What's the buzz, tell me what's a-happening (16 Feb 2010)

I have a post up at Generation Bubble that's inspired by the launch of Google Buzz. It's about the ways in which online media companies are always devising ways to accelerate and automate the processes of our "sharing" because what we share is marketable information to them. This is the dek, which sums it up pretty pithily: "Postmodern alienation has given way to computer-age integration as social media like Facebook and Google Buzz encourage us reduce, reuse and recycle the trappings of identity." I draw heavily on an article in Eurozine by Kazys Varnelis about the transition from postmodern to post-postmodern society or what he calls the networked society. The gist of his essay is that the postmodern strategy of having open-ended fluid identities to defeat the establishment's desire to dominate by rendering us homogeneous and thus easier to control with the same methods is no longer operational. The networked society turns fluid identity to account, supplies it with a place within the logic of capital. We don't escape through "free play" -- instead, that play is a new source of exploitable labor. (Metafilter has a useful bunch of links on this issue as well. I particularly liked this: "The Googles and Facebooks do not want that [sharing] to be a choice, they want it imposed as a cultural standard — hence the age-baiting and mockery of 'hypocrites' who want to retain privacy: Big Brother isn’t just watching you anymore, he’s shaming you! He’s calling you out! Lol. This explains Zuckerborg’s edict that privacy is no longer a 'social norm.' ")

If you want to read more of my wrangling on that subject -- how the modes of subsumption of labor under capital have changed with technology, you can check out these notes I'm making on labor sociologist Stanley Aronowitz's The Politics of Identity over at the Marginal Utility annex.

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

Prolific Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written several books over the past decade about consumerism -- which he for some reason prefers to call "the world of consumers" -- hence the verbose title of his most recent book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? -- in what he has dubbed the "liquid modern era." (He also dislikes the term postmodern, and this is his way of avoiding semantic arguments about what it precisely means.) There's not much suspense about the question the title poses: The answer, as you'd probably guess, is basically no.

It's a not a question you'd ask if you were actually optimistic about it. Bauman, while not as thoroughgoingly pessimistic as such past consumer-society critics as Jean Baudrillard, is still left dispiritedly positing utopian scenarios after laying out his grim analyses of our social situation -- he calls it a "battlefield" in the introduction -- which, in his view, technology is rapidly worsening. The characterological changes brought on by consumerism are accelerating, he argues, turning the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood into the diminished qualities of security, parity and networking.

In Bauman's account -- and it is a familiar, comfortable story to anyone schooled in leftist, Adornoesque social theory -- the liquid modern world's problems start when aspects that traditionally limited our possibilities in the world (religion, geography, class, occupation, family, ethnicity) gradually became less restrictive, thanks mostly to capitalism's modus operandi of creative destruction. Things once regarded as more or less permanent or unmarketable were subsumed by the market, reified, branded, and made subject to neoclassical economic truths about privatization, rational choices, and marginal utility. No longer assigned a specific role in the community from birth, we are alienated, atomized, cut free as an individual, forced to make our place. This has tangible benefits, obviously, in expanding our freedom to act. But it also brought with it the scourges of insecurity and boundless responsibility. (This is Frankfurt school orthodoxy -- not unlike Erich Fromm's and Herbert Marcuse's ideas about freedom, in Escape From Freedom and One-Dimensional Man respectively.) "As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues," writes Bauman, who frequently selects choice quotes from other thinkers (one of the nice things about Bauman's book is that it serves as a kind of index to recent theoretical trends), "most common human sufferings tend to grow from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past" -- an insight he may have attributed to any number of behavioral economists as well. Overt coercion in the pre-consumerist world was replaced by the regime of flattering persuasion, which is just as coercive, only we feel like we are in control, volunteering to participate in it (we shop because we want to), making the meaningful choices (between the things supplied by the market to satisfy the needs it has trained us to adopt). "As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires."

At this point, I'm nodding in agreement, but none of this is new -- this is more or less the case that all left-leaning thinkers have made about consumerism. It seduces us to control us, replaces the ideal freedom of citizens in the public sphere determining a future for society collectively with that of a a bunch of individuals free only to choose among doodads after having their brains filled with bafflegab.

But Bauman turns an interesting corner. He cites philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's notion of society as not a limit on our selfishness, as Freud, for instance, claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, but as a limit on our boundless ethical responsibility to our fellow humans. "Using the vocabulary of Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, 'with its institutions, universal forms, and laws,' is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of 'others,' considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable)." Society may be not the force that stops the Hobbesan war of all against all, but "an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the 'order of egotism.' " (It's like bizarro Ayn Rand.) That altruism -- that feeling of ethical responsibility to others -- is an impossible, crippling burden. Only by curtailing it can we accomplish anything. But in doing that, we also curtail the spontaneous impulse Levinas believes that we have to trust and help others. And possibly we curtail the source of life's meaning.

The way consumer society allows us to escape from that responsibility -- its innovative method, perhaps -- is to train us to fix it on ourselves. "Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('You owe this to yourself,' as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise." The celebration in consumer society of individualism and our "right" to convenience mean that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people's needs -- and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the hassle they represent. "The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show vastly expanded 'free space' (free for myself, of course)," Bauman explains, "a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space consumers need and are advised on all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans -- and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves." (This ties in another subject Bauman has written about frequently: the systematic exclusion from society of the victims of the Holocaust.)

Along with that championing of individuality and training of responsibility on ourselves instead of others comes a newfangled responsibility for shaping and projecting our own identity, which used to be dictated entirely by our circumstances but is now subject (seemingly) to our control. As a consequence, we are now all required to continually fashion our identity and project it in social symbols, which are supplied by the language of consumer goods and brands. In order to keep the consumer economy dynamic, the meaning of these symbols are constantly in the process of redefinition, and we adapt our identities to follow suit, let our identities function as brands for ourselves. What Bauman doesn't mention, but is sort of implied, is that in making identity formation a never-ending process, consumer society sells that process as pleasurable. Actually, it probably is in fact pleasurable -- it makes real life into a kind of daydream in which we can impersonate anyone and fantasize freely and openly, playing pretend games in public. And when you embrace novelty as an end in itself, it becomes a need easily (albeit temporarily) gratified. If you're a dog who likes chasing your tail, you'll never want for entertainment. The point is that pleasure comes not in some final achievement of the right identity, but in the multiplicity of identities always available to us, and the freedom we feel in swapping them out. If we were easily satisfied, it would take a lot to motivate us as workers (we could just sit in the park and watch butterflies rather than work overtime to buy a flat-screen). Not accidentally, our consumerist refusal to be easily pleased, to demand more, is routinely portrayed as a positive trait, a testament to our superior discrimination.

Bauman argues that we all are forced to become pseudo-artists, with our identity as our chief work, a kind of temporary installation in our own bodies. At the same time, any continuity between identities is discarded, leaving us living through a series of discrete moments in which it is possible for us to be anything. Bauman argues,

What follows is that the sole skill I really need to acquire and exercise if flexibility -- the skill of promptly getting rid of useless skills, the ability to quickly forget and to dispose of the past assets that have turned into liabilities, the skill of changing tacks and tracks at short notice and without regret, and of avoiding oaths of life-long loyalty to anything and anybody.

As individuals, we need to embrace capitalism's creative destruction at the personal level, seizing upon a moment's given opportunities with no recourse to past or future inclinations or sentimentalities. The most important aspect of that flexibility is the ability to forget -- to believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia. Skirts have always been knee-length. Crocs have always been stylish.

The institutionalized contempt for continuity encourages us to replace friendships with the network: "relations set by and sustained by network-type connectedness come close to the ideal of a 'pure relationship,' one based on easily dissolvable one-factor ties, with no determined duration, no strings attached, and unburdened by long-term commitments." What this gives individuals is "the comforting (even if ultimately counterfactual) feeling of total and unthreatened control over his or her obligations and loyalties." Of course, if you control obligations, they aren't exactly obligatory -- they are voluntary. That is what conceals from us the larger dimensions of our cultural obligations.

Bauman implicitly likens this situation to the notion of "groups of belonging" and the conditions of exclusion that set up the parameters of the Holocaust. The illusion of control may mask our obligations to play the game. The coercion to be a consumer is experienced generally as freedom (our ideology's accomplishment), but if you resist it, you run the risk of social exclusion -- not on a stateless-person-headed-to-concentration-camp level, but moving in that direction. "All of this may be intuited," Bauman writes, "from the dark premonitions that haunt them at night after a busy shopping day -- or from the warning that goes off when their bank account falls into the red and their unused credit reaches zero." To be without credit takes on multiple meanings -- you become worthless as a human being.

This is a roundabout way of point out that in a society where purchasing power is how we experience freedom, being poor means being very unfree. In other words, poverty really sucks, moreso than it did when society was less open. (Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation explores this simple truth at length.) The poor, and those who are sympathetic to them, or nostalgic for old roles, or repulsed by the identity shuffling were expeced to relish, perhaps "do not view this life as a kind of life that they themselves, given genuine liberty of choice, would wish to practice." But these people obviously need reeducation. "Those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts." If you aren't worried about keeping in tune with the zeitgeist, you are seen to be expressing some kind of contempt for the socially-agreed-upon way of being happy.

It is often said of such people that they are indifferent if not downright hostile to freedom, or that they have not yet grown up and matured enough to enjoy it. Which implies that their nonparticipation in the style of life dominant ... tends to be explained by either ideologically aroused resentment of freedom or the inability to practice it.

If they only loved freedom a little more, they wouldn't be concerned with how the system is basically rigged to assure that they will never be regarded with dignity in the public sphere, that they will always seem helplessly out of touch. Their fashion backwardness seems to justify their social exclusion, as we are invited to see how they manifest their identity as an expression of their own poor opinion of themselves. "If 'to be free' means to be able to act on one's wishes and pursue the chosen objectives," Bauman notes, "the liquid-modern, consumerist version of the art of life may promise to all, but it delivers it sparingly and selectively."

So what do you do if you don't want to include yourself in the consumerist economy, you want to preserve an ethical code, but you don't want to risk living as a semi-persecuted outcast. Do you "go live in a jelly jar"? Bauman's text doesn't offer much in the way of answers. He urges that we become better educated in the sorts of things I was taught in civics class -- fundamentals about the how politics works and so on -- and that we become citizens instead of consumers. But it seems that in order for that to happen, citizenship will have to assume some of the technique of consumerism -- it will have to be able to generate the personal, individualistic pleasures we have come to expect from consumerism and which we now regard as the guiding purpose of our lives. We need to make the pursuit of happiness an explicitly political matter once again.

The ease-of-influence factor (10 Jan 2008)

Science News reports about a study testing the influence of opinion leaders, busybody extroverts eager to share recommendations with a wide network of people. Somewhat surprisingly, the researchers Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds found with computer simulations that a critical mass of easily influenced people is more important for the spread of an idea rather than super proselytizers.

More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people.
Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. "If it had been raining," Dodds says, "that same match wouldn't have had an effect." Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature.
The upshot of the study, Dodds says, is that "in the end, you don't have control over how people spread your message." The best way to increase the odds of person-to-person transmission of an idea is to make it a good idea and to give it "social worth," he says. "Some things are just fun to talk about."

Ideas, then, are subject to network effects -- the notion that the size of a phenomenon creates its own exponential positive feedback -- and their spread has even less to do with their intrinsic quality. What helps spread an idea is not some Tipping Point style special influencer but the ability to bring a large group of naive and easily persuaded people with a propensity for novelty for its own sake into contact with one other -- say, some site that would get a bunch of teenagers together to do little other than share and reaffirm one another's preferences. I wonder if some clever college dropout will come up with such a thing.

Price incentives and peer production (4 Jan 2008)

This recent post by Nicolas Carr, about Amazon's vaguely creepy "Askville" campaign -- a World of Warcraft-like scheme in which consumers win virtual money for use in Amazon's virtual world by supplying real world tips and facts -- offers another way to explain the point I was fumbling toward in the previous post. Carr, a techno-skeptic who generally sees nothing especially liberating about the internet, details a long-running debate he has had with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who touts the internet's transformational possibilities.

In July of 2006, I entered into a quasi-wager with Yochai "Wealth of Networks" Benkler about the ultimate economic structure of the most popular social media sites. I predicted that the dominant sites would pay for their content - that they would, in Benkler's terms, be "price-incentivized systems." Benkler predicted that the sites would be pure "peer-production processes" existing outside "the price system."
So what happens if people get paid with virtual gold: Is that price-incentivized or not? I would argue that it is. If you're working for gold, whether real or fake, you're putting a price on your labor. I mean, if you take beads in trade for something of value, then the beads are money, right? But of course I'm biased, being a participant in the wager. Maybe Benkler would argue that fake gold is more like a token of esteem or a gift of the heart than like a wage.
One thing's for sure, anyway: If you can pay your workers with virtual money, you've got a helluva labor strategy.

Yesterday I was trying to make the case that we are conditioned to be price-incentivized, and this makes it hard for us to process culture that's not assimilable to that logic; we tend to import market thinking to our manner of appreciating culture, even when the cultural is not distributed through a market, or produced with profit incentives in mind. Carr seems to consistently argue that non-financial incentives are illusionary, utopian, or really monetary motives in disguise, and I'll admit that this sort of cynicism rings true to me. But then I wonder whether if that case holds true only for firms and doesn't necessary apply to individuals, who are more flexible in their motives, and can win in other ways than registering profits. People clearly are willing to work at public tasks not for money but for inclusion, recognition, and the sheer pleasure of social participation. It may be that people like integrating themselves into networks not necessarily with a view to any definite advantage, but for its own sake, out of a species-driven urge toward gregariousness. Being a part of a network for its own sake is at least as plausible as accumulating money for its own sake.

Anyway, Carr is mainly concerned with production: Can you extract quality without paying for it through the sheer size of a network? This is sort of a belief that a million monkeys gleefully and spontaneously typing online will ultimately produce Hamlet, even if each monkey only contributes a word. Yesterday I was wondering about consumption, and whether we need price incentives to motivate us to consume, to cue us to the value of what we might consume and to give us a framework for manufacturing desires. Or could some networked system of peer recommendation replace prices as cues to what culture is valuable? Also, will we be able to conjure limits for ourselves in the absence of cultural scarcity, a condition that was created by the transformation of cultural activity into a product. In other words, is the internet decommodifying artistic production, leading to new (or a return to old) ways to experience cultural phenomena?

Entertainment as attention (16 November 2006)

In No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, Tom Slee's book about the foibles of individual choice, he cites this passage from Grant and Wood's Blockbusters about the risk involved in putting up cultural goods for sale:

The risk factor in launching new works of popular culture is impossible to overestimate. Simply put, the great majority of cultural products do not succeed: few people by the CD or watch the movie, and the investment in the creation of the intellectual property is not recouped. Adding to the risk is the blunt fact that research and pre-testing are notoriously ineffective in the realm of popular culture. Until audiences actually experience a creative product, it simply cannot be evaluated. In advance of the actual release of the title, nobody knows.

This point is often raised when someone wants to debunk the power mainstream-media conglomerates have in shaping taste or to validate the sovereign, spontaneous role of the consumer in creating culture, which, if this is true, is exactly what we want and deserve. But Slee is citing it to make an almost opposite point -- the market for cultural product is so polluted with failure that audiences are always becoming that much more risk-averse themselves. The more product that floods the market, the more difficult it is for an audience to choose something, and the more the audience will rely on safe herd choices.

According to Slee, it's an asymmetric-information problem -- no one knows what makes anything any good (i.e. successful, profitable -- the meaningful criterion) so the slightest fortunate accident that creates a focal point (or the concerted ad campaign, or the presence of a known star, or any other aspect that brings a modicum of familiarity and comfort) can drive a herd to something specific, which then becomes something everybody needs to know about in order to have something to talk about with one another (which is the main function of most popular culture) -- you need to see Borat because everyone else has and is reliving it in conversation. Economists calls this increasing returns to scale -- the bigger something becomes, the bigger it will continue to become, because the incentives for choosing something else diminish. This is why the longer the long tail gets, the bigger the blockbusters become. Adrift in the deep, vast ocean of mediocrity, we need brighter beacons to bring us home.

But what makes the ocean so deep is the ease with which anyone can distribute their creations. This may allow more people to conceive of themselves as creators making culture rather than consumers digesting it, just as cultural-studies Pollyannas were fond of saying all along -- consumption is a form of making, of production. Now, consumers have the opportunity to really prove that by distributing their various repurposed versions of the culture they consume -- the remixes, the mash-ups, blog posts, etc. With that distribution capability available, it may become incumbent to distribute one's creative work. One no longer has the excuse of being shut out from the technology as a reason for not attempting to share one's innovations with an audience larger than the person in the mirror. If one takes the possibility of an audience for the innovative ways in which you consume culture seriously, this shift changes the pursuit of entertainment into the pursuit of attention. So perhaps the future of the "superstars" economy is this: a handful of successes in the sense that Grant and Wood mean, and then a legion of reimagined versions of those successes, at varying degrees of separation and revamping.