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What is Significant About Twitter

I was a skeptic about Twitter, that aggregator of life's mini-sodes.  I resisted for months, until last week.  Since then I have become a convert.  The reason?  I like how it feels to use it.  I mean emotionally.  Let me explain.

I resisted Twitter as it seemed just another tool or widget I had to get my head around.  I had my first baby in January about the time it seems widgets exploded on the scene. The number of social media tools introduced became an avalanche and I simply lost touch with it all, even before I was in the hospital for 14 days, then dealing with a tiny newborn.  I was overwhelmed and irritated by it all, honestly.  "Hell, I can't even keep up with my blog, why would I want to add something else to the mix," I thought.  It was friend Guillaume du Gardier who finally broke down and tried it that convinced me to do the same.  I am glad I did.

A quick aside.  Something has been bothering me as I catch up on blogosphere (socmediasphere?) happenings and reportings on what is happening and so forth.  It seems like folks (esp. the pundits and anti-pundits) are missing an important point.  Maybe THE important point about why all this communicating, sharing, networking, blogging, tagging, tweeting, etc. is so significant.  It it that it is LIFE that we are seeing shared here.  It is our LIVING as we live it that we share.  And it taps into emotion as real as any physical life activity (and as we type, record etc. it IS a physical life activity, of course, but you know what I mean). 

All of us, as we navigate and create online are constructing our digital identities.  But don't think that these are somehow separate from our physical identities - nothing so neat and clean.  We are simply extending ourselves, growing larger...becoming-digital to put it in a Deleuzian context.  We are transforming ourselves as humans, transforming others, transforming the world.  Big stuff this.

So don't tell me that the sharing of trivia online is trivial.  We are sharing little bits of ourselves, of our emotions, particularly.  That sharing should be treated with respect (I am not saying respect what people say, merely respect THAT they are saying it. But let's not get too philosophical here.)  Online social sharing taps into that scary, dangerous, exhilerating libidinal economy discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and many others.

Ok, so that wasn't just a brief aside, but back to Twitter...

I said I like Twitter because of how it makes me feel.  Happy. Connected. Like I felt when I first started blogging. I feel like I am back in touch with the world.  I don't have the time to blog like I used to, but Tweeting is easy.  When companies are seeking to create new products and services or promote said products and services online, they really should be thinking about emotion.  Will their new stuff help me create a happy life?  Yes, big stuff indeed.

Characteristics of Authentic Online Participants

I have been heads down writing my thesis, thus my absence from the blogosphere lately.  As part of my work, I wrote the following piece, which explores a bit more deeply the Baudrillard post I put up a couple of months ago.  The article has been posted at the New Communications Review here, but I have pasted it below for you as well.  I look forward to your comments, as always.

Characteristics of Authentic Online Participants

We must be cautious of the utopianism that can be found around the emerging global network, exemplified by statements such as John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,":

"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."

While it is seductive to think that distributed, many-to-many, loosely coupled web connections foreground a new political power to the people, it is certainly not that simple or straightforward. The dualism of command/control vs. distributed communications frameworks conceals the fact that both play the same game, just in a different way. Crucially, in both schemas, technology is used as a means to an end: power. Either in terms of concentration in the hands of a few (e.g., media conglomerates) or via collectivities of individuals that form around certain themes, the goal of both of these is to control the message -- or to put it another way, to seek to make someone take action against their will -- Weber's classic description of power. If we are really seeking alternatives to this type of politics of power, we must look outside this dualism. Or rather, look more closely at what is actually happening online and see if it does not present something different to us – a framework for authentic communications. To get there, we have to ask some questions. I'd like to focus on one here: What would the characteristics of the participants in this alternative framework have?

Baudrillard, Identity and the Online World

This quote from an article by recently-deceased Jean Baudrillard haunts me.  I was hoping to ask him about it during a planned seminar on April 2 he was going to lead in Paris for my graduate schoool, EGS, but unfortunately, he died beforehand.  As I think about digital identity and what social media (or whatever we want to call it) means, it is important to think about the negative as well as the positive.

"We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras [figurants interactifs]; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge "reality show." It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of disincarnation; no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all our cells; an enterprise of radical deterrence of the world from the inside and no longer from outside, similar to the quasi-nostalgic universe of capitalistic reality today. Being an extra [figurant] in virtual reality is no longer being an actor or a spectator. It is to be out of the scene [hors-scene], to be obscene."

The question(s) is/are: are we just extras, we who participate in the burgeoning blogosphere, socialnetworksphere,  virtualworldsphere, *sphere?  Is what we are doing really real, or are we fooling ourselves?  Are we really building something different? An augmentation to our physical lives?  Or are we constructing a mind prison?

There is so much utopianism around what is happening online these days that I am forced to ask questions about what might be the downside of it all.  I did so a couple of weeks ago, and I will continue to do so.  Personally, I think what is happening is a positive thing.  I believe that what we are doing in constructing our digital identies (how I characterize everything we are doing), is adding to our humanity, is, in fact, perhaps the only way forward for the human species (a risky statement, I know).  I am trying to work out the arguments, support and so forth for this hunch.  However, there exist real dangers as well, as Baudrillard has seen.  It is terrifyingly easy to fool ourselves into thinking what we are doing is significant, when perhaps we are simply playing another game.  Adorno constantly warned us about this as well.

Some random musings: 

We are "no longer alienated and passive", Adorno's complaint, but "interactive extras."  This word "extras" deserves thought.  If we are extras, who represents the main cast?  The same power structures (corporate/goverment) as before? Something/one else?  Extra implies superfluous, but surely we are more needed (by the powers, by each other) than not.  Maybe it is this idea of "each other" that allows us to escape the implications of "extra".  If we are all a community of extras, conversing with each other, perhaps outside the powersphere, perhaps unknowingly subject to it, perhaps ignored, does that make what we are doing less real/worthy/effective/etc.?  And yet, even if we are extras, we are pursing something profoundly human (designing ourselves) and authentic.  If we are constructing our own mind prison, is this so bad (a la the Matrix - if you don't know you are a slave, then it doesn't matter, etc.)?  Or are we fooling the powers that be?  They think they should be our jailers (seeking to become so by rules, regulations, surveillance, etc.), they believe they are, yet we look at them as if they are in their own bubble world that in reality has little effect on us, comfy in our virtual selves.

We need to think about "interactive" as well.  I always think active is better than passive.  Active implies will, ability to effect the world, dynamism, and so forth. What about "interactive"?  How can we distinguish this from "active"?  Does interactive connote impotent action? Hmmm...I really need to think about this, but I will spare you for the moment! I just felt like thinking aloud a little, and as always welcome your reactions.

Where I am on Digital Identity Work

So much for regular posting.  Really, I had the best of intentions, but a few things have consipired against me.  Number one? The Tour de France.  I was addicted and spent far too much time over the past couple of weeks watching it live.  Floyd Landis' comeback ride was one of the most amazing things I have seen.  What an athlete!  Second?  The heat.  It has been over 90 degrees here for the last two weeks and I don't have AC.  So every time I sit at the computer, my body temp rises and I feel horrible.  So I have been spending much of my time sitting in front of a fan reading vs. conversing with you. Please forgive me!

Update on Digital Identity Work

My reading has been very interesting indeed.  Right now, I am working my way through The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze.  What does that have to do with digital identity, you might ask?  Well, in order for me to answer the question, "what does it mean to be human in a digital age" (at the core of digital identity, of course), I have to figure out what Being Human means.  I am, after all, pursuing a philosophy degree.  So, on the advice of my wonderful thesis seminar teacher, I have taken a headlong dive into ontology:  from Hegel to Derrida to Deleuze, with detours to Nietschze, Leibniz, Heidegger, etc.  Coming soon: Jean-Luc Nancy.  (I won't link to all of these folks now, you can find them on Wikipedia, of course.)

There is something incredibly liberating (and naughty, almost, in this day and age) in asking questions like, "What is it to be human?" and "What is freedom?"  Because when you start to think about these things, your assumptions immediately pop up.  The trick is to recognize them, question them, and figure out why you believe the things you do.  In my case, I have discovered that much of my belief is based on instinct, which doesn't cut it in a thesis!  So I am seeking proof for my beliefs.  And, quite happily, I am finding it in absolutely beautiful and rather mind-bending descriptions of Dynamic Being, Multiplicity, Plurality and Monads. 

Once I construct my foundation, I will have a much stronger primary thesis, which runs something along the lines that digital identity is an authentic part of being human, not something separate or less-than.  In fact, I have come to the position that is is utterly natural, and inevitable.  But more on that later!

So, please be patient as I battle heat waves, ontology and other distractions.  As it is, it quite honestly will be closer to September as to when I am really back on track with regular postings. 

Thinking about Digital Identity

After my marathon of reading these past few months in preparation for school, I have begun to narrow down what it is I want to focus on for my thesis: digital identity.  As a kick off to this, I have started to frame my thinking on the topic, using a paper for school as an impetus to start pulling it all together.  I am not completely happy with this paper, but it is a start, and I thought I'd share it with you.  I am, of course, always interested in what you have to say!

Thinking About Digital Identity

One of the more intriguing aspects of participating in cyberspace is how it leads one to question identity, specifically identity as technologically mediated.  Certainly identity has been mediated before (and continues to be so) via telephones, photographs, home movies and videotapes, and so on.  But now, with the growth of online social media (blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, forums, discussion boards, chat, photo and video sharing, social bookmarking, tagging, etc.) more and more people are actively creating digital identities (whether they realize it or not).  And these identities are persistent slices of personality that others interact with and react to, which then can feed back into self.  Managing identity therefore becomes a serious task and there are increasing numbers of tools for one to do so.  So questioning identity in this environment becomes more critical.