User:Cristinac/Tyingeverythingtogether

As we are becoming more and more interlinked through our digital devices, the gap between them is becoming smaller too. CCTV, Near Field Communication, GPS, Google Earth, Google Street View are just a few examples of how human presence is recorded and digitized in exchange for provided services. We are only a few steps away from reaching the heralding moment when the connection between networks will be so compact that it will not leave an exit option for its users, each of us being profiled and building up our own data pool of places we visit, services we prefer, health or legal issues. From this information, a virtual doppelgänger slowly rises to the surface.

There is a term prevalent in computing environments that describes this situation fairly well: Identity Management. IdM is the management of individual digital repositories, access control and authentication. In other words, it is a way of regulating the digital identity of a person and assigning it privileges as well as boundaries across a system. It has different functions: the pure identity function, the user access function and the service function, which feed into two opposing polarized discourses: the empowerment discourse and the privacy discourse.

South Korea and Japan have entered a competition to become the first country to connect all chips and sensors together through the exponentially growing culture of Ubiquitous Network Societies. The aim is to become fully connected to a single network associated to an individual’s legal identity, to bring all disparate virtual actions under one encompassing techno-social umbrella.

With the emergence of such new cultural drives we are now part of what Deleuze called a society of control. Fifteen years after Foucault's article, 'The Means of Correct Training', was published, Deleuze writes 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' as an answer to it. In the short essay, he extends societal analysis to the modern era and speculates on what is to come by comparing and contrasting the two operation modes of the state. He points out the fixed quality of the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the vast containing spaces that came with sets of behavioural rules were unmoving environments. They were not connected through a modular system, but were singular elements distributing concentrated power. However, the fallibility of this particular way of thinking meant that it would soon become outdated and obsolete, similarly to the societies of sovereignty, which focused on other goals that lost relevance, tax rather than organising production and on ruling on death rather than administering life. Deleuze believed they found themselves in a crisis of establishments: prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, families had "finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods" (Deleuze, 4). The term "control" was put forward by Burroughs and utilised by Paul Virilio in his writings about velocity and free-floating control.

The Black Mirror episode White Bear is an illustration of the society of control, in which it is not the few that control the many, but the many that control the few. The episode begins with a woman waking up in a house that she does not recognize, sees bandages on her hands, feels sickly, medicine sprinkled at her feet, is in state of shock and confusion. As she exits the house, we notice ghost-like figures behind windows in an otherwise empty street. They are filming her and refuse to respond to her questions. It is interesting to note that the few memory flashes that she has, appear in the form of glitches. The first interaction between the "audience" and herself is the sound of a picture being taken on a phone. Already technology makes an entry. A man comes out of a car wearing a balaclava and pointing the gun he has in his hand to our protagonist. Finally, the onlookers step out of the safety of their houses, not to jump to rescue, but to film and take photographs of her. A chase begins, the unknown woman runs into a gas station where she meets two apparently unaffected people, out of which one is murdered. As the plot unfolds, the woman is being told the reason for the strange behaviour originated from a video signal most were subjected to, except for a select few which are now in full possession of their consciousness and without functioning law systems now have the perfect outlet for their most horrific fantasies. Our protagonist keeps having flashbacks, all the while being chased by two new masked characters. The two women are offered a ride by a van driver that they stop on the street, who then takes them to the woods and attempts to murder them. They manage to escape to White Bear, where the truth is finally unveiled: the gun she uses to shoot her attacker explodes confetti, loud applause resonates in the room. It is revealed she is on stage, the audience clapping frantically. The host is the van driver who calls our protagonist by her real name and restores her identity: the accomplice of her fiance's murder of a 7 year old girl. The woman is taken to the same house she woke up in and has her memory erased only to endure the whole process over and over again, each time with new participants. The episode ends with the training of the following audience members and rebuilding of the set. Their last rule is to enjoy themselves. Indeed, the last instruction is the key to the episode: the source of amusement of the new control society will be the punishment of their fellow citizens when they haven't obeyed the rules.

The audience in this Black Mirror episode is both the punisher and the performer: the illusion can only be maintained with the tacit or active cooperation of all participants. The phone cameras they hold up serve as a separating screen: they are transposed to their secondary selves and thus are exempt from all moral obligations.

Signs of both the disciplinary and control societies are present, the criminal is dehumanised and deterritorialised: she no longer has the same rights as her fellow citizens, she has become an outsider to the system. The audience is trained not to speak to her: she is being turned into data.

Another episode called The Waldo Moment is a different reflection of the tactics of control societies. Jamie Soulter is a comedian that appears on television under the pseudonym of Waldo, an animated blue bear. After a heated interview in which Waldo provokes politician Liam Monroe with aggressive and abusive language that causes the ratings of the show to sky rocket, the television network owner makes Waldo stalk the MP candidate in his rounds and abuse him further. Waldo's popularity grows and soon the idea of him competing for the MP position seems obvious to everyone except for Jamie. In a televised debate, Monroe attempts to remind the public that Waldo is not invulnerable, and similarly to the previous episode, restores Jamie Soulter's identity. The moment when the latter decides to quit is also the moment when the illusion is broken: Waldo is an invisibility cloak, a tool that facilitates closed circuit power mongering. In this sense, he is an emblem for technology: he doesn't have the history of a body, his body is fluid. Another symbolic scene unfolds when “the agency” representative, Jeff Carter, attempts to buy control over the puppet. As indicated in Postscript of the Societies of Control, corporations are rushing to become the gel that makes the transfer between consumerism and political trends.

Comments on the go:

societal pleasure comes from punishment of criminal
individual is alienated because they cannot achieve the aura around these commodities; we are now in a society of performance; moving from a society of representation to one of performance, breaking down of barriers: difference between labor and pleasure
Waldo is Jamie’s avatar, interview with Mr Munro, control by invisibility: he is not vulnerable because he still has his identity
Waldo is the symbol of anti disciplinary societies, he does not conform to spaces
“i can’t answer serious questions”, “i don’t know politics”
“looks politicsy”
Waldo is not real but he’s realer than all the others, example of youtube as a democracy that has videos of dogs as most popular
Jamie’s agent is the company: he owns Waldo but he is not Waldo, his threat to take over the character brings to surface the dangers of its lack of identity: a vessel for other personalities
popularity comes from his circumventing the laws of enclosed spaces
surrealist anthropology
not about representation but a performance of a particular discourse
typical instruction Harrison: we’ve been covering common work place people, let’s go posh for today: how many spoons do they pinch and put in their bags how many sugars how many times did they say thank you

bibliography:

everyware - adam greenfield

information superhighway

the network society - manuel castells

http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/95/169

http://keywon.com/files/thesis/everyware_intro.pdf

http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/definition/identity-management

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/enough

http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/research/pdfs/JF_NetworkSociety.pdf

http://books.google.nl/books/about/Loving_Big_Brother.html?id=l1zaPL5a2RwC&redir_esc=y

http://www.itu.int/WORLD2006/forum/society.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

empowerment vs privacy discourse

the emergence of the internet released us from space and time

with the digitalisation of the public space, these two dimensions are returning\

Rebecca Baron - How Little We Know Our Neighbours

——————————— ———— first half of film

tunnel vision
instantaneous photographs have invaded the sacred life
A Sleeping Habit; over the next month he would rise early and photograph her
no sacred aura, more than depersonalise it categorises, captures a deeper truth that we see, captures the event in space fromm its imprisonment, it snatched the event in time
humphrey spencer
jan 1977 empirical ethnographic experiment in Britain, out of touch of the public, anthropology of ourselves, The Mass Observation Movement, people sitting around volunteer observers to record and observe the behaviour of people everyday why were they smiling what were they wearing
all by Humphrey Jennings, Tom Harrison, John Madge
Harrisson more interested in observations of the public, more than by it, unlike Madge
typical instruction Harrison: we’ve been covering common work place people, let’s go posh for today: how many spoons do they pinch and put in their bags how many sugars how many times did they say thank you
observers were sent into the street and noticed, people drinking pints, length of laughs at the cinema
mass observation believed there were truer meanings behind patterns of behaviour
surrealist anthropology
objects and events uncover inner states, use image and objects as signposts
camera itself aids in collecting manifestations of collective obsessions not visible by the human eye
miniature 35 mm camera was a rarity, made people interested, camera needed to be concealed ex under coat
holding 5 sec, 10 sec in your hand, that was quite difficult
edward sandbell’s routinely photographed school girls around kensington, followed individual girls for years at a time, he assigned them pet names, noting not only which ones they’ve seen but also his success in photographing them in “zoological studies” with pictures of animals sprinkled around the girls
detective camera term for hand cameras
toy hand cameras would allow people to lurk and photograph people unaware
paul lartin?? ,most known, candid photographs nowadays
film influenced by John Tagg: Burden of Representation
not about representation but a performance of a particular discourse
Foucault would use it as an apparatus, a whole way of thinking, discourse of the university, discourse of the work place, discourse isn’t only conversation it’s a material practice: where the lecturer stands, how the students face the classroom, hand gestures, architecture, attitudes
shaping by discourse