jayjay’s stuff

More details:

http://richardgiles.com/2009/10/09/the-olympics-and-creative-commons-photographs/

http://richardgiles.com/2009/10/14/the-olympics-and-creative-commons-photographs-part-2/

A couple of things:

After the last post, I was recommended to get this book, City of Bits (1995) (William J Mitchell) by my supervisor- so I have ordered in on Amazon and have began reading a small preview on Google books.

Of the short section I've scanned over, already picking out themes of identity which still haven't really changed in the last 15 years since the book's beginnings.

I've maintained the principle that online interaction is becoming less literal (no need for an obvious avatar, ala Second Life - rather a multitude of interactions on different levels and platforms) - so I like the perspective that identity online is heavily manipulative, and reliant on how you think others see you. Michael Wesch suggested in his presentation about politics of authenticity that online communication is truly the first communication mechanism where we have been forced to look at ourselves in the reflections of others. Using youtube as his main example, Wesch shows clips of his students using Youtube for the first time, coming to terms with talking to a webcam, watching back their videos from the perspective of others and contemplating how others might see and understand them as human beings.

What Mitchell is saying here, however, is that persona is created by other people and can lead to a jarring sensation when you actually decide to meet in "meatspace" - Certainly, when you work with online media, maintaining an online identity is a full time occupation, but the notions of private and public start being more about what you prefer or WANT people to see about you, rather than who you actually are (it is said that if you never lie, you never have to remember anything...).

I don't think that feeling will ever go away, at least with online media in its current guise, but the fact that we have managed to change, or at least add to how we understand ourselves as individuals is fascinating.

Posterous keeps getting cooler - being directly able to lift pages from google books can never be a bad thing. All I need now is to be allowed to use a digital highlighter to complete the paperless transition.

The grid and its certainties is what Negri mourns. Geometric and planar, horizontal and rational, from Malevich to Mondrian, the Grid embodied the state of the modernist political-technological art, which was a disciplinary art. But as the societies of discipline morphed into the societies of control, the ‘architecture of borders, walls, doors, and locks give way to that of passwords, fire walls, public key encryption, and security certificates.' Modernist culture, organised by the grid (and its subjective correlate: the enlightened master) succumbs to a thousand niche-market cuts, whipped raw by Chris Anderson's ‘long tail' and decomposed into tribes by Mark J. Penn's ‘microtrends.' The grid mutates into the web, the imperial/utopian into the molecular/heterotopian. The new media-architecture begins to manipulate smaller units. The birth, from the ruins, of the negative center, issues the coup de grâce. The centre is robbed of its sovereignty.

‘The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past,' notes William Burroughs. ‘We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. Hegel writes of the function of kingship as consisting in dotting the i's and crossing the t's. No system can close itself-off using only elements internal to it. The function of the sovereign (what Foucault terms the author-function) was to supply the seal of transcendence. 20^th century dictators, captured by cameras and connected with telephones, pumped-up the volume.

‘The age demanded an image,' notes Ezra Pound, ‘of its own accelerated grimace.' Placed in the heavens of a vertical hierarchy, the iron willed dictator conducted and channeled the psychologies of his followers: The Father of the Nation. But the death of God, pronounced by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, was the death of transcendence; the death of the possibility of an absolutely transcendent image. The ‘age of extremes' was a reaction-formation, against Gödel's incompleteness theorem, against Nietzsche's nihilism. Modernism was an ideology of reaction, which grafted the forms of the past onto new contents (Stalin the Red Tsar, Hitler the Sorcerer-Emperor...) and then stood back, aghast, as the host rejected the transplant.

The invention of digital technology ended this period of ideological frenzy. ‘As the Enlightenment and "modernity" were increasingly called into question,' writes Peter Wollen, ‘a process accelerated by post-1968 disenchantment, French intellectuals turned away from "knowledge-based" approaches to the humanities and towards the more speculative domains, urging a decentralised vision of "dissemination," "rhizomes" and "molecular" microstructures^, Replacing Stalin and Hitler are ‘Enterprise Systems', computerised content management systems which cross organisational boundaries, and actualise the potential which the panopticon once contained.

Disciplinary power was based on anxiety; prisoners could never be certain whether the watchtower was occupied. Citizen-subjects today can be sure; the prisoners are now watching each-other. ‘In sales organisation,' reports Richard Sennett, ‘sales reps' performances can be mapped in real time on home-office computer screens.' Instead of a centralised point of imaginary control; a distributed network of leveraged eyeballs.

Something to chew on.