| Ned Rossiter on Sat, 3 Nov 2007 15:06:06 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> YourSpace is MyTime |
New Cultural Networks: You Google My Second Space, Theater van't Woord, Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam, Sandberg Institute of Design, Amsterdam, 2 November 2007, http://www.all-media.info/page.php?id=99 Ned Rossiter 'YourSpace is MyTime, or, What is the Lurking Dog Going to Do - Leave a Comment?'* You might know my second space, but do you know my first? Do I even know? In this time of ubiquitous media, the territory of offline existence is increasingly harder to define. These days you've made it when you're able to log off. Google narcissism services our curious and always fragile egos, but after 50 pages the attraction has either worn off, run out or turned into Japanese. Like Pavlov's salivating dog, we return a month later to the algorhythmic mirror to work out what's gone on in our life. Who's listening, who's reading, who's watching, who's appraising, who's attacking? Who knows and who cares? Just feed me data. In the society of voluntary exposure, practice has outstripped pedagogy. Speed is the default of dissemination. And someone else is making bucks out of your expenditure of energy. Success requires a re- engineering of time. In the competitive attention economy of creative networks, cultural production becomes an art of lingering and resonance. Zero comments are equivalent to the dead link. MySpace and Facebook continue the social networking tradition of compiling friends. But who are your enemies? What do friends mean for collaborative constitution? What happens to the creative logic of constitutive tension when all you have is endless affirmation? Maybe you go on a demo for the palpable thrill of confrontation, but where, really, is your enemy? Watching the replay three days later from a hundred CCTV recordings that your income tax paid for. Therein lies the auto-erotic drive of opposition. The imaginary reigns supreme. And you pay for it. What is the role of critique in this kind of environment? With the Rise of the easyJet Class, some suggest that critique serves to eradicate the possibility of hotbeds of creativity.[1] Like politicians and mediocre consultants, critics contribute to the dirty appeal of emergent 'creative cities'. Berlin is 'poor but sexy', claims the city mayor. Now that it can boast number one ranking according to the Floridarian spin-index of '3 T's' - Talent, Technology and Tolerance - Berlin is supposedly guaranteed of development via its creative economy.[2] The message? Stay Poor and Move East to Get Rich Fast. And what happens then? Welcome to the Desert of a non-English Real. Your networks develop within the ghetto of Euro-American exodus. Self- affirmation, but with a difference. Everything is fast, dust sticks, lungs collapse but value is added in immaterial ways. Everyone awaits the call of repatriation. It's a gamble against time, and the updated graduates of instituted creativity are stacking up fast. This sounds like evolutionary economics all over again. TV real-estate shows belt out the mantra 'Location, Location, Location!' Tune in or give up. If you don't have enough savings, then take a mortgage out on life. It'll only cost you. But seriously, how and where do we locate ourselves in an era of rapidly diminishing returns? We know that every act of consumption is one of ecological destruction. Is the Slow Movement the only answer? Even that has succumbed to a dependency on earnest consumption by the Enlightened Middle Classes. Bring back the commons, we are told. But that only welcomes proprietary control through the backdoor cult of libertarianism. Free is only so good insofar as you've got a Second Life of income generation on the side. Writing in his twilight years of productivity - the late 40s and early 50s - the Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold Innis discerned a 'bias of communication' operating across the epochs of civilization. His novel insight was to connect the materiality of communications media with time and space. Examining the relation between the continuity of empires over time and their extension across space, Innis concluded, in correct negative fashion, that the history of mediated human life demonstrated that it was always off-balance. 'Monopolies of knowledge', he argued, are shaped by the spatial and temporal properties of technology. The clay writing tablet in Ancient Babylonia endured over time, whereas the invention of papyrus by Egyptians enabled easy dissemination across space. The downfall of each of these empires was a result, he argues, of their bias of communication. Time or space. The secular technology of papyrus in Egypt marginalized a monarchy whose control over time centred around the use of stone and hieroglyphics. The Assyrians invaded Babylon due to their superior technologies of speed: the stirrup, chariot and experiments in horse- breeding made possible the rapid transport of cavalry across space, conquering the religious administration of Babylon. Without an adequate military reserve, the bureaucratic apparatus of an alluvial empire and its rule of law came tumbling down. What lessons might we gain from the history of technology and culture? Explicit in Innis' archaeology is an acknowledgment of the relationship between media, culture and the enemy. The enemy is revealed through the bias of communication. But how do we identify the enemy in social networking technologies that have one option only: links to our friends? In social networking sites such as Facebook, the enemy is loaded into the space-time continuum: often pictured but never present. Your friends make it impossible to avoid enemies. Indeed, they can only be your friends. The enemy is never a guest blogger. Does the anonymous comment register the enemy voice, or the friend passing as enemy? We never know. What is an enemy without a face? 'I don't waste time despising people', writes American legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum in The Guardian's Weekend magazine. 'Anger is much more constructive than contempt'.[3] Emotions are fine so long as they can be made productive. Nussbaum's protestant instrumentalisation of affect holds similarities with Facebook. There is no tragedy. There is no surprise. These are not options. The limits of Facebook are revealed through the trope of irony. One of my 'Very Conservative' friends with 'Serious' religious views, whose Facebook face looks distinctly psychotic, discloses a failed romance we never had. This bi-modal form of public outing as conservative and gay within the closed circuit of friends might function as a minor disruptive device. But this is hardly a case of conflictual constitution. Instead, it gestures toward an uneven networked sociality of knowledge and affective proximity. Nothing of consequence is at stake. Potential conflict is subsumed within the Facebook code of tolerance. The technics give you no other choice. The logic of tolerance reaffirms a cool, liberal world-view. Zizek is the exemplary embodiment of Facebook. His intolerance of tolerance is another variation of the ironic trope. Fightclub 2.0. And this is why nasty hate sites are so refreshing: their non-ironic mode broadcasts intolerance right from the start. 'Tolerance is Suicide', declares W.A.R. - White Aryan Resistance.[4] Yet hate sites in many ways are no different from their liberal counter-parts of networked affirmation. In both cases the addressee is always absent. They are never there, only you and your friends. With their form of indirect address, the disruptive potential of noise is rendered inoperable. There is no constitutive outside when you are blasting out hate or confirming your friends. We are not talking about cybernetics here. Nor, really, are we talking about networks. It's all about associative desires. And if you're migrating to Facebook from the proletarian parametres of MySpace, then you're displaying symptoms of the aspirational impulse. If you're in any doubt about these claims, then go visit a site extolling the virtues of pet hate. Holy Shmoly!'s blog posts an entry on '8 reasons to hate cats'. With 355 comments, this rates as an A- list blog for sure. RICHSRD CAT HATER: 'CATS ARE SHIT!!!! THEY SHOULD ALL DIE!!! SO SHOULD BIRDS'. some guy: 'cats have a use by date, just like food'. Tim: 'I hate fucking cats. the only fun part about a cat is blasting the hell out of it with a .22 rifle. the sons of a bitches should all die. indpendant lil bastards, fuck them all!' Jacky (smart scots girl): 'P.S. We eat cats in Scotland'. matt: 'How do you make a cat go woof? Dowse it in gas and light a match'.[5] Online, nobody knows the person you hate is actually a dog.[6] This is where activist cartographies of media control come in handy. The database technographies of Josh On's 'They Rule' and Bureau d'études' maps of the military-industrial complex combine political economy with the aesthetics of design. At best, they conjure a project of collaborative research that cuts through a particular slice of time. As web 1.0 productions, these are not cultural technologies of real-time. Both inform us of the relation between institutional and individual interests. Combined assets are revealed. But it is hard not to be seduced by the aesthetics of presentation in both of these works. Part of their success derives from a recognition factor. They Rule affirms our sense of how networks appear, but not how they might change. And for all its amazing research, the cartographies of Bureau d'études resemble the Paris, London or Berlin metro systems, albeit in a Stalinesque aesthetic form. As with many media of vision, what we find in both of these examples is a bias toward space. Relations are mapped, but changes over time are nowhere to be found. The advent of open and interactive databases corrects this imbalance, to a certain extent. OpenStreetMap.org is a good example.[7] Brought to my attention by the Ljubljanian free software activist Luka Frelih, openstreetmap integrates handheld GPS mapping technologies with a non-proprietary value system. It invites a collaborative platform for users to create an open version of everyday orientation. Using handheld GPS data loggers as a system of real-time updating of abstracted space, openstreetmap would seem to deliver Innis' dream of social-technological balance: a technic of communication predisposed to neither time nor space, but both, simultaneously. In time, across space. While it's low on eye-candy, opensteetmap is a great example of techno-sociality that is secondary to outcomes - the generation of maps - but primary as a condition of possibility. First and foremost, openstreetmap invokes the potentiality of communication as a mode of collaborative constitution. For all the joy and narco-gratification that attends social networking technologies such as MySpace, in the first instance these are technologies of solitude. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a great fan of mingling with the masses. Despite the pernicious dimensions of individualised sociality, there are few who don't find considerable relief when exiting the office. What I'm suggesting, then, is that collaborative constitution is necessarily an uncertain, unpredictable endeavour. It resists easy formulation. Concepts are contextual. Experimentation is key, and experience is crucial. Those who insist on predefined outcomes and lists of deliverables will only be disappointed. But such agents of administrative anxiety are essential for the collaborative constitution of creativity. See these procedural types as conflict generators that wish to police the borders of reason and the act of action. Don't be concerned about the registration of denial. The negative affect will undoubtedly take hold and propel your investigation in one direction or many. But what to make of all of this? Don't reply to that Urgent! Email. Tell the boss to take a hike, and bend over instead for your buddy. Maybe then you make your enemy. Excess is easy. 'Concrete research' in order to create 'a strategy of the future' (Tronti) is not. Techno- cultures are delicate, that much is certain. Life, even more so. There's something to be said for religion. It rates as the most successful institution in history. But let's face it, true believers are, quite literally, out of it. Our time requires substantial readjustment. That much is clear. But where to turn? That, I submit, is a question to you. Notes: * Thanks to Julian Kücklich for kicking in with some one-liners. 1. See Steffen Böhm, 'Re: [My-ci] Correction - Berlin Tops Germany for "Creative Class"', posting to mycreativity mailing list, 18 October, 2007, http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/my-ci. See also Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Re: [My-ci] Berlin Tops Germany for "Creative Class"', posting to mycreativity mailing list, 15 October, 2007, http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/my-ci 2. 'Economic Prospects Report: Berlin Tops Germany for "Creative Class"', Spiegel International, 10 October, 2007, http:// www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,510609,00.html 3. Martha Nussbaum, 'Q&A: Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet', The Guardian, 27 October, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/ 0,,2198680,00.html 4. http://www.resist.com/ 5. http://ocaoimh.ie/2005/03/15/8-reasons-to-hate-cats/ 6. For those of you who really hate Facebook, then try out Arsebook - 'an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE', http://www.arsebook.org/. Thanks to Els Silvrants for the link. 7. http://openstreetmap.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org