User:Cristinac/Tyingeverythingtogether

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\

bibliography:

everyware - adam greenfield

information superhighway

the network society - manuel castells

As we are becoming more and more interlinked with 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.

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. In a way, this is similar to Friedrich Kittler’s predictions relating to the eventual convergence of all media into one extra layer synonymous with reality.

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.

In contrast, 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 around 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: she was her fiance's accomplice in his murder of a 7 year old girl.

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 aggresive 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.