Interesting meditation on the new peer socialities, in which Adrian Chan recognizes two major shifts.

This is followed by a related meditation from Rob Horning (Generation Bubble blog), who wonders whether the new corporate-funded social networks are not designed to create ‘capital-friendly’ identity formation.

Adrian Chan on the first shift

“The way I see it … social media are currently undergoing a radical if not inevitable transformation. We have come off the page, out of the network, and with that struck forth from territorial identity for nomadic travels and connections. We identify less now by where we are from and more by who we connect to. We maintain this identity less by identity through place and more by identity through sociality.

I’m speaking not just metaphorically, but directly to this realtime culture in which we now spend so much of our time, and to which we commit so much of our attention.

The siloed world of mass media, with its disconnected channels, its fixed real estates, and branded identities, is receding from relevance and by virtue of acceding ground to global nomadism, losing its claim to authority. A new mode of production is in place — one based not on manufactured goods, not on information, but on communication. And social media are its mode of production.

Social media may now be approaching the point of coming off the page entirely, reaching a condensation point (system threshold) at which stage communication may connect to and permit interaction by means of mediated talk anywhere through and on any screen or device.

Our relation to activity in the online social world is shifting from space to time. Attention should always have been measured in terms of time. We do not occupy space in the online world — we relate, in time and for stretches of time, to content and people.

Time is now multiply threaded, it is more often discontinuous than continuous, knitted and connected together out of intersections and connections that weave a social fabric more closely resembling the smooth and non-hierarchical architecture of felt, than the old, striated and linear designs of pre-patterned weave.

Time discontinuous is constituted on interruptions and distractions, our own individual focus of attention being the only synthesizing continuity possible. Separate times and timelines for each of us, in a world that is incapable of mediating truly shared time. A social world of adjacency and contiguity but lacking the higher and moving power of togetherness. We are next to, but not with, each other. And are our increasingly our own movers.

As we use media to stretch our relationships with people and interests across time and space, a bifurcation emerges between our own inner experience of now — attention, focused — and the online world’s capture and persistence of now-for-anytime. We are here now, online, but leave behind a wake of meaning that once digitized is durable without decay. The temporality of online is of connectedness, not continuity, for findability and visibility are the constraints on the “value” of the flotsam and jetsam that drifts in the flow of a realtime streaming world.

The activity streams in which we now live flows unceasingly, a river of news and information, rippling and eddying when currents are sustained for their currency. Trendlines on the surface of flow. The old world of territory, with its stocks of knowledge, its piles of treasure, was a world of allotment. The new world of flow, with its moving trends, its exchange dynamics, is a world of apportionment. The old media capital value of stocks and piles now washing downstream in a flow that values currency.

Currency flows, values dynamically representing present and changing interest and value, an attention economy made productive by means — you guessed it — of communication, threaten to displace old media capital investments. Social capital, valued not for its number, its pile size, but for its currency when put in play, and deeply contingent not on audience size but on its distribution by audience engagement and participation, is the currency of currency — the realtime flow.

A flow that we view not standing on its shores, but while drifting within it. For our perspective and lens on the flow is ours and ours alone — threaded as it were on our own, unique, and personal line of time. We live in our own streamtimes, even as we seek to connect.

This is a world not of information value, but of communication value. An open state of talk in which every statement and reference supplies connectedness to the timeless world of online. A world not of information but of meaning, not of static content but dynamic and relational action. Not of know-ledge but of know-who and know-how. Social, not archival.”

Adrian Chan on the Second Shift

“We are perched now at the threshold of another shift of paradigm. A world of interconnected streams, of intersections in flow and of dramatic escalations in amplitudes, of constructively-interfering ripples and waves, as well as chaos, turbulence, and noise. Meaning in the social cannot thrive on communication alone. It is only with social action and activity, that is, by means of relational connectedness, that it is cemented and validated socially.

This paradigm, of action streams perhaps, requires coupling, reciprocity, mutuality, for the proper binding that glues social connections. Talk not just spoken but heard and listened to. Talk not echoed but replied to. Talk that is not just the murmur of a babbling brook, the language of being, but the doing of becoming: communication that is action.

Streams, intersecting and cross-referential, permitting not just identities but socialities. A social media age in which communication is action, in which messages perform, and in which information is relation.

This is how I see it today. Social networking is rapidly becoming communication. Our profiles serve as resources, distributed identities but serving evergreen interests and referenced when the relevance adds value. The universe of social networks is itself becoming connected and in its connectedness, it matters less to the user where identity resources are kept and more how they are protected, secured, and made visible. And as networks become communication, communication becomes increasingly networked.

The next steps then, if possible in a world of un-coupled messaging, would be to enable interaction by messaging. To lift social activities out of their containers and architectures and embed them where possible in streams of social activity. And to architect, around communication, the meta data and state required for a truly inter-subective web.”

Rob Horning on capital-friendly identity formation:

“There are clear parallels between the transformational space of ads and the interactive spheres opened up by commercial social networks — in which brands intermingle with people on equal terms and data about the sort of connections we make are carefully aggregated. Much of our behavior online consists of this “linking work” — a form of immaterial labor which strengthens the consumerist code of meanings for goods while presenting that work as the strengthening of ties between friends and family. We are recognized as subjects by virtue of performing this sort of work.

It may be that the internet is expanding the kinds of domains that can signal identity, driving the domain hierarchy to ever further reaches of minute refinement. Berger and Heath claim that the product choices that are typically used for identity signaling are “publicly visible and made from a large choice set and take time or effort to make.” Web 2.0 services seemed to make more product choices visible and thus potentially identity-signaling. Social networks also help give shape to the groups that we seek to belong to through consumer goods — the networks produce and disseminate meanings for goods that need not be engineered in advance but that add value to the products. Social networks give us a field to display our identity in and a compendium from which to learn possible meanings that can be displayed. These are becoming more and more refined all the time, so that everything has an identity component, and everything must be “shared” in order for the consumer to realize what identity value is there to be realized in a good.

At this point, identity itself becomes a highly wrought, labor-intensive product. It begins to play as a status good, helping others signal belonging and uniqueness through association with us, with our reified identity, and so on. It has become an object among objects in the field of advertising, of which social networks are merely an extension. This is what Web 2.0 is ultimately all about — making everything part of the code of identity and stripping away the autonomy of any of our choices. Instead, they all mean something that we may or may not intend, we may or may not want to have to worry about. ?

That ties in to what is most disturbing about consumerism: how it appropriates consumption rituals and commercializes them, building in the priorities of capital directly into the social world and its material culture. It promises a paradoxical escape from being labeled by what we consume, by suggesting we can consume in isolation from society. But at the same time, that isolation makes us vulnerable, more prone to turn to advertisements in lieu of communities for a quick infusion of the social meanings none of us can exist without, regardless of what ideology tells us. The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation: rather than potlatches and festivals, we orient our consumption through such ideas as invidious comparison, competitive conspicuous consumption and self-presentation as branding. Rather than use consumption to stabilize identity and render it secure, we end up using consumerism to chase the impossible dream of unfettered individuality, of identity that is entirely free of contingencies, of finding the goods that represent us and no one else for only those rare soul mates who can interpret them. We search and search for these people, destined never to find them, no matter how many fleeting glimpses of them we catch in the mirror.”