database of intentions, doesn't matter whose

from Nicholas Carr, re informavores:

The Web has been called a "database of intentions." The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.

The horizons of the self are adjusted and ultimately fixed by our interaction with the totalizing system of Web 2.0 -- our subjectivity doesn't begin outside Web 2.0 but is constructed within it, with our capacity for generating desire specifically outsourced to other non-biological parts of the hive mind we are plugged into.

industrialization of memory, production of insecurity

From "Beyond the 'Networked Public Sphere': Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0" by Dr. Ben Roberts, University of Bradford (link)

Simondon argues that the rise of the machine tool removes the ability of the skilled worker to differentiate their labor from that of other workers: 'a loss of individuation' which Stiegler sees reproduced at the level of consciousness by the new teletechnologies and their industrialization of memory.

The industrialization of memory -- archiving identity on corporate-owned servers, letting that replace or restructure neurological memory -- opens the self to new forms of manipulation by those corporations, or by the state that controls them. Shifting memory to a quasi-public sphere, having us broadcast it, opens us to new exploitable forms of existential insecurity. Discovering new insecurities to exploit is how consumerism survives. It leaves behind impersonal markets when the anonymity they suggest limits the amount of insecurity available to be put to the use of shaping subjectivity.

Predictive search's black box, horizons of identity in social networks

From "Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis" by
Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin of Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University. (link)

1.

How can we understand, map and otherwise critique emergent forms of connectivity and articulation among Web 2.0 sites, users and content, especially when the architecture and technical processes shaping communicational dynamics are black-boxed, opaque and secretive?

This is an important question because of the way Web 2.0 platforms want to tell us what we want before we know we want it, and thereby predict our identity before it has a chance to discover itself. It's one of the ways it impoverishes possible narratives of the self under the guise of activating more of them. By recommending things we wouldn't have discovered on our own, it seems to enlarge us, but it also forecloses on unbounded curiosity. Because these predictive systems aren't openly disclosed, because we can't see the algorithms or all that feeds into them, we can't know if the ways in which they prescribe our identity are benign, in our best interests, or if they are producing subjects (and subjectivities) suitable for a system engineered to exploit them. We can't decide after we've received the recommendations, etc., because that prescribed subjectivity is by that time a fait accompli, meaning our own judgments can no longer be trusted. We need to know what is in the black box before we disappear inside it.

2.

Web 2.0 spaces do not simply transmit content according to specific communicative formats, even though this is still one of their roles. Rather, Web 2.0 spaces serve to establish the conditions within which content can be produced and shared and where the sphere of agency of users can be defined.... While the type of commercializing processes at stake with Web 1.0 were primarily about transforming users and their content into commodities, Web 2.0 dynamics establish the conditions within which such processes of commercialization can occur through the promotion and harnessing of user-generated content.

Web 2.0 imposes a horizon of possibility for identity, aspiring to become the dominant institution in the interpolation of subjects in techno-capitalistic society ("the cyber-capitalist infrastructure" or the "networked economy").

What Zimmer (2008) describes as a Faustian trade-off between augmented personalized exploration and surveillance and commercialization gives way to a dynamic whereby the process of commercialization is part of providing to users augmented cultural knowledge, affect and desire, to borrow from Terranova (2000).... Commercial Web 2.0 is about us -- it is about re-presenting ourselves through the mediation of the platform. This where Web 2.0 platforms echo Lazzarato's point that contemporary forms of capitalism is about the creation of worlds, which means the setting up of a horizon of possibilities. This also means that specific processes of subjectivation can be formulated as the crystallization of psychological, social, economic dynamics and factors that favour the formation of specific subject positions. These processes are present on Web 2.0 platforms and present us with the paradox of narrowing down the field of possibilities while creating, producing and enriching our experience of being on the Web. Commercial Web 2.0 platforms are attractive because they allow us, as users, to explore and build knowledge and social relations in an intimate, personalized way. In this dynamic, the commercialization of users and information is one of the central factors through which this enrichment takes place. As a consequence, alienation disappears, as in the Web 2.0 worlds there is no contradiction anymore between the marketing of user information and the subjective enrichment of users: what used to be two separate processes are now one in the augmentation of social and cultural factors. Third-party advertising is reinscribed as cultural capital produced by the platform for the user through personalized recommendations.

Alienation seems like its opposite -- the process of restricting our identity to its articulation on social networks appears to us as an opening up of possibilities, thanks to automated recommendations, archiving, and the facilitation of immediate feedback on our broadcasted self-fashioning gestures. We cooperate with the shifting of our identity and our social relations online into pens built and controlled by commercial interests. The commercialization comes to seem like authentication, proving our selves have social value. It also seems like an escape from old-economy impersonal market relations because all transactions are deeply personalized and specific, and thus seem identity-validating. It seems more like "community" in relation to a long-outdated sense of what consumerism was supposed to connote -- mass conformity. But consumerism is now the inverse, hyperpersonal identity mongering, with the "unique identity" as the perpetual product being sold and resold to the same individual subject. This fixes subjects with in the matrix that Web 2.0 is building, which will allow for total administering of identity to subjects if and when the project completes itself.

Basically, Web 2.0 is letting us sell out before our authentic self even exists. Selling out becomes the prerequisite for having an authentic seeming self, validated by the predictive systems online and fixed in illusory flux of social networks. "The hybridity of the user points out how processes of subjectivation on Web 2.0 worlds are both highly personalized and standardized. That is, the representation of ourselves takes place through a platform's universal algorithmic logic. As users, we input personal information into the platform, and in turn, the platform represents us on the user-interface as the aggregation of bits and pieces of images, texts, sounds, videos, and links. The user-interface becomes the site where the exploration and extension of ourselves, our knowledge, culture and affect is negotiated through a technocultural mediation"

Informavores

From the transcript of an Edge.org interview with Frank Schirrmacher:

information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations.

Not sure how this works in practice, how information adapts to claim attention. Or is it that information that survives is meant not to describe reality but compel attention, and the strategies it reproduces replicate not a structure of the Real but a structure of desire. The information that will shape how we understand the world will have nothing to do with reality per se but more to do with what can fascinate humans.

2.

now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn't important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it's in Facebook. And others say, well, it's on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it's very hard to say it's somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

The deep internal structures of identity are being externalized in computer networks, but why? Is it merely that they become more explicitly instrumental, operational when reified that way? Is it that their significance seems amplified, the self externalized is free to become grandiose? Is it the market rationality that we have absorbed from living under capitalism seeking to find application in the deeper psychological structures, so that it can dictate extra-economic decisions, work with attention and emotion as neoclassical economics worked with resource distribution? The social-networking developments seem to answer this question: How can we apply ideas of productivity and innovation to the production of the self?

3.

when you have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which are adapted to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, and which goes farther and farther in predictive certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it. What will this mean for the question of free will?

The field for our idenity production is beginning to be circumscribed by the data we ourselves generate -- we archive past iterations of ourselves and these hem us in for our own supposed good. The original choices that set us on a particular path recede into the domain of original sin. This is a digitization of the cliche about the butterfly effect. If only we hadn't bought that Adam and the Ants song on iTunes so long ago. I wouldn't be this person that I am now.

4.

maybe the future will be that the Twitter information about an uproar in Iran competes with the Twitter information of Ashton Kutcher, or Paris Hilton, and so on. The question is to understand which is important. What is important, what is not important is something very linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad.

The time needed to hierarchize the significance of information appears to have collapsed. New information supplants the old as the old settles into networks of relevance. What will be relevant to us must already be given in advance, predicted by the Googles and Amazons, etc., before information is disseminated. The simultaneity of all information means that we need a premade set of rules to create a bounded set at each moment that we can cognitively assimilate. We will see only what is preordained as important to us, but we will be convinced that we designed the filters for our own good.

From Douglas Rushkoff's response:

I would argue we humans are not informavores at all, but rather consumers of meaning. My computer can digest and parse more information than I ever will, but I dare it to contend with the meaning. Meaning is not trivial, even though we have not yet found metrics capable of representing it. This does not mean it does not exist, or shouldn't.

The danger is that we outsource the meaning to these systems that do the thinking outside ourselves. That we trust the meanings supplied by the hive mind, by the search engine, by the wisdom of crowds and so on, because we end up demanding quantified versions of everything, along with a quantified data-driven sense of self, with immediate metrics to tewak and calibrate.

From Nick Bilton's response:

Free will is not a prediction engine, it's not an algorithm on Google or Amazon, it's the ability to share your thoughts and your stories with whomever wants to consume them, and in turn for you to consume theirs. What is import is our ability to discuss and present our views and listen to thoughts of others.

A very strange concpetion of free will as the ability to share thingsand impose one's self on others. But that reciprocity is not free will; free will is a matter of not being circumscribed or determined by preexisting contexts. The cant of sharing is here used to distract us from the real problems posed by prediction engines and the archived self.

Filtering information to suit the self

From Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker review of Cass Sunstein's latest book:

From this, it is often argued that the Internet is a boon to democracy—if information is good, then more information must be better. But, in Sunstein’s view, the Web has a feature that is even more salient: at the same time that it makes more news available, it also makes more news avoidable.
“The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” he has written, is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.”

Filtering is the prerequisite for consumerdom -- the economic surfeit/surplus is winnowed down in an ongoing process to make for a given Self at a given moment, which is then evaluated in terms of how popular it proves at the proverbial water cooler or in the social networking domain, etc., and then adjusted by consuming more information. (Information can now be a matter of facts, data, opinions, or retail purchases -- anything that could be deployed in signaling.) The goal is not to become informed so much as to signal a tentative, tactical self in the marketplace of identity (arena of identity might be better -- money doesn't necessary change hands, as the currency is attention). This identity, since it is documented online, can serve as a rolling target for marketing, which in turn shapes how it will evolve -- how the subject's self-knowledge will develop. The seemingly autonomous choices will actually be contained by the field of possibilities intrusively presented, by the various filters the subject's prior consumer behavior has shaped.

Choice in informing oneself is now driven by the social-networking self (the self that can be ranked and archived and broadcast to ever-more people), which covertly serves the ends of the corporations that control those networks. Less important to be informed than to know the passwords to admission into chosen hierarchies structured in networks online.

Sunstein’s theory of the (Dis)Information Age is pointedly nonjudgmental. By his account, the problem is basically structural: certain tendencies of the human mind interact badly with certain features of modern technology, much as certain prescription drugs interact badly with alcohol. Young or old, bigoted or tolerant, liberal or conservative -- everyone is equally implicated here, since everyone is predisposed to the same, or at least analogous, mental habits and has access to the same technological tools.

Sunstein points to the polarization effect of like opinions reinforcing each othe rin the absence of facts. Does this extend to the tendency to fixate on a fabricated self-concept in lieu of one grounded in a broader shared reality -- atendency to restrict the reality filtering through to only what suits a particular notion of self, thereby granting inordinate power to the filter-keepers.

More on "Consumer Emancipation"

I have posts at Generation Bubble and PopMatters about impersonal markets allowing us to escape the tyranny of identity, whereas Web 2.0-type hyper-personalization gestures work against that in the name of regenerating a lost sense of social relations. All this does is create a new form of commercialized social relations, extending consumerist practices (shed of market-based restrictions) into more intimate spheres. And it brings back the hierarchies that originally constituted social capital with renewed force.

Reading an article by Robert Kozinets about Burning Man ("Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man") galvanized a lot of my thinking on this subject. I have a few points to add in response to some ideas he raises in the Discussion section of his article.

1. Kozinets writes:

Burning Man provides a powerful example that blends the often volatile and individualistic self-expressive urge with a communal ethos. The key is in the casting of self-expression as a communal gift. Self-expression thus becomes a means to connect one's most heartfelt thoughts and feelings to other people.

I think that the self-expressive urge and the communal ethos don't blend but remain in tension. One must invent a community, an adoring audience, in order to imagine that self-expression is a gift. and things like Facebook serve to make that fantasy easier to sustain, by making positive feedback thoughtlessly implementable. It costs nothing to seem as though you are taking in someone else's updates, etc., as gifts and not nuisances, because the mediating role of Facebook makes it easy to consume and process those "shared" "gifts." Outside the mediating system of Facebook, the reality of having the gift of our self-expression rejected outright or ridiculed grows much greater. The sharing begins to seem more a violation of social norms of courtesy. Our identity project seems less whimsical and more intrusive, demanding. Outside Facebook, we would seem like we are wheedling for attention. So we take refuge in Facebook, as Kozinets suggests Burning Man serves as a refuge (fantasy space) where one does self-fashioning as a favor to the world. And in Facebook, our "gifts" can be harvested for marketing purposes by taking our proffered information and collating it with our networks and deriving sellable demographic data.

2. Kozinets: "The most important rules of conduct fostering Burning Man's emancipatory potential are actually not its No Vending injunction but its interconnected No Spectators and Radical Self-Expression rules."

I think that all three are interconnected. The ordinary impersonal markets with cash exchanges that we are accustomed to in capitalist society are suspended to force participants to sell their own "radical self-expression" instead as a self-conscious product, for approval and attention and status and a stable position in an emerging social hierarchy. This is allowing identity-driven consumerism to supplant capitalist consumption. In other words, consumerism (in the theory I am trying to elaborate here) is not a product of markets but an independent ethos. It sprang from the need to consumer a mass produced surplus but has since become autonomous and established itself as the primary discourse for generating narratives of the self. The market, on the other hand, is an atavistic structure that works against the sort of self consumerism exalts -- markets prefer anonymous subjects engaging in exchanges ruled entirely by rationality rather than the vagaries of social relations and social/cultural capital.

3. Kozinets: "I suggest the term hypercommunity to distinguish from these other communal phenomena the phenomenon of a well-organized short-lived but caring and sharing community whose explicit attraction to participants is its promise of an intense but temporary community experience."
The intensity and the impermanence are linked (as Kozinets goes on to note); social networks seize upon the mechanisms Burning Man evinces for creating a community built on coercive sharing, but tosses out the impermanence that excuses the coercion. It becomes an unbounded injunction to confess everything in order to be.

4. Kozinets:

Whether in culture-capital-laden appeals to authentic communities that exist outside of the market or to so-called radical self-expression that fits within subcultural and communal norms, the urge to differentiate from other consumers drives participation at Burning Man and does not release them from the grip of the market's sign game and social logics.

Precisely. Only the sign game and social logics are cut free from markets by events like Burning Man, setting the stage for the more complete domination of society by those logics. Kozinets calls it "youtopia" and wants us to believe that it is a positive thing, a way out of the isolation, atomization, and alienation that consumer capitalism has brought on rather than its perfection.

Pop culture references

They can be indexed to which age cohort has the dominant voice in the entertainment media. Hence it seems like 1984 was a hugely significant year for film, rich in lasting reference points. But that's only because the people who were watching those movies as teenagers are now injecting the references into the current culture. But a look at this well-intentioned but naive series of video essays shows how much young film lovers have lost sight of in the 1980s, and how distorted the notion of its lasting relevance will become. Experiment: try watching Ghostbusters now and see if you laugh.

Atavistic garage bands

Elijah Wald in this FT article makes an interesting point about pre LP listening habits:

My father, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906, had a terrific memory for the hits of his youth and I grew up hearing “The Sheik of Araby”, “When Frances Dances with Me”, “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, over and over. I would sometimes ask, “Who sang that song?” – a normal question for any pop listener born after 1950. But it made no sense to him. Everybody sang those songs; that was what a hit was. Record dealers assumed the average customer would be happy with any decent performance of a hit – just as casual buyers of classical music still shop primarily on the basis of the composition and composer.

The charm of garage bands, who often play the same songs (e.g., "Hey Joe"), lies in precisely their permitting listeners to reconnect to that era when the personalities of musicians didn't matter, and generic assumptions about them could suffice. There is the song and the attitude, but no faces and gossip.

Listening strategy

Taste is not important; it is the approach to listening that is definitive. We must have a "listening strategy" -- see end of this Pitchfork article about impact of MP3s -- it no longer suffices to pretend that organic responsiveness counts. There is no unmediated reaction to music; only what sort of reaction we are prepared to have. What are the ethical criteria for these listening strategies, I wonder.