The click is a yes, an affirmation, but is not an affirmation of what is represented in the links, given that links are explorative and that clicks are undifferentiated. The recursive logic by which we assess and interpret clicks means that we can only, at best, suppose that a click affirms what has been clicked.

Methodologically speaking, cessation of clicking would offer the surest sign that a link clicked has provided what the user seeks, but as we know such an interpretation would often provide us with a false positive. By extension, further clicking of links would seem to indicate that a link has not provided the user with his or her satisfaction, but that too would be to overburden observation and interpretation with a necessary and paradoxical bifurcation: that the clicking of any link might simultaneously represent its affirmation or rejection.

If we were to assume that action of clicking links affirms user intentions, then we would like to conclude that the user affirms the links clicked. However, the act of clicking is the means by which the user determines whether or not the links clicked are appropriate, and thus every act, or click, is ambiguous. Every click is ambiguous, and every link is ambivalent. This follows from the fundamental dual operation of the link: to serve as a means of navigation, or action (userâ€s selection of the link by clicking) and the representation of an actionable medium within the same form. The possibilities of action are collapsed into form (the link), and at the same time intention of actions is deduced from form (its content, or meaning, or the link).

The link is a kind of utterance already uttered (itâ€s shown as a picture or statement that is a clickable link); and yet in deducing user activity, we attribute the act of uttering it to the user who clicks it. Every impression measured is read as an expression of user action. Reading clickthroughs is tantamount to mapping a pedestrianâ€s destination from the footprints he leaves behind while wandering about, lost. Clicks record what they have produced, and produce their own recordings.

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“What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the ‘message†of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

To say that YouTube is not just video hosting or video watching is stating the obvious. The social participation YouTube gets in the video posting, commenting, rating, and circulating is what made it the killer app of hosted video. It is precisely YouTube’s popularity that set it apart, and earned it the ability command a huge acquisition fee (read: head count. It was the audience head count, which to Google looked impressively like loyalty, and they may be right, which is why they’ll leave it as YouTube for a while and keep their little “video NEW!” link sandwiched between images and news)…

I asked in a recent post what the content of YouTube is, using McLuhan’s formula that a medium’s content is a previous medium: “This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content†of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.â€? Then if the content of YouTube is television, its value was measured in terms of audience share (not advertising or programming quality). YouTube was clearly the biggest of the online video networks.

If the content of YouTube was television, but modified because it is online, then its formal content was television, its content as substance is viewers (users). And why is this so important? Because it would be a mistake to see YouTube in terms of its core value proposition: watching video. YouTube is a communication medium, and its real value lies in providing a marketplace “in” which people gather to pass around videos they like. “Watch this, you’ll like it” is conversation. It’s a statement, and YouTube is full of them. Look up Robin Williams and the first page of results are all the same 2 min and 19 second clip of Mr Williams doing a Scotsman inventing Golf. Why? Because posting is, as we learned from blogging, the fundamental act of communicating. Not reading. Not watching. (Not listening!)

This will all get more interesting as we look at the nature of utterances and communication involving video as reference. We need to compare YouTube and related phenomena to the blogosphere and to blogging. Ask yourself, what is it to refer to a cultural commodity or object, in a statement addressed to friends (or anonymously, to the world). What is that act? Is it a “look at this” act or is it a “look at me” act?

Or is it a “look at me looking at this” act? Let’s suppose that the videos on YouTube are like commodities, and that they have the sign value that we associate with fast cars, exclusive brands, and other status symbols. I’m not suggesting of course that some YouTube videos better brands than others — videos aren’t brands. I’m suggesting that videos signify social relations.

Videos on YouTube, because they are on YouTube, accrue social significance. That a person wants to share a video with somebody, be it by telling a friend or by posting, or by commenting, means that person likes it. And wants to communicate that like. In a “public” setting, identifying with a commodity carries social connotations. I’m into guitar rock. Or stand up. Check out these Bush out-takes. etc. Each video, in addition to its own content, has a reflective signification also: to like something is a reflection of my likes. The particular (video) makes a general reference (this is my taste). That’s the social move. Association with videos can now become social, using the commodity form, as other commodities are social (the status symbols mentioned above). And they’re free! Fast! And the consumption of them is ephemeral, and it doesn’t oblige anyone to post one back, or to applaud, even to publicly agree.

The social works in online marketplaces like this by establishing a communicable interest between a user and his or her selections (books, videos, music, blogs, etc). If the interest were personal only, it wouldn’t need to be communicable. It could just make sense to the person and end there. Its communicability is a sign that it’s social. But in each medium, in each application (social software site, community, marketplace, etc) the site has to successfully create an audience/public, and successfully enable the linking of user to interests, and communication of these selections to individuals, groups, and the audience at large. One cannot really wait for the other. Hence the importance of viral marketing, and hence the advantage that has returned to first movers.

Our next investigation ought to be into the changing nature of sign value, of commodities as form and of our relations to each other through these mediators.

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I’m on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube’s acquisition to Google still in the air. And Kim Jong Il leaping up and down at the far eastern edge of the map: living, ridiculous proof that power is all about getting attention (Dumb and Dumber: starring Bush and Kim Jong Il). I don’t think Robin Williams could’ve scripted a better skit; nor the South Park team have animated it any better than Kim did himself. Let’s all pay attention to lonely wittle Kim Jong Il.

But back to our original news… YouTube. Why did Google take it when they had their own video service? Because Google’s wasn’t as popular. And why not? Because Google approached video as information. Youtube saw it as television.

This is not about videos, it’s about television, and the future of television most importantly. Which will be why Sumner and Ballmer and Murdoch are still awake at night unsure of whether they just were too stingy. Marshall McLuhan claimed that television was a social medium. Film was not. YouTube is the present-day television, not television. YouTube, aptly named, since “You” (= My) and Tube (= Television) precisely describe television’s reconfiguration in the Communication Age. Yes, and MyTube would’ve sounded a bit weird. But MyTube would’ve seemed a bit, well, narcissistic (ah, the truth about teenagers and MySpace is written in the name!). And it would’ve missed the function of Communication as it’s applied to television. Since television is configured as a broadcast medium, it’s reconfiguration is as a communication medium. MyTube would’ve missed the point. YouTube captures it: television communicates only if it’s seen by others with whom one is communicating (namely, one’s friends, or social network).

The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you’re seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don’t often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it’s all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one’s own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content.

Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren’t social (they’re a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There’s always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film — room’s too dark. Social’s not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social…ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.).

The new generation doesn’t sit down to watch prime time tv together. It’s on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that’s mine, that’s mobile, that’s interactive, and that’s connected: the computer.

Google bought YouTube. Makes perfect sense.

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“If I wish to observe one of my own lived experiences, I must perform a reflective Act of attention. But in this case, what I will behold is a past experience, not one presently occurring. Since this holds true for all Acts of attention to my own experiences, I know it holds true for the other person as well. You are in the same position as I am: you can observe only your past, already-lived-through experiences. Now, whenever I have an experience of you, this is still my own experience. However, this experience, while uniquely my own, still has its signitively grasped intentional object, a lived experience of yours which you are having at this very moment. In order to observe a lived experience of my own, I must attend to it reflectively. By no means, however, need I attend reflectively to my lived experience of you in order to observe your lived experience. On the contrary, by merely “looking� I can grasp even those of your lived experiences which you have not yet noticed and which are for you still prephenomenal and undifferentiated. This means that, whereas I can observe my own lived experiences only after they are over and done with. I can observe yours as they actually take place. This in turn implies that you and I are in a specific sense “simultaneous,� that we “coexist,� that our respective streams of consciousness intersect. To be sure, these are merely images and are inadequate since they are spatial. However, recourse to spatial imagery at this point is deeply rooted. We are concerned with the synchronism of two streams of consciousness here, my own and yours. In trying to understand this synchronism we can hardly ignore the fact that when you and I are in the natural attitude we perceive ourselves and each other as psychophysical unities.� Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 103

• How important is simultaneity to meaning?
• How important is it to interaction?
• How important is it for the “binding” that occurs between interactants when they are in a cooperative type of interaction?
• How important is it for the exchange of truth, for displays and confirmations of sincerity and authenticity, between interactants?
• Does culture change when we participate in asynchronous activities, when our interactions involve less actual being together, less coordination of our interaction in shared space and time, less in terms of getting on the same page emotionally, or of creating a mood, disposition, and common attitude?
• How critical is this moment of shared stream of consciousness, as described here by Schutz, to the production of human relations?
• How much of it can be leveraged as a basis of interaction when interaction cannot be face to face and must be mediated? Or is every asynchronous and technically-mediated interaction a tiny death, a departure from home, a lesser version of the real human experience?
• As it is in the philosophical duel between Isabbelle Huppert and Lily Tomlin/Dustin Hoffman in the film I Heart Huckabees, the question (or one question) seems to be: are we all connected, or is there an infinitessimally small but ever-present gap and space between us? Does the shared stream of consciousness described here really happen, or does it only seem to happen?

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If you subscribe to the version of economic and social history as told by the Left, our daily lives today have become rationalized, instrumentalized, and assimilated to economic purposes more now than ever before. But things are even more complicated in the view of these authors. By their account we are beyond any conventional late stage advanced capitalism. Affective capitalism, as it’s put here, has progressed even further: beyond extracting value from surplus value, to the extraction of value from our relationships, our leisure time, our desires and enjoyments. By their definition, in this phase of capitalism, economic organization “is essentially the production of sociability itself.”

Clearly though, capitalism is far beyond the industrial age, and I would argue, beyond the information age also. I’ve suggested elsewhere that we now live in an age of communication, and that one of the vectors behind the explosion of communication technologies is a centripetal force of decentralization. A proliferation of productive and consumptive relations expanding ever outward: into the home, into leisure, into daily practices that go go go, around the clock. “The individual serves and is served, in turn, by an economy based on desire, affectivity and pleasure.”

Capitalism is founded on growth and progress, and if it is not spreading horizontally across the world’s territories, it instead colonizes the “lifeworld” (the every day) along a line that descends like hook, line, and sinker. A line of economic logic that runs from the currents and trends that send waves across the surface, downward like a vertical, (data) mining the depths of our desires and interests. Even if you disagree that capitalism eats at the soul, you have to agree that it increasingly looks as if everything is for sale…

Indeed, a dark reading of the Long Tail (concept) might argue that all of the serendipitous dots connected by collaborative filtering engines reduce the rich spontaneity of friendships to relations based on a one-dimensional pivot around a simple data point: common interests shown by the consumption of alike objects. Renters of March of the Penguins and Winged Migration Unite!

This dark reading is possible even with the lights on. In fact it’s more enjoyable. In the words of Juan Martin Prada:

“economic power does not intend to continue to base all of its privileges on the exploitation of its subjects as a workforce but on the increasingly lucrative regulation of their ways of life, life dynamics and personal and affective interactions, emotions, consumer habits and satisfaction.”

This is the rub of affective capitalism. It describes a mode of regulation we could conceive of enjoying. Precisely because it targets enjoyment itself. So the inclusion of affective and emotional aspects of life and experience in economic production and consumption is a positive or negative development according to how you calibrate your philosophical and critical sensibilities. Negative, if you would like to reserve some of your heart and cranium for activities outside the economic sphere. Positive, if the Venn overlap of the public and private, productive and intimate, is as good as it feels. There is nothing essentially wrong with a capitalism whose growth and reach increases with every bigger and expanded catalog of new and enriched products. And surely an open-minded view of body modifications, gene therapies, and other life-preserving medical advances could befriend affective capitalist production, whether it seeks quantity or quality of life:

“affectivity is for once and for all liberated from its former, restrictive enclosure in the contexts of intimacy and the family and is gradually becoming the real object of production in new industries that are increasingly designed to produce new forms of life and subjectivity.” Juan Martin Prada

The evidence for affective capitalism is all around us. Entire industries now cater to entertainment of all kinds, from life-threatening location-based thrills to one-click phenomena like Amazon and Netflix. There’s tourism for the ecological, archaeological, religious, even medical tourism, and with trips to Gulags and Chernobyl now possible, the pathological? If the evidence simply showed that money can be made by pleasuring the senses this would be nothing new. But by “affective capitalism,” the authors mean more than the economics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of economics). I think they also mean the mobilization of “human interests” (Habermas) but with affective attributes added to those of reason. An economy not just of reason and rational choice, but of pleasure and affect.

An economy of affect would have to generate affective flows just like any other. It would have to inspire the desires it can satisfy, and successfully market to markets it has presumably created. The argument gets interesting here, and here I depart from a strict reading of our affective capitalism entry. Backing up a few levels, what is an economy? Cultural anthropologists have described “archaic” economies as allotting deductions from a common stock (e.g. land) and apportioning amounts from shared flows (say, harvests). Pre-capitalist economies took from the land, or cultivated and farmed foodstuffs and livestock, using allotment and apportioning regimes to distribute shares to members (of a tribe). The act is deductive. It is a distributive act of dividing resources that belong to all into parts according to a social logic, with a view of sustaining not only a society but the relations among its members. Capitalist production, by contrast to the disjunctive economic logic of archaic societies, produces through conjunction, by a creative act of addition (see Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus). Goods are created ex nihilo, not given by the gods or spirits (in gift economies the gods are placed in debt to tribes through offerings and sacrifices, those divine debts repaid in the form of bountiful harvests and other interventions). As consumers of a capitalist mode of production, we do not owe higher authorities anything but a tax (which is a debt, but a monetary one only). The conjunctive economy constantly adds. It adds through relations, connections, and links. But how? Communication.

What better to use for creating links and associations than communication (and related tools and technologies). Here’s Hardt on affective capitalism:

“Whereas in a first moment, in the computerization of industry for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and “degraded” to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process, in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and “elevated” to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital.”

From the marketing might of mass media to social marketing phenomena like MySpace (miniMedia), messaging, imagery, and the sheer sex appeal of people, goods, and services move from mouth to mouth by face to face as well as mediated connections. Word of mouth marketing, then, is an example of affective capitalism, for it establishes demand on the evidence of shared interests and likes. We’re back to the long tail. Buzz marketing is marketing to affects, by means of communication tools.

Indeed, collaborative filtering is also a means of filtering collaboration. In particular, it suggests an AND between two products based on their likeness or similarity. Connections and relations spread out like a web among products, and with the dots connected (collaborative filtering), human relations emerge (filtered collaboration). Our relations become subordinate to economic relations because they have been produced by them. Is that not an example of “human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital?” And are these relations not an example of filtered collaboration, for our communication is in the service of product promotion?

Coda
This being an economy of surplus and digital duplicates, not of scarcity, getting attention is the aim of affective marketing. But it works off a logical twist: that we like things that are alike. Surely we don’t like things (intrinic logic) because they are alike (extrinsic logic). We may like things that are alike, but not because they are alike. The long tail is an example of affective marketing in its early stages, because the similarities among products promoted together (linked) is only a stand-in for the real marketer’s grail: the connections between personal likes. For now, connections of likeness substitute for the connections between likes. The latter suggest themselves as a frontier of resistance to author Michael Hardt, who writes: “On the contrary, given the role of affective labor as one of the strongest links in the chain of capitalist post-modernization, its potential for subversion and autonomous constitution is all the greater.” Hardt seems to suggest that we thwart marketing surveys and throw a wrench into the machine, with the aim of refusing to allow capitalism its sought-after model of our desires and pleasures.

I wonder whether Foucault, were he alive today, might write a book on the database as a concrete design equally suited to surveillance and to marketing purposes. The concepts here are rich. Affective capitalism marks a historical moment in capitalism’s development. I’m with Hardt. But I’ve always thought that if there’s one thing we have going for us (humanity), it’s that capitalism can’t think. It can only observe. We have a lead on it, always.

Adrian Chan

The post The Net Effect of Affective Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We often speak of proximity as a matter of space, of closeness, nearness, even touch. We’ve seen that distance collapse, foreshortened by the spin of a mouse on the point of a click. Who among us is not a click away? But interestingly, I think, the dimension that’s transformed most by social media is time, not space. It’s time in the sense that the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no “there” there, presented but not with a deep presence. It’s a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves. We’ll have 16 tracks of conversation going but at different time signatures, and our presence to and in all of them will feel more fragmented than whole.

I don’t know what a p2p take on temporality might look like. I think the discipline is more inclined to spatial and visual maps and representations. But time and temporality are of paramount importance to production coordination, action sequencing and the organization of dependencies in the distribution of work, and so on. We have long departed from a simple “serial” time and temporality. But might the organization of social relations by p2p not better accommodate time than it currently does?

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From a social interaction designer’s perspective, the 2.0 web is a fascinating and somewhat confusing amalgamation of information selection and delivery, computing functionality, social interaction, individual user activity, design, and presentation, all rolled out over time through a medium whose front and back end continuously present and integrate their use. We’re accustomed to polls on television, surveys over the phone, radio call in talk shows, and numerous other participatory media. But only the current web is a social medium whose particpation barrier is low enough to have attracted the highest level of intervention by certain governments and organizations. Low enough to carry talk of the most intimate and cheap kind, available enough to publish it alongside the most official decree and manifesto. A talk system whose dialtone is more up than Verizon’s, whose open-ness to participant can be frustratingly open, and which records and makes available all talk such that the talk is preserved, but also sustained indefinitely. A talk system whose organization across time and space, in other words, is unique, as talk, and as medium.
This is one of a few parts on the folksonomic phenom. I’m not sure how many parts yet. Three maybe. (Not two, unless proceeding to three. Five is right out.)

Online communities vary by the intensity and richness of the relationships and activities they’re built on. A typical social software service like GoingOn, which hosts profiles, discussions, posts, and which enables direct interactions can generate richer community participation than “communities” that exist by virtue of blogrolls and commentary. And it is my view that blogposts plus comments do not equal conversation; message boards would be a more accurate metaphor. Similarly, “community””would be a misnomer for the phenomenon of loosely networked blogs.
Folksonomic participation sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, and technorati.com seek to create value by aggregating individual participation. Not, in other words, through member to member communication. What one person finds interesting, when she adds it to a tagging site, contributes to shared community knowledge. The more other users submit the same interest and site, and possibly tag identification, the more this loose social system can produce “knowledge.” So goes the idea.
There’s no disputing that value is added during social participation, but there is some debate around what that value is, not to mention how to measure it. Tag cultures, for example, are a knowledge system that combines at least two axes of value: categories associated with web site content; and popularity. In much the same way that a lottery jackpot grows more quickly the more it is worth, social media, too, deliver content dynamically updated by its very consumption.
I’m tempted to say that social media uniquely captures participation: a means of production that records its own consumption. And whose consumption is its distribution. Only electronic media can claim this, for it’s only with digital media that consumption does nothing to the original, each product being a copy already.

–Adrian Chan

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http://mcstrick.livejournal.com/806969.html

–Adrian Chan

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A state’s ability to inflict damage, over its susceptibility to damage = trust. In short, trust = offensive capability/defensive weakness. I wrote that trust = knowledge/uncertainty. Military means being the means of the former; communication and institutions being the means of the latter.

Things are falling apart. Our global institutions are not unbiased, communication has not proven a way out of conflict, be it actual or virtual, national or system, and a growing divide seems to be shaping up between those holding on to and protecting their historic influence and lacking natural resources, and those in possession of natural resources and thus possibly holding the keys to power in the future. Just look at the US, Britain, Europe, and compare against Russia and China. Honestly, it’s not looking good at all. What we’re seeing today is possibly just the beginning. Smaller states engaged in a taste of the proxy conflict that, if unchecked, could easily devolve into big power conflicts over energy, labor, and capital.

I used to think communication would lead us out of centuries of military conflict. But we’re not doing so well at communicating. To succeed in establishing trust in the international system, communication must be honest. Understanding, and reaching agreement, is possible only if communication is truthful. If it’s not truthful, it’s strategic, manipulative, deceptive, and that does nothing but to obtain results from communication based on force and coercion rather than consensus and partnership.

I’ve been getting into systems theory again recently and yesterday I began to wonder whether capitalism (not my favorite organization of human relations) might be our only hope. If we take the assumption that every system, be it religious, military, political, social, financial reproduces itself by making selections from available information, making choices, in other words, then capitalism has two things going for it (and us?): it presumes linear growth and it’s oriented to the future. The presumption of growth, even if it’s a fundamentally cracked assumption, motivates future-oriented action. And we need to preserve future possibilities now more than ever. Religious, ethnic, territorial, political, and military forms of social organization carry a lot of historical baggage, heavy memories, and a perception of Self that’s often de facto opposed to Other. Capitalism, by choosing possibilities of growth (some people read: exploitation), sees Self as inclusive of Other (some read: assimilative).

I’d like to keep thinking that communication offers a means of preserving and respecting difference while forging a common future out of trust, discourse, and agreement. But we’re running out of time to reach agreement, and “rogue” states, stateless movements, and global institutions simply stall when they see that their communication partners are powerless (as we are vis a vis Iran and N Korea, Venezuela, etc.) Why have things not blown up with Venezuela? We buy their oil. And Iran? We buy their oil. Russia? We buy their oil.

The G8 (really, the G7+Russia) meet imminently and Bush is going to tell Putin that he likes Aquafresh toothpaste too. Toothless talk from a system that’s got no bite left but the one it drops into a glass of water by the bedstand, nightly. I’d like to think that understanding beats profit. But if we don’t have enough time? Capitalism still has its quarterly reports to prepare, and that’s three months at least…

–Adrian Chan

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