On 14/08/13 01:51 AM, marc garrett wrote: > The primary purpose of > digital media, we contend, is simulation with free communication being > merely an appealing side effect or distraction.
Simulation is precisely what computers are for, the problem is not that they simulate but what and how they simulate (see "Tron Legacy"). Rushkoff's "Program Or Be Programmed" has an interesting section in which a young person's evening ostensibly spent socialising at the coolest parties in town is shown to actually consist of watching for announcements on social media and posting photos there. What people simulate on social media (and in Second Life) is mostly not the cybercultural dream of a free play of identity but rather aspirational and normative reproductions of mass media images. Even those alternative self-reinforcing identity cultures that Tumblr enables are strongly normative both internally and against (fantasies of) mainstream media imagery. We need alterity and play. The strategies that teenagers use to evade parental surveillance on social media can be generalised (see Danah Boyd's amazing work on young Internet users, e.g https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128 ). We should do this rather than affect intense singular macropolitical seriousness (one of the hallmarks of neoliberalism ;-) ). > http://culturedigitally.org/2013/06/we-are-what-we-tweet-the-problem-with-a-big-data-world-when-everything-you-say-is-data-mined/ "[Quoting the Deterritorial Support Group] When asked by liberals “Do you condone or condemn the violence of the Black Bloc?” We can only reply in unison “This cat is pushing a watermelon out of a lake. Your premise is invalid”." That's "condone", then. ;-) But yay Situationism. "In fact, nonsense clarifies what matters about Internet tricksters like LulzSec or the hordes of trolls that spew forth from sites like 4chan. [...] 4chan users often deploy their penchant for nonsense in a tactical fashion. " There's a longer and more interesting history of net tricksterism than that, but it demonstrates that people were thinking and acting critically about the net before last Wednesday and so makes essays like this one susceptible to historical contextualisation and critique. ;-) 4chan are exceptional in that they (through Anonymous and less comfortable projects) take the semiotic and technical skills that they gain from acting out the online power fantasies that are the hallmark of the RL impotence of most trolls and occasionally do something constructive(ly destructive) with it. Second Life griefers do not, they simply disrupt other people's fantasies. It's important not to make the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mistake with trolls. Social media have certainly been supported so strongly because of the personal data they allow to be harvested. This was not their original intent (as the people who constantly tell us how politically hopeless geeks are should easily be able to believe), and the distortions they impose on the presentation, self-representation and actions of the subjects whose data they collect are politically problematic for both their proponents and opponents. "These resistances, however, run the risk of just being filtered out. " Worse than that, they will be recuperated by the very system they critique and be used to improve it or at least to increase its profits (Time Warner profit from every mask Anonymous, or Justin Bieber, buys). This is the fate of critique. The key is to keep moving. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
