Connections, Conversations, Serendipity, and Shit

David Weinberger describes, in his discussion of hyperlinks, connections that can serve to reconfigure the entire (business) world. But do these connections actually reduce the distance between people, enabling better and more human conversations? Or do they serve to more distinctly define our place as nodes in networks?

He says that within pyramidal structures we are strictly defined. But it would seem that even in the decentralized power structure the web provides, we are still just as (if not more) defined than ever before - this definition is simply disguised as something we have written ourselves. We believe these new definitions to be our very essence, that the web captures something not previously able to be tamed. Weinberger obviously believes this makes us more free, but we are still defined - instead of a hierarchical definition of where we fit into a power structure, we have a definition bounded by hyperlinks.

Weinberger also talks about the freedom of movement on the web, saying, "If you want to go to a page, you just click on the link and, boom, you're there. (The fact that this might have required, beneath the surface, thirty 'hops' among servers in places you've never heard of is completely irrelevant. You don't see the hops; you just see the page)." But if we remember the digital enclosure, then we know that these thirty hops are not "completely irrelevant." Even if we don't see them, those other thirty servers do see them - and it makes their definition of us ever clearer.

Finally, Weinberger also introduces a concept we saw in Wark's Gamer Theory. "The Web isn't primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It's a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play," Weinberger says. He goes on to note that "without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens." Play, however, is spontaneous. It cannot be given to us - in Wark's terms, it would seem that only a designer can truly play. If this is true, then Weinberger is probably right, and play would be good for a business. The problem, however, is that neither the pyramidal structure he derides nor the decentralized hyperlinked one he promotes actually provide much of a space for play.

Networked Desire

As I sat in Geneva Foreign and Sports this morning waiting for the estimate on my car, I tried pulling a few things on networks and online marketing together to distract myself and pass the time. In emotional branding, Marc Gobe notes that "it is the emotional aspect of products and their distribution systems that will be the key difference between consumers' ultimate choice and the price that they will pay." But how do networks (on which the emotional aspects of products are sold, and of which the distribution systems themselves are made) utilize this emotional aspect?

Making this question even more enigmatic is the viewpoint of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, summarized in a question they pose toward the start of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks: "Is there a 'nonhuman' or an 'unhuman' understanding of networks that would challenge us to rethink the theory and practice of networks?" Their goal is to "seek a means of comprehending networks as simultaneously material and immaterial, as simultaneously technical and political, as simultaneously misanthropic and all-too-human."

How do these contradictions become reconciled? What is it about online marketing and networks themselves that allows for an imposition of a human quality while still remaining entirely inhuman? Which do we notice more - the human or the inhuman? Why? And why do we respond in such an enthusiastic manner?

Questions, I suppose, that I will have to settle for myself over Thanksgiving. So much for relaxation.

Taking Back Play

"Sure, reality TV doesn't look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games." So says McKenzie Wark in the book Gamer Theory. The idea is that play was once radical, an option outside of mundane daily work and routines. Today something very different has happened: "While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game, the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it," Wark says.

Within this game, different rules apply than the rules within the world previous to its transformation into gamespace. Here we have "latent destiny - the virtue of right through rule." Likewise, Wark says, "all that is righteous wins; all that wins is righteous." In this context, play is no longer play. Playing is simply a method used to win the game - "it is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity."

So - what's left to do? Take play back. Wark writes that "with the triumph of gamespace, what the gamer as theorist needs is to reconstruct the deleted files on those who thought pure play could be a radical option, who opposed gamespace with their revolutionary playdates." While the military entertainment complex - which took part in constituting this gamespace as reality - would like us to think that gamespace is just as clean and well-ruled as games themselves, this is just a means of control. The way out, as Wark points out, is to "take the blue pill." In other words, "Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid."

Tactical Media, but Whose Tactics?

Axel Bruns argues that citizen journalism (or tactical media) holds a new and important place in the mediasphere, opening up a space for discussion with traditional mainstream media. He says blogs and other forms of this tactical media "have added a second tier of news media that comments on, critiques, and regularly corrects the mainstream news . . ." This has led to journalism as a conversation, rather than as a lecture, Bruns says.

However, he discounts political antagonisms as holding any place in this new form of journalism: "a true 'rule of the people' can only be established through productive debate and deliberation; it cannot be reached through entrenched political antagonism," Bruns writes. Are productive debate and deliberation not precisely a product of antagonism, though? Bruns pinpoints it himself, albeit unknowingly, when he says "sites which do little more than publish content are in danger of becoming mere PR tools for oppositional groups, simply containing press releases for the latest cause."

Bruns also misses a crucial element of this conversation. While he does say that "each time news bloggers and other citizen journalists point to omissions, misrepresentations, or biases in the mainstream media content by contrasting news stories, press releases, and other background information, they use the news media's own tools and resources against it." On the other side of this, however, is that mainstream media sources are also quite adept at taking tactical media stories and recontextualizing them to fit the way that traditional media is covering any given story.

So, while Bruns contends (and he quotes Douglas Rushkoff here) that "'we are heading not towards a toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes, but towards their reinvention in a new, participatory context,'" I would ask how this is possible without antagonism. It seems to me that without antagonism, we wind up with simple echo chambers in which no real change occurs.

Election Day

The New York Times website has an interactive page up today asking users to choose one word to describe their state of mind today - November 4th, 2008 - election day. It has a scrolling word page where you see the words picked move across the page (and you can even pick whose supporters' minds you want to read).

The Numerati

Rob Walker has a review of "The Numerati" in the New York Times today - They've Got Your Number: Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek, categorizes the categorizers into seven chapters: some number crunchers seek to decode us as shoppers, others as voters or patients or even potential terrorists. In all cases, the idea is to gather data, use computers to compile and interpret it, and draw conclusions about how we will behave — or how we might be persuaded to behave. “We turn you into math,” one of his subjects declares. Sometimes the data comes from firms that collect it from public records or subscription lists, or that conduct exhaustive attitudinal surveys, concluding on the basis of whether you own cats or subscribe to gourmet magazines which political “tribe” you belong to, and thus how a campaign should approach you (or not). But the most interesting information comes from us, particularly by way of our online activities. Baker’s savants monitor our collective (if anonymous) Web surfing patterns for “behavioral clues” that, for example, help advertisers decide when to hit us with what pitch.

Technological Fetishism and Online Democracy

Professor Dean writes in the Digital Media and Democracy book that we now have a system of communicative capitalism. She says that instead of being heard, messages are "circulated, reduced to the medium." This reduction results in part from a technological fetishism. We believe that now, more than ever, technology and online contribution equate to democracy and democratic values. Part of this is something (which she mentions in the article and I've mentioned in a previous post) that Slavoj Zizek calls interpassivity. We allow the technological object to act (democratically) for us, and while we feel that we've "done our part," no change actually occurs.

This is backed up, in part, by Clay Shirky's essay, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." In it he says that only a few blogs today are read widely, while a huge number fly under the radar and are rarely visited, regardless of whether or not they have a valuable contribution to make to any number of discussions.

Professor Dean says that "to ontologize the political is to collapse the very symbolic space necessary for politicization, a space between an object and its representation, its ability to stand for something other than itself." This destruction of the symbolic removes real hope for political action online, and is simultaneously happening in other regions of our society as well. In the consumer realm, the symbolic has all but disappeared - instead of actual political action, we buy "fair trade" coffee and invest in products which are political for us. Likewise, "by sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political."

All hope is not lost, however. While thought like this seems to indicate that any entry onto the web should come with the disclaimer "abandon all hope, etc etc," it does not mean that things cannot change. If we can stop the fetish surrounding technology and break away from the idea that passively "acting" online is akin to political action, then real political action becomes a reality once again. As Professor Dean puts it, "politics in the sense of working to change current conditions may well require breaking with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism."