User:Pleun/rwrs/Essay II

Essay #II

Topics:

[Steve: choose one of these topics. You have 4 essays here, each builds on the other:

1. Technologies of Self
2. The Self in the age of Digital Exhibitionism
3. The anthropomorphic web: How can the web be seen as a (metaphysical) entity
4. Internet Switching Policies: Two minutes of Jon Postel

Reading List:

[Steve: You need some Foucault here if you are going to tackle technologies of self- try means of correct training]

• Databases
• Hoer van de Duivel
• Postscript on societies on control – G. Deleuze
• The rise of the network society
• A declaration of independence of cyberspace
• Black transparency
• ‘protocol’ – A. Galloway
• Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

[Steve's feedback and suggestions:
Key points: control societies are governed by pattern and code, and regulated by images and algorithms. This is opposed to disciplinary 
societies, which are governed by meaning and sense and regulated by precepts (see A. Galloway’s   ‘protocol’ and G. Deleuze’s ‘postscript 
on the societies of control’)

Recognition of these systems (control and discipline) allows us to understand contemporary media as a mode of (self) governance and opens 
up a number of avenues of enquiry. I will mention four here:
1. Databases and protocols as control mechanisms
2. Digital labor (immaterial labour)
3. Digital mediation providing new ‘technologies of self’
4. Participatory surveillance

Over the next few weeks we will study a series of texts that explore these avenues
Sample texts:
* Tiziana Terranova: ‘free labor’ (from ‘digital labor, the internet as playground and factory’, ed Trebor Scholz, 2013)
* Ayhan Aytes: ‘return of the crowds, mechanical Turk & neoliberal states of exception’ (from ‘digital labor, the internet as playground 
and factory’, ed. Trebor Scholz, 2013)
* Geert Lovink: ‘Facebook, anonymity and the crisis of the multiple self’ and ‘ society of the query: googlization of our lives’ 
(from ‘networks without a cause’, 2011)
* A. Galloway: Protocol, Introduction (2004)
* A. Galloway: The Interface Effect, one chapter from the book (2012)
* Douglas Rushkoff: Programme or be Programmed (2012)]

Part of last Essay:

This essay caused a few question relating the the current state of media and aura. In the contemporary media landscape a medium is not only used to mediate between us and, or interact with, the information, but also to broadcast ourselves. This takes the 'simulation of the self', which Nichols is talking about in his essay, a step further as in that the simulation is not supposed to be 'the Other', but as much alike the self as possible. I'm questioning what happened to a persons aura, uniqueness and even value compared to previous times, before this narcissistic exhibitionism within among others social media. Your online self is a manipulated reproduction, but is it manipulated enough to convey value in itself or does it decrease value of the original. Does our online presence become a work on its own or is it still to much a version of the one work?

In a very simple comparison: a technical reproduction of a work of art increases accessibility which has a great deal of positive effects, but also the negative one that the original always decreases in value. The need for putting effort into experiencing the work of art decreases when having already experienced its reproduction. At the end of Jos de Muls essay he looks to the future and wonders if the non-human characters of the new media we invented are going to be our successors in evolution of life. Is our online presence going to have more value than our offline one? Isn't this in many instances not already the case, where we present ourselves online to find jobs and husband/wives? To what extend can we separate ourselves from our online presence?

The main question here would be, but maybe to save this for another time in another text, are we losing our own aura?