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.

McCartney at Citi Field

I'll be going to see McCartney live at Citi Field in Queens tomorrow night. I'm hoping beyond hope that he'll play "Press."

Guest posting at Generation Bubble

FYI: I'll be guest posting at Generation Bubble starting soon, so keep a look out there.