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Friends or not?

– September 3, 2010

I’ve been spending a wee bit of time on Facebook trying to work out if the posts from the programme blog are being imported onto the Wall of the Social Change page. It’s a great feature which allows staff on the programme to post information, updates, news and views on the blog which then feeds automatically to the Facebook page without them ever having to visit Facebook – or even have an account. Well, it’s a great feature in theory! In practice, it either fails to import or can take up to three weeks to bring external posts in. There’s a lot of complaint about this by users of Facebook with various emails and group discussions. But to no avail. Facebook are just not interested in getting this feature to work as it should. And from a business perspective you can see why. Simply, they want Facebook users to generate their online updates from within Facebook. Encouraging it to be a platform aggregating content from external sites is simply not a priority for the business plan.

As with all these things though there is a workaround solution. I’ve just installed a Facebook application called RSS Graffiti which seems to do the same thing (import posts from the blog) and which actually works. It’s important that it does so since the value of the Facebook update is that it should be (almost) immediate. If anyone has another suggestion that could improve on this do let me know.

Last year, in the unit ‘Home Page to Tweet: Networked Society and Social Change’, we talked a great deal about the nature of the Facebook ‘friend’ and the value of strong and weak ties in instituting social and personal change: the friend of your friend’s friend can actually influence your health and even make you happy/sad! We realised that one of the problems with Facebook is that it doesn’t differentiate between different types of friend. I’m sure nobody would claim that all their Facebook friends had the same ‘status’ as friends. Yet differentiating between them in sharing ideas, images, videos etc. is complicated/near impossible.  It might be OK when ‘friends’ are limited to a social circle deriving from school, or even university. But when you want to share some things with friends, some things with work colleagues and other things with absolutely everybody, it gets difficult.  One solution I’ve just come across suggested by Niley Patel involves creating three simple lists: people I trust, people I don’t know well, and limited profile. Here’s how Niley explains the difference between them:

  • People I trust: These are your main dudes and ladies, your closest friends. You’re only going to put 10-15 people on this one, max. My friend Will’s version of this list is named Inner Circle; mine is named True Blue. It’s the VIP list, so treat it accordingly — people have to earn their spots.
  • People I don’t know well: Virtually everyone else you know goes on this list. It’s the one for friends from class, or the people you only see at parties, or friends of friends. Remember, you really don’t know that many people well — anyone you wouldn’t trust to keep those pictures of you on spring break in Mexico under wraps while you run for Congress goes on this list.
  • Limited Profile: This is everyone you probably have to be friends with but that you don’t really want seeing your profile. Your boss, your little cousin, your mother. You’re going to lock this list down tight.

He then goes on to give a step by step guide to set this up on your own profile.

I think it’s a sensible system to take more control over what you share and how you share it. The more that Facebook becomes a window onto our online worlds, the more we need to take control and manage what can be seen through that window.

Did you know?

– September 1, 2010

Like me, you may have taken a number of photos this summer charting your travels. You may even have uploaded them to Facebook or a photo sharing site like Picassa or Flickr. Some of you probably use smart phones which allow you to post updates to your friends and family seamlessly, and in real time. And it is incredible (‘a picture is worth a thousand words’) uploading a shot of you sitting in some bar in _____ (complete the gap) to Twitter via Twitpic lets everyone know in seconds how amazing an experience you’re having.

What you may not realise as you click and send on these smart phones is that encoded with that photo is specific data not only about the camera used, whether with flash or without, the lense, etc. but also the longitude and lattitude indicating where the picture was taken. This location based data is stored thanks to geo-tagging. Now most digital cameras don’t automatically geo-tag photos. But smart phones do. It’s their default, meaning that its shipped like that. In order to turn it off you have to read the manual and change some settings. We shouldn’t under-estimate the default settings of any gizmo we buy or website we visit and contribute to: it directly effects what the majority do and can make or break the company introducing it.

With that bit of background you might want to pop over to ICanStaulkU which uses that data to plot very precisely where a person is who’s uploaded a photo and tweeted it to their followers on Twitter. It may sound a bit creepy, but in fact, the site has been set up to raise awareness about the power of the default and the ways in which such data can be used. So, a quick example:

Here’s the tweet collected on the I CanStaulkU Twitter feed.

That message has been generated from chrispople’s Twitter account

When he uploaded this photo onto yfrog

Most interesting though is the way that the geo-positioning from that photo has been instantly loaded onto a Google map giving his precise location.

Now although I’m showing the different elements here on a blog post by capturing the screen I’m looking at, if I use this on my smart phone then that access is in real time. I can know where chrispople is seconds after he uploads his photo.

You might not think this is a big deal. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly fashionable to disclose location information as we physically surf the city.  Services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Facebook Places are capturing the market for the fashion thereby linking the online social network to the offline, physical meeting up of friends or even friends of friends. That same information is also being harnessed by groups monitoring abuses in civil and human rights and is one way in which new communications technologies (particularly mobile phones) are being used to hold governments to account.

But to disclose such information accidentally, now that’s another question … isn’t it?

Dead Ringers

– July 28, 2010

In the 16th century it was discovered that not everyone who’d been buried had actually died. Scratch marks found on the inside of coffin lids suggested that gravediggers were not always too careful who they buried – a fact which elicited panic from the public at the horrific prospect of being buried alive. As modern autopsy didn’t start until the 17th century and gravediggers earned extra money from buying and selling graves, it seems that this panic was not without justification. The solution? People would insist that before they were buried a piece of string be tied to their wrists, passed through the coffin and the earth above it and hung over a nearby tree. To the end of the string would be attached a bell. Now if they did wake up, they could give a tug and the gravedigger (sitting next to the graves on the graveyard shift) would know they were still alive and dig ‘em up. Hence the origin of the phrase ‘dead ringer’ and, by association, of the ‘graveyard shift’.

Now if I tell you that I heard that story originally from Tom Waits in this interview

you might be thinking, “what a load of bull. Tom Waits is telling stories again”. Now he is famous for telling stories and he tells some very good ones (if you use Spotify, try this, this and this) but is this one true? And if it is, how did the phrase’s current meaning – someone or something that very closely resembles another, as in ‘he’s a dead ringer for Brad Pitt’, develop from the bell-ringing gravedigger?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tracy Goodwin speaks British

– July 22, 2010

Here’s an amusing lesson from Tracy Goodwin in how (not) to speak English with a British accent which has become a bit of a mini-hit amongst language students on the web. Keep listening to the end … it gets worse!

And now a video reply pointing out how hopelessly wrong Tracy’s attempt is. One of the things I find interesting here is the way in which this particular YouTuber is responding in a quasi-dialogic way with Tracy’s video. YouTube is being used increasingly as a medium of comment – which, in a curious way makes it almost conversational.

Students who followed the ‘Language in Society’ unit in Level 5 will recognise Tracy’s unusual use of ‘dialect’ here – we would use ‘accent’ to talk about the features she’s demonstrating. They’ll also recognise that she really has produced a mashup of different geographical and social features of English which nobody, on this island at least, actually speaks.

It is funny and it has garnered numerous funny responses – including this parody. But what if she’s successful? If she actually teaches hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of North Americans to speak with her variety of British English? In a cruel irony of cultural globalisation could we find ourselves in some distant future importing and appropriating an accent which now, in 2010, we’re deriding?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s time for a coff-eh instead.

The Death or Dearth of Books?

– July 21, 2010

I remember as a first year undergraduate visiting the home of friend in North London and being amazed at the number of books lining the shelves in the living room, piled up the stairs and filling the empty spaces on the kitchen tops. “So, you grew up amidst all these books. What a priviledge”. “Yeh, but I never read any of them”. The house had a certain ‘air’ to it, one where books were clearly central, not only as wallpaper, but as a manifestation of what was engaging, pleasurable, valuable. I was reminded of that visit when I came across a study about the effects of having a home library on the educational achievements of children. I just wish now that I’d actually counted the number of books in the house – though to be fair, that might have appeared a wee bit strange.

Not so strange though for the authors of a recent study published in the Journal ‘Research in Social Stratification and Mobility’. In it the authors claim that parents’ scholarly culture, measured by the number of books stacked in a home library, enhances their children’s educational attainment. That scholarly families nurture scholarly children doesn’t seem particularly contentious – it’s something that I’d intuited back then in North London. However, in correlating the number of years’ schooling with the number of books in the home regardless of social class, parents’ occupation, nationality, historical period or particular government education policies is surprising. The report states that:

in the US – where the advantage is relatively modest – a child whose parents have 500 books can expect to get about 2 or 3 years more education than a comparable child from a bookless home. The advantage in Australia and West Germany is similar; not far different in France; larger in Norway and Spain (4 or 5 years); and largest in China (6 or 7 years).

So, unschooled parents can offset the relative educational disadvantages accrued by their children in comparison to university educated parents by filling the house with books.

There are a couple of significant implications from this that go beyond my initial intuitions:

  • any government that confines policies designed to improve student attainment to schools is missing a trick. Family culture – in particularly a book-buying family culture – can be a determining influence on the number of years that children stay in education.
  • and if, as Vince Cable suggests, graduates earn on average £100,000 more than non-graduates in their life-time, those Oxfam purchases during the teenage years could turn out to be a pretty good investment.
  • I now have an evidence-based reason for ducking out of household chores on a Saturday afternoon and sitting down with a good book. I’m investing in my daughter’s future by cultivating that scholarly culture which will maximise her educational attainment!

Clearly, lots of caveats and explanations are needed to arrive at the conclusion and the implications that emerge from it. And I have to admit, that last one failed miserably to convince my wife. [You can check those caveats and explanations by reading the whole article directly from mmu's elibrary or, if you are off-campus, via athens. Find help to do this here.] What is key throughout the paper is the emphasis placed on books as the means through which a scholarly culture is manifested. Books as a material presence is what counts – and what the researchers count.

But what is this scholarly culture that stands atop the mountain of volumes of fiction and non-fiction titles parents have amassed? It’s a way of life – related to books as material objects and activites such as reading and talking about books – which leads to children developing a toolkit of skills and understandings particularly apt for dealing with the kinds of tasks met in formal education. This is the argument that they present and although it’s endorsed by the numerous scholars they cite, there’s little flesh on its bones in the article itself.

If is meant the focused and immersive experience of delving into and staying with a book, emerging to critically appraise and talk about it, then yes, I certainly see the pleasure and value in that, and I do do it. So does my eight year-old and she doesn’t have to duck the housework! I’ve also followed literary traditions, ‘adopted’ great writers and ‘gurus’ and felt that I was entering distant worlds which questioned my values and understandings. But that’s just a part of it. I know. By now you’re probably screaming. And the Net?

To be fair, so was I as I read through the article which was increasingly looking like ‘A defence of the book in the face of the onslaught of the digital.’ Was no mention made of the internet, or the Kindle, the iPad or the Sony Reader because they can’t be stacked on shelves? Or is it that reading screens develops a different kind of cognitive toolkit which isn’t the most apt for scholarly attainment? And why the either, or? Isn’t a scholarly culture – that way of life – a fusion of the online digital reading (the spine tensed by sitting forward towards the screen) with the offline (the spine split between the hands sitting back into the chair)? And isn’t the management of that fusion the key cognitive skill that my own eight year-old will have to develop?

No, I don’t think books will disappear. There’s no reason why two technologies can’t sit together as the telephone and email do quite happily. What will disappear though is the measurement of educational attainment that fails to reference the digital, even if, as a minimum, it is controlled for in the kind of studies reported on here. We might not be counting Kindles yet but we’ll increasingly have to take account of them.

Addendum

I’ve just heard on the transistor radio that the sale of e-books seems to have hit a tipping point with Amazon reporting that it sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books in the second three months of this year.

Image by Flickr user Dammit Jack / Creative Commons licensed

Mediated

– July 19, 2010

There’s been a lot of talk of late about whether internet technology is good for our brains. Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows is skeptical; Steven Pinker optimistic; and Clay Shirky enthusiastic. If such discussion mirrors a more general obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness – mainstream science reporting seemingly can’t get enough of it (see here, here and here for some recent examples in the NY Times), it also reminds us how marginalised economic and cultural critique has become. I’ve yet to see any significant, sustained political economic examinations of Web 2.0 (apart from Benkler’s Wealth of Networks), which place new media inside a theory of mediation. That is, until I came across Mediated by Thomas Zengottita.

Published in 2005, Mediated is not directly concerned with new/social/web 2.0 media. Instead, it attempts to articulate a cultural and philosophical theory of mediated representation. Central to the theory is the notion of the mediated person, the person whose life is ‘composed of an unprecedented fusion of the real and the represented’ and ‘shaped by a culture of performance that consitutes a quality of being, a type of person’. Of course we have always been mediated by whatever tools we’ve had at hand for thousands of years. Only now, however, are we experiencing reality indistinguishable from its representation. That experience is, in turn, creating a new person, a new self, brain and all.

On the face of it the idea that we are unable to distinguish mediated experience from real experience seems extreme. Wouldn’t we all claim to distinguish the representation from the real – a real chicken burger from its representation in a TV advert? According to Zengottita we do make such claims and we can make the distinctions we claim. However, his point is that in the media saturated world in which we are born and grow we simply don’t make the distinction. We don’t make the distinction because 1) represented experience is ubiquitous and 2) representation constantly flatters us.  The fusion is simply too tempting to resist. Instead we go with the flow of representation retreating ever more securely into a virtual world (of representation) created for us and reproduced by our very acquiescence. Our wriggle room inside it is presented to us in the form of options. We choose amoungst endless choice – whether flavours of yoghurt in the supermarket, images to be moved by, body shapes to cultivate, people to friend, books to read … . We are the lifestyle we adopt before we change to a new lifestyle. Mediated is not an academic treatise. Zengottita is a better writer than that genre generally allows. Here’s a taste of the way he expresses the above ideas in his introductory chapter:

Yes, there were ersatz environments and image-driven commodities and glitzy ads back in the 1950s, say, but this is something else entirely. Saying that it’s more than we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze. So you need to ask yourself this: do you parse the real from the fabricated in that melange? Not can you but do you? The Fox screen is showing an Afghan woman learning to read – real or not? Posed? Candid? Some glorious babe in her underwear is sprawled across 35 percent of your visual field. She’s looking you right in the eye. You get that old feeling – real or not? A fabulous man, sculpted to perfection by more time in the health club than most parents have time for their kids, is gliding by on Day-Glo roller blades eight inches high. He’s wearing Tex-Tex gear so tight it looks like it’s under his skin, and the logos festooning his figure emit meaning-beeps from every angle – real or not? What about the pumped up biceps? If he uses steroids? But once again, the issue is not what you can do when I call your attention to it. Then you can be reassured – you can say, “Hey, okay, cool. I see what you mean but I still know the difference.” Not the point. The real issue is do you make the distinction as a matter of routine processing? Or do you rely instead on a generalised immunity that puts the whole flood in brackets and transforms it all into a play of surfaces – over which you glide and hover like a little god, dipping in here and there for the experience of your choice, the ultimate reaches of your soul on permanent remote? (22)

The radical implications of this – and this is where it links into current writings on technology – is that if true, representational technologies have colonised our minds to the extent that, unhinged from direct experience, we literally don’t think our own thoughts. We could, but we just don’t. If Nicholas Carr is right and the internet is increasingly acting as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, perpetuating and justifying those thoughts (which are not ours in the first place) then Jaron Lanier’s warning to designers of technology futures (to stop treating us like gadgets) really does need to be heeded.

Here’s how Zengottita gets to that conclusion. He starts by making the case that the modern reflexive self has its origins in the invention of the printing press in the onset of modernity:

The idea is that reading and writing, by their nature, turn the mind inward, cultivate habits of rational reflection, encourage the imagination, the inner life in general – thus giving birth to a self in the modern sense. A self that didn’t need the intervention of priests and rituals to connect him to God because his soul had direct access, by way of scripture – call him a Protestant. A self informed by a free press, enabled to make up his own mind about political issues – call him a citizen in a representative democracy. A self that could decide on a career and choose among commodities – call him a participant in a capitalist economy.

… And, later, she and her as well, of course.

He uses that to show how the modern notion of the child was born of the printing press (and universal education which sprang from it) and with it the child-centred society in which we are presently submerged. Zengottita’s take on child-centredness is rather different to those which see the the child as the centre of his or her world or which argue that children should direct their activities. Instead, Zengottita examines the ways in which being a child is a status which stands on its own – it is both self-conscious and self-validating because it exists in a representational world that reflects back on itself. Nor is it exclusive to kids. As I read to my own 7 year-old daughter what I find myself doing is representing the child’s world to her as she sees it. I create mirrors which enable her to ‘learn’ how to be a child. And of course she’s clued up to it. She’s self-consciously a child in ways and extent that are completely alien to previous generations – who lived childhood more directly. And adults collude through those same representations – discovering the inner child in reading Harry Potter or watching the latest Disney production, and even wearing the same clothes as their eight year old child-accelerating-towards-adolescence.

Of course adolescence and ‘the teenager’ is a key ingredient of the soup which constitutes the fusion of the real with the represented. The fact that the teenage years have extended – to the early 30s? – is, according to Zengottita, suggestive of the ways that a mediated world offering more choices, more reflexively, creates a kind of stasis which only accident or necessity can transcend. And the classic posturing of adolescence – the trying and performing of personae – is now validated by an entire culture of identification and self-recognition. Fact, Fiction, comedy and tragedy (in whatever medium or genre) constantly tries to elicit the response, ‘I’m just like that …’ or ‘That’s exactly how I would feel’ (if, as on Jeremy Kyle, my sisters boyfriend had a child with my second cousin). Perhaps this is why the notion of empathy seems to have hijacked sympathy. Empathy, ‘the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation’ (OED), is so much more flattering (fully comprehending?) than mere sympathy, ‘fellow feeling’ (OED).

The same process (of course it does, it’s representational) is manifested in politics – the rise of identity politics. Through the expansion of channels of communication/representation the politics of self-expression has been elevated to a new level of self-consciousness. Politics as (self) presentation = politics as (self) advertising.

As political activity becomes the production of representations, the dynamic of commerce is reproduced in politics. Because political representations must contend with clutter, they must be packaged in a certain way, they must grab the most attention in the least amount of time and get across a simple message.

So the days of ideology, of debates which link issues together, which reference philosophies of human nature and analyses of history and which promote policies designed to advance that vision, seem in the 2000s rather quaint. Instead we have issue politics in which, those who are interested, take a position – largely expressing an identity and promoting the interests of those who share that identity. Just watch ‘Question Time’ on the BBCI to get a taste. It may be that the current debate about the ‘Big Society’ is an attempt to put some content back into the public space but even if it is, that public space is so full of attention seeking distraction that its reception might just be filed away in the ‘to attend to’ tray. Performance, representation, self-consciousness, spin, self-validation, identity … it’s difficult to argue against the idea that the fusion of reality and representation is almost complete. Nor is it difficult to understand why so few are actually interested.

But politics is just one manifestation of the ways in which representation has hijacked the real and why we retreat evermore willingly into the simulation of reality rather than get ‘really’ dirty. Whether its managing 650 online ‘friends’, following the fortunes of our online investments, or immersing ourselves in the online travel blogs as we plan our ‘escape’, the attraction of the virtual continually distances the real. The busyness of our lives, the opportunities to multi-task, the constantly connected to everything and everybody, and the endless options we (could) enjoy are the self-sustaining performative mechanisms that numb us into accepting that this is, actually, the best of all possible worlds.

But is it the best of all possible worlds? Isn’t it instead as Zengottita says, a ‘monstor vision’, a vision where the aims of modernity have been fully achieved?

The aim of modernity fulfilled means this: humanly created options that endow ordinary people with entitlements no mortal in history, no matter how exalted, could ever have assumed before. While these entitlement are now limited to a relative and priviledged few, this cohort now comprises many millions, shows every indication of expanding, and is, in any case, the source of the global zeitgeist. Members of this cohort either have, or can realistically anticipate, the obliteration of all barriers of time and space, instant access to every text and image ever made, the free exercise of any lifestyle or belief system that does not infringeon the choices of others, custom-made environments, commodities, and experiences in every department of activity, multiple enhancements of mind and body, the eradication of disease, the postponement of death, and the manufacture of their own progeny in their own image.

Plus improvements. (266)

In other words – and this is the logical conclusion to Mediated – the MeWorld has replaced God with Me.

Zengottita is relentless in his exploration of the representational and the supplanting of reality by its simulacra. And he has no conclusion to assuage the discomfort he inflicts. The idea that ‘Representation Rules!’ has no happy postscript. But … being forewarned is to be forearmed. Understanding the frames that are created and which constitute the real is knowledge. And perhaps a knowledge that will enable other frames to be built to constitute a less dystopic future than the one he so cleverly describes.

Experts, opinions and options

– July 16, 2010

My wife recently had a fairly serious operation performed by a maxillofacial consultant. Whilst the procedure went well, recovery has been more difficult than she or I expected, marred by unexpected swelling and discomfort. What has struck me, both in the consultations we had prior to the operation and the emergency consultation after it, has been the ways in which the experts have presented their expertise as opinion.

Of course, on one level (epistemological) I can recognise that medical knowledge is built on educated guesswork, a series of deductions tested and corroborated by experimental and experiential evidence. I can also appreciate a species of postmodern skepticism about the nature of absolute truth. But at the same time I’m surprised that the ‘experts’ no longer profess their expertise. Instead they proffer their opinions and lay out the options that emerge from them. What option to choose remains the domain of the patient. But how to choose? Do A or not do A? Do A or do B? It’s the patient’s choice. On one level it’s very flattering. I can choose. Presumably, this is what is meant by ‘empowering’. But is it really empowering? Could it be instead that the power of the expert is somehow being played down, or even displaced as if it were somehow embarrassing or perhaps a liability? And isn’t the affect to burden the patient with a weight of responsibility that they are really not in an epistemological position to shoulder?

Ulrick Beck was the first to draw attention to the novelty and ambiguity of the term ‘expert opinion’. The philosopher Slavoj Zizeck made the point in a recent interview on Newsnight that when he was young, experts didn’t have opinions,  they knew things – only commonsense idiots had opinions. The irony is that in a world increasingly dominated by science, the discourse of opinion is ubiquitous.

So what do we do? I don’t propose some return to the ‘Doctor’ as all-knowing authority to whom we submit unthinkingly. But there ought to be mechanisms for relieving the burden of choice. What we did – and I wonder how many others do the same in similar circumstances – was to ask: ‘and what would you do Doctor if you were treating your wife in this condition?’ At that point and with what seemed like some relief, expert knowledge came to the fore and decisions more easily taken.

Cuba and Filtering software

– July 15, 2010

In a recent post in Voces Cubana by Miguel Iturría Savón reflects on why he’s been finding it impossible to access any of the blogs in the Cuban Voices project from computers on the island with full connection the internet. He finds himself talking to a girl, Yudeisi who tells him

about a girl who couldn’t use internet chat with her boyfriend in Spain. The boyfriend, an ‘expert’ in computing had bought her a computer manufactured in China from a shop in Paseo y Malecón. There are rumours that the Asian computers sold in Cuba are pre-loaded with the filter software ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’.

Green Dam Youth Escort is a piece of content control software, i.e. web-filtering software that is:

designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web. Content-control software determines what content will be available (Wikipedia contributors, “Content-control software,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Content-control_software&oldid=372853735 (accessed July 15, 2010).

If computers bought by the Cuban government and used throughout the island have mandated software installed by the state, in this case by proxy through Chinese partners … there really is no hiding place. What you do is what is seen. And certainly there’s no way to ensure that what you write is what is read – at least as long as the state controls how it’s read. Tough times continue.

Tzvetan Todorov, Cuba and Exile

– July 13, 2010

There has been an eerie echo of the 21st century reverberating through the news this last week. Ten Russian spies were deported from Russia in exchange for four alleged “double agents”. The theatricality of the swap, which took place on the tarmac of Vienna airport was not lost on the master of the spy novel, John Le Carre who was as bemused as the rest of us at the significance of this cold war re-enactment. In the same week, the Cuban government promised to release 52 political prisoners as part of a deal agreed between Cuban authorities and the Roman Catholic church brokered by the Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos.There’s little doubt that the deal was struck to improve Cuba’s human rights image on the world’s stage – and encourage trade with Europe. After the death in February of Zapata Tamayo who had been on hunger strike in a Cuban prison, the protests of the Damas de Blanco, and the hunger strike of Guillermo Farina, all of which received extensive coverage in the world’s press, it seems the Cuban government couldn’t ‘tough it out’ any longer. So, as I write, the first seven prisoners released have, with their family and close relatives, landed in Madrid to begin a new life in exile. Was the deal conditional on the prisoners agreeing to expatriation? If so, how many will refuse that condition? What is certain is that dissidence – that word we associate most commonly with the twentieth century and Soviet communism – is alive, well and kicking in Cuba.

As these echoes reverberate I’m reading Hope and Memory by Tzvetan Todorov. For Todorov the most significant innovation and greatest evil of the twentiethy century was totalitarianism. Unlike many historians, Todorov considers fascism and Communism as two of its variants. The book examines in detail the origins and development of totalitarianism to support this hypothesis as well as including a moving account of six people who resisted it. Todorov is himself a survivor of a totalitarian regime (he spent the first 24 years of his life in communist Bulgaria) adding weight not only to his evocation of those six people, but also to his implicit criticism of the (largely left-leaning) intellectual conceit that the Soviet regime was progressive and that it’s ‘errors’ could either be conveniently forgotten or understood to be stages on the way to social justice. Todorov attacks the conceit by contrasting the ideal of totalitarianism with the ideal of democracy and detailing the similarities between variants of the ideal of totalitarianism, Stalinist communism and Nazism. It’s an attack that needs to be extended to the conceit – still held by many – that Cuba is an island stubbornly holding out against the imperial ambitions of its Goliath neighbour; that it is still trying to achieve a social justice so totally abandoned by the Capitalist world; that its achievements in education and health justify its intolerance; and that the future would be rosy if only its sovereignty could be respected.

It’s clearly difficult for me to read Hope and Memory without reflecting on Cuba. Todorov’s analysis gives constant food for comparison. Here’s how he characterises totalitarianism:

Because the group must take precendence over the individual, pluralism in a totalitarian state is relaced by its opposite, monism. This means that:

On the one hand, individual life is no longer divided between a free private sphere and a regulated public sphere; instead, everything in it, including beliefs, tastes, and affections, becomes part of a unified whole which must conform to public standard. … On the other hand, a totalitarian system imposes monism in all aspects of public life so as to reach the ideal of an organically unified and “bonded” community. By making the state dogma out of a single ideal, by requiring subjects to subscribe to it, by establishing itself as a “virtuous state”, totalitarianism effectively restores the old unity of the theological and the political. (14)

That ‘public standard’ in the merged private/public sphere in Cuba is constantly monitored and those who are seen to subvert the standard run the continuum of pressure to conform, of being hounded, villified, stigmatised, criminalised and, ultimately, expatriated. The expression of difference is anti-social, anti-social is anti-state and so, very easily, pluralism becomes an act of treason. Even when Cubans retreat into the four walls of a small apartment, the unfreedom of that private space allows for little development of autonomous thinking – so little free dialogue dilutes its future possibility. Public dogma can very quickly colonise private space.

Totalitarianism subordinates economics to the political sphere through nationalisation and ever-changing edicts of state control. The changing ideological climates in Cuba have meant that any ‘opening’ of the economic sphere towards less central, state control has always been provisional. Trading licences are given then removed without explanation. Markets appear and then disappear according to political whim.

A totalitarian state operates a single party system which means the abolishing of political parties altogether. The state takes control of all other types of public organisations and associations. The difficulty of assembly in Cuba makes the legal formation of non-government approved groups impossible. The only alternative is to act clandestinely – however open or secretive you are prepared to be. The Catholic church may have emerged into a more open position during the last few years but its an involuntary alliance – a pragmatic, strategic valve to which the state holds the key. Hence the use of the Roman Catholic Church in the release of the political prisoners.

Social unification gives form to a new social hierarchy: the masses obey party members, party members obey the nomenklature (the party elite), and these in turn are the servants of the inner circle of leaders at whose apex sits the supreme commander, or “guide”. Whilst the system may be creaking in Cuba and lip-service often paid to obedience, this is still the system that operates and without recourse to another system, even lip-service is enough to maintain it. Raul may be the President of the Council of State, but Fidel remains an influential “guide”. I’m sure there was no coincidence that Fidel appeared on Cuban TV, after a long absence, the same evening that the released prisoners left Cuba from Jose Marti airport. Nor was it a coincidence that no mention was made of the prisoners during the one and a half hour broadcast.

In totalitarian regimes on paper, the sovereignty of the people is respected, but in practice the “general will” is hijacked to benefit the leadership group, which uses elections as plebiscites. Whilst the product of the elections in Cuba may be transparant, the processes which lead up to them are certainly not. The sovereignty of the people expressed through the “general will” is a construct, moulded and manipulated for the benefit of those in power. Used then as a mirror it reflects itself in never-ending self-perpetuation. It does so because all information services are controlled by the regime; no dissident opinion can be expressed. The trials and tribulations of attmpts at alternative publishing in Cuba are legendary.

The ideal of equality is proclaimed, but in fact totalitarian society is riddled with complex hierarchies and levels of priviledge. The priviledges of the party elite (in educational choices, career advancement, travel opportunities) have been inbuilt since the beginning of the 1960s in Cuba. Only now with the less oblique, more transparant overlay of the dual economy, has the situation become critical and the legitimacy of the ideal begun to be questioned. But it is the dollar economy that is criticised – of course it is. To criticise the priviledges endemic to the system would not be tolerated.

Todorov does not discuss ‘authoritarian’ states in Hope and Memory. It’s an interesting ommission though I tend to think with regard to Cuba that the label has been used as a sop to those still holding to the conceit and as a distancing mechanism from the more extreme right-wing views of some Cubans in Miami. Todorov’s book stimulates thought – as I’ve shown above – and is full of wisdom on every page. He reminds us that the habits of thinking that engendered totalitarianism have not gone away – they are alive in Cuba but they are also alive in the utopian ideals of freedom and the war against evil that have fuelled the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the accounts of Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann (a survivor of both Soviet and Nazi concentration camps), David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary and Germaine Tillion, Todorov shows the human capacity for seeing good even in the face of the most extreme suffering. We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, Todorov says, but struggling against ‘the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found’. Ultimately, for Todorov as for Grossman, it is freedom and kindness that mark the path for humanity – a path towards the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the collective.

The reflection of the the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves. ( Grossman: Life and Fate 69)

Staring at the cloud: The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

– July 7, 2010

Broadband connection is increasingly being seen as a basic utility for households in the UK, both in terms of the benefits of connectivity and also things like access to services such as BBC iPlayer and others. The government’s Universal Service Commitment announced in the Digital Britain report of 2009 aims to make this expectation a reality for all.

In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr looks in detail at the rise of internet technology as a utility, comparing it to the rise of electricity as a utility and reflecting on the changes it bodes in society, culture and economics. Such changes, he argues will be ‘epochal’, by which I think he means very, very large:

Electric light altered the rhythms of life, electric assembly lines, electric assembly lines redefined industry and work, and electric appliances brought the Industrial Revolution into the home. Cheap and affordable electricity shaped the world we live in today. (11)

When electricitybegan to be delivered into the home and factory, not by individual generators but by central grids, electricity became a utility – a universal service which everyone could benefit from. In Part 1 of The Big Switch, Carr charts this story from Henry Burden’s water wheel in the 1850s through Edison’s innovations in electricity production and distribution to the breakthough into a central electricity grid pioneered by Samuel Insull. It was Insull who held the key to electricity as a universal utility by realising that with new technologies electricity supply could be consolidated in enormous central stations which would meet the demands of even the largest industrial consumer. He was also the first to realise the power of the network effect: ‘as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the costs of power further and in turn attract more customers’ (39).  If this is the history of electricity production, distribution, and consumption, what are the lessons to be learned for the development of computing as a utility?

The most instructive similarity between electricity and computation is that they are both general purpose technologies; platforms rather than discrete tools which can be used to construct many different applications. The more ubiquitous the applications, the more opaque the technology that acts as its platform. We don’t think of the electricity supply when we are styling hair, instead we think about how beautiful our new hair tongs will make our hair. In the same way we don’t think of our own computer’s chip when Google comes up with 834,000 results in 0.2 seconds for a term we entered in its search box. In both cases the technology is delivered at great speed over a network, takes advantage of economies of scale, and innovates constantly to improve the service.

Of course, many of us have already begun to use computer technology as a utility. Google as a search application is just the most central of its services to encapsulate the utility model. The application Google Docs allows users to take advantage of Google’s chips, memory and storage devices to write documents, create and deliver presentations, and store accounts information in spreadsheets. The Web is now full of such services. One of the results is a general re-thinking of what your computer is. Once we filled a big fat box next to our desk with programmes and worried about how much hard disk space we had to store them all. Now we’re increasingly satisfied with a laptop and a lightening connection to the Web where we read, write, listen, watch, save, store and share (pretty much) whatever we want. All the processing power that’s needed to do all this is now available on the Web and more is coming. At the moment it’s still a matter of the ‘early adopters’ who are using and experimenting with such services (though some big companies and institutions are clearly taking advantage of the cost cutting benefits of outsourcing for example memory and storage capacity) but Carr asks us to imagine what it will be like when the only computer is the internet computer and where we simply plug in when we need to ‘do digital’. What will that world look like?

Carr is no cyber-utopian. His 2008 article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stupid? put him on the grumpier side of the cyber divide. Carr doesn’t believe we can control technology. We can’t control the way we pursue and embrace technological innovation because the economic imperative simply doesn’t allow us to do otherwise. This is how Carr explains it and positions himself in the technological determinism debate:

Technology shapes economics and economics shapes society. It’s a messy process – when you combine technology, economics and human nature, you get a lot of variables – but it has an inexorable logic, even if we can trace it only in retrospect. As individuals we may question the technological imperative and even withstand it, but such acts will always be lonely and in the end futile.

This ‘cyber-existentialism’ shapes Carr’s detailed examination of the implications of the internet-as-utility model in Part 2 of the Big Switch. And as we live more of our lives in the ‘computing cloud’ it’s not all good news. Here’s a summary of his observations:

1. As the market economy is rapidly subsuming the gift economy, user-generated content is devastating information sectors such as newspapers, film and music companies, and photography where thousands are losing their livelihoods.

2. Wealth is being concentrated not in the hands of a small number of companies but in a small number of individuals – YouTube was initially owned and run by two people, Flickr was sold when it had 10 employees. Both companies amassed billion dollar value on the back of very large and active user communities. It’s this new phenomenon of crowdsourcing that generated such wealth:

By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses, but witholding from those masses any ownership over the products of their communal work, the World Wide Computer provides an incredibly efficient mechanism for harvesting the economic value of the labor provided by the very many and concentratin it in the hands of the very few. (142)

And people still claim that the Web is still in search of a business model!

3. Culturally, the personalisation of content afforded by the the technology is creating polarised, homogeneous communities where our experience of ‘otherness’ (in people and information) is automatically filtered out to flatter, passify and encourage our digital selves to, well, shop more and protest less.

As the tools and algorithms [of filtering technologies] become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in an amplified form, our existing preferences.

4. As more and more information data is outsourced by companies and governments (and it will be simply because it will be cheaper to do so) there will be increasing concern about where such data ‘is’ and how secure it is. Some of the questions may be answered peaceably in discussions about how the trans-continental computing grid should work but it’s not difficult to see very serious conflicts emerge over who owns the cloud(s).

5. Computer systems are technologies of control (not of emancipation) designed to influence and monitor human behaviour. Governments use them to spin their messages, identify and contain dissident voices and extend the focus group to the networked group. Companies use them to influence the lives and thoughts of their employees as well as extend the working day and the monitoring of that working day. Your boss gives you Blackberry – hurrah! – you’re always at work. Companies have even convinced customers to become ‘friends’ through social networks and products actually contribute texts to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. All in the service of selling more.

6. The development of the artificial mind promised by the inventors of Google is imminent. Collective intelligence is it’s current incarnation where every time we click a link we’re feeding our intelligence into Google’s system. Slowly, but inexorably, we are transfering our intelligence into the machine which we then access to retrieve what we forgot we had. Ultimately, according to Carr (and this is the frightening bit that I think will be expanded upon in his latest book The Shallows) the Internet Computer is changing our brains – as with all new tools, memory, perception and language begin to change. As we become more plugged in the more we’ll be shaped into hyper-efficient data processors at the behest of the cloud and who controls it. The more we are trained to think like computors the more our consciousness will thin out and flatten and our humanity become a distant memory.

I did say that Carr was far from being a cyber-optimist! He is convincing though extreme and rarely gives justice to opposing positions and counter-voices to his skepticism/pessimism. But his writing – ‘high journalism’ – is engaging and the book is a real page turner. So, I’ll certainly be ordering his new book – though I may wait until the summer is over and the encroaching darkness of Autumn makes for a more appropriate reading experience!

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