User:Dave Young/Annotation

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In the introduction to her book Control and Freedom: Paranoia and Control in the Age of Fiber-Optics (2005), W.H.K Chun states that “power now operates through the coupling of control and freedom”. (1) This idea is explored throughout the rest of the introduction, establishing a firm basis for a more detailed investigation in the following chapters.

Through the analysis of the cultural shift from disciplinary systems to control systems in the internet age, Chun discusses the effects of this on our social, political, and economic use of technology. She begins by briefly addressing the issue of privacy and the reproducibility of online content, and how our internet activity can be monitored using data-sniffing technologies. These acts of eavesdropping and cyber-espionage are contrasted with respect to Foucault's idea of disciplinary society and Deleuze's control society: in the former, power should be always visible but unverifiable, whereas in the latter the illusion is that the subject is provided with greater liberties while alternative, more subtle forms of enslavement are utilised. From an economic perspective, Chun draws a parallel between George Bush's statements on capitalist freedom (ie, the freedom to “make a living”) and Marx's “condemnation of [the] bourgeois freedom” that leaves the living person with a subordinated relationship to capital. (11)

Chun argues that the online relationship between control and freedom can be experienced as sexuality, or sexual paranoia. Referencing the terminology of hardware components such as plugs and sockets, Chun describes how online networks are dominated by sexualised metaphors and concepts. She describes technology as being a trojan horse for pornography – putting forth the idea that the ubiquity of sexualised content and interactions online essentially render technology as being a “carrier” for pornography. Following on from this, she describes how the protection of minors from online sexualised content were the dominant reasons for internet censorship pre 9/11.

With relation to ideology, Chun describes how computers simulate ideology by acting as a “false interpretive apparatus.” (19) Software, she argues, provides us with a representational relationship with our hardware, symbolising the real-world concepts of recycling bins, folders and files. Furthermore, the way in which the computer addresses the user directly highlights the notion of the “personal computer”, or the users assumed power over the machine. The implications of this can be seen in the acknowledgement of the prescience of cultural theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari by studies and analyses conducted by various new media researchers. For example, studies into usage of online chat rooms and multi-user domains in the late 1990s suggested that Foucault's notions that sexuality is becoming increasingly discursive and that gender is performed seemed to be proven.

Finally, Chun argues that while technology has been seen as an antidote to political problems, in effect using it in this way “generalises paranoia.” (25) She states that “to claim users are an effect of software is not to claim that users, through their actions, have no effect.” (30) Arguing that we must be made aware of our vulnerability online, Chun argues that we “must seize a freedom that always moves beyond our control.” (30)

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel - Discipline and Punish
Poster, Mark and Savat, David (Editors) - Deleuze and New Technology