A Battle for the Socius

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…

X-posted at Human Potential