Mi Moleskine

Transmediale award 2010- On geotagged Youtube videos on Google Earth

The Fantasy of Participation

“Not only are people accustomed to putting their thoughts online but also in so doing they believe their thoughts and ideas are registering – write and tell me what you think! Contributing to the infostream, we might say, has a subjective registration effect. One believes that it matters, that it contributes, that it means something. Precisely because of this registration effect, people believe that their contribution to circulating content is a kind of communicative action. They believe that they are active, maybe even that they are making a difference simply by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition or commenting on a blog. Zizek describes this kind of false activity with the term “interpassivity.” When we are interpassive, something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead. Zizek explains, “you think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive …” (1997: 21). The frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, to prevent something from really happening. This suggests to me the way activity on the Net, frantic contributing and content circulation, may well involve a profound passivity, one that is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless.” (Jodi Dean)

“ The Social Web is free to use but the middleman is paid with our data. We are willing give up our privacy or at least our anonymity for convenience and “free services.” Which price do we put on the psychological and political implications of this loss of privacy?

— Trebor Scholz

“ Ideology: the play of ideas in the silence of technology.

— Regis Debray, Media Manifiestos

The Homophily of Networks

In a networked world, people connect to people like themselves. What flows across the network flows through edges of similarity. The ability to connect to others like us allows us to flow information across space and time in impressively new ways, but there’s also a downside. Prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our networks. In a world of networked media, it’s easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. Information can and does flow in ways that create and reinforce social divides. Democratic philosophy depends on shared informational structures, but the combination of self-segmentation and networked information flow means that we lose the common rhetorical ground through which we can converse […] In an era of networked media, we need to recognize that networks are homophilous and operate accordingly. Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. (Donah Boyd, Streams of Content, Limited Attention).

Exploit 2.0

“ Machines, the reality constructed by capitalism, are not phantasms of modernity after which life can run unscathed – they are, on the contrary, the concrete forms according to which reality organizes itself, and the material connections within which subjectivity is produced. Ordo et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum.

— Antonio Negri

The Real Internet

“The Real of the internet is the circulatory movement of drive — the repeated making, uploading, sampling, the constant pulverization that occurs as movement on the internet doubles itself, becoming itself and its record or trace — effected by symbolic efficiency as loss. The movement from link to link, the forwarding and storing and commenting, the contributing without expectation of response but in hope of further movement (why else count page views?) is circulation for its own sake. Drive’s circulation forms a loop. The empty space within it, then, is not the result of the loss of something that was there before and now is missing. The drive of the internet is not around the missing Master signifier (which is foreclosed rather than missing). Instead, it is the inside of the loop, the space of nothing that the loop makes appear. Indeed, this endless loop that persists for its own sake is the difference that makes a difference between so-called old and new media. Old media sought to deliver messages. New media just circulates. Understanding this circulation via drive enables us to understand how it is that we are captured in its loop, how the loop ensnares. First, we enjoy failure. That is to say, insofar as the aim of the drive is not to reach its goal but to enjoy, we enjoy our endless circulation, our repetitive loop. We cannot know certainly; we cannot know adequately. But we can mobilize this loss, googling, checking Wikipedia, mistrusting it immediately, losing track of what we doing, going somewhere else. We are captured because we enjoy.” Jodi Dean.

“ Tiny controls, consistently enforced, are enough to direct very large animals

— Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

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Luciano Floridi on the 4th Revolution: New technology has changed our relationship to one another and to the world. This calls for a shake up in philosophy.