Michael Agger at Slate has offered an interesting prediction about 2009: Google and Facebook will not be playing all that nice. Google vs. Facebook will be fought on the terrain of the socius(which means “ally” or “comrade”), as alluded to in the title of this here post. The world “socius” is Latinate root for social and thus society but I use here because of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In their incredible Anti-Oedipus, they link the socius to the production of the flows of desire.
Now this is interesting because as Agger notes, Google and Facebook are fighting to get to develop and monetize “portable social data.”
Think of an activity you do on the Web in a solitary way, and then imagine how that activity would be better if the site knew about the other people that you care about. I read the New York Times every day. In Glazer’s model, the Times would show me what articles my friends have read or give me a list of articles where they’ve left comments. That’s kind of a cool idea, and one that the Times is trying to pull off with its Times People feature. Glazer believes that everything on the Web is better if it’s social. Checking out a stock? It would be nice to read chatter from other potential investors. Baking a cake? Look at advice from those who have already tried the recipe. Tempted by a new restaurant? See if your foodie friends have eaten there already. The reason we don’t do these things now is that the “barriers to social are too high.” It’s still too annoying to fill out all of those registration forms, and there’s no universal way to manage your online identity and networks of friends. Google and its partners want to collapse the barriers to social and give each and every one of us an entourage.
Now on this very blog, I talked about Facebook’s “Connect” initiative, which has not caused any kind of stir on the Internets. But Google countered with something very similar called “Friend Connect,” which has also suffered the same fate. Here’s how Agger characterizes it:
This may seem like an arcane, technical struggle, but I believe that a year from now, you are actually going to care who owns your social network. A lot of Facebook is flirting, photo sharing, and inane status lines, but we are also telling it how much we value certain people. I want to hear less about this person. I’m married to this person. Please block this person from ever contacting me in any way ever again. We are sorting out the entourage, or, to put it in a more utilitarian way, we are deciding which people are worthy sources of information.
So why can Facebook and Google or any other company “bank” on your need to socialize? According to Glazer of Google,
“People are inherently social—killer user habits are built around connecting to other people.” Killer user habits also make great marketing and advertising platforms.
So what’s the point?:
The hope is that as Google and Facebook compete, we are fitfully making our way toward the benefits of portable social data, a sort of command center for our online self. The advocates of this openness discuss such sci-fi goodies as geolocation and “ambient controls” that would let us decide, like a dimmer switch, how much social information we want to receive. (If you need to get something done, change the setting to “Hermit.”) Keeping a close eye on your online identity might feel burdensome, like putting on a second set of clothes, but consider how much nicer it will be to manage how you look, rather than letting some algorithm do it for you
Modulating informational selves within a sea of other selves? Sounds Deleuzian indeed…
The latest installment of the danyelliott podcast:
Could it be a bitter cranky Saturday at the danyelliott Castle? Ha! Elliott goes ape shit over Twitter flirts, and his Facebook fiasco. Danyel’s not feelin’ Obama’s swearing-in snafu and people mistakin’ kindness for weakness. Throw in Special Ed. Wale. Hiero. Shirea L. Carroll. Twitter’s djbigdaddy, and Solange Knowles. And it’s all just another week in the life of danyelliott. Thanks, as always, to Sam Han for riding shotgun.
Yesterday, we not only witnessed the inauguration of Barack H. Obama (did anyone find that “H” to be rather conspicuous-sounding and bizarre also?) but also perhaps (to the satisfaction of the right-wing of the US) the largest, though all-too-temporary collective anti-capitalist action.
What am I talking about?
According to the NY Times, more people attempted to stream online video coverage of the inauguration than ever, setting records for Internet traffic. Some people’s Internet was too spotty to even watch successfully.
When people are checking for election results or the score for a big game, they tend to produce smaller bursts of traffic spread out over several hours. On Tuesday, everyone wanted to watch video, and that produced bulky streams of data traveling from media companies’ data centers out to people at work and in their homes.
Here are some stats.
Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.
Engadget reports that South Korean scientists(biggups to the motherland)have made some breakthrough regarding graphene for electronic device use. What’s graphene? I didn’t know either. I figured it was close to graphite and come to find out, it is. It is a kind of weirdo sheet made up of carbon but is extremely bendable and has potential to be super-conductive. The future of gizmos is tactility.
Ever since PCs and then mobile phones became pretty much the norm, we have kind of under though the rather stark dichotomy by which these devices are described in terms of tactility–hardware and software. Hardware is the outside. Software is the programs and applications. Pretty simple. But why does hardware need to be “hard”? Why can’t we have play-dough like mobile devices? It is this kind of rethinking of hardware that has so many people who follow mobile devices so excited. We have already seen companies take the “tactual turn” with the iPhone, tablet PCs, and the MacBook’s new trackpad (in lieu of the touchpad mouse) among other things.
Why this is particularly interesting for me is that there have been debates in media and social theory regarding exactly what kind of “epoch” we are in. On the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman has called what we have “liquid modernity” dominated by “software capitalism.” On the other hand, Friedrich Kittler has declared “there is no software.”
Ummmmm, so maybe we can split the difference with graphene? Flexiware?
Whattup folks! A while back I had floated (rather Tweeted) the idea of a podcast to Elliott Wilson (formerly Editor-in-Chief of XXL magazine) and Danyel Smith (Editor-in-Chief of Vibe magazine). After a few things (like a long email I sent them about their first podcast)…now I’m their engineer/producer! (Lesson: Twitter is that FIRE. Hit me on there by clicking on the Twitter logo on the right.)
Anyway, I’m mad excited about the future of this. It is sorely needed I think in the online mediascape(Appadurai) of hip hop; and also desperately needed by me because I can’t keep doing the academic thing without an outlet for my creative side. This opportunity came out of left field but man, I’m pretty happy it did. Biggups to Elliott and Danyel!
It is for the hip hop heads but if you aren’t one but want to listen to two of the best journalists for a little of an hour, I think it doesn’t get much better. Plus, they’re married. That’s pretty amazing.
If you’ve been paying attention to any debates in the world of “theory” in the last decade or so, then you are probably aware of Jacques Derrida’s use of the term “spectre.” He takes it from the very famous first few lines of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto but others have frequently cited it (Slavoj Zizek does so at the top of his The Ticklish Subject). Anyway, most people believed Derrida to be just using it and also the concept of “haunting” as metaphor. Perhaps the most influential philosopher of the second-half of the 20th century talking about ghosts, actual ghosts? Pshaw.
I was always of the inclination to believe Derrida. And we can rely on the Department of Defense, who gave us the beginnings of what we call the Internet today, is also leading in proving Derrida right. Well, not exactly. It’s kind of an unintended consequence.
The announcement, from the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, requests “a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with virtual renditions of deployed Service Members.” The application must “produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families … using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying ‘I love you’, or ‘I miss you’, or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ “
For all you normal, bourgeois-value having people, this may seen a bit creepy. But here’s the rationale:
The military’s proposal blends the attachment of sentiment with the detachment of technology. It seeks to “allow a child to receive comfort from being able to have simple, virtual conversations” with a parent and “to help families (especially, children) cope with deployments by providing a means to have simple verbal interactions with loved ones for re-assurance, support, affection, and generic discussion.” Affection, support, reassurance, comfort. These are basic needs. But the point of the program is to separate the fulfillment of these needs from the person who normally delivers them—in short, to disembody your loved one.
Now I’m not sure about all this disembodiment-talk regarding real-time video. I think the author here has a bit of an older way of defining what “embodied” is, but still I understand the sentiment.
Why is this interesting? Well, beyond the ghost part, I think it really kind of shows us that technomedia was never about “communication” as in the transferal of meaning. In fact, as we see with this example, it’s about affect. Something that exists outside of the realm of some kind of “communication” model that so much of Internet criticism still holds on to. Even stuff on “Web 2.0″ is about increased “interactivity.”
I’m glad that more and more folks are ditching that language for something else. Slate may not be 100% right on this but they are definitely on the right track.
I’m way late on this but Virginia Heffernan of The Medium blog ofthe New York Times has raised great issues regarding digital content and new forms of dissemination and distribution that will undoubtedly change the nature of content.
Heffernan makes three points about reactions to the supposed irrelevance of traditional media.
…we insist that content is king. If a story, image, film or report is compelling enough — a candid photo of Malia Obama, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the columns of Maureen Dowd — it will translate into pixels. It will flourish on any platform, dominate every sport. By this logic, creators, producers, artists and journalists should attend only to producing great work and leave the current changes in the distribution and display of information to nerds in suits.
We say that classic 20th-century forms like Hollywood movies and glossy magazines breed natural digital extensions. A videogame can be spun out of “Gossip Girl.” Social networks can coalesce around publications like The Economist or Vogue. Maybe these secondary media will draw people to the main event or maybe — we have been reluctant to notice — they will be the main event themselves.
We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms.
She really throws the gauntlet down.
People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store (it will soon exist!).
