Hi Rob (and all), Along the same lines, an excerpt from this [ http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf ]:
++++++++++++++++++++ Institutional Production of the "Interactive Subject" The problem is, not all forms of web 2.0 "interactivity" are inherently "tactical." Put another way, mere "use" does not automatically constitute "resistance." Is using off-the-shelf corporate software to create a "unique/personal" MySpace page a way of subverting the institutions of mass media production, or is it simply one more example of these institutions using the myth of "originality" to assimilate and amass a demographic market of "unique" individuals? Artists who use these templates have to be particularly wily if they hope to keep from being assimilated and rendered "tactically" impotent. How do you hack/resist a platform that already allows (indeed, invites) you to customize it? Either we have arrived at an open source utopia and we simply need to keep using these social networking tools appreciatively in the ways that they afford; or the agency of our radical "resistance" has been rendered irrelevant because the corporations have decided to let the people eat cake (provided we eat their particular brand of interactive cake). The agency that de Certeau's consumer enacted to tactically reassemble the oneto-many media broadcasted to her in 1980 is being increasingly usurped by institutionally recommended (and protocologically enforced) modes of interactive behavior. Once the consumer mistakes these institutional "suggestions" for the exercises of her own tactical agency, she fails to exercise that actual agency. With so many "customizable options" available, how can she "resist?"[1] In a fleeting moment of insight, Billy Joel sings, "I got remote control and a color TV / I don't change channels so they must change me." The corollary may actually be more accurate. [2] The more I change channels, the more they change me. I sacrifice my "resistant" agency at the altar of trivial difference. The danger of MySpace and YouTube is not the threat that they may wind up archiving and owning all the "content" I produce, or that they are currently getting rich off the content I produce, but that they control the parameters within which I produce "my original" content. "Production" turns out to be an amorphous term. It begs the question "production of what?" Now that "consumers" have become "content producers," we should be asking ourselves, Who are the meta-producers? Who produces the contexts surrounding "creative" prosumer production? Who produces the tools that suggest the proper "way" in which amateur's are to produce? These meta-producers are no longer producing "content." Or rather, their "content" is the production of an "interactive" human subject -- a subject who feels autonomous, empowered, and creative; but who may have difficulty enacting any pragmatic agency. This transition from spectacularized consumption to spectacularized production is insidious. The placebo effect of web 2.0 "empowerment" is at least as problematic as the original one-to-many TV effect of disenfranchisement. At least in 1980 there was a suspicion that something needed to be resisted. +++++++++++++++ [1] A cynical extreme of this position was expressed by Julian Stallabras in 2003: "It can hardly be expected that people crippled in other walks of life by mass-media trivialisation and the instrumentality of work will be able to slough off such ingrained influences and so realise rational discourse online." (Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (London: Tate Pub., 2003), 67.) I'm not sure that "rational online discourse" is necessarily the ideal goal, but his point is duly noted. Spurse co-founder Iain Kerr says that every time he goes on a derive, he always winds up at a book store. His revolutionary epiphany: he has been conditioned to buy books. [2] "[Interaction] corresponds to a networked model of control... Many today say that new media technologies are ushering in a new era of enhanced freedom and that technologies of control are waning. We say, on the contrary, that double the communication leads to double the control." (Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 124). Put more acidically, "Since democracy means having more consumer choices, and information technology will vastly increase the power of our channel changers, hey, presto! More democracy!" (Thomas Frank, "The New Gilded Age," Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997), 28). > > On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 5:04 PM, anniea <[email protected]> wrote: >> (ENG)* Collaboration* on and via the Internet has been a hot topic for >> some time. Now everyone tends to see the Net more as a space for >> conservative individual self-representation and mediation. I wonder >about > > this. What makes it so difficult? Why doesn't, does it work? Why are >> people >> less interested?>> >>> Any thoughts on this from you netbehaviourists? >>> If yes, thanks a lot in advance! > >There's more collaboration than ever before, but it's with Facebook and >Twitter rather than with other human beings. This looks more socialised >than web 1.0 because the machinery is hidden behind a slick veneer. But so >are the people... > >The barriers to entry of the old email-and-homepages net art era are easy >to paint as having been more exclusive than web 2.0's easy sign-up. This >doesn't explain why there's less collaboration, though, you'd think it >should be the opposite. > >I think that having to be able to deal with *people* enough to find out >how to code html, get some space on a server, and ftp a file or set up an >email client, or locate a mailing list and subscribe, was more socialising >than just having Facebook template up the same information about you as >about everyone else. You had to be able to find and communicate with >*people* who knew about the technology, and you this led to a shared body >of technical and social experience. Having tasks that everyone had to do >meant that everyone had to start out by collaborate on them. With that >intital collaboration established, you could continue from there. > >Second Life is an interesting halfway house between web 1.0 / web 2.0. >It's reasonably simple to log in as a porn-star-look-alike, but much harder >to build things. Eventually a Facebook-style sausage machine will emerge >that means you don't have to struggle productively with the medium, you can >just be cool like everyone else instantly. And the people who use it will >laugh at the old prim hackers and their ignorant, restrictive ways. > >Web 2.0 is a race to the bottom for individualism. Everyone is expressing >their recognisably individual selves (sic) in a global context. The >pressure to conform is much greater than just for an immediate social group >(even where that is the limit of someone's personal Facebook interaction). >When the pressure to conform requires that you choose reified, consumable >signifiers of "individuality", or even that you package any actual >individuality into an anti-individualistic presentational schema, it >becomes much harder to laugh like all the other cool kids at the twinkly >star backgrounds on old homepages. At least there were figure and ground >relations then. There aren't any on Facebook. > >There's not enough distance between technology and society any more for >art computing or net art to continue as before, therefore there are not the >tasks to collaborate on. We need to move from collapsing that distance to >recreating it, or to problematising the closeness, or to finding a new >distance where it now exists. We'll need to collaborate on that. > >- Rob. >_______________________________________________ >NetBehaviour mailing list >[email protected] >http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
