A contribution by Mark Andrejevic, via the IDC mailing list:

“The familiar framing of submission to various forms of online monitoring in terms of the logic of exchange (we submit to the collection of information about ourselves in return for access to “free” goods and services) needs further interrogation: not just in terms of what information is collected vs. what information we consciously disclose about ourselves, and not just in terms of the economic and social relations that structure the “free” exchange, but also, perhaps, in terms of the split between the forms of gratification associated with online services and the data gathered about us. These might be seen, increasingly, as overlapping categories.

I’m thinking here of a constellations of developments associated with so-called sentiment analysis: the use of the internet as means not just for gathering information, but for measuring sentiment. For starters, we might include in this category Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of Facebook as a means of reconstituting the organization of information online in terms of a “social graph” — a means of organizing information and facilitating searches based not on, as Wired magazine puts it, “the cold mathematics” of a Google search, but on a more “personalized, humanized” algorithm that draws on our social networks to shape our searches and provide us with customized results. Alongside this individual use of the social graph is the goal of enlisting so-called sentiment analysis — an attempt to gauge sentiment by sorting through large-scale databses (what Pang and Lee have called “opinion mining”) — for marketing purposes. Companies like Jodange and Scout Labs (which I learned about through a NYTimes piece on sentiment analysis), promise a kind of gestalt reading of the data flow: a means of seeing the whole without necessarily having to read through all the discreet data, that is reminsicent of the new spate of attempts to privilege gut instinct, first impressions, body language, etc. (as outlined, for example in Gladwell’s Blink and represented in a spate of shows about adepts who are able to beat the machines — the cold mathematics of the algorithm — through their ability to read emotions and gauge impressions — Lie to Me, the Mentalist, etc.).

So Jodange, for example describes its goal as: the development of “business applications that drive tangible value by allowing knowledge workers to better understand who is influencing their customers, competitors and marketplace in an environment where information continues to originate from an exploding number of information sources” and Scout Labs promises to help clients track social media and “find signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships.” The site includes the following (anonymous — maybe the web is speaking) testimonial: “Scout Labs provides an intuitive and elegant interface for managing a wealth of conversations across the web. It makes social media monitoring dead-simple.”

I’m not sure what this adds to the portrayal of interactive applications as (among other things) a means of gathering information about consumers — but I’m intrigued that the goal is not simply demographics, patterns of browsing or purchasing behavior, and not even the collection of data about indvidual preferences, but the goal of discerning in the data flow a dominant feeling tone coalescing around particular products, initiatives, people or campaigns. At work here is a kind of prosopopoeia in the sense in which Zizek has been using it recently — the creation of some kind of aggregate non-subject whose sentiments can be read off the data.

It’s hard, when looking at these developments, not to be struck by Patricia Ticineto Clough’s observation that, “this is a dynamic background, a probabilisitc, statistical background which provides an infra-empirical or infra-temporal sociality, the subject of which is, I want to propose, the population, technologically or methodologically open to the modulation of its affective capacities. Sociality as affective background displaces sociality grasped in terms off structure and individual; affective modulation and individuation displace subject formation and ideological interpellation as central to the relation of governance and economy” (from The New Empiricism: Affect and Sociological Method, European Journal of Social Theory 2009).”