Session 1: Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything
Moral problems are mere technological problems to be solved: this is the theology of Google. We should not doubt but just believe…
All social and cultural theory starts with theology – postmodern and post structuralist theory tries to resist the universal of theology
principle of Google is that it copies everything – this is what a search engine does in order to index. But what Google book search is doing is reaching outside the web into the ‘old world’ of copyright and saying the old world must become like the web.
Google surveillance in data-mining consumer profiling etc is completely different from the panopticon. Discipline comes from being aware of surveillance. Web surveillance is distributed and we are not aware of the level of activity…exact opposite of the panopticon…we are encouraged to do what we want online, to misbehave because the corporation wants the ‘real’ you in order to better profile you…
Tiziana Terranova Everything is everything: Network science, neo-liberalism and security
Foucault’s lectures on market and security as part of a society of control. Marxist perspectives, according to Foucault, tend to think about capitalism from the inside – ie how does it function. We need to get outside of this to get outside of capitalism. Rtaher its better to look at the sigularity of moments of organisation of capital.
Neoliberals – the market is not natural but a game, or rather a thing that needs to be produced and extended to as many fields of the social as possible.
The panopticon fades and this is replaced by the mechanism of security. Security is linked to the problem of the series – events keep happening, a series of users clicking, a series of blogs, a series of downloads. Security addresses itself to this.
perhaps many of the web maps we have are ways of spatially representing this series of events. (However, the series is uneven and discontinuous in actuality…)
Key to Web 2.0 -’harness’ users’ collective intelligence…for O’Reilly. (power of cumulative series of events, uploading, downloading, commenting etc).
What kind of market then is this? for Lazzarato – market is a dispositif for construction and capture of the customer. Net economy directly mobilises social relations for the market. What are these social relations – perpetual state of movement between multiplicities of passwords, ids etc.
Liberal versions of explaining network economies try to explain social relations in terms of economic rationale – e.g. we participate in the web because we invest time and we expect a return (Benchler Wealth of Networks)
Whereas for Lazzarato – participation is a social relationship a process of capturing and being captured.
Wendy Chun Imagined Networks
OED -network as diagram – network as representation goes to network as reality. These move backwards and forwards and hence the notion of the network as diagram is oxymoronic. Yes maybe, but what a powerful oxymoron…
Mapping is part of a web drive that tries to map the net into a more intimate space…this returns us to the ARPANET mapping techniques.
Best way to represent a network is to reject the global – we need to try to imagine how technologies and social interactions are engaged together.
temporality of networks is the ephemeral enduring – the undead of information. Blog entries are uninteresting because they are immobile – ie constant updating – empty homogeneous time.