All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
and everything under the sun

-”Eclipse“, from Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

What defines your individuality on the network? Is it the things that you do, the things that you say and the people that you interact with, as well as the things that you have done in the past and those that you will do in the future? How does one individuate themselves on the network, and what are the costs and benefits of this kind of identification? I would argue that an individual’s characteristics and actions are indeed important components of their identity, and that they are being increasingly tracked and analyzed across an ever-growing number of vectors.

Increasing amounts of data are being collected and mined for insights into each individual identity, searching for ways that it can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of services delivered according to the specific characteristics of a given individual. This may range from the use of genetic profiling in an effort to personalize a medical treatment regimen, to building a purchasing history database at the super market with a loyalty program that offers discounts to members. In these systems, individuality is defined by both the given characteristics of an individual (their genes, their average checkout ticket value), and the actions that they undertake which differentiate one patient or consumer from another (reacting to a discovery of susceptibility to a form of cancer, buying private label or premium brands).

As adoption of the network has grown, the use of these types of knowledge systems have broken out from the realm of business and regulatory regimes and become increasingly common attributes of mainstream consumer web applications. For instance, Amazon’s recommendation engine is familiar to most users of the e-commerce site, and the internet radio service Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project which seeks to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by labeling artists, songs and albums with any number among hundreds of qualities that are construed to circumscribe the universe of possible musical ‘genes’. Apple’s iTunes Genius software works in much the same way, and in both cases the ‘individuality’ of each user can be reduced to their characteristics (the musical tastes that they input into the system) and their actions (their critical response to songs that Pandora and Genius deduce the individual should like, according to the algorithm).

Social Network Sites like Facebook have considerably widened the field of individuation of your network identity over more specialized services like Amazon or Pandora. On Facebook your individuality is determined by the characteristics that you enter into the system (your favorite bands, your profile picture, your networks) and especially the actions you take within the network: the friends you request and accept, the fan pages you follow, the status updates you post, the links that you share. All of these characteristics and actions individuate you on the network, and secure your identity as unique, as different than others (indeed, different than the twelve other people on the network who share your name, but not your identity). They are also increasingly public.

So, what’s new about this? Identity and reputation have always been defined by given characteristics and a track-record of actions taken. Perhaps what is new is the shelf-life of those actions, and the granularity with which individuals can be differentiated thanks to information technology. If all of the siloed and separated stores of an individual’s network identity were to be pooled and integrated, which is what it appears that Facebook Connect and other projects aim to accomplish, then an individual’s network identity could persist across every service under the sun.

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Filed under: Identity, Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Monday, August 24th

Unrest continues in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and every source under the sun is talking about how the post-election demonstrations and subsequent government crackdown unfolded on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As virtual communities scholar Howard Rheingold quipped, social organizaton through electronic media increasingly moves to the center of world events. And it’s true; Iranians have posted many streams of information ranging from photos to microblogs and cellphone videos, providing a glimpse of conditions in the Islamic Republic during this unprecedented civil disobediance.

We are seeing data that is being spread through the network from the streets of Tehran to our screens in the West, and we are now getting access to information that would previously have been unavailable to us. However, we also need to be mindful of the sources of that information. Opposition supporters are definitely over-represented online, and although everyone appears to want to presume that Mousavi did indeed win, the facts aren’t in yet on that count. There is a definite risk of getting carried away with our notion of social media changing the world, although social media or no social media this does appear to be a very significant event in the history of the Islamic Republic, and will probably continue to unfold over the coming days.

It also demonstrates an important caveat in the techno-utopian discourse that is expounded by Rheingold and others: use of the internet for social organization requires access to network infrastructure, and that infrastructure – for all of the talk of the internet freeing us of geography – exists in a physical location under the jurisdiction of a sovereign authority. Although the Iranian government apparently forgot to add Twitter to the list of blocked sites, they have taken serious steps to limit cellphone and text message use, and blocked satellite signals. We will see how far this escalates, but the government of Iran always has the extreme option of shutting off the network itself until the disturbance passes – if it does.

So I guess that we haven’t fully subjugated geography quite yet, have we?

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Filed under: Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Monday, June 15th

One of the key processes that I failed to touch upon in that manifesto I dreamt up last week was globalization. The process of globalization has been an ongoing human effort for thousands of years – I just a few short weeks ago found myself standing at the Jade Gate in China’s Gansu province, which marked the limit of the Emperor’s (天子) territory. This facility marked a significant node of global trade at the time, and two of the branches of the Silk Route entered China through this gate bringing with it wares from Anatolia, Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and even Europe. It was also a cultural node as well, bringing together the merchants, traders and officials who gathered in the area to profit from the commerce that globalization had encouraged. The nearby Mogao Caves reflect the cultural capital (.pdf) accrued by powerful merchants who sponsored elaborate statues and frescoes in the contemporary Buddhist style.

Today airplanes have replaced camel trains, and the airport is the new Jade Gate that connects across distance and between culture. Functioning as a crucial node in the global network, airports present both an enticing business opportunity and an enormous management responsibility. It feels ordinary today to go to the airport and travel thousands of kilometers to a distant destination in a single day. This is definitely a contemporary attitude, as travel used to be incredibly time consuming. Distance used to be something that you measured in time – the time that it took one to travel a given distance. For instance in the 19th century It took settlers five to six months to follow the length of the Oregon Trail to the West Coast, and in 1912 the Titanic was in the midst of a five day journey to cross the Atlantic. Thanks the greater speeds enabled by airplane propeller (and later jet) engines we can cross the same distance in just a handful of hours.

When travelers reach their distant destination, they first enter the liminal zone of the airport. As a node in the global transportation network, airports are venues that stand in-between the place that you departed from and the place that you are traveling to. Experience tells us that airports do not tend to take advantage of this privileged position to build their own identity, and If you think about all of the airports that you have been in over your lifetime chances are most of them had similar features arranged in a typical style. This space of the airport terminal itself is an example of what Marc Auge calls a ‘non-place’ – a location from which cultural context and identity are largely stripped as a consequence of their transient nature.  This can be soothing – if a little boring – because of the volume of different kinds of people that transit airports, all of whose needs must be served by the same space. This has led to a general homogenization of airport terminal layouts and design around the world to make the ‘non-place’ of the airport surprisingly familiar, if unspecific to its geographic location.

So here is the conundrum: airports must be functional above all other considerations – their value is primarily tied to their ability to connect travelers and cargo with the global aviation network. And yet, as a consequence of this effort to serve functionality, airports have largely neglected developing an individual identity that reflects the geographical and social circumstances surrounding them. If international airports are modern-day Jade Gates, then they are too often lacking in their demonstrations of institutional cultural capital; they do not have their own Mogao Caves.

Without sacrificing essential functionality, airports should be striving to develop individuality instead of sameness in their terminal experience, and distinguishing themselves from both regional and international competitors through performances of their fitness as essentian nodes of the network and their socio-cultural significance as the facilitator of contemporary global consumer lifestyles. By developing and propagating a stronger institutional identity, airports will be able to tap into the potent strengths that are inherent to their essential function in the global market, and assume a singular character as among the most meaningful places of contemporary life, rather than an abstract ‘non-place’ connecting to other ‘non-places’ in the network.

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Filed under: Globalization, Identity, Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Thursday, June 11th