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

It has only been a few days since I last posted, but my scaredy-cat city has gone berserk. This time, though, we’ve managed to keep the lunacy in the newspapers. Yes, this time, we color our fears with smudges of printed ink, rather than with that peculiar Mooninite glow.

What the heck am I talking about?

T H I S :
2.21.2007 : The Boston Phoenix : Facing off over Facebook : Who’s Looking at You, Kid?
2.23.2007 : The Boston Globe : Beware the land minds in new media
2.25.2007 : The Boston Globe : Managing your online persona becomes a key career skill

Consider yourself warned, I guess : watch your back, etc : because someone’s coming for you.

It seem to me that this coverage represents something of a backlash to the popularity of Web technologies - FaceBook & MySpace, in particular. More than that, though, it seems to signal a backlash to the indifference Web users have about the ways that the information : their online personas, etc : can be accessed, used, & used to incriminate them.

I’m reminded of Jackie Orr’s genealogy of panic disorder, in which the sociologist pays attention to the production of panic during the Cold War. No doubt Orr’s analysis is of a situation more dire : maybe, closer to our Y2003 duct-tape panic : than this current panic web . . . s i t u a t i o n we’ve got our selves into, but that doesn’t disqualify the comparison.

I don’t have my copy of Orr’s book around : nope, it’s in Minnesota : but my memory of her chapter on the Cold War, “‘Keep Calm’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient” goes something like this : armed with only the meager technologies of the media & real bombs, dropped on some simulated Anytown, U . S . A., our politicians & military men waged a battle for the our psyche, which was : most of the time : politically indifferent to mushroom clouds & other doomsday imagery. During a cold War, this indifference was a liability . . . was evidence that the threat-from-Out-There wasn’t understood; so through all sorts of scare-tactics, the federal government attempted to mold a bold, new citizen : prepared for the worst-case-scenario, but, through the processes of preparation, fixated on the severity of the scenario.

Now, while I acknowledge the gap in severity : a bad resume ain’t nothing like a mushroom could : it’s time to bring this back to the Web.

It seems that we have an indifferent population, that’ll say what it thinks & mean what it says & will give out all sorts of incriminating evidence online, no matter the consequences. & this population isn’t panicking, isn’t holding back, isn’t, to paraphrase one of the classics, bothering all that much with the presentation of the online self in their everyday, online lives. Perhaps, as the two Boston Globe articles suggest, this is a population that wants to live with (not in) a past : that doesn’t want to play some game of cultural amnesia, forgetting all the messy loose ends.

So if we need some order, if we need to (re)consolidate the voices that matter, why not watch them where it hurts : make moves on their attempts to acquire an education (see the Phoenix article) & a job.

& so it goes, so it goes : . . .

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are — and what they are doing to mess up their resume? Follow the cybertrail.

EP

I was raised in house on a “half-mile stretch of narrow road in the shadow of the Shawangunk Ridge,” where “our past, our present and our future collide and struggle to somehow co-exist.” Today, no matter the cul-de-sacs, no matter the acres of (zoned) sub-divisions, landing hi-speed Internet requires persistence. You need to harangue cable companies : get them to explain; inevitably, though, we’re told that the necessary equipment - the cables or whatever - stop running a half-mile from the home, in either directions. It’s up-hill both ways, or something like that.

In the late ’90s, no one missed hi-speed Internet because most of us hadn’t yet been exposed to it. In the late ’90s, from the fringes of most meaningful, high school cliques, I took to the Web, putting up crappy pages & engaging in non-sense debates in my local newspaper’s forum.

Yes, before I had landed my first kiss, I’d landed my first url. Both, I’m not afraid to admit, were sloppy as hell. Those old geocities site addresses invoked ancient architecture; my first web page was housed in Geocitie’s “Colosseum.”

In the late ’90s, my peers were emailing & instant messaging, but they were certainly not forging robust online identities. But then the Web changed. Many of us moved into dorms at colleges, learned what an Ethernet cord was, learned we didn’t have to dial-up, & learned that none of us had to contribute to what must have been an outlandish-electricity bill. We kept our computers on 24/7.

More importantly, whenever our computers were on, AIM was on. Profiles became personal ad-space for the witty & profound. Away messages proved one of two things : you had somewhere to be or you were groping for a slogan that made it sound like you had somewhere to be.

From the fringes from all meaningful social cliques, I groped for slogans that made it sound like I had somewhere better to be. (But then the Web changed.) My one-or-two line away messages - quotable quotes, of sorts - earned me a fan-club of AIM nobodies. Not of automated, virus-ridden messages … those came later, but of AIM buddies I neither knew nor knew were looking. One day, one of them messaged me, complimenting my away messages & letting me know that s/he had friends who also kept me on their buddy list just to read my aways.

So there was an audience; sometimes anonymous, sometimes not. (Before the RIAA infiltrated file-sharing networks & freaked university ITS’s out, students who shared the densest & most eccentric mixes of music were minor-celebrities; if you ran into one, you’d be genuinely excited & refer to them by their network computer name.) &, by offering their attention, these audiences could elevate an online contribution to something greater than the mundaneness from which it emerged. (Or, at least, that’s where my away messages came from.)

In other words, when the Web changed, it was time for popular kids to ransack the fringe’s bandwidth.

I woke up this morning, to read again about the day the Web changed. This time, the narrative came at from me a New York Magazine feature “Say Anything.” (Tiara.org directed her readers, including this one, to that link.)

“Say Anything” is an eight (web)page sojourn through the generational gap between the prophets & junkies of Web 2.0 & their parents. In what might be the most profound passage of the feature, the latter - the parents, hand-wringers, ITS administrators, & surveillance studies professors - are the insane ones.

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

This is an eloquent & compelling defense of our Web habits. Surveillance is nothing new. Orwell, we know, sensed 1984 in 1949. & it was in 1965 that Bob Dylan warned that the “phone’s tapped anyway.”

(Then again, it’s been 42 years since he warned us that the vandals took all the handles & that hasn’t come to pass…)

Of course, this defense (or excuse?) for Web habits, as well as cultural attitudes about them, ignores, as both tiara.org & Kenneth Rufo point out, the context in which : who? teenagers : FaceBook, MySpace, & YouTube : politicians : market researchers : off privacy.

This is not to say that to put an address or name or image online is only naive or is really that much more exposing than the pieces of us we leave (or have taken from us) during our day-to-day.

It is to say that this article, as entertaining as it might & as littered with hip-looking teenagers & 20-somethings as it might be &, especially in its discussion of the changing face(s) of fame, as profound as it might be, ignores the efforts of a whole lot of political, social, technological, & corporate forces to develop the webscape of privacy.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound(?)

A final thought. If you read the New York Magazine article pay attention to how “old” ways of doing gender creep into this story. See, especially : the (now) familiar story about the sex tape : in this article, at least, always released by a man : who, apparently, has nothing to lose in exposing how he performs sex : to the detriment - or gain, as the case may be - of a woman. It’s not new, nor surprising, but it’s there. Just another “symbolic edifice … as structuring principle” (to again quote Kenneth Rufo) that points us to the intensity & expense at which the privacy of some, & not others, erodes.

EP

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.

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