of a social network like Last.FM for whom archivization and aggregation takes precedence over the immediacy and ephemeral nature of live performance. So while inventive and whimsically guileful, The Last Tag Show as a performance was starkly out of place in an environment existing in the future as much as it looks to the past.

Yet, it is from this oversight that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece arises. After the performance was finished and the Show creators had moved on, their once purely diegetic characters began to take on a life of their own outside the confines of that single 24 hour period. It seems that there are a number of other Last.FM users who listen to tracks in which the artist is listed as “Voiceover” or “Papa” (another character in the Show) and a number of other names. As these other users consume their oddly labeled tracks, the artist profiles, which served as a stable signifier for the Show's players, began to change. Suddenly their “most listened to tracks” were not out-of-context snippets of dialogue, but what seemed to be...actual songs; and the very real possibility of users coming in and subtly changing Gregg's biography comes to mind.

Indeed, the fact that these fictional characters have the ability to continue to “live” - produce and be produced - long after their utility to the performance has ended, is what makes The Last Tag Show so interesting, and the limited period of its run-time so constricted. Where the creators began this piece as a “hack” of a social networking site, in the end it may turn out that they are the ones hacked - by their own creations.

Posted by Nathan at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 thi