On the political tip, High school kids in LA were using their Myspace pages to organize pro-immigration rallys, danah boyd writes about it here. So maybe Shannon is right, political action is sometimes defused and redirected by these systems, but sometimes it’s facilitated by them as well. A whole other discussion could be had about what happens when the network isn’t complete, or when the data is wrong, deliberately or accidentally. I know tons of college students whose facebook pages are just elaborate lies, and my little brother is definitely not 99 years old, but Myspacce thinks he is.

Apparently things aren’t all going well at MySpace. Maybe we are headed for some Negri & Hardt style revolution via networking, but I’m still skeptical. I don’t click on Google Ads either (I use Firefox with the Adblock & Customize Google extensions, so I never see them) but someone must, or how is Google making so much money?

We did an interesting trial at work with Google Ads for 6 months. You’d be surprised at how many people do click . . . and because advertisers only pay up for the advert once it is clicked on – so for example we might have gotten 100K ‘views’ for only 20 or so ‘clicks’.

Now in ‘brand’ terms, the 100K of views is probably worth more than the 20 clicks to us as an organisation, even if only 1% of these views, or less, is aware or even ‘sees’ the advert.

Remember the oft-quoted spam percentage . . . that something like 1% of spam results in a sale. Its probably less nowadays, because of the massively increased volume of spam, but people don’t advertise unless the advertising results in sales. It doesn’t really matter that you don’t buy, but that someone does.

There’s a good post I read a while back about the ‘attention economy’ vs what should really be called the ‘intention economy’. It is intention that matters – Glen is more likely to be interested in what other sellers want to sell if he has the intention of buying. On MySpace and other social networks the intention is different.

[When a microphone feeds back via a loudspeaker, there is (usually) a gap between the two, and the tone of the feedback is shaped by the distance, the dimensions of the space as well as the frequency response of the technology.]

Apparently things aren’t all going well at MySpace. Maybe we are headed for some Negri & Hardt style revolution via networking, but I’m still skeptical. I don’t click on Google Ads either (I use Firefox with the Adblock & Customize Google extensions, so I never see them) but someone must, or how is Google making so much money?

I guess I’m wary that whatever positive cultural activity occurs, capitalism will find ways of profiting from it &/or defusing its political potential, at least enough to prevent more radical (utopian?) and substantial political & economic change from occurring. We’re given enough room and distraction to stay occupied and maybe even think we’re getting somewhere.

Steven Shaviro’s recent post, Pluralism and Antagonism is very relevant to this discussion.

The Scharmen paper, although very good and written extremely well (I am jealous of the fluidity!!), certainly examines online networking software from a single dimension: ‘control’. The paper runs into trouble when it attempts to shift from discussing ‘control’ to a political economy of attention discussed in terms of “eyeballs” (which I have also discussed on my blog many times, in the exact same way), ie the role of banner ads and other forms of internet advertising.

The problem with part of this argument, that the ads even exist, is that it is in part a rehash of the old conservative assumption of a causal determination between advertising and consumer. Firstly, that logic is reversed in a basic way in such ‘networking’ spaces. The advertising itself is led by the desire and enthusiasm of participants. Scharmen talks about this in terms of ‘identity’ but this is not the same thing as desire/enthusiasm. For example, he is a grad student of some description, so he gets ads for academic diplomas, but the diplomas are for some other discipline. He thinks the advertisement programming is dumb for getting it wrong. Sure it is ‘dumb’, but the key point is that it is tapping into the singular desire Scharmen has for a certain future expressed through his education status: the ad attempts to tap into this desire, not make a correlation based on a resemblance of identity. Hence the shift from Foucaultian (or, Scharmen’s case: ‘academic’) disciplinarity ‘molds’ to Deleuzian control ‘modulations’. Not a particular identity, but, in this case, the yearning that drives identity production. (My unfinished paper on the film Punch Drunk Love is all about this stuff; that film is an exploration of escape from ‘Oedipalising’ machines and ‘control’ machines through ‘love’.) That is the first problem with the paper.

Second. This is a very complex point, but a ‘modulation’ effects capacities of population aggregates. The individual doesn’t matter, they become part of the horde. Ok. Does this mean however that every affectation (a becoming effected by an affect) is therefore of the mode ‘control’? Of course not! Control operates by modulation, but so do many other social functions, including, in part, sociality itself (hence my ‘mate’ argument). The modulations that effect ‘control’ have certain traits (ie the production of dividuals, etc), but other modulations may have very similar traits that have nothing to do with control. For example, to love or to “lose on’s self in the moment” are forms of affective attunement and are therefore modes of modulation, but hopefully they are not necessarily of the ‘control’ mode. By extending the capacity of teenagers for sociality and constraining other capacities by making them ‘users’ the social networking technologies effectuate a complex modulation. Certainly part of this is ‘control’, but there are other dimensions to this modulation premised on the sociality of friendship, on the music scene (an affective space of amateur infrastructure), and so on.

Or to put it in your language, resistance and appropriation are certainly never absolute, neither is control. If ‘control’ is defined simply following the online economists’ definition of revenue (in terms of ‘eyeballs’ or attention), then there is a massive problem. Sure ‘users’ may be ‘controlled’ to watch certain ads, but this only matters for those who make money from ads. Architectures of social networks have other ‘uses’ with different ‘modulations’.

Or to put it yet another way have you ever clicked on an ad!?!?! I think I did once (because I was googling a business and it came up in the ad banner) from the several million I guess I would’ve seen in over a decade of online computer use. Where is the control?!?! On second thoughts, I use google 40 times a day and my attention has actually come to be conditioned to not even notice ads anymore!!!

Oh, there is another problem with the paper to do with the complexity of social networks. Maybe uber geeks only have online social networks, but mine a pretty messy and I am a total nerd, there are multiple cascade and interference patterns between different spacialities of social networks (online, in person, instituional, combinations, etc). Desire and enthusiasm therefore can never be captured entirely in hyper-commodified social networks. It might happen one day?!

Oh, one other thing this paper has made me think of, it is to do with a paradox, or a serious plot flaw at the minimum, within the Matrix film universe that is sort of repeated in the ‘eyeballs’ type of political economy argument. very quickly, the matrix uses people as batteries, yeah? Surely we must produce more energy under certain circumstances. So why doesn’t the matrix produce a fictional world premised on those circumstances where energy production is maximised? Similarly, why doesn’t the society of the spectacle maximise ‘eyeball-time’ if that is how it makes money? Oooh, yes, now we get to the problem of relative maximisation and the production of differential consumer populations. Simply put, why is the fictional world of the matrix a single world in which ‘everyone’ exists? Why didn’t the machines make a much smaller matrix? Maybe it is?