What has it been, an hour or so or so, since I outlined some of the claims about new media that are circulating in the blogosphere?

(Everytime I use that word - blogosphere - I can’t help but feel a little guilty. I know Swarming Media blogs on wanting to off the word, but I haven’t had a chance to read that entry yet. I do get a sense, though, that the most popular of the terms used to describe blogs, social networking sites, user-generated content, etc. are quite imperfect, sacrificing the diversities of the Web for the simplicity of catch-alls.)

It has only been an hour or so, yes : well, perhaps three, perhaps six before this is posted : but I want to spend some time considering the last claim about surveillance.

From that entry : 4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

Nathan @ Swarming Media has written on vision & the panopticon in two entries at his blog. The two - Seeing and Being Seen & The New Self-Regulating Subject - fit together rather coherently. Hopefully, I can sum them up here without doing significant damage to Nathan’s writing.

(Note to the reader : Yup, right now, I rely heavily on Swarming Media : that’s because that blog is so damn good.)

It seems to me that the heart of Swarming Media’s take on panopticism is articulated in “The New Self-Regulating Subject.”

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

The components of this statement recur in “Seeing & Being Seen” : distribution (& decentralization) of the panopticon; “identity traces,” which are left in other users’ (conceptualized both as a multitude of others & an other / swarm of the multitude) fields of visibility; & participation in a mass regulation of others’ identity traces. The sum of these components is put succinctly in another Swarming Media entry:

If the disciplinary society was defined by the controlling individual / controlled mass duality, then this new control society is defined by the reversal of that duality: the controlling mass / controlled individual.

It occurs to me that this entry might read like a Very Short Introduction to swarmingmedia.com. So I’ll try to move on. But before I do, one final thought on the imagery of this version of surveillance, especially that of prisoners-with-binoculars. What’s clever about this image is that it accounts for the appropriation of the means of surveillance to (re)view the activities of those authority figures who like to hang around the panopticon. You know, the ones who used to do all the watching. At the same time, it accounts for the decentralization & multiplication of fields of visibility, which makes possible the “controlling masses.”

If this reading of Web panopticon is correct, then efforts to enforce centralized surveillance & control on the Web is regressive; it is as if policy-makers interested in controling Web use are relying on architectural designs ill-suited for the Web.  (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link on McCain’s proposal to create a national database of illegal images.)

Professor James Doyle of Duke University observes something happening in the transformation from Bentham’s model to the one outlined by Nathan. Indeed, Doyle might call this transformation a slippage; not that power decreases, but that our capacity to see power as power diminishes when the panopticon becomes decentralized.

If the first conclusion of this study is that the state may actually have more power than the digerati believe, the second conclusion is that the attractiveness of technical solutions stems not simply from the fact that they work, but that they apparently elide the question of power — both private and public — in the first place. The technology appears to be “just the way things are”; its origins are concealed, whether those origins lie in state-sponsored scheme or market-structured order, and its effects are obscured because it is hard to imagine the alternative. Above all, technical solutions are less contentious; we think of a legal regime as coercing, and a technological regime as merely shaping — or even actively facilitating — our choices.

Technological solutions : think filtering software, site “ratings,” etc : (this article dates from 1997) : does not signal the end of power & the liberation of the end-user, free to choose which privacy & security devices to use. It involves something more complex : the “hardwiring” of power - sometimes state power - directly into the “technologies of freedom.”

Ten years later, it seems that Swarming Media contributes an update to Doyle’s work. Doyle was largely concerned with the seepage of the state into technology; Nathan might be arguing that the Panopticon has seeped into the design of this new Web . Seeped, I say, because the architecture has changed, but the effects seem to be more or less the same.

I mean, who needs John McCain, ISP surveillance, & messy debates about privacy, what constitutes obscenity, & the reality of digital depictions of bodies when volunteerism - code or some Net-savvy boys - will do the work for you.

EP
PS : I’m not as down on visibility as I sound. I swear. I’ll get to that & the pleasures of visibility some other day.

I have surveillance on my mind; my mind is a mess.

What I mean is that I’m considering : ruminating on, you know? : competing claims & competing (stories about) realities of surveillance & technology : a few of which come from some very articulate bloggers. What I mean is that I have a handful of knotted hyperlinks & a short stack of books, footnoted, in a small room. Not to mention an empty blog in which I can try to talk to myself about this.

(Familiar with the White Stripes’ ditty “Little Room”? It occurs to me that these new Web technologies are helping us solve the timeless dilemma Jack White poses in that song;

“Well you’re in your little room /and you’re working on something good /but if it’s really good /you’re gonna need a bigger room /and when you’re in the bigger room /you might not know what to do /you might have to think of / how you got started sitting in your little room.”

Here I am, in a small cluttered room, feeling a little squashed by the stack of articles at my feet, the print&bound editions books at my elbows. But - ah! - I found out about RSS feeds, & RSS readers, & my del.icio.us - & things are beginning to clear up. I may never have to leave this little room after all. But all this is beside the point.)

: COMPETING CLAIMS :

My knowledge & understanding of the claims being made about social import of user-generated content is partial, in more than one sense of the word. (1) I can’t claim “ethnographic authority” in the composition of these claims; I have been reading blogs & blogging for a little over a month now. & (2) I’m involved in a sociology department that emphasizes power-reflexive methods; such reflexiveness will, you can probably guess, position me on a particular half of the continuum of optimism/pessimism about the social uses & effects of the Web.

That said, the competing claims, as I see them this afternoon, go a little something like this.

(1) Web 2.0 democratizes public discourse.

This is the most optimistic narrative about Web 2.0. The basis for this optimism is the explosion of access to &, following from that, participation in the media. It is this understanding of new media that Time magazine expressed when it named “You.” its Person of the Year; You, the magazine claimed, were busy during 2006 “seizing the reins of the global media,” “founding and framing the new digital democracy,” and “working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

(2) The democratization of the media democratizes democracy.

Tiara.org cleverly points out that Americans don’t live in a direct democracy, so this claim really means that “political participation” increases in “meaningful ways.”

Evidence? :

• Jennifer Earl, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that the Web both facilitates offline protest & replaces it, becoming a venue of activism. (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link.)
• Politicians might just be more afraid of bloggers than they are of Catholics!
  
• The accessibility of technologies of surveillance allows for the surveillance of authority.

There are smart & important discussions of the types of democracy that emerge from the Web : see, for example: tiara.org’s skepticism & Swarming Media’s hyper-democracy. Specifically, though, the final claim about surveillance is what interests me most. It’s at this point that I notice the turn from optimism to pessimism.

(3) Democratic surveillance is no democracy at all.

In a previous post, I cite William G. Staples thoughts on this. They’re worth repeating here, since they’re exemplary.

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

Of course, simply because access to surveillant technologies increases does not mean that the uses of it are equalized. Again, tiara.org’s blog is informative; the promise, she writes, of Web 2.0 to provide filtered, personalized content is tethered to “behavioral marketing” practices. (In my imagination, my meandering entry on Cymfony & data mining buttresses tiara.org’s concise critique of this marketing strategy.)

This kind of surveillance seems benign - a perfection, of sorts, of marketing techniques that we’ve already accepted; Staples, in fact, refers to it as “soft” surveillance. This doesn’t signal the end of “harder” forms of surveillance; surveillance that seeks to uncover deviance & wrong-doing continues. &, given the ambiguities about standards of decency & obscenity & given the breakdown of a strict difference between real & fantasy : what constitutes real, digital child pornography, for example? : & given the diversification & saturation of technologies, these forms of surveillance frequently expand their “field of visibility” in order to increase their efficiency.

(4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

According to Swarming Media, participatory media generates a new, self-regulated self.

According to me, a critique of contemporary surveillance must account for the pleasures derived from mass participation in it.

& it’s on this : the pleasures of surveillance : that I’ll conclude this entry : GPS shoes make people findable : because find-ability is safe-ability : the dream of a perfect visible :

EP