Archive for November, 2007
Privacy, Web 3.0 and Who We ‘Really’ Are.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 22, 2007
Privacy concerns are ubiquitous on the ‘net – as much a feature of the web as analysis, whining and pornography. The most recent kerfuffles over privacy were the false rumours of iPhone phoning home and the definitely-not-false worries about Facebook’s Beacon ads. We are, however, quite used to this now – we hear about something, we kick and whine, sometimes it gets fixed and sometimes it doesn’t.
But what is it exactly we are trying to defend when we protect our privacy online? I would suggest that most discussions about online privacy actually conflate two separate approaches. The first is obvious and is what I what i think we usually refer to: the inappropriate use of personal information by companies and individuals to, at best, target ads and, at worst, engage in identity theft. The second is a more general concern that might roughly be summed up by the phrase “keep your nose out of my business”. It isn’t so much a practical concern as it a personal, emotional one – a vague sense that my activities and tastes are my own concern and shouldn’t simply be available to anyone.
The distinction may seem trite, but I’d argue it’s crucial. This second aspect of privacy is intimately tied to our individual sense of self. As an example, when social music service last.fm was recently purchased by CBS, many decried the idea that their listening habits now belonged to a huge media company – that the transfer of data about one’s music tastes was akin to an invasion or betrayal. A friend of mine left the service immediately going so far as to call such sites ‘behaviour harvests’.
What strikes me most here is the shifting conception of identity at work. We often think of who we are in terms of a core identity that exists within us that is then expressed outwardly. How we conceive of privacy, however, suggests that our identity is also a collection of markers, a congolmeration of the social and economic activities that we partake in. When last.fm users left the service, they did so because their identities had been sold, identities that were not composed of family pictures, beliefs or ideology, but which bands one liked. We are thus not simply ‘who we are’, but also what we do and what we consume and, furthermore, that this situation is not an externally imposed one, but one to which we readily subscribe. In cultural theory this is considered a ‘performative’ approach to identity, where one’s identity is made in acts performed rather than inner characteristics expressed. To wit, socially constructed markers or signifiers define what and who we are.
It is remarkable then how closely this notion of identity as a set of markers fits into the recent buzz around Web 3.0. The disassociation of the individual and his or her markers is exactly what will drive commerce in the ‘semantic web‘ as tags and code, divorced from the people who employ them, become free-floating signs of one’s status and value as a consumer. This web of data or ‘social graph‘ then becomes a network of signifiers in which identity will not be what you do, but the markers of which you are comprised.
I think my gut instinct here is to criticise – to say “oh look at how late capitalism is distorting identity”. But I don’t think there is – or ever was – an alternative. Identity always has been as much a collection of signifiers as it has anything else. But what I do think we need to be careful about is the extent to which we are willing to only define ourselves through our online activities and consumption. This isn’t about maintaining a purist attitude but, rather, the inability of consumer goods and culture to adequately capture the complexity of identity. When we resolutely defend our privacy, we are in effect surrendering it, choosing to define ourselves through mechanisms inadequate to do so. While I’m going to be the last person to decry all this newfangled technology, before we dive headfirst into a purely semantic identity, we might want to stop and pause.
Amazon Kindle: A Literary Perspective.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 20, 2007
What makes my perspective more literary than yours? Nothin’. I’ve just spent so long in grad school that I’ve become bitter and arrogant… Problem? 
So, today Amazon announced the Kindle, its new eBook reader and the reaction has been expectedly mixed. While some seem pleased with the free wireless bookstore and clean, effective interface, others are less happy about the expensive content and the Kindle’s ample supply of ugliness.
But as my general interest is the intersection of technology and culture, what struck me was how the introduction of the Kindle reveals how we often think of ‘books’. Most analysis of the Kindle has treated books like any other form of ‘content’ – that charming modern term that reduces all art and knowledge to a commodity. I know, I know: at the end of the day it is a commodity. It’s just very very annoying. But despite how pragmatic the ‘books-as-content’ approach is – the publishing business is after all a multi-billion dollar industry – what this approach misses is that the sort of person most likely to pick up the Kindle is precisely the sort of contrarian who is going to fervently insist that “books are art dammit’, not just things to be bought and sold!”. The Kindle is obviously going to be pitched to the book-lover, the sort of person who has fetishised books and the aesthetic experience of reading: the smell of a leather-bound work, the feel of paper on one’s fingers, to make no mention of the cultural significance we attach to literature or simply ‘curling up with a good book’.
My point is that books, perhaps even more than records or films, are cultural artefacts as much as they are ‘content’ and also, that despite Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ grand proclamations, the revolution in reading will probably not come as a result of the Kindle. What the Kindle does well is to provide the convenience of digital to book lovers. What it fails at – and this is something it cannot help at all – is replicating or engaging the centuries-old valorization of ‘the book’. We are obviously not simply casting away CDs and replacing them with MP3s – we are changing a cornerstone of something we have used to define culture. And while I firmly believe that eBooks will be part of the broader cultural shift from a text-based society to a screen-based one, what no-one is yet able to deal with is the simple fact that the nature of reading is changing: how we read and what we read is undergoing a profound shift that has to do with much more than simply how we get our books. We are in the midst of a unprecedented cultural and epistemological shift of which the Kindle may only be a part.
I am by no means decrying the Kindle. Quite to the contrary, I am hoping that Amazon sees fit to release it Canada around the same time packets of money start falling from the sky into my backyard. That said, I wonder about the digitization of books – not as a luddite clinging to his leather-bound copy of Hamlet – but simply as a reader and a technophile who is skeptical of the market potential for reading Kafka, Joyce or Rushdie on the subway in the way one might use an iPod. And not to sound too much like Sven Birkerts, but what I think bears some thinking about is how the shift from page to screen will change how we conceive of reading: will it still be seen as an inherently edifying activity, or one that has a external goal? Will literature retain its sense of authorship and permanency? Will ‘the text’ become even more fluid than Derrida imagined? And will what constitutes the ‘literary’ start to shift as the words on the page become even more unstable than any post-structuralist theorist from the sixties was able to imagine?
If you have any thoughts, hit the comments and lemme’ know what you think 
[Update]: Nick Carr has his take on it here – and has conveniently skipped out on the last fifty years of intellectual progression as I so self-righteously argue in the comments.
[Update 2]: As Nick points out in the comments, arguing for the inherent superiority of contemporary approaches to literature is stupid. I still, however, think his prioritization of the individual author is simply a mode of reading – and an unpopular one at that too.
[Update 3]: That it is unpopular is irrelevant. It’s been bugging me for ages that I wrote that. What’s important is that Carr’s argument that the integrity of a work comes from it being created by an individual author is something that has been thoroughly critiqued. It’s not that it’s ‘wrong’, of course – rather that it turns reading into a game of ‘what did the author mean?’ thereby constraining how we view texts.
Andrew Keen, We Hate You
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 17, 2007
And when I say ‘we’, I mean all of us who recognise the value and significance of the epistemological shift that is loosely know as ‘Web 2.0′. Know who else agrees with me? Mark Federman, of the fantastic blog What is the (Next) Message?. In this post, Mark (another blogger who’s a PhD candidate!) links to his appearance on TVO’s The Agenda and performs a thorough critique of Keen’s ‘Cult of the Amateur’ argument. Among the choice bits in his breakdown of Keen’s approach is this:
“Second, his argument supposes that modernity (i.e., late 19th and 20th century) got this whole business of creating culture and knowledge right, and that we are at the pinnacle of our ability to produce cultural and knowledge artefacts. That is a type of arrogance that we have also seen over the past 3000 years – at every age, the privileged have assumed that they are at the zenith of advancement and enlightenment. And every time, they are wrong (and if you watch the Keen interview, you’ll see precisely what I mean about privilege and arrogance).”
Like all of Mark’s posts, it’s a solid read, particularly because he’s hyper-aware of the relationship between mass culture and structures of power. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, it’s definitely one of those blogs that you should add to your reader.
[Image from geektronica.com]
Zip.ca: I May Never Watch TV Again.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 14, 2007
While there is nothing particularly new about DVD mail rental services, they are new to me specifically: after putting it off for months, I finally buckled and started a Zip.ca subscription – and I think I might never watch TV again. Rather than another long rambling post, I’m just going to get all ‘listy’ to explain why I am so impressed:
- Selection. The long tail effect means that the selection is far better than a regular video store. Choices range from obscure TV series to independent films to ‘World Cinema’, all of which are either in short supply or simply unavailable at Rogers Video or Blockbuster.
- High-def. Want to rent HD-DVD or Blu-Ray films in Canada? Well, unless you live near a handful of stores across the country, you’re out of luck. Zip has Canada’s largest selection of films in high-definition and for audio-video geeks like me, that’s awesome.
- Make your own Schedule. Much like owning a DVR or Tivo, renting by mail frees you from externally imposed schedules. You can watch a disc the moment you get it or a week after – it makes no difference. Furthermore, renting TV serials like Lost on DVD lets you string episodes together in sequence, all with no commericals.
- The Queue and Choice. When you walk into a video store, what you end up walking out with is dependent on a variety of factors: what is available at that time, what has been recently released and what is being heavily advertised. Your Ziplist can accumulate over time, letting you add films whenever you think of them. Ever walked into a store thinking you’d get that obscure film you’ve wanted to see for ages, only to walk out with Super Troopers? Having an online queue allows you to be less swayed by marketing and more in tune with your own tastes.
Now, I know this is somewhat crass boosterism – but someone as relentlessly negative as me may as well give praise where praise is due. Of course, I have yet to see what their customer service is like and there are some nightmarish reports around. Still, for the time being, I am going to be adding things to my Ziplist like there’s no tomorrow.
Is Your Facebook Profile ‘More You’ Than You?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 2, 2007
So: Microsoft’s ‘small’ investment of $240 million has revealed that at least someone thinks Facebook is worth $15 billion. But now that things have had time to settle in a bit, the big question now is “so what?“. Most analysis so far has focused on longevity, essentially looking at how can Facebook increase its ad delivery in the long term and also how it might monetize other things like music so that it might finally have a comprehensive and sustainable business model.
But the focus on Facebook’s ‘usefulness to its users’ – i.e. what function it serves as a social medium – is only one aspect of Facebook. Part of Facebook’s worth that I think has been largely overlooked (except in this piece here in the Globe) is the value of online identities to users. What I am concerned with here is not the function of the identity – i.e. what one can do to stay in touch with others or read advertising or purchase products – but what the actual construction of an identity means to the person who created it.
All discussion of online identities have historically been constructed as supplementary – that online identities are an incomplete, shadowy representation of one’s real life that work like little appendices to one’s existence. But I wonder to what extent people are starting to conceive of their Facebook identities as part of who they are; and, furthermore, that the investments in something like a Facebook profile is akin to creating a particular ‘look’ or ‘style’ or other such visual manifestation of one’s identity.
The process of constructing a Facebook profile is to ask yourself what you want to present to the world. Particularly since the arrival of F8, you can choose if you want your taste in films, music, books or a host of other markers of taste displayed in your profile. Our profiles are projections of what we either hope to be or how we hope to be perceived. Thus Facebook profiles have become as sociologically interesting as Second Life avatars; as my much-smarter-than-me friend once said, the reason Second Life is so important is because when it comes to identity, fantasy is the real – that how we project ourselves in fantasy or online identities reveals what we value and why. There is a reason that Second Life contains so many hyper-sexualised characters, much like there is a reason that so many Facebook profiles are filled with carefully picked photographs or deliberately chosen music.
As such, the question becomes to what extent people will grow attached to the projection that is their online profile. In much the same way people are loathe to give up their WoW avatars, will people start to feel the same way about their profiles? Will they be willing to pay to keep the online version of themselves around? And will the idea of identity as a set of images and projections be only further cemented by the epistemological shift to internet culture? So, while you mull those over, I’m off to add some obscure post-rock to my Facebook page…
CanCon on the Internet? Even Crazy Leftists Like Me Say No.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on November 2, 2007
Today, Michael Geist links to responses to a proposed plan to prioritise Canadian content on the internet. Undestandably, Galacticast producer Casey McKinnon – one of Canada’s more famous online personalities – is less than thrilled with the idea, and argues that the internet is”a land of opportunity. A new world where people had the freedom to make their dreams a reality… Instead of sitting around waiting for some executive to call us to approve of a script, or going to countless auditions, we’re doing it all on our own and making our dreams come true.” She suggests that CanCon rules will destroy this spirit, instead subjecting Canadian content to the same sort of mediocrity that plagues the lineup of the CBC.
The argument is convincing – the sort where you don’t want to disagree even if you, like I, feel you should. After all, this sort of meritocratic, free-market approach appeals directly to the individualist core of North American values – McKinnon even goes so far as to praise the ‘Wild West’ mentality in her post – and it usually drives me up the wall.
But while I am normally wary of arguments that reject government interference because it ‘restricts freedom’ – they so often miss the fact that power, wealth and cultural capital are bound up in self-reproducing networks – I can’t help but get behind Geist and McKinnon on this one. Because of the relatively low cost of entry and potential for word-of-mouth, the internet is remarkably more free that other media distribution methods. As such, McKinnon’s suggestion that it should be funding and not regulation that we focus upon is spot-on: by developing Canadian online talent and destinations, one encourages the development of a new culture industry as the inevitable shift from traditional to new media accelerates. Beyond the fact that it would be impossible to mandate – how exactly would you guarantee that Candians experience 40% of CanCon online? – defining Canadian content online is a mess that no-one wants to get into, so why bother?
All that said, I don’t think we should become overly complacent or naive about the internet totally being a ‘land of freedom’. Even a cursory glance at the domination of English and Western democratic-capitalist ideals online should clear up that particular fallacy. But though I never thought I’d say it, I’m with the business-y folks on this one – leave the internet alone.
