ulises mejias

What follows is NOT intended to be a comprehensive review of the European Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) and the New Network Theory (NNT) conferences, which took place in the Netherlands this June (for good summaries of NNT, see the Masters of Media blog or Lilly Nguyen’s post). Instead, my intention is to briefly discuss some of what I heard in the context of my own research, putting some of those arguments in conversation with my own, so to speak. I apologize in advance to all the authors I’m citing because this selective form of quoting will undoubtedly reduce and perhaps even misrepresent their original arguments. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, correct?

My remarks are organized into three major areas having to do with network metaphors, network metrics, and network critiques.

Networks: Metaphors or models?

My own presentations at the two conferences were framed in the context of the current shift from using the network as a metaphor to describe the social to using it as a model for organizing sociality (putting people into buckets called ‘nodes’). This theme of the limits of the network as metaphor was a recurring one, specially during NNT. Marianne van den Boomen (all authors are from the NNT conference, unless otherwise indicated), for instance, discussed the tensions created when we try to stretch the metaphor of virtual community (a troubled metaphor to begin with) to encompass the kind of social structures engendered by Web 2.0. According to van den Boomen, the very label “Web 2.0″ suggests a metaphor that at least acknowledges the role of software in forming social structures. But the question is whether the network —or any other metaphor, for that matter— can adequately describe social realities. Part of the problem, according to her, is that new media can no longer be associated with a stable ontology. If I understood her correctly, whereas before we had ’stable’ categories of media, new media is too vast and too amorphous, too difficult to pin down. New media is more about the processes of transmediation and transcoding than about a particular kind of tool or industry, so it is problematic to use such an polymorphous concept to metaphorically describe “stable” social and cultural structures. If anything, as Mirko Tobias Schafer (and others) suggested, the network functions more as epistemology than metaphor, blurring the distinction between information infrastructure and social relations. The network, in other words, does not describe or represent our social world, it is how we understand and construct our social realities.

Bernhard Rieder enlisted some of the tensions inherent in working with the network as metaphor or model: Should we describe its structure topologically (in terms of broad ‘areas’ and components) or through thick anthropological description, as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) would have us do? Is the network static or evolving, tangible or abstract? How are network configurations caused? Should network critique be localized, or overarching? I understood Rieder as suggesting that we approach the network as a methodology to explain the social, not as an ontology to take certain forms of sociality for granted. The network as question, not as answer, in other words.

Network metrics: Quantifying the social?

But is the methodology that the network suggests biased (dare I say, corrupted) by a form of scientism that subordinates the kinds of questions we allow ourselves to ask of the network to the kinds of answers we can, quite literally, compute? What I see in this latest ’social turn’ of media is a propensity to let the computational functions that the code can perform define the nature of the social functions we can perform. Social is what code does. In the Web 2.0 rush to innovate, to re-invent sociality with code, there is no room for asking what aspects of sociality to formalize, and how much.

Perhaps, as Noortje Marres suggested, the problem began when ANT 1.0, which started as a way to explain technosocial systems, became a bit arrogant and re-imagined itself as ANT 2.0, capable of explaining anything and everything. Yes, as Valdis Krebs stated, the network as method allows us to map and measure what was formerly invisible, and this data may indeed tell us something new about the way we perform our sociality. But from there it is a slippery slope to thinking that sociality can be quantified and reduced to network functions.

The kind of network logic that Giovanni Boniolo (ECAP) is in the process of formulating describes the relation between nodes in terms of logical propositions. Relations between elements in a database can be expressed through these logic statements, allowing us to map the network through logical operations. This form of network quantification is meant for application in the natural sciences, but how long before such methods become the research standards in the social sciences? Aren’t the algorithms embedded in the code of social media already the precursors of this reductive logic?

Moreover, behind the social markup schemes that Alan Liu proposed to calculate or quantify the social character of networks is the belief, shared by Warren Sack and others, that new forms of object-oriented democracies or publics are not only possible, but desirable. After all, as Noshir Contractor suggested, it’s all about relational metadata: “it’s not who you know, but what who you know knows.” Being is subordinated or reduced to informational value. What will democracies and publics look like under such models of efficiency?

Towards a critical theory of networks

According to Jeroen van den Hoven (ECAP), technology —by virtue of its affordances— presents us with a form of epistemic enslavement: deferment to the authority of the system. Epistemic enslavement in networks takes the form of what I call nodocentrism: nodes are capable of knowing only other nodes. As Wendy Chun puts it, we need to question the kind of network logic that seeks to eradicate gaps (the paranodal) at all costs. In this context, she argues that we need a critique of “openness” as an end (this is an important question: to what extent do open source, open content, p2p, etc., contribute to this ethos to “close all gaps”?). According to her, mapping a network can be enlightening, but can only happen if we surrender ourselves fully to the logic of the network. Thus, the best way to map the network might be to refuse the map altogether. Thus, it seems to me that any useful critique of networks needs to begin with an exploration of their indeterminacy: not only their borders, but the very paranodal spaces that help define them.

Perhaps a way to begin to formulate such a critique is to address how network logic is inadequate for locating suffering in social networks. This seemed to be part of Thomas Berker’s plea for a meaningful and non-trivial theory of suffering within the network. Power Laws and Long Tails might explain why there are elite nodes and less-fortunate nodes, but do they address the meaning of inequality in the network? Can they suggest a politics to correct it? Or are these concepts a new opium that allows the masses to think of themselves as a new elite, as I thought Ekaterina Taratuta (ECAP) was hinting at?

[photo: An emergent mosaic of Wikipedian activity, cc: silvertje]

Apparently there was a revolution, and I almost missed it.

This is what happened: Somebody cracked and published the encryption key that unlocks HD DVDs, allowing for the copying of the discs. The code started appearing on various websites. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) began issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notices. Some websites attempted to censor the publication of the code. There was a massive reaction from users towards this apparent act of censorship: the more the code was being “suppressed,” the more it appeared on web sites, blogs, t-shirts, songs, etc. [For a detailed account of the controversy, see the Wikipedia article.]

I found this interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is the way in which Web 2.0 companies have had to negotiate a balance between their corporate interest and the interests of their users. As you probably know already, after its initial attempt to censor the posts containing the code (and the subsequent ‘revolt’ by users), Digg reversed its decision and said that it would rather “go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.” As Andrew Lih writes:

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

But what you have, actually, is a Web 2.0 company (reportedly worth around $200 million USD) doing a cost-benefit analysis and realizing that losing its user base would pose a higher and more immediate risk than facing the possibility of lawsuits from “a bigger company” (I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the cost-benefit analysis does not favor the users…).

The second aspect that I find fascinating about this whole thing is the way in which the dissemination of the encryption code has been constructed as a revolutionary, subversive act —as an example of what cyber revolt looks like (establishment, beware!). I was surprised to see many of the people I read online immediately jump on the bandwagon, and gleefully proclaim our revolutionary duty to publish the numbers (one actual quote: “Hahahaha! I am breaking federal law! Hahahaha!”).

Now, I’m no friend of the DMCA. Also, I believe that breaking the law can be a powerful statement if the right social cause is invoked… But a DVD encryption key? Why not refuse to pay taxes to protest the war, or something like that? Perhaps the nature of the revolt can be explained by the demographics of the “revolutionaries”: according to Businessweek, 94% of Digg’s army of free labor are male, over 50% are IT workers in their 20s and 30s, and they earn $75,000 a year or more. Ryan Shaw calls ‘em as he sees ‘em:

While most of the blogosphere was atwitter over the tantrums being thrown at Digg, real injustice in Los Angeles was being ignored. After watching this video [of Police oppression during the May 1st immigration reform march] I was ashamed to be part of a community (the designers and evangelists of “Web 2.0?) which sanctimoniously promotes “people power” among the spoiled and entitled while disregarding the tightening grip of authority on the poor and disenfranchised. [see his post for links to video and newspaper articles]

We keep hearing that social media tools will help to bring about social change. So are we being overly critical of the tools just because of the communities that presently wield them? This whole affair might have at its core something rather trivial (a code to hack DVDs), but can we extrapolate some of the lessons and techniques learned to a social justice context? Or as Ethan Zuckerman asks:

What would it take to harness this sort of viral spread to harness the net in spreading human rights information? Can activists learn from the story of The Number and find ways to spread information that otherwise is suppressed or ignored in mainstream media?

I wonder what activists would compromise in this transition to cyber revolt. To begin, I doubt that experienced activists believe that all it takes is for suppressed information to reach the public. Brecht suggested that “He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” Today, however, he who laughs has indeed heard the bad news, but from The Daily Show.

But the thing I believe anyone interested in social change should explore more carefully are the kinds of action that information can be transformed into as it is communicated. Perhaps, as Tiziana Terranova explains in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004, Pluto Press), what we call “information” already embodies a certain containment of openness:

The first condition of a successful communication becomes that of reducing all meaning to information —that is to a signal that can be successfully replicated across a varied communication milieu with minimum alterations. (Terranova, 2004, p. 16)

When activism is defined solely in terms of the exchange of information, we are reducing the options available for acting. That is how an encryption key (information in its purest form) was easily converted into a “subversive message” whose replication and dissemination was seen as a revolutionary act. As long as we’ve had media —and I’m afraid emerging “social” media don’t pose a significant alternative— we’ve seen this dynamic: the replication of information has itself come to define what it means to act, has become the source of meaning. The individual goes from being a social actor to an intersection of information flows. She possesses more information than ever before (about global warming, about genocidal poverty, about the false pretenses under which wars are started), but all she can do is replicate and pass on this information. The purer the information (09 F9 …), the more efficient the activism.

Here it is: PDF of the full dissertation. Right-click and choose Save As…

mejias__networked_proximity.pdf (1.2 MB)

I’m removing all previously posted drafts from this blog.

There are important differences that make this final version much better.

Abstract

Networked Proximity:
ICTs and the Mediation of Nearness

Ulises Ali Mejias, 2007

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model for organizing them. The large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies is producing new architectures of networked participation in which the social subject becomes a decentralized node, unbound by location or physical space. Nearness (in terms of social proximity) acquires a new significance, since the distance between two nodes—regardless of their physical location—is practically zero, while the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Thus, physical proximity is replaced by informational availability as the basis for experiencing social nearness, resulting in a form of networked proximity characterized simultaneously by a sense of renewed connectedness to the local (hyperlocality), and a sense of distancelessness that makes any point in the network readily accessible. Hence, critiques of networked sociality need to account for the fact that the network is neither anti-social nor anti-local: it thrives on making social connections, and is indifferent to where nodes are located in relation to the social subject (physically near or far). Instead, critiques need to focus on the epistemological exclusivity engendered by the fact that nodes are only capable of recognizing other nodes. In other words, the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality. In this context, the paranodal—the space between nodes—becomes an important site for disidentification from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of networked sociality and providing alternative models of social engagement.

[cc photo credit: striatic]

Here is my summary of this month’s discussion at the iDC forum. The archive of the discussion can be found here.

**********************************************************

It’s time to wrap up this discussion on the question of ‘How does social media educate?’ I would like to thank everyone who contributed to it, even by lurking! As the moderator, the one responsible for reading everything and trying to engage all opinions, I am thankful because I probably benefited the most from these exchanges. At the same time, I want to apologize if I somehow failed to fulfill my duties responsibly.

Below I offer a summary of some of the main themes I took away from the discussion.

What is social about social media?

The conversation started by questioning the term ’social media’ itself, and wondering what the word ’social’ is supposed to be telling us if all media is, by definition, already a social construct. Perhaps the redundancy is a good reminder that the assumptions behind the word ’social’ are precisely what we should be dissecting. As Latour says in his book Reassembling the social, those who treat the social as a black box “have simply confused what they should explain with the explanation. They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one should end with them” (p. 8). In other words, one should not take the word ’social’ as something no longer in need of explanation. When looking at various instances of the application of sociable web media in education, we need to take these social aggregates as points of departure, as what needs to be explained in the first place.

The goal, then, is to trace the interactions of humans and technologies as they go about redefining the social, inventing new forms of sociality. Just as the concept of ‘virtual reality’ (with its own set of assumptions, contradictions and delusions) helped us to question what was real, ’social media’ should help us question what is social, how the social is being put together in the world of education.

The politics of networked participation

Interpreting the meaning of new social assemblages is not a neutral exercise that can be accomplished by means of scientific inquiry exclusively. We rely on ideologies and metanarratives to explain the impact of new media on society. Throughout this discussion, there was much debate about which framework is best suited to explain new social assemblages. There was even some arguing over which assemblages (corporate, independent, etc.) are more worthy of analysis!

One side seems to espouse a Lyotard-influenced framework that sees the increasing role that digital media play in our societies as solidifying the spread of a capitalist culture that commodifies *knowledge* by transforming it into *information* that can be easily exchanged and consumed. To us, the educational applications of sociable web media should not be analyzed without considering the ethical implications of capitalism and a market economy. This is not to say that the architectures of participation that social media engenders cannot present an authentic challenge to the dynamics of the market, even right in the middle of corporate-controlled platforms. But to fail to acknowledge the context from which these technologies emerge can only result in incomplete analyses.

Learning 2.0 - Opportunities and challenges

Depending on how it is applied, social media can be a site for a liberatory or an oppressive education. As educators and learners, we need to be aware of our own practices, simultaneously teaching and learning ‘with’ and ‘against’ social media. Simply embracing new technologies or taking for granted the pedagogical assumptions behind the new ‘Youniversity’ is not enough. The fact is that we live in a world where education is not a ‘good’ distributed equitably or always for the benefit of the learner, and some applications of social media will continue this trend. Increasingly, the ‘public’ education system is being used to separate the unproductive members of society (the ones that need to be ‘managed’ by the growing private incarceration business) from the productive ones (the ones who demonstrate compliance and aptitude for jobs in the service industry). The kinds of social media applications the latter are more likely to see will probably be in alignment with the needs of a control society:

“In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.” (Deleuze (1995), Negotiations, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The ‘constant student’ is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Social media can be used to ensure that education for the constant student becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which –more importantly– can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ life of the individual.

Daily Kos: They Hate us for Our Freedom (the Assessment Movement in Higher Ed)

Social media literacy

For a long time, educational technologists have put their faith in technology as a way to change education, and even the world. Access to the technology is seen as the magical solution that will end disparity:

Web 2.0 can benefit the world’s poor - SciDev.Net

Unfortunately, for the reasons discussed above and during this whole month, access is not enough, and narratives of bridging the ‘digital divide’ do not help us better understand how digital technologies such as sociable web media contribute to the commodification of education.

The work of a new generation of educators and learners shows us that social media can be used to promote positive change in the world. This work demonstrates that the issue is not universal access, but rather the strategies through which those who benefit from access to social media are able to transform those benefits into benefits for the greater society, extending the value of social media beyond the privileged minorities that have access to it.

And so I end by recapitulating some of the skills I mentioned earlier in the discussion that I think we need to develop as part of a critical literacy of social media:

• The ability to articulate the difference between open (FLOSS) and proprietary social media platforms (including how to tell when the former mutates into the latter, and what to do about it).
• The ability to determine when it’s appropriate to use open (FLOSS) or proprietary social media platforms to promote social change with maximum effect.
• The ability to understand the social agency of code of a particular technology, i.e., how the program promotes, constricts or redefines social functions through its affordances.
• The ability to identify the benefits of contributing to a social media environment that operates as a gift economy versus a market economy (including the ability to identify social media environments that operate as both simultaneously).
• The ability to articulate in personal terms how networked participation is changing the relationship with one’s local environment, and be able to calculate tradeoffs and assume responsibility for one’s choices.

I hope you can help us continue to refine these, within or outside of the iDC forum.

-Ulises

[UPDATE: Asma and I were interviewed for the NPR show Weekend America about our Hajj experiences. It aired this past Saturday 1/13. You can listen to the interview here.]

Ali Shariati, an Iranian intellectual and political activist, member of The Movement of God-worshipping Socialists, called the Hajj an “antithesis to aimlessness” (1994, p. 1), in the sense that it is a break in the routine of our daily lives and comforts, a physical dislocation from the familiarity of our surroundings intended to deliver a shock not only to the soul but to the body. For the Hajj is not only a spiritual but a social learning experience, a simulated migration involving masses of pilgrims converging in a small corner of the Arabian desert; a test of one’s devotion, empathy, patience… and immune system. There was nothing to prepare me for any of this, however, as I started my Hajj accompanied by my wife in December of 2006, or the month of Dhul-Hijjah in the year 1427 according to the Muslim calendar. What follows are some reflections on my experience.

Some exercises in spiritual renewal involve a retreat into the solitude of nature or the quietness of the inner self, and focus on the cleansing of the body and the mind. The Hajj, on the other hand, hits you with the sudden force of 3 million people from all corners of the world descending on the vicinity of Mecca (in Saudi Arabia) over a period of a week —probably the largest flash mob of our times. It is an awesome enactment of the unity and purposefulness of God’s creation. It is also an apocalyptic laboratory of pandemic viral outbreaks. The environment the pilgrims create is not what one would think of as being conducive to spiritual growth: they bring sickness, pollution, selfishness, prejudice, tiredness, and the bad temper these combined factors create. When you are stuck in a bus inhaling carbon monoxide for 12 hours (moving all of 6 kilometers during that time), hungry, tired, sleepy and in need to go to the bathroom, and you and everyone around you has some form of respiratory ailment or is in the process of getting one, what chance of realizing taqwa —consciousness of God— can possibly exist?

But the pilgrims also bring devotion, communal love, compassion, a predisposition to solidarity, and a thirst for knowledge. Perhaps it is the impact of the collective worshiping that facilitates an awareness of the divine amidst the grimy reality of the world. As a Muslim, you face a particular direction when praying, as does every other Muslim in the world. But when you actually reach the focal point of the prostration —the Ka’bah— and witness masses of people bowing down in synchronicity, the collectivity of the action takes over a certain part of the consciousness. Perhaps it is this mob mentality, increasingly associated with Muslims in the media, that scares the individualistic sensibilities of the West. (If I was still doing film theory, I would like to explore the connection between the re-emergence of the zombie genre film and post 9/11 Islamophobia…)

Some basics: For Muslims, performing Hajj at least once during a lifetime (if one has the financial means to afford it) is a requirement. Along with the belief in the unity of God, prayer, charity, and fasting during the month of Ramadan, Hajj is one of the fundamental pillars of Islam. Before the era of modern transportation, the journey to perform Hajj could take months, and it was dangerous enough that some people would’nt survive it. While air travel has made the trip easier, the explosion in attendance has introduced a new set of safety threats, mostly related to health issues and mass stampedes. The ritual involves, in short, visiting certain areas around the city of Mecca:

Arafat (9th of Dhul-Hijja, daytime), where God asked humanity to stand on this particular day and promised to forgive whatever one asks mercy for.

The scene is like the day of judgement [the two pieces of unstitched white cloth one wears during Hajj are the same style Muslims are buried in]. From one horizon to the other, a “flood of whites” appears. All the people are wearing the Kafan. No one can be recognized. The bodies were left in Miqat and the souls are motivated here. Names, races, nor social status make a difference in this great combination. An atmosphere of genuine unity prevails. It is a human show of Allah’s unity. (Shariati, 1994, p. 10)

Muzdalifah (9th of Dhul-Hijja, night), where one is supposed to spend the night in the open desert, praying and collecting pebbles with which to symbolically fight the devil the next day. In actuality, most of our time was spent looking for a place to park.

Mina (10th to 13th of Dhul-Hijja), where one spends these days waging battle with the devil (one’s own weaknesses), and where the Saudi government has set up a camp of thousands of tents which become a veritable slum during this time. On the 10th, after the first ’stoning of Satan,’ this is also where men shave their heads, remove their white clothes, and where a sacrifice is offered (the sacrificial meat is meant to feed the pilgrims as well as the poor).

Mecca (10th to 13th of Dhul-Hijja), where the Holy Mosque, that houses the Ka’bah, is located. This one and the Prophet’s mosque in Medina are the two Holy Mosques of Islam, open only to Muslims (which I guess adds to their mystery in the eyes of non-Muslims).

Since information about the specifics of Hajj can be found elsewhere, I will instead offer some disjointed, non-chronological snapshots of my experience.

Muslims on a plane

The flight from JFK to Amman is packed with ‘Arab’-looking men reading the Qur’an. It occurs to me that had this been a regular flight with any non-Muslims on board, the national security threat level would have gone up a couple of notches.

Monolith

The Ka’bah is a recognizable icon: it is the black cube built by the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and his family to venerate the One God. It is not meant to be a representation of God —it is but a simple, empty black structure. Instead, it is meant to serve as an attractor or anchor which allows Muslims to express their belief in the unity of God. The act of circling the Ka’bah in counterclockwise direction seven times is called Tawaf. It is an awesome spectacle: a black smooth cubical structure exerting some sort of magnetic attraction which brings people from every corner of the world. All Muslims bow down in the direction of the Ka’bah at the prescribed prayer times, but to see the prostration of thousands of Muslims of all ethnicities converging on one single point, men side by side with women, gives a visual significance to that act that is unforgettable.

Ismail

Given that the Ka’bah was built by Ibrahim, his story plays a central role during Hajj. According to Shariati, Hajj is about each one of us identifying and sacrificing our Ismail.

… whatever weakens your faith, whatever stops you from “going”, whatever distracts you from accepting responsibilities, whatever causes you to be self-centered, whatever makes you unable to hear the message and confess the truth, whatever forces you to “escape”, whatever causes you to rationalize for the sake of convenience, whatever makes you blind and deaf… that is your Ismail!

God asked Ibrahim to sacrifice what was most precious to him in this world: his son Ismail. One cannot claim to follow monotheism and at the same time set partners with God (worship or love other things beside God). These false partners with God can take the form of material goods, or our bodies, lifestyles, desired fame, jobs, or our own families. God asked Ibrahim to sacrifice his son not because God is bloodthirsty, but because monotheism accepts no substitutions — there is no ontological ambiguity here: it is the death of the self, absolute submission to a will larger than our own.

Of course, once Ibrahim demonstrates that he is ready to carry out the sacrifice, God stops him. It was only a test. We are all tested in a similar manner throughout our lives, and most often fail. I know what my Ismail is, but will I have the strength to make the sacrifice?

Crush

There is that moment when you go from a theoretical to a practical understanding of what it means to be crushed by a mass of people. It is not any one individual’s fault. The mass acquires a will of its own. You find yourself surrounded by people on all sides, pushing in opposite directions. Telling the people next to you to stop pushing is futile, as they themselves are being pushed by somebody else, the source being somewhere far away. You are simply experiencing the accumulated aggregation of a thousand little pushes. No one can stop it. You move without necessarily using your feet. Bodies are jammed so close together that eventually there is no room for the lungs to expand. If the situation worsens, you realize you could asphixiate. Fortunately, this does not happen this time. The force finds other outlets.

Clash

Upon entering Mecca, we are handed a Guide to Hajj, Umra, and Visiting the Prophet’s Mosque, written by the “Agency Of Islamic Enlightenment in Hajj, approved by The Permanent Committee of Islamic Research and Fatwa and Shaikh Muhammad Bin Saleh Al-Uthaimin (May Allah have mercy on him).” It is a gift from “Your Highness Prince King Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud.” It contains some useful information, but I am particularly intrigued by a section called The Things That Nullify Iman (a sort of “you know you are no longer a believer if…” kind of list). This is where State ideology meets religious practice. Apart from the usual stuff (setting up equals to God), Article 4 states:

Anyone who believes that some guidance other than the Prophet’s guidance is more perfect, or a judgement other than the prophet’s judgment is better, has become an unbeliever. This applies to those who prefer the rule of the Evil One (Taghut) over the Prophet’s rule. Some examples are:

(a) To believe that systems and laws made by human beings are better than the Shari’ah of Islam, for example:

(i) That the Islamic system is not suitable for application in the twentieth century.

(ii) Or that the Islamic system is the cause of backwardness of muslims.

(iii) Or that Islam is only a relationship between a man (sic) and His Lord, and does not have any relations with other aspects of life.

(b) To say that working with the judgments of Allah in enforcing the punishments prescribed by Allah, such as cutting off the hand of a thief, or stoning an adulterer is not suitable in this day and age.

(c) To believe that it is permissible to rule by a law other than what Allah has revealed in Islamic transactions or matters of criminal justice and similar affairs, even if he does not believe that such rulings are superior to the Shari’ah. This is because by doing so he would be declaring as permissible something which Allah made impermissible, such as adultery, drinking alcohol, or usury, and similar things whose prohibition is common knowledge to all, such a person has become an unbeliever according to the consensus of all muslims.

In short, anyone living outside of Saudi Arabia is an unbeliever. But by the way, isn’t the Shari’ah made and modified by (a select group of) human beings? And should a judgment which authorities claim is derived from the practice of the Prophet be taken as valid even if it contradicts the Qur’an? And where in the Qur’an exactly does it say that the punishment for adultery is stoning to death? And… oh, forget it. The only comforting thing about inhaling gas fumes is that they are a reminder that oil kingdoms will one day go up in smoke.

Voiceless

Entering Mina, you cannot believe your eyes. It is a city —or more accurately, a slum— of thousands of identical tents. There are 3 million people living here, but not all of them can afford a tent. All the roads and sidewalks are crammed with poor people’s make-shift camps. It’s hard to walk without having to step over some family sleeping on the ground, or cooking, or going to the bathroom. It is filthy. Bulldozers push piles of trash to clear the roads. Police cars constantly patrol the area and force people sleeping on the roads to move in order to clear the roads so that cars transporting more people and provisions can go through. There are ’sections’ for different nationalities: Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, and on and on. It is a microcosm of the world. Of course, the European and American camps are surrounded by a fence and the tents are considered ‘upgraded’, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the bathroom stalls which double as showers, and which are perpetually flooded.

By the time we reach our camp, I am sick as a dog. My cold has gone from viral to bacterial, a doctor traveling with our group informs me. I completely lose my voice, which I take as a positive step towards the death of the self. The doctor says I should start taking antibiotics. We brought one course for my wife, which she took when she began her cold almost as soon as we reached Saudi Arabia (she is quite susceptible to respiratory problems). A Muslim brother, who overhears our conversation (I mostly communicate by grunts and signs) offers me his medication. I say I feel bad taking the antibiotics —what if he needs them later? He insists. He says, with a smile, that I should allow him to earn the reward of a good deed. In our tent, people are sharing their medication and food, and looking out for each other. It is only a spontaneous and momentary show of communal solidarity, but it’s genuine and touching. One forgets the value of such moments in restoring one’s faith in humanity. My wife, however, informs me that in the sisters’ tent the good will is not as abundant.

Rhythm

When you have the opportunity to pray at one of the two holy mosques, you try to take advantage, despite the crowds. Sometimes you can’t even make it inside, and have to pray in the courtyard, or even on the dirty streets. The azzan, or call to prayer, sets the rhythm of your life: you sleep little, eat little, and try to spend as much time as possible in the mosque.

Cell phone

Yes, even in the holiest place and at the holiest time you will not escape the curse of the ringtone, and someone saying in a foreign language what I imagine to be something like: “Hey, what’s up? Nothing, just going around the Ka’bah…” They receive some disapproving stares and maybe a chastising comment, but this does not seem to dissuade them one bit.

Patience

When the bureaucracy of the Saudi government is coupled with the ineptitude of the Hajj guides, you are constantly reminded that part of the purpose of Hajj is to learn patience. At first you are insulted at the insinuation that you are a bad pilgrim, but eventually you realize you have no options. Things will unfold completely outside your control.

Aunties

After a while, you become one with the shoving and the pushing, and you learn to incorporate them into your own movements. Except for the pushing of the Aunties. These little frail old ladies from the Sub Continent have a way of poking you and shoving you aside with their bony hands that leaves bruises afterwards. I call it the Auntie Vulcan Maneuver.

Comfort

After performing our farewell Tawaf on the last day, we board our bus to Jeddah, sick and exhausted. I get some local cough mixture for my wife and myself before leaving. It is dark, and I don’t have the energy to read the directions, so we end up inadvertently taking four times the recommended dosage. That, and the exhaustion, knocks us out completely. My sleep in the bus is so deep, that the next thing I know my wife is shaking me, telling me that we have arrived at the Sheraton in Jeddah. In a daze, we go up to our room. It is sometime in the wee hours of the morning. The cleanliness and the comfort comes as shock, considering what we have endured the past few days. No more standing in long lines for food, or to use the messy bathrooms. No more sleeping toe-to-toe in tents with 50 snoring men. The luxury of the hotel feels familiar; it is what I am accustomed to in my privileged life. I feel sad, and wonder if the comfort will erase some of the lessons of Hajj too quickly. I don’t want it to. I don’t want to be like the person admonished in Naser Khosrow’s poem: “You spend your money to buy the hardships of the desert.”

Foot

It is considered bad manners to cross right in front of someone praying, but in a Mosque with thousands of people moving about, it is impossible to avoid this sometimes. I am praying at the Holy Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, before Hajj begins. I am immersed in meditation, and feel particularly attuned to my prayers. I’m on the floor, about to bow down and place my forehead on the floor as part of the prayer. As I am about to prostrate, a foot plants itself right in front of me, on the spot where my forehead is supposed to touch the floor. It is no ordinary foot. It is the most disgusting foot I have ever seen, verging on leprosy. The skin is scaly and replete with oozing sores… the sole is cracked, with bloody lines as deeps as canyons… there is stuff growing on the “nails” that is straight out of a horror film. My first reaction is extreme repulsion. My second reaction is extreme anger: I feel like violently removing this foot from my prayer space. But the foot moves away soon enough, leaving the space free for me to place my forehead where it was just standing. Needless to say, my concentration is broken. Only later does it occur to me that none of my initial reactions was of compassion for the owner of such a limb. Surely, it could not have been comfortable to perform Hajj under such conditions (I doubt this person was traveling First Class). Did my personal outrage outweigh his discomfort, and justify my lack of compassion? My experience of the Hajj begins to change at the moment of that realization.

Arafat gives you a blank slate, an opportunity to change the direction of your life, but your old self awaits you back in Mina, where evil must be faced. In between, you will partake of the unity of creation by circling the Ka’bah and running between the hills of Safa and Marwah. That is the Hajj, a reminder that we are nomads, immigrants, ceaselessly going back and forth —simultaneously losing and finding ourselves in the crowd.

Reference:
Shariati, A. (1994). Hajj: Reflection on its rituals. Houston, TX: Islamic Publications International.

All photographs: Creative Commons 2007 Ulises A. Mejias

Networks have become a powerful metaphor to explain the social realities of our times. Everywhere we look there are attempts to explain all kinds of social formations in terms of networks: citizen networks, corporate networks, gamer networks, terrorist networks, learning networks… and so on. Information and communication technologies—in particular the internet—and the structures they enable have greatly influenced how we imagine the social. It’s similar to what happened in cognitive science when the computer was taken as the favored metaphor for explaining how the brain works, except that now we are attempting to explain how the social works.

But is there something anti-social about imagining and organizing our social realities in terms of networks?

Most critiques of the rise of the network as a model for organizing social realities focus on what it has replaced: tightly-woven, location-specific communities (a community itself can be defined as a particular kind of network, but for the moment let’s stick to these conventional terms). Wellman (2002) traces how social formations have developed from densely-knit traditional communities to sparsely-knit but still location-specific “Glocalized” networks (think cities connected to other cities), to networks unbound to any specific physical space, or what he calls Networked Individualism, where “people remain connected, but as individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household.” (p. 5)

Thus, an important characteristic of Networked Individualism is the overcoming of physical space. Today’s networks connect individuals regardless of the distance between them. This has led various authors to announce—some with glee and some with regret —the Death of Distance. But more than its elimination, Networked Individualism promotes the reconfiguration of distance: it is not only our relatonship to the far that is changed, but also our relationship to the near. Of course, early on critics sensed a threat to the near in this reconfiguration, and saw in Networked Individualism the destruction of communal location-specific forms of sociality (i.e., the irrelevancy of the near). However, this has not proven to be necessarily the case, as Network Individualism can play a part in (re)connecting people to the local. The network then also becomes a model for “reapproaching nearness” (Mejias, 2005), with the added benefit that nearness now encompasses new forms of global awareness.

But this is where it starts to get tricky. Reapproaching the local thorough the network is not simply a case of arriving right back where we started after a process of dislocation and re-location. It’s not simply reaching our nose through the back of our head. The near that the network delivers is a slightly different near, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

It’s true that our relation to the near has always been regulated by some thing or other. Mediation between the individual and the world is not an invention of the network. But the point is to try to understand how the network mediates our understanding of the world, and how the network’s particular kind of mediation competes or participates with other forms of sociality.

My thesis is that the network undermines productive forms of sociality by over-privileging the node. It might be difficult to see this because nodes are not anti-social (they thrive by forming links to other nodes), nor are they anti-local (they link to nodes in their immediate surrounding just as easily as they link to other nodes). But what I am trying to say is that to the extent that the network is composed of nodes and connections between nodes, it discriminates against the space between the nodes, it turns this space into a black box, a blind spot. In other words, networks promote nodocentrism. In this reconfiguration of distance, new ‘nears’ become available, but the ‘far’ becomes the space between nodes. To ignore this dark matter is to ignore the very stuff on which the network is suspended, much like the fish ignoring the water around it.

How is internodal space collapsed? If roads and highways connect any two nodes, they also allow for the commuter to quickly bypass the space between the nodes. Those locations may be nodes in other networks, but from the perspective of the two nodes being connected, they do not matter. Of course, for networks unbound by physicality, the nature of what is black boxed is different. Wellman (2002) writes:

The Internet both provides a ramp onto the global information highway and strengthens local links within neighborhoods and households. For all its global access, the Internet reinforces stay-at-homes. Glocalization occurs, both because the Internet makes it easy to contact many neighbors, and because fixed, wired Internet connections tether users to home and office desks. (p. 4)

The point here is not so much that the Internet forces people to stay at home, and that it black boxes one’s surroundings. After all, the promise of pervasive computing and ‘the internet of things’ (incorporating objects outside the network into it) is that nodes becomes physically unbound, mobile, “ubiquitous.” The point is that instead of stay-at-home, the Internet reinforces stay-in-network. One can have all the interlinking of nodes one wants both at a local and global level, but one must remain in the network; one must adopt the network’s ontology of what constitutes a node, how links between nodes are to be established, and how to collapse the space between nodes (and I’m not even going to go, for a change, into issues of who controls and regulates the network). The network is an epistemology, a way of interpreting the world, a model for organizing reality.

We are told not to fuss about the space between nodes, because everything is a potential node and can be added to the network. Actor-network theory tells us to ‘follow the actors’ to uncover what kind of links they form with other nodes, thus giving us the framework to consider everything a node. But a network is the opposite of continuous space, so no matter how many nodes we add there will always be, necessarily, space between nodes. Without that space, there would simply be no network.

So what are the consequences of interpreting the social as a network? According to Vandenberghe (2002), scientific explanations of social realities as networks flatten the richness of symbolism and replace it with causality, reducing interaction to economic exchange governed purely by interest. In other words, social network theories fail to account for the ontological differences between humans and non humans, explaining human agency in dehumanized terms:

Being-in-the-world among humans and non humans is systematically displaced by a formal, atomistic, intellectualistic and pseudo-economic analysis of the vulgar interests of humans who link up with other humans and non humans, translating their interests in a reciprocal exploitation of each other’s activity for the satisfaction of the personal interests of each of the parties involved. Humans are thus no longer seen as co-operative ants, but as egoistic ‘r.a.t.s’ – i.e. as rational action theorists who behave like ‘centres of calculation’, strategically associating and dissociating humans and non humans alike, pursuing their own political ends by economic means. Conclusion: when science enters in action, meaningful action disappears and all we are left with is a pasteurized and desymbolized world of strategically acting dehumanized humans, or humants. (p. 55, my emphasis)

Not only are such explanations bound to yield limited understandings of the world, but when actualized as models for organizing the social, they institutionalize an individualistic form of interest as the only viable motive for cooperation. It might not seem like networked individualism is anti-social at first, because networks thrive on forming social links. But in the long term, the effect of reducing the social to transactions of capital (even if it is non-monetary ’social’ capital) is detrimental, since it subordinates the social to the rules of exchange. At that point, as Vandenberghe argues, “the economy is no longer embedded in the society… society is embedded in the economy” (p. 58).

The tyranny imposed by social network theories is that a node acknowledges only other nodes, and can relate to those nodes only in terms of commodified exchange. If something is not a node, it cannot be engaged in exchange, and therefore it has no value. Nodes take for granted the internodal space that supports the network (and it is often a question of literally “supporting” the network through the labor and decisions that happen in those dark internodal spaces). ‘So what?’ some might ask. Surely, we cannot pay attention to everything, and as a result we have developed self-interested strategies (predating networks) for making some things more relevant than others. My point is that although self-interest might be a functional principle to organize networks, even at a local level, it might not be sustainable as the basis for a social ethics, which requires a degree of selfless engagement. If we are going to go with the network metaphor, we need a praxis and an ethics, for engaging with the world beyond our interests, which means accounting for the space between nodes, becoming invested in the non-nodal.

References:

Mejias, U. 2005, Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis. First Monday, vol. 10, no. 3. Retrieved April 28, 2005 from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html

Vandenberghe, F. (2002). Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant- Network Theory. Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 19(5/6): 51–67. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE.

Wellman, B. (2002). Little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. In M. Tanabe, P. van den Besselaar & T. Ishida (Eds.), Digital cities II: Computational and sociological approaches (pp. 10-25). Berlin: Springer. Accessed on October 3, 2006 from http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/littleboxes/littlebox.PDF
Picture credit:

phauly

While I am not very familiar with the whole ‘internet of things’ discourse, I recognize plenty of recurring themes to be troubled about. We encounter, once again (but with new buzz words), the argument that new technologies can rehabilitate our relationship to the real and to the social. This time, however, instead of investing our sense of self entirely in the virtual (soooo 1990’s), we can invest it in ‘things’ (human-object assemblages) which populate reality, but which are still interconnected and organized in the virtual. The return of the object or ‘thing’ would seem to suggest that we are moving away from the idea of the virtual as an alternate realm of reality and towards a more complex understanding of reality as encompassing both the virtual and the actual (thank you, Monsieur Deleuze). However, I fear that our technophilia is obscuring the politics of these virtual-actual assemblages, obstructing the need to critically assess how agency is distributed amongst things connected through the internet.

One possible direction this critique can take is to analyze new (and old) modes of production and consumption in the internet of things. The corporate call to action (there are non-commercial alternatives, thankfully) is that we must break free of the shackles of passive consumption to enter a new era of active consumption organized around networked objects scattered in the ‘real’ world. To be called an audience is an insult in this age when "the demand side supplies itself," when —given the sanctioned source materials— we can all be producers or re-mixers of the objects we shall consume (what I call ‘ultimate consumerism’). The difference is that now we need not be stationed in front of our computers to do so; our regained mobility and wirelessness signals a return to the real. Hurray! The freedom to move around while being invisibly tethered to the market, digitizing things or information about things outside the market and putting them in circulation within it. Needless to say, I share Anne’s concerns about the fetishizing of ‘things’ and about the ‘return to the object’ as the privileging of objectivity.

What I find most troubling is that the discourse of the ‘internet of things’ suggests a certain inevitability: the true potential of the internet of things can only be achieved to the extent that it encompasses everything (it is not accidental that the internet of things is an extension of the discourse of ubiquitous or pervasive computing). Shouldn’t we question this inevitability? After all, the act of ‘outsourcing’ (to use Trebor’s term) our memory and social functions to internet things is not without political and social consequences: The mobility of us cyber nomads —our ability to detach and re-attach ourselves to reality at will— is usually acquired thanks to the drudgery and exploitation endured by someone else (the call center worker in India, the Cassiterite miner in Congo, the factory worker in Mexico or Taiwan, etc.).

At the same time, our response should not be a blind rejection or phobia of things. There are no more ‘things’ today than before, nor do we rely more on ‘things’ now than in the past. I was reading an old essay by Ivan Illich ("Silence is a Commons") in which he basically laments the pollution of silence by new electronic things. While I share some of his concerns, I wonder if an average day is less filled with things for someone living on the fringes of consumerism than for someone living within it. Of course, the differences should be accounted for (from natural things, to things produced by us, to things produced by somebody else), but assemblages of humans and things are not abnormal or evil, a priori. The questions is: If we have always delegated (or in the worst case, surrendered) social agency to things in order to control, manipulate, facilitate, condition, interpret, etc., what functions are the ‘things’ in the internet of things fulfilling?

I don’t think Illich was arguing against new things per se, but against the loss of opportunities to reflect on what is being substituted by or forgotten with the new things, to be critical of new things, and to reject things we find unsustainable.

Creative Commons photo: joi

I was reading Anti-Oedipus, minding my own business, when I came across this marvelous anthropological observation describing what the chief of a tribe does with surplus food:

“The chief converts this perishable wealth into imperishable prestige through the medium of spectacular feasting. The ultimate consumers are in this way the original producers.” (Leach, 1966, p. 89; quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 150, my emphasis)

The quote struck me because of the degree to which it can serve to describe the current relationship between social media as a means of production and what we produce with it. In essence, this single quote has given me a nearly-perfect metaphor to articulate what I have been struggling to say since I suggested that production is the new consumption: Hi-tech capitalism (aka, the chief) transforms (commodifies) perishable wealth (social capital) into imperishable goods (money and market prestige) in a spectacular feast in which we (the original producers of the wealth) become its ultimate consumers. And consider the appropriateness of the word ultimate here, signifying both the end of the process —when something that was outside of the market is finally put in the market— as well as the most consummate form of consumerism —paying for things we ourselves produce, and that need not be commodified in the first place… Ultimate consumerism. Since Marx, we have understood that the ‘beauty’ of capitalism is that those whose labor is alienated end up financing capital’s ventures as well: I work at a car factory so I can buy a car. Social media, then, is merely the latest course in this never-ending spectacular feast in which, as Doc Searles pointed out: “the demand side supplies itself.” And who are we technophiliacs to resist the spectacle?

Suddenly, the actions of the brave new cultural producer/consumer appear a bit less daring and revolutionary: reducing difference to a set of pre-defined variables that are data-mined for similarities thanks to the ‘free’ services of SocialProfiling Inc. (that “trojan horse of internet censorship“), remixing and distributing media (text, audio, video, multi) thanks to the ‘free’ services of SocialPublishing Inc., classifying and distributing the products (packaging them for consumption, essentially) thanks to the ‘free’ services of SocialTagging Inc. —all the while believing we are operating outside of capital. Ha!

At whose service is this new literacy? To what purpose is this democracy oriented? What mass have we supposedly left behind?

By this time, you should rightly have lots of objections to my argument, most likely including the words open, commons, or collective somewhere in them. After all, aren’t you reading this blog for “free”? Haven’t I made this post available so that you can quote, reproduce, re-mix or appropriate it “outside” of the realm of profit (or as “outside” as you can get in our context, anyway)? Aren’t I speaking out of both corners of my mouth, then? The answer is: Yes. Now that I have defined the problem, I shall allow myself to go back and discuss certain exceptions. I will continue to handle these exceptions carefully, though, because most of what is out there claiming to be an exception is really not, and because this discourse of ultimate consumerism is still too new. Above all, we must continue to resist uncritical social media-philia, resist the spectacle of the cannibalistic feeding frenzy that is ultimate consumerism.

Actually, I’m less interested right now in identifying specific exceptions than in identifying where the possibilities for exceptions lie. My claim is that they are to be found less in open source, open content, open learning, or open anything, and more in the openness of social reality itself:

…history is a dynamic and open social reality, in a state of functional disequilibrium, or an oscillating equilibrium, unstable and always compensated, comprising not only institutionalized conflicts but conflicts that generate changes, revolts, ruptures, and scissions… (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, pp.150-151)

And it is precisely because these ruptures exist that exceptions are also part of the rule, that anarchy is allowed at the fringes of order. Every crisis is an opportunity, but every opportunity is a crisis. In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, capitalism depends completely and absolutely on waging war with itself, on testing and pushing its own limits. It is the opportunities that social media affords for moving beyond its own limits that must be seized. If new technologies provide capitalism with new opportunities for control and discipline, and for new opportunities for commodifing the social (that which need not be commodified), they also invite insurrection, as Dyer-Witheford (1999) argues:

It is in cyberspace that capital is now attempting to acquiree the comprehensive command, control, and communications capacity that will finally allow it to, as Marx put it, “along with labour. . . also appropriate its network of social relations.” And yet at the same time it is also in this virtual realm that some of the most remarkable experiments in communicational counterpower are being conducted. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 122)

But are we simply being ‘allowed’ some controlled revolution? How real are the possibilities for change?

If machinery is a “weapon” then it can, as Cleaver says, be stolen or captured, “used against us or by us.” Or—to use Panzieri’s perhaps richer and less instrumental metaphor —if capital “interweaves” technology and power, then this weaving can be undone, and the threads used to make a different pattern.

This need not imply a crude “use and abuse” concept of technology of the sort neo-Luddites have rightly criticized. We can accept that machines are stamped with social purposes without accepting the idea that all of them are so deeply implanted with the dominative logic of capital as to be rejected…

This is not to say that technologies are neutral, but rather that they are often constituted by contending pressures that implant in them contradictory potentialities: which of these are realized is something that will be determined only in further struggle and conflict. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, pp. 71-72)

So why, then, haven’t we moved beyond capitalism? Is capitalism really the best social machine, to use a Deleuzian-Guattarian term? Has there not been enough struggle and conflict? I’m not sure those questions can be answered. But one thing is certain: mere technological innovation (of the “new technology X will completely revolutionize Y” kind) will not bring down the machine, but help feed it:

The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxiety they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 151)

In other words, we will not bring the machine down by rage alone, by the contradictions this rage might engender. Maybe we should start by recognizing, like the Borg, that we are already part of the machine, participants in the spectacular cannibalistic feast it has placed before us. Only then can we begin to desire alternatives, and draw plans for different “machines of struggle”:

Deleuze and Guattari speak of revolutionary organization as the creation of “machines of struggle.” This has to be understood carefully. For Deleuze and Guattari, any assemblage of desire —at a subjective or social level— is a “machine.” The term is aimed to break with humanist concepts of natural identities, to emphasize (as Haraway does with her concept of “cyborgs”) the constructed, produced, and collectively fabricated nature of psyche and society. Thus when they speak of radical political organization as the creation of nomadic “war machines,” while they certainly do not preclude armed struggle, the phrase has a far wider dimension. They are thinking in terms of aggressive, mobile, decentered organizations, capable of being built or dismantled as needed, that can harry and erode the structures of established order—”state machines.” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 182)

Doesn’t the conflict between “mobile, decentered” machines and “state” machines sound familiar? I can only hope that we are capable of assembling machines of struggle different from those of terrorism and state repression. Or will we be too distracted by the spectacle of cannibalism, of ultimate consumerism? We are, after all, a culture that fetishizes new technology, and the self-indulgent satisfaction it momentarily affords while it pushes the limits of the system.

Offline References:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999). Cyber-marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Leach, E. R. (1966). Rethinking anthropology. London: University of London Athlone Press.

Creative Commons photo credit: Mister Wind-Up Bird

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Foucault, the “panopticon guy”, is characterized as a thinker of power, discipline, and punishment. But as Deleuze (1995) points out, Foucault also believed that we are increasingly moving away from being societies based on discipline to societies based on control. According to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault: “We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” (1995, p. 174, my emphasis).

Did Foucault prematurely announce the end of confinement? It sure looks like it when looking at the US, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. According to government statistics, the number of people in prison and jail is outpacing the number of inmates released, even while the crime rate continues to fall. By June 2004 there were 2.1 million people in US jails, or one in every 138 residents (ref, ref). Race has everything to do with this issue: “blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested… and 49 percent of those in prison… One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995.” (ref).

And that’s just at home. The US is also in the business of confining people abroad. According to the article American Gulag in Harper’s Sept. 2006 issue, 450 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, approximately 13,000 in Iraq, 500 in Afghanistan, and an estimated 100 in secret CIA “black sites” around the world. They have not been formally charged, and have little legal recourse. In essence, they are guilty until the US decides they are innocent. While the man in charge of the facility “firmly believes” that there are no innocent men in Guantanamo, a report based on data from the Dept. of Defense indicates that 55% of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its allies (ref, ref). According to Harper’s, 98 Guantanamo detainees have died to date, it is safe to assume not from natural causes.

But it’s not simply the case that this society is a bit behind in the transition from discipline to control. It is actually advancing equally well on both fronts. In fact, increased control goes hand in hand with increased confinement because increased control means more precise ways of identifying those who fail to perform to society’s expectations. In a technocracy, control is surveillance: the continuous monitoring of public, private and work life, and the “intelligent” identification of any deviance. But while new control technologies afford more effective and efficient methods of management and surveillance, you still need an apparatus for controlling those who fall outside the established parameters. This group includes those who have failed in the educational system and therefore cannot productively contribute to the service economy, enemies of the state (preemptively defined), non-conforming minorities, etc. (I’m not suggesting there are no criminals in prison; I’m merely drawing some conclusions from trends in the makeup of the prison population). The trick is then to turn the confinement of these ‘burdens’ of society into a business opportunity by benefiting from their cheap labor or by privatizing the industry of confinement itself (think Halliburton).

I hinted above at the role of education as a control mechanism that helps differentiate the productive members of society from those who should be confined and disciplined. The fact that the same groups who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population are also those most likely to drop out of the educational system is not a coincidence (only about half of Black and Hispanic youth graduate with a high-school degree; ref). But for everyone else who succeeds, what does education look like? The answer is: continuous control. I was struck by Deleuze’s comments regarding the changing nature of education in a control society:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business. (1995, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The constant student is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Thanks to distance education, e-learning and technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS), education becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which —more importantly— can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ career of the individual. Thus, assessment-based education helps reconcile control and discipline in society by helping to effect, in the case of those who fail, a transition from controlled subject to disciplined object.

I want to go back briefly to Deleuze’s comment about control societies also operating through “instant communication” (1995, p. 174, my emphasis). It would make sense to assume that, in a crude way, control societies would want to control communication. But that is not the case. According to the standard technophile discourse, thanks to technology our societies enjoy an unprecedented freedom of speech and expression. Communication technologies with low operational cost and low barriers of entry (such as blogs) are praised for giving “everyone” a chance to express themselves. But Deleuze points out that “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves… What we’re are plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (1995, p. 129). Deleuze is suggesting that there is a connection between control and an over-abundance of (meaningless) expression. More of this type of communication has not resulted in stronger social bonds, but in increased isolation: concurrent with advances in ICTs, the last U.S. census shows that 25% of the nation’s households (27.2 million) consist of just one person, compared to 10% in 1950 (ref).

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

Offline Reference:
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Creative Commons photo credit: thost

[UPDATE: Raph Koster has replied to this post over at his blog, and Gus offers some interesting thoughts as well.]

The September 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (contents not online, unfortunately) has a piece titled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. It is a conversation between Jane Avrich (author and English teacher), Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Raph Koster (video-game designer, including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies), Thomas De Zengotlta (author, teacher) and moderator Bill Wasik (senior editor of Harper’s).

The participants were asked to discuss how video games could be used to teach literacy. The guys (Jane is allowed to interject here and there) immediately get to the task, envisioning various kinds of possible games for this purpose, including a zombie game where you have to type a word correctly in order to off a Z. But the conversation does include more interesting nuggets. For instance, the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:

KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)

Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation. If anything, it reminds me of certain critiques of technology (such as Rivers’) which argue that our current technosocial systems stamp out individuality and are responsible for the erasure of the individual by the mass. One could argue that appropriation and annotation are the natural forms of a mass literacy, operationalized through the extreme individualism of the blogosphere (masses are not collectives as much as they are homogenous collections of isolated individuals). That resulting kind of democracy, therefore, is one which blocks authentic difference and makes the masses more susceptible to control. And speaking of control, the Harper’s group briefly touches upon the issue of authority:

WASIK: But you’re suggesting that increasingly it’s the social network itself, through reputation systems or what have you, that is acting as the authority?

JOHNSON: This is especially true in the online network games, too, which are really the most influential games in the world right now. Raph, actually, helped to create some of the biggest ones. With Ultima Online and other online games, we’ve had the rise of guild structures, these distributed systems for collaborating. A player who wants to slay a particular dragon will need to get twelve people together, and put one in charge of this, another in charge of at. (p. 37)

The kind of authority described here, however, is very simplistic. It is more interesting to explore the question of how in social media (and networked games) the masses are not susceptible to a central form of authority, but to a distributed form of control emanating from the mass itself, from what are considered to be ‘objective’ rules and values. It’s rationalism all over again, with logical thinking as the only valid method for interpreting the world. At one point, the Harper’s group confronts this problem:

ZENGOTITA: … But when the players go out into the real world, I think there’s a real danger—and I see signs of this in my students, and young people in general—of failing to understand not just the complexity of the real world but also its mystery. I’m using “mystery” as opposed to “problem” on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don’t. People are profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real world involves understanding that you’re never going to entirely understand them.

…

KOSTER: To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a really big mistake. But of course this perspective predates video games. It harkens back to behaviorist psychology, and a variety of unsavory political movements as well.

ZENGOTITA: It’s systems-based thinking, model-based thinking. I can’t claim that Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara were products of video-game education. But they show all the symptoms of it. (p. 35)

Zengotita sets up a dichotomy between problems that have solutions and mysteries that don’t, and points out how the gamist perspective inculcates problem-solving skills but not the skills required to live with the ambiguity of complex ‘mysteries.’ The thing with rationalism is that it inverts the problem-solution relation in such a way that only problems that have solutions it can handle are made relevant. Problems, in other words, are subordinated to solutions. This makes, ultimately, for a very impoverished relationship with reality. As DeLanda (2004) warns: “The crucial task is to avoid the subordination of problems to solutions brought about by the search for simple linear behaviour” (2004, p. 171).

Interestingly, while this threat was identified early in the Harper’s piece, the participants quickly move on to describe more ways in which games can teach literacy. It is as if we are required to surrender our agency in a technocracy, and while we can make observations, we are beyond questioning the progress of technology. So what if video-games produce more Rummi’s?

(Disclaimer: I own a Gameboy)

I’d love to hear from the literacy and gaming people what they think about the Harper’s piece or my reading of it.

References:

De Landa, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London; New York: Continuum.

Creative Commons photo credit: gregoryperez