User:Birgit bachler/readings2/chun control

Chun W.H.K. (2006) Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, MIT Press Massachusetts

Introduction How does power operate through the coupling of control and freedom? "Invisibility and uncertainty has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical." The emergence of the Internet as a mass medium epitomizes a new structure of power. (1-2)

Chapter 3 - Scenes of Empowerment

169f:

• disembodiment
• TCP/IP precedes individual users, openly copying and transporting seemingly private requests & messages, and reducing identity (that by which one can be identified) to numerical representations of voltage differences. (…..)
• >> Claude Lefort, Democracy & Political Theory 1998

Chapter 5 - Control and Freedom

247:

• >> Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions MIT 1996
• diagnosing a new form of agoraphobia
• fear is masked as nostalgia
• fear of open spaces
• "agoraphobics claim that the masses or identity politics have made post-(variable date) public spaces unlivable. = agoraphobic alibi
• devotion to public space vs. transformation of public space into a safe zone
• "safe, public zones??"
• Deutsch: "public is a phantom"
• public space is an "experience of interruption or intrusion of all that is radically irreducible to the order of the individual human subject, the unavoidable entrance into everyday life of the 'one' who would be human."
• "Nostalgia is a panicked reaction to the openness and indeterminacy of the democratic public as a phantom"

248:

• "conflicting agoraphobic cover stories -which conflate freedom and control- underpin representations of fiber-optic networks as a public"
• would Internet be safe without pornography et al.?

249f:

• "Fiber-optic telecommunications cables, double-coated glass tubes stretched to tiny threads do not allow for vision."
• "The 'picture' we see on our screen s generated: there is no guarantee that the image we receive is a pixel-by-pixel representation of a previously recorded original"
• "Sent over the network, our suppose representations - which can now only be understood as involuntary user 'events' - are sent in ways that cannot be seen or heard."
• …"computer-mediated communications are arguably human-mediated communications (>>appearance)
• users sending "involuntary representations"
• "The routine, necessary and non-ceasing transmission of packets, which are constantly opened, broadcast, redirected & possibly misdirected, simultaneously ensures that cyberspace can never conform to a "safe" marketplace and establishes these nonspaces as public."
• …"web asa a safe space if only certain tracking mechanisms such as cookies were eliminated."
• "new definitions of privacy as secrecy emerge in response to electronic publicity."