This week, Boston gave up on the charade it calls Winter ’06-’07.  But I do not feel betrayed,   even if our collective conscious demands boots and wool accessories : I swear I saw the winter fashion out yesterday, though the thermometer read balmy! : even if our inner curmudgeons, all clam-chowder and dirty New England looks, still hallucinate slush and muck.

Today, I ran.  (It was a pleasant run.  Thanks for asking!)  At the end of the run, I walked through the alley between my apartment and another.  The walking was to let my legs recover, but it allowed me to take in the spread of graffiti-covered brick on the side of my building.  The wall presents nothing major, nothing that impressive, but I noticed that the graffiti starts slowly.  As you walk into the alley, leaving the busy street, you notice a few tags on the wall.  But it isn’t until you come to a small crevice, produced by a wall of brick that juts out from the building, that you find the painted words piled on top of each other.

The jutting break, which only peaks a foot or so from the building, isn’t enough to hide the graffiti artist from a passerby, but it is enough to provide a cover and to obscure the vision of a curious pedestrian or commuter. 

I thought about that during my walk.  I don’t know who the graffiti artists’ audiences are.  I don’t know how they matter either.  Does what the wall holds before s/he gets there effect the art?  If they’re hiding out behind crevices, what kind of pressure of passing gazes do they feel?  Are their hands shakey?

Or is it that a tag is a tag is a tag […] objectively, almost, if I could use that word.

And here, I am, thinking about writing on the wall.  Wishing that writing in a blog was a little easier.  I don’t know for whom I’m writing and how they matter.  If I wrote for myself, this blog would make a little less sense.  So there is someone, are some bodies out there, and I’m addressing you.

 This is important to me because I have been thinking about my dissertation.  Well, I haven’t really been thinking about “my dissertation,” but the questions and research sites that might help me produce it.

I’ve been thinking about lurkers and all the problems they caused social scientists when they made their way to the Web.  A good portion of early sociological Web research was devoted to proving that the Web was a valid field site.  One strategy to accomplish that was to claim that Web communities were real communities.  Lurkers posed a problem because they frolicked at the virtual border of those communities, making the definition of a member of it considerably more ambiguous than a researcher might like. 

 Now, though, few talk about lurkers.  This is partially because online communities are so 1990.  They remain, of course, but social networking has largely replaced them.  I’m not sure if lurkers have a significant role in how researchers conceptualize participation at FaceBook or MySpace, but what I think is more interesting is that in other Web 2.0 sites – blogs, especially – the lurker (1) transforms into a reader or audience member  and (2) becomes a critical participant in how this Web activity is defined.  Whereas lurkers were annoying, but accepted, participants in web communities and usenet groups, the number of readers … or the size of one’s audience (which is different from the number of links one has received or the number of comments one’s blog entries generate) is now one of the most important ways that we filter Web content.  “Most popular” videos or images are typically those viewed or downloaded the most often.  Readership is one measure of the authority of a blog.

The online audience might constitute a new, panoptic architecture.  But, despite the title of this blog, I’m not ready for that.  Right now, I just wonder who this audience is.  It is not homogonous nor are its members united in their intentions.  We have professors and parents and peers and digital friends and people who see us around campus and anonymous Web users and marketers Googling us.  And many of us know that.  So, I wonder […] how they are reading and why?  And, more importantly, what does their reading do?  And I wonder […] what do the content-generators, the FaceBookers, and MySpacers, and YouTubers, and bloggers do given their presence?

Hmm.  Just hmm.

EP

Turns out, John Edwards’ bloggers will keep their jobs.

So, to recap, Edwards is employing a blogger who once wrote

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

& Virigina elected to office a Democrat & novelist who wrote

“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

Yes, the subject of this entry is a bit … just a bit … hyperbolic. But something’s happening, & hell if I know what it is.

EP

According to GlobalPOV’s write up of a Zogby poll, privacy is for geezers; young net users conceptualize privacy differently than do older net users.

Evidence of this? According to the poll, “Only 19.6 percent of 18-24 year-olds consider their dating profile to be an invasion of their privacy, compared to 54.6 percent of other respondents.”

Are these different definitions of privacy significant? GlobalPOV thinks so, since these young people will one day be effecting policy decisions about web use & privacy.

What I find more notable is the pleasure(s) that young people & Web 2.0 users in general derive from online self-disclosure. A profile on a social networking sites (think MySpace or Facebook) is largely an accumulation of lists: favorite music, books, television shows, music. Blogs may not be as self-indulgent as some media gatekeepers claim, but blogs, especially as they’re situated in the larger blogosphere, generally involve some disclosure of & community building around shared interests & concerns. &, of course, blogs that function as online diaries are bound to mention the brand-name products that bloggers’ everyday rituals involve.

Apparently, there is enough discussion of companies & products in blogs to justify the existence of Cymfony. Cymfony (located in nearby Watertown, MA) is a service that other companies can use to “mine” blogs for discussions of their products & services. In a way, it provides a Nielsen ratings for blogs; a company that uses Cymfony’s services can find out what its “market share” of blogs is, in addition to the “top attributes” bloggers associate with its product or service.

The language that Cymfony & those who celebrate it use is telling. Cymfony’s homepage cheerily proclaims that the company is “harnessing influence 2.0.” A July/August 2005 RFL Communications, Inc. publication opens

“The rise of so-called ‘consumer-generated media’ online (e.g., blogs, chat rooms, etc.) has turned the Internet into something of a giant, free-wheeling focus group–and multiple research providers have cropped up to help marketers tap into the unprecedented wealth of insights.”

It used to be that marketers had to compensate consumers to participate in focus groups. It used to be that marketers had to solicit us for the information about our consumptive habits. Or, they could acquire it surreptitiously - by tracking our Web clicks & searches, for example.

In Everyday Surveillance, Willam G. Staples writes that the secretive-ish going-ons of market research on the Internet

“helps companies ritualize knowledge-gathering activities that build case files out of the smallest, mundane details of our lives, often without us even knowing about them. By increasing the amount of information they have about us, and by decreasing the amount of control we have over that information, private companies shift the balance of power in their favor. W e are thus vulnerable to being ‘targeted’ for marketing campaigns that bring all the ‘intelligence’ gathered about us together with the power of the human sciences in an attempt to shape and influence our choices, behaviors, and social and cultural activities.” (2000:148)

What is peculiar now is that we’re voluntarily giving up the information that marketers want without them asking for it. & we’re enjoying giving it up, finding the experience of creating & managing an online self pleasurable. & we’re creating our online social networks around the very data that market researchers desire. (I won’t go so far as to say that Web 2.0 users are manufacturing their own manipulation (& having a ball doing so), but that does seem like one implication.)

At least Web 2.0 is killing off spying; no one needs stealth strategies if we like publishing & publicizing what they want to know in the first place.

EP