That’s probably because folks who don’t know anything about “branding” insist on calling it the Mexican Revolution. An estimated two million people died in the long struggle (1910-1920) to overthrow a despotic government and bring about reform. But why shouldn’t we re-name the revolution not after a nation or its people, but after the “social media” that had such a great impact in making the struggle known all over the world: the photographic camera? Even better, let’s name the revolution not after the medium itself, but after the manufacturer of the cameras that were carried by people like Hugo Brehme to document the atrocities of war. Viva Leica, cabrones!

My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things, the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity. I agree with Jillian York when she says:

“… I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight.  But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi–or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause–by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.”

Granted, as Joss Hands points out, there appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are primarily responsible for igniting the uprisings in question. But that hasn’t stopped the internet intelligentsia from engaging in lengthy arguments about the role that technology is playing in these historic developments. One camp, comprised of people like Clay Shirky, seem to make allowances for what Cory Doctorow calls the “internet’s special power to connect and liberate.” On the other side, authors like Ethan Zuckerman, Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov have proposed that while digital media can play a role in organizing social movements, it cannot be counted on to build lasting alliances, or even protect net activists once authorities start using the same tools to crack down on dissent.

Both sides are, perhaps, engaging in a bit of technological determinism–one by embellishing the agency of technology, the other by diminishing it. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, and philosophers of technology settled the dispute of whether technology shapes society (technological determinism) or society shapes technology (cultural materialism) a while ago: the fact is that technology and society mutually and continually determine each other.

So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy.

To elaborate, the discourse of a social media revolution is a form of self-focused empathy in which we imagine the other (in this case, a Muslim other) to be nothing more than a projection of our own desires, a depoliticized instant in our own becoming. What a strong affirmation of ourselves it is to believe that people engaged in a desperate struggle for human dignity are using the same Web 2.0 products we are using! That we are able to form this empathy largely on the basis of consumerism demonstrates the extent to which we have bought into the notion that democracy is a by-product of media products for self-expression, and that the corporations that create such media products would never side with governments against their own people.

It is time to abandon this fantasy, and to realize that although the internet’s original architecture encouraged openness, it is becoming increasingly privatized and centralized. While it is true that an internet controlled by a handful of media conglomerates can still be used to promote democracy (as people are doing in Tunisia, Egypt, and all over the world), we need to reconsider the role that social media corporations like Facebook and Twitter will play in these struggles.

The clearest way to understand this role is to simply look at the past and current role that corporations have played in “facilitating” democracy elsewhere. Consider the above image of the tear gas canister fired against Egyptians demanding democracy. The can is labeled Made in U.S.A.

But surely it would be a gross calumny to suggest that ICT are on the same level as tear gas, right? Well, perhaps not. Today, our exports encompass not only weapons of war and riot control used to keep in power corrupt leaders, but tools of internet surveillance like Narusinsight, produced by a subsidiary of Boeing and used by the Egyptian government to track down and “disappear” dissidents.

Even without citing examples of specific Web companies that have aided governments in the surveillance and persecution of their citizens (Jillian York documents some of these examples), my point is simply that the emerging market structure of the internet is threatening its potential to be used by people as a tool for democracy. The more monopolies (a market structure characterized by a single seller) control access and infrastructure, and the more monopsonies (a market structure characterized by a single buyer) control aggregation and distribution of user-generated content, the easier it is going to be for authorities to pull the plug, as just happened in Egypt.

I’m reminded of the first so-called Internet Revolution. Almost a hundred years after the original Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation launched an uprising in southern Mexico to try to address some of the injustices that the first revolution didn’t fix, and that remain unsolved to this day. But back in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos and the rest of the EZLN didn’t have Facebook profiles, or use Twitter to communicate or organize. Maybe their movement would have been more effective if they had. Or maybe it managed to stay alive because of the decentralized nature of the networks the EZLN and their supporters used.

My point is this: as digital networks grow and become more centralized and privatized, they increase opportunities for participation, but they also increase inequality, and make it easier for authorities to control them.

Thus, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to continue the struggle after the network has been shut off. In fact, the struggle is going to be against those who own and control the network. If the fight can’t continue without Facebook and Twitter, then it is doomed. But I suspect the people of Iran, Tunisia and Egypt (unlike us) already know this, out of sheer necessity.

[Ulises A. Mejias is assistant professor at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. His book on digital networks and inequality is coming out in Fall 2012 by University of Minnesota Press.]

[UPDATE: This post has been linked to by Forbes.com and The Huffington Post, mentioned by Inside Higher Ed and Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, reproduced in the French online magazine OWNI, the P2P Foundation wiki, and published in The Post-Standard's opinion section (central NY's leading newspaper).]

You should also take a look at the iDC listserv for a continuing discussion about these topics.

I have been invited to give a paper at the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, organized by Medialab-Prado (in Madrid). The meeting will focus on “an analysis of ‘peer-to-peer’ networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.”

I’ve heard good things about this workshop, and it looks like an interesting selection of papers. My own contribution is titled Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly. The proposal is below.

In theory, P2P networks embody a model of collaboration that spells out the end of monopolies of communication. Like the Inclusiva-net Call for Papers states, P2P exemplifies principles like “equality of power among participants, free cooperation among them, putting into circulation or forming what are considered ‘common goods’, and participation and communication ‘from many to many.’” While all this has been empirically confirmed in isolated cases, we need to question the ‘goodness’ of these premises at a large societal scale.

Even if we are to accept the claim that P2P network architecture engenders publics instead of markets, we should not put aside Kierkergaard’s critique of publics as nihilistic systems intended to facilitate the accumulation of information while postponing action indefinitely. While Kierkergaard was putting down newspaper media, his critique couldn’t be more fitting in the age of Web browsers, RSS aggregators and bitTorrent clients. Another way of putting this is to say that while P2P networks may indeed democratize access to cultural contents, we still need to ask: Whose cultural contents? The whole piracy debate revolves around the fact that the statistical majority of ‘pirates’ are using P2P networks not to disseminate radical countercultural products, but to share the latest Hollywood blockbuster or teen idol musical hit. We need to question how network processes normalize monocultures, and to do so we need to theorize what form of resistance is embodied by existing in the peripheries of networks.

In my work, I argue that digital technosocial networks (DTSNs) function not just as metaphors to describe sociality, but as full templates or models for organizing it. Since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node, DTSNs are constituted as totalities by what they include as much as by what they exclude. I propose a framework for understanding the epistemological exclusion embedded in the structure and dynamics of DTSNs, and for exploring the ethical questions associated with the nature of the bond between the node and the excluded other. Contrary to its depiction in diagrams, the outside of the network is not empty but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network. Thus, I put forth a theory for how the peripheries of the network represent an ethical resistance to the network, and I suggest that these peripheries, the only sites from which it is possible to un-think the network episteme, can inform emerging models of identity and sociality.

This is important because we are perhaps entering an age when deviation from social norms will only be possible in the private, non-surveilled space of the paranodal (the space beyond the nodes), away from the templates of the network as model for organizing sociality. Subjectivization, as Rancière argues, happens precisely through a process of disidentification: parts of society disidentify themselves from the whole, and individuals and groups recognize themselves as separate from the mainstream. Thus, to paraphrase Rancière, the paranodal is the part of those who have no part; it is the place where we experience—or at least are free to theorize—what it is like to be outside the network. Articulating this form of disidentification, of imagining and claiming difference even in relation to ‘democratic’ P2P networks, is an important step in the actualization of alternative ways of knowing and acting in the world.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: You write that “We should be less concerned about designing technologies that will afford young people ’satisfying participation opportunities’ and more concerned about ensuring that new generations can challenge and question the opportunities that are ‘offered’ to them. The goal –for young people as well as old– should be the self-critical individual.” Do you think that the Internet — either as a medium, or as an environment — inspires/encourages such self-critique? Do you think that digital natives are more or less likely to be interested in and have the capacity for inquiry and/or self-reflection?

Ulises Mejias: Well, as with any discussion about the affordances of a technology (what the technology allows us to do or prevents us from doing), there are two sides to that answer. First: Structure is not everything! The features of the Internet by themselves do not promote or encourage x or y, democracy or tyranny. From that perspective, we can view claims that the internet will help us do this or that as simplistic. Ultimately, it’s all about what people do on the internet, how they choose to apply this technology (this is the cultural materialist or social constructivist position). In other words, the same Internet structures can be used in ways that promote self-realization, or for exactly the opposite purpose.

Which brings us to the other (seemingly contradictory) side of the answer: Structure is something! The technological features of the Internet do shape the nature of our actions to some extent. Consider, for instance, claims like Nicholas Carr’s that the Internet is making us stupid by diminishing our powers of concentration, distracting us with advertisements, and promoting a broad but superficial kind of knowledge that erases the possibility of a shared cultural meaning. According to these kinds of arguments, the way the Internet is used is not necessarily contributing to our capacity for inquiry and self-reflection.

I think what is important to recognize here is that when a particular use of a technology becomes the norm for a large percentage of the population, there is no way we can avoid saying that technology shapes society (or what is known as technological determinism). So despite the fact that the Internet is being used by a few people to engage in critical inquiry, at a mass level the Internet is not being utilized that way — that’s the norm.

Why do I say this? Well, the word ‘mass’ is very important here. A self-critical mass is an oxymoron. I do believe that the values behind today’s Internet mass applications (especially anything controlled by commercial interests, i.e. most of the Internet) are not meant to help people become critical, much less self-critical. They are meant to turn them into better consumers. Sure, I think the Internet offers exiting new possibilities for inquiry, activism, social involvement, etc., but it’s naive to think that these will become widespread without a fundamental change in social, political and economic structures. And to think that the same Internet that promotes the creation of masses will help us achieve such change is a double fallacy. I’m not saying it won’t play a role. It must. But the Internet by itself will not liberate us, that’s for sure.

ABS: Does the Internet create habits of mind that are conducive to the asking of questions? Studies indicate that young people engage with the news more as headline skimmers, and that they don’t spend much time evaluating the results that they get back from Google searches. But perhaps this is just about the young people we’re raising, and not about the Internet. Or is it inherent to the abundance of information that the Internet offers? Relatedly, do you think that the Internet encourages an “answer” orientation — that it’s all out there, you just have to find it?

UM: Geert Lovink recently wrote an article in which he calls on us to stop searching and start questioning. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve come to believe that Google has all the answers, without realizing that what is changing is our ability to formulate questions Google can’t answer. As suggested by the Carr article mentioned above, I do think that the Internet is changing our research habits and our relationship to knowledge, for the worse. What’s interesting is that when I discussed the Carr article with my students, they said: “The Internet is not making us stupid, it’s just making us lazy.” That’s even worse! We can’t help it if we are stupid. But to be lazy suggests that we know there is an alternative, perhaps even a better alternative, but we consciously choose to go with the option that requires the least effort and that places less demands on questioning what we are doing. This is typical mass behavior.

ABS: You wrote about online protest and its lack of efficacy – both in terms of its impact on government and the experience of those involved. You tie this to the lessening relevance of the “local.” How do you see the rise of the “Facebook cause” related to the interest in involvement in local community activism? Are they in competition? Do you think that inquiry is more, less, or equally present in involvement in the actual physical local community versus online causes? You wrote about the lack of risk in online protesting. Is this lack of risk accompanied by, or the cause of, a lack of questioning when it comes to deciding how or if to be involved in this cause?

UM: I believe that the Internet can help small groups with the organizational aspects of activism, but on the other hand I think that the Internet’s mass commercial applications, including the so-called Web 2.0 services, militate against civic engagement. The only thing what you call the “Facebook cause” (that web application intended to rally people around a social issue) can contribute is mass numbers: massive membership, massive signatures attached to the petition, massive numbers of comments and opinions… all of which can be easily dismissed because there is only a ‘virtual’ weight behind them. Reminds me of a quote by Gilles Deleuze: “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, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, p. 129). Of course, Walter Benjamin had already touched upon this “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” back in 1936 when he wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” So online activism is quite vocal, but not much else. Which is not to say that a “Facebook cause” cannot provoke some people to take action to the next level, to something that unfolds beyond the domain of cyberspace. Whether the sum of these little ‘lines of flight’ are enough to counter mass behavior remains to be seen.

You bring up an interesting point: Is online activism bankrupt because it cannot concern itself with the local? Actually, no. Unlike other critics, I do not proclaim the devaluation of the near and the death of distance at the hands of virtual reality. Networks do not create exclusive links to the far; they link to the near as well. What we should be looking at is the emergence of networked nearness — the phenomenon of rendering nearness in such a way that if something is not on the network it might as well not exist (even if this ’something’ exists in un-networked proximity). So the ‘local’ is alive and well. The problem is that we increasingly depend on technological networks to reveal what is local, what is near. And when the networks are controlled exclusively by commercial interests, this might be a problem. The social, as someone said, becomes part of the economy, instead of the economy being a part of the social. The process of inquiry that can lead to the kind of (risky) commitment to a social cause that can be translated into more than just an expression of support is subverted by the lazy behavior of the masses.

Attention Economy: The Game

Ulises A. Mejias

How do new bloggers gain recognition? Why are some people in MySpace or Facebook more popular than others? Why does one YouTube video get seen by thousands of people, and another by just a few? What does it mean that “on the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people”? Can the subject matter of the content we post to an online network make us more or less popular?

This game is an accelerated simulation of the process of gaining attention online (acquiring more readers, friends, hits, etc.). The goal of the game is to collect the most attention. The game tries to condense a process that can take weeks or months into about an hour. It is intended for people who are new to the study of online social networks, but anyone can play. The game can also be used to teach some basic characteristics of networks, such as the role of hubs or connectors in scale-free networks. Players are asked at the end to critically reflect on the values that drive this Attention Economy.

Number of players: around 10-25

Time for activity: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on number of players)

Background

Attention is “the action that turns raw data into something humans can use” (Lanham, in Lankshear and Knobel, 2003, p. 111). Information is not scarce, attention is. Attention Economics establishes that what information consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon, in Lankshear and Knobel, 2003, p. 109).

Game Set Up

Goal: Collect the most attention.

Players:

• Newbies: Individuals who just joined the online community. Few people know they exist.

• Oldbies or Hubs: Individuals who have been around the online community for a while. They have established reputations, and people pay attention to what they say.

[Tip: In a group of 20 players, I usually designate 3 oldbies, but this number can be adjusted.]

Materials:

• Attention Credit cards: Used by players to directly award or “pay” attention to another player.
• Recommendation cards: Used by players to try to influence others to award or “pay” attention to someone.

[Tip: The reason section of the Recommendation card can be left blank, but writing something here can make the recommendation more "sticky".]

• Log sheet: Used by players to keep track of how they have allocated their attention and who has awarded them attention, which is translated into points. Note that for every two Recommendations players receive, two points are gained.

DOWNLOAD A PDF WITH CARDS AND LOG SHEET READY TO PRINT!

• Topic Boards: Used by players to identify themselves and the subject matter of their content. Players can change their topic as many times as they want during the game. It might make it easier to limit the topics to a few areas. For instance, I have students choose topics related to Entertainment, Sports, Politics or Religion.

[Tip: Dry-erase boards work best as Topic Boards, but they can be a bit expensive. I purchased the ones I use from The Markerboard People. Twenty boards (with markers, erasers, and display base) cost around $130.00 USD.]

Playing the Game

Different scenarios can be provided. For instance, players can be told that they are part of the blogosphere, and their topics reflect the subject matter of their posts. Or they can pretend to be YouTube users, and their topics reflect the subject matter of their videos, etc.

Game Setup

1. Sit in a circle, so everyone can see each other.
2. Have players write their names (in big letters) in the top section of their Topic Board.
3. Newbies get 15 Attention Credits and 5 Recommendations
4. Oldbies get 15 Recommendations and 5 Attention Credits. Make sure oldbies are clearly identified (attach something to the Topic Board, have them wear a party hat, etc.)

[Tip: The number of cards each player receives can be adjusted to control the duration of the game. The fewer cards, the shorter the game. I usually prepare individual player packs with the corresponding number of cards before the game.]

Playing the Game

1. Choose a starting topic and write it on your Topic Board (remember that you can change your topic as many times as you want).
2. Pay the Oldbie Tax: All newbie players must write their first Attention Credit card to one of the oldbies [Tip: if the game goes on for a long time, you may want to have players pay the Oldbie Tax more than once during the game.]
3. Decide who you are sending your first Attention Credits to, fill out your card, and log your decision.
4. Decide who you are sending your first Recommendation to, and fill out your card.
5. Send Attention Credits and Recommendations by passing them from left to right only along the circle. If something is addressed to you, keep it. If not, pass it along quickly. If it’s a Recommendation, read it before passing it along. Players can send cards to the same person more than once (or even send all their cards to the same person!).
6. Log any received Attention Credits or Recommendations.
7. Continue to send the rest of your Attention Credits and Recommendations until you run out of cards.

Ending the Game

1. The game ends when all cards have been used and received by their intended parties (or you can end the game early by stopping all traffic).
2. Have players calculate their scores and post in on their Topic Board.
3. Discuss the post-game questions.

Post-Game Questions

1. Why did oldbies have less Attention cards but more Recommendation cards than newbies?
2. What strategies did newbies employ to gain attention?
3. How did you decide to allocate recommendations?
4. Was it possible to gain more attention than oldbies?
5. What was your strategy for selecting or changing topics?
6. What was more important in guiding your actions: reciprocity or self-interest?

Reference

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham [England]; Philadelphia, Pa.: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.

See also:

• The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net – Michael H. Goldhaber
• Attention economy – Wikipedia

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]

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]

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

At a general level, we could say that on one side of the debate are those who believe that social media can increase civic participation and shift the balance of power away from the institutions that currently stand in the way of change. On the other side are those who warn that social media can only offer a reduced form of participation, that it diminishes the value of individual contributions, and that it leaves social systems more prone to manipulation by lowering their intelligence to the minimum common denominator (i.e., stupidity or mediocrity).

Thus, the debate can be framed in terms of whether social media can engender democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the sum of its members, or whether it will merely continue to support the production of anti-democratic masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, social media is a big label encompassing many different technologies, and even the same technologies can be applied differently in various contexts. But while features and applications might differ, the people contributing to this debate are obviously focused on the aggregated impact that social media is having on our societies rather than on specific examples of applications.

The effects of social media are probably most visible in emerging forms of public discourse and collaboration. Given that our notions of democracy are closely tied to the ability to voice one’s opinion and to the ability to organize collective action, this is not surprising. The more opportunities for discussion and collaboration (such as those allegedly generated by blogs and wikis), the healthier the public sphere and the healthier the democracy, goes the argument.

In his book The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) C. Wright Mills summarized, with a touch of dry humor, this model of democratic “authority by discussion:”

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. One viewpoint ‘wins out.’ Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do. (pp. 299-300)

Idealists believe that social media improves the processes described above by giving us more efficient tools for discussion and for ‘acting out’ what comes out of these discussions. But the problem is that, in practice, democracy does not unfold so neatly. Mills argued that an unequal distribution of power and knowledge allows a small elite to impose its viewpoint on the population (through the media, for instance) while convincing them that it is the people’s will that the elite is carrying out on its behalf. Authentic democracies require an informed public to operate. Conversely, oligarchies require the consensual passivity and ignorance of a mass. But what role exactly do publics and masses play in each situation?

Below, I extract from Mills’ argument three features of a democratic public sphere and present his analysis of how a public reflects those characteristics, while a mass doesn’t. I then summarize some arguments from the social media debate which suggest how social media realizes, or fails to realize, that particular feature of a public sphere. I would like to point out that although there are many people contributing to this debate, I am only citing some of the authors I am most familiar with.

FEATURES OF A DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPHERE:

1) Balance between the ability to produce and consume ideas

In a public, according to Mills, “as many people express opinions as receive them.” In a mass, “far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media” (Mills, 1956, pp. 303-304; my emphasis).

Advocates of social media argue that it represents an opportunity to reverse a process of massification and returns people to the status of a public. This is because social media, they argue, allows individuals to become producers, not mere consumers, thus making it possible for as many people to express as to receive opinions. This position is captured in Jay Rosen’s manifesto The People Formerly Known as The Audience. According to Rosen, users of social media are saying to the old media: “You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.” I also have suggested that the alternative models of participation, collaboration and ownership that social media makes possible can have a significant social transformative power. If you change the ways of producing and consuming culture, you change society.

Alternatively, critics of social media are not convinced that it fundamentally changes the balance between production and consumption. As I have argued (yes, I tend to argue both sides!), when looking beyond exceptional examples, the new forms of production that social media affords amount to nothing more than new forms of consumerism for the majority of users. Production is the new consumption. Indeed, social media generates more opportunities for people to express themselves. But the majority of people remain equally susceptible to impressions from the mass media because they fail to evolve into anything more than an “abstract collection of individuals,” as Mills puts it (this recent Pew study seems to support the claim that most bloggers, for example, prefer to talk about themselves and avoid political topics). In other words, giving means of expression to each individual in a mass is not enough to transform the mass into a community of publics . The other features of a democratic public sphere will further clarify why this is the case.

2) Affordable and effective means of producing ideas

In a public, Mills argues, “communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public.” In a mass, “the communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect” (Mills, 1956, pp. 303-304; my emphasis).

Again, supporters of social media claim that we are entering an age when it is indeed possible for individuals to respond to any public opinion. The cost of becoming part of the networked public sphere has become negligible, and new models of participation are being developed and tested. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, recently launched an initiative that seeks to redefine the political process: “If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics. One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it.” While not everyone will use this opportunity to become a full-fledged activist, Ross Mayfield argues that social media can provide different levels of participation to accommodate even the most apathetic: “few of us have time or interest in politics, but there is a way for us all to have civic engagement within our means. That way is though social software.” He goes on to describe how social software is changing the public sphere:

The cost for personal publishing has fallen to zero. Its common for citizens to express a facet of their identity online. The cost for group forming has fallen to zero. Networked appeal has proven itself as a fundraising mechanism. A broad conversational network and common sense repository supports collective sense making. Today social software has gained use broad enough to support civic engagement.

While individual opinions can be dismissed, argue enthusiasts, social media represents a more effective public sphere because it aggregates the voices of thousands and is able to respond to issues immediately (the ‘collective common sense’ Ross is talking about). Using James Surowiecki’s thesis about the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ advocates propose that social media engenders an intelligence of its own, an intelligence aggregated from individual contributions but greater than the sum of them, and which allows for a more effective process of generating and selecting the best ideas and responses.

Immediate and low-cost response? Yes. Effective? Not so much, say the critics of social media. In an article that has generated a fair amount of debate, Jaron Lanier warned of the danger of endowing social media with a more effective intelligence than our own: “The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.” In a follow-up interview, Lanier elaborated:

“Let me be specific: I don’t like people pretending something better than themselves exists in the computer. This is a great danger… You get a bunch of people together on a project, and they quickly become anonymous. They contribute to some sort of computer-mediated phenomenon, and treat the results as an oracle.”

Supporters of social media have contested Lanier’s claims that it undermines individual contributions and suggested that it is effective precisely because of them. Wales, for example, says that “authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the judgment of their own minds.” Clay Shirky adds that “individual motivations in Wikipedia are not only alive and well, it would collapse without them.”

It is because we believe (rightly or wrongly) that social media aggregates the best of individual contributions that we trust the results. But what is at stake here is precisely the way the computational processes of social media get to define what constitutes sociality. Trebor Scholz, for example, describes how individual contributions are not simply channeled by social media, but fundamentally transformed in the process (in this case, he is talking about social bookmarking):

Individual goals of participants are not always shared by the “group,” which gives the del.icio.us project a decisively non-collaborative character. What does collaboration mean? Collaboration is generally a risky, intensive form of working together with a common goal. The gain or loss is shared among all. Cooperation, on the other hand, is a less intensive form of working together in which participants account for gain or loss individually. Contributors have individual goals.

According to these definitions, while social media users may cooperate, they might not necessarily be collaborating. Could this be enough to distinguish a public from a mass? I had made a related argument previously (again, talking about social bookmarking): “tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. And yet, the whole point of distributed classification systems (DCSs) such as del.icio.us and flickr is that the aggregation of inherently private goods (tags and what they describe) has public value…” However, if the code aggregates contributions by disaggregating goals (individualizing motives), what exactly is the public value of social media?

In other words, we should ask whether in processing individual contributions, social media’s code engenders affordances more along the lines of a public or a mass. The answer to that question is directly related to Mills’ last feature of a democratic public sphere.

3) Ideas are translated into action

According to Mills, in a public, “opinion formed by such discussion readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against—if necessary—the prevailing system of authority.” In a mass, “the realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action” (Mills, 1956, pp. 303-304; my emphasis).

This is where the virtual rubber must meet the actual road, so to speak. Advocates of social media believe in its power to unleash new forms of action extending beyond the boundaries of cyberspace into the ‘real’ world. The Open Planning Project’s (or TOPP) mission statement, for instance, states that:

Instead of harassing our overworked public officials, TOPP believes in building tools that will ultimately aid them directly, increasing efficiency in true democratic decision making through projects that streamline citizen involvement and enable the accessibility and effective use of public information… TOPP wants to bring people out of the virtual and in to the real, where the network can have a huge effect, by motivating for change in a community, and bringing people together for action instead of just talking.

Not only are critics skeptical of social media’s ability to ignite action in the ‘real’ world at a large scale but some, like Nicholas Carr, argue that new social media initiatives will end up merely replicating the same forms of authority and governance that are currently the source of the problem. This is because it is we who shape social media by encoding our forms of sociality into it, not the other way around. Thus, according to him, social media experiments are bound to result in un-innovative forms of social action. Citing an interview with some of its most active members, Carr quips that Wikipedia has “become more interesting as an experiment in emergent bureaucracy than in emergent content.” He illustrates by pointing out that “the rules governing the deletion of an entry now take up ‘37 pages plus 20 subcategories.’ For anyone who still thinks of Wikipedia as a decentralized populist collective, the interview will be particularly enlightening.”

The nature of the role that the individual plays in social media is what limits its potential to transform society, according to the critics. Previously, the concern was that social spaces like the blogosphere reinforced people’s narrow group identities. For instance, Trebor Scholz (borrowing the concept of plural monocultures from Amartya Sen) wrote:

The Internet becomes a fabulous host for this type of multiculturalism. Often, no two opinions have to confront each other. In their own inner chamber people can forget about racial, ethnic or economical differences and just talk about the very narrow interest set that connects them.

Now, asserts the critical camp, social media takes the next step by altogether removing any trace of the individual’s identity in the name of a higher collective intelligence. Social media is built on individual contributions, yes, but the code must remove any present biases before aggregating them into a meaningful data set. Otherwise, the output would be too noisy. Social media’s collective intelligence, its perceived ‘wisdom of crowds,’ is directly related to the degree that its code can accomplish this cleansing of personal opinion.

While valorizing this new form of computationally-derived intelligence might not necessarily lead to a devaluation of individual intelligence (as Lanier, Carr, et. al would seem to suggest), it’s true that it might lead to a scenario where individuals must compromise their individuality in order to get through the filters of social media.

For example, Howard Rheingold, in his reaction to Jimmy Wales’ new project, wrote that

One important contribution to political discourse that we could all adopt from Wikipedia is the “neutral point of view” process: Because anyone who disagrees with you can change your wiki entry with the click of a mouse, it is necessary to clearly articulate the different points of view on a subject — and to state them well enough that someone who disagrees with your own point of view won’t be motivated to edit your statement.

In other words: express your point of view in such a way that your opponent won’t find anything to fault in it. If before communication was defined as the sharing of meaning, now social media provides a space where meaning can be assembled without being shared, and provides the mechanisms to enforce this kind of neutrality [for a response from Rheingold, see the comments at the end, as well as this post]. The problem is that meaning then becomes atomistic, a reflection of what the code has aggregated from detached individuals, not what has emerged through debate and cooperation. Paradoxically, social media provides less incentive for people to be social.

If the end goal is a neutral point of view, the danger lies not in erasing the individual’s contributions, but in inadequately supporting the mechanisms that allow individuals to share meaning. Nicholas Carr’s ‘law of the wiki‘ —which asserts that the more people involved, the lower the quality of the wiki— seeks to name this phenomenon: unlimited aggregation does not result in order, but in randomness. Wikipedia contributors themselves recognize that good articles are the result of small communities of experts working without interference from the larger public.

What can we conclude from the various perspectives I’ve summarized above?

Advocates of social media will point out that while there are applications such as wikis and social bookmarking that embody this ‘unlimited aggregation’ approach, the ecology of social media is balanced by the presence of other applications such as blogs and social networking where individuality and cooperation are alive and well. They might be right to an extent. By using a mix of social media, communities can benefit both from the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of individuals.

Social media —which makes visible the connections between the online and the onsite— is helping us understand that reality doesn’t just serve as a metaphor for computer-facilitated interaction; rather, it is its very medium. For the most part, critics are no longer using the ‘virtuality’ of the networked public sphere as an excuse to declare it unreal or less than real. Actions still speak louder than words, regardless of whether the words originate online or onsite. The question we are now interested in is whether these new forms of action can emerge even against the prevailing systems of authority, or whether they are still organized and controlled within the framework of the dominant sphere of debate. Will the old concepts of public and mass be enough to capture the possibilities?

Offline Reference

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Flickr Photo Credit

beaunose, licensed under Creative Commons.

This point became increasingly clear while I was reading Bruno Latour’s latest book, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (2005, Oxford University Press). Latour is critical of the way in which the concept of the social has become a sort of “black box” which we use, perhaps out of laziness, to bracket all sorts of connections that should be explored in more detail. His goal in this introduction to ANT (actor-network theory) is therefore to “redefine the notion of social by going back to its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again” (p. 1).

Tracing connections? What does that mean? According to Latour, the social designates “a type of connection between things that are not themselves social” (p. 5, italics in original). Examining the social is, therefore, the tracing of associations between things, or ‘actors’ in the vocabulary of actor-network theory. These things or actors can be human as well as non-human:

A new vaccine is being marketed, a new job description is offered, a new political movement is being created, a new planetary system is discovered, a new law is voted, a new catastrophe occurs. In each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant. We are no longer sure about what ‘we’ means; we seem to be bound by ‘ties’ that don’t look like regular social ties. (p. 6)

Actors are constantly on the move, ‘networking’ with other actors, creating associations. One of the main precepts of ANT is to get off the soap box of the know-it-all theorist and follow the actors, “grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the social is made of” (p. 11). In the context of ANT, the social is defined not as “a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing,” such as Social Software, “but only as a very peculiar moment of re-association and reassembling” (p. 7).

This is directly in opposition to the kind of normative critiques that assume a singular model of what the social should look like. For instance, new technologies are often condemned because they are seen as somehow corrupting The Social (for more on this, see my draft on Social Agency). These critiques rarely specify the composition of the social (it is enough to conjure up the term), but nonetheless they lament any attempt to redefine it. According to Latour, 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 social aggregates as points of departure, but as what needs to be explained in the first place. Unfortunately, by sticking the word social in front of the word software, we tend to revert to a social determinism in which it is assumed that the software does the bidding of something called The Social, something no longer in need of explanation, so that instead we can focus on what ‘cool’ things the software can do.

So what is the alternative that ANT proposes? What tools can ANT provide for those of us who want not just to deconstruct the social in Social Software, but re-construct and re-assemble it? [Apparently, deconstruction is soooo 1990's: "Dispersion, destruction, and deconstruction are not the goals to be achieved but what needs to be overcome. It's much more important to check what are the new institutions, procedures, and concepts able to collect and to reconnect the social" (p. 11).]

Latour describes three steps which are treated in each part of the book: deployment, stabilization, and composition: “We first have to learn how to deploy controversies so as to gauge the number of new participants in any future assemblage (Part I); then we have to be able to follow how the actors themselves stabilize those uncertainties by building formats, standards, and metrologics (Part II); and finally, we want to see how the assemblages thus gathered can renew our sense of being in the same collective” (p. 249).

This probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t read the book, but basically these steps help us move beyond reified and empty definitions of the social:

…the question of the social emerges when the ties in which one is entangled begin to unravel; the social is further detected through the surprising movements from one association to the next; those movements can either be suspended or resumed; when they are prematurely suspended, the social as normally construed is bound together with already accepted participants called ’social actors’ who are members of a ’society’; when the movement toward collection is resumed, it traces the social as associations through many non-social entities which might become participants later; if pursued systematically, this tracking may end up in a shared definition of a common world, what I have called a collective; but if there are no procedures to render it common, it may fail to be assembled… [S]ociology is best defined as the discipline where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective. (p. 247)

In short, the goal is to be able to notice new actors and new arrangements of actors, to be able to trace the connections between those actors and the local and the global (”in spite of so much ‘globalonney’, globalization circulates along minuscule rails resulting in some glorified form of provincialism” p . 190), and to be able to ask the following question: how do we end up with a shared definition of a common world, a world to be shared among all the actors?

Doing this is essentially the work of tracing a network. However, as Latour points out, tracing a network is not the same as describing something that has the shape of a network:

Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described… [Y]ou can provide an actor-network account of topics which have in no way the shape of a network—a symphony, a piece of legislation, a rock from the moon, an engraving. Conversely, you may well write about technical networks—television, e-mails, satellites, salesforce—without at any point providing an actor-network account. (p. 131)

The use of the social black box as a meta-explanation was a nice way in modernity to privilege the role of some actors (mostly human) over others (mostly non-human, but including also the ‘barbaric’ others). Now, the gate has been opened and the sacred city of the Social is under siege by all sorts of actors, human as well as objects. The result is, of course, chaotic assemblages. But this is not so bad, because we are not dealing with chaos in the sense of the complete absence of political agency. On the contrary:

The feeling of crisis I perceive to be at the center of the social sciences should now be registered in the following way: once you extend the range of entities [types of actors], the new associations do not form a livable assemblage. This is where politics again enters the scene if we care to define it as the intuition that associations are not enough, that they should also be composed in order to design one common world. (p. 259, my comments in brackets)

Which brings me back to Social Software. All this talk about the role of non-human actors does not translate into saying that we are surrendering our agency to the code (virtuality taking over reality, people forgetting how to behave socially, mass hysteria, and other such alarmist arguments). It is a delegation of agency, not a surrender. Like any delegation, it requires responsibility. But something new and productive can happen when we delegate to the code some of the job of tracing social associations, and we need not become the Borg in the process:

… information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. Not because they subvert the old concrete ‘humane’ society, turning us into formal cyborgs or ‘post human’ ghosts, but for exactly the opposite reason: they make visible what was before only present virtually. (p. 207)

As I try to show in my own work, the social is indeed something that keeps referring us back to the virtual. This was equally true for so-called ‘primitive human,’ who relied on non-human artifacts to keep virtual ancestors part of her social assemblages, as well as for so-called ‘modern human,’ who relies on software objects to keep virtual contemporaries part of her social assemblages. The power of Social Software lies in its ability to render apparent the complex, arduous and never ending work of building sociality, of actualizing the virtual, as Deleuze would say.

The trick is to walk slowly, like an ANT.

References

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading

http://bruno.latour.name/

Actor Network Resource

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