Category Archives: GMU Coursework

Internet – Synthesis – On Newness

The question of what, after all, is so new about the internet has run through the introductory and summary posts in this series. It is a divisive question. Some proclaim the revolutionary, worldchanging emergence of the internet a wholly unique phenomenon. Others describe its continuity with older forms of media, communication, technology, or ideas. And each vein has its proponents and detractors of the internet’s cultural effects, which seem ubiquitously manifest, though not unequivocally ethically or morally valenced. Since we are concerned, here, with not just cultural effects but also cultural conditions for today’s internet, though, we cannot neatly reduce our approach to any of these positions.

Each position here assumes that the internet is an historical phenomenon -- as opposed to an event, for example -- and that it has an ethical valence, if not necessarily a political one.
Ethical valences for interpretation of the internet as an historical phenomenon
Instead, we can find another way of asking the question – a way that rests implicitly in the same discussions and arguments about newness. That is, we can ask, what is historically significant about the internet? This minor switch allows us to explore slightly different avenues than those commonly traversed by humanities and social-sciences research. Instead of “new media,” in particular, we can focus more precisely on the internet as such. Further, by stripping the newness from our central questioning, we avoid freighting our inquiry with ontological assumptions. In so doing, we are better able to determine what is new and what is old, in greater detail.

So, we are faced with a series of comparisons and contrasts.

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On Google’s Privacy Policy

Effective 1 March 2012, Google adjusted the terms of its privacy policy, affecting users of all its applications. There was no option to waive or deny these changes, aside from cancelling one’s accounts, which would still require the migration and/or deletion of emails, documents, and personally identifying information from Google’s servers. Further, the policy became homogenous across every service and product that Google offers. These were not unprecedented changes, as many End User License Agreements and other similar contracts assume that use of a product or service constitutes unmitigated acceptance of the provider’s terms. But this round of legalese brings two unique changes to discussions of privacy and openness. Ongoing lawsuits against Google (among other large technology providers) highlight the stakes of thses discussions. Many of us are so deeply invested in the daily use of Google’s products and services — with or without knowing it — that the opportunity cost to simply find new information or technology providers seems to far outweigh any perceived offense on their part. Google’s legal and PR representatives know this. They took great care to frame the recent changes as matters of convenience, simplicity, and security, rather than in more complex and realistic terms.

Making the new policy easy to read was not their only motivation. Though Google posted many on-screen notices, and even sent a mass email to all their users (a rare occurrence), the changes took many by surprise. More importantly, for those users who bothered to read the information made public about the change, Google only made available a brief overview of the policy, in layman’s terms, and a revised FAQ page — the actual terms and conditions were not linked from those pages, and were scarcely to be seen upon further inquiry. Once acquired, though, these new terms reveal a curious shift in the way that Google will manage their relationship and responsibility towards their users. The shift — which deals with slippery phrases and ideas, such as identity and information — effectively both strips users of control over what happens to their digital footprints, and hides that control in Google’s prerogative to maintain a vast, persistent, and deeply centralized set of records. Since only Google can benefit from those records, and only users can be harmed by their use and abuse, the new policy can seem to value privacy only when Google’s corporate interests are in question. So we enter the late stages of a technology monopoly’s rise: their consolidation of control over their users’ decision-making.

Turning to specific issues in the new policy, we find a less obvious, but no less serious conundrum. It arises in the unexpected distinction between what counts for data, as opposed to information.
content vs information. sensitive personal info
content vs data. user uploaded content

what counts for which where determines what is sold and what is kept hidden. what is kept hidden is not deleted including server and search logs by ip addresss.

On Privacy Policies

Effective 1 March 2012, Google adjusted the terms of its privacy policy, affecting users of all its applications. There was no option to waive or deny these changes, aside from cancelling one’s accounts, which would still require the migration and/or deletion of emails, documents, and personally identifying information from Google’s servers. Further, the policy became homogenous across every service and product that Google offers. These were not unprecedented changes, as many End User License Agreements and other similar contracts assume that use of a product or service constitutes unmitigated acceptance of the provider’s terms. But this round of legalese brings two unique changes to discussions of privacy and openness. Ongoing lawsuits against Google (among other large technology providers) highlight the stakes of these discussions. Many of us are so deeply invested in the daily use of Google’s products and services — with or without knowing it — that the opportunity cost to simply find new information or technology providers seems to far outweigh any perceived offense on their part. Google’s legal and PR representatives know this. They took great care to frame the recent changes as matters of convenience, simplicity, and security, rather than in more complex and realistic terms.

Making the policy easy to read was not their only motivation. Though Google posted many on-screen notices, and even sent a mass email to all their users (a rare occurrence), the changes took many by surprise. More importantly, for those users who bothered to read the information made public about the change, Google only made available a brief overview of the policy, in layman’s terms, and a revised FAQ page — the actual terms and conditions were not linked from those pages, and were scarcely to be seen upon further inquiry. Once acquired, though, these terms reveal a curious shift in the way that Google will manage their relationship and responsibility towards their users. The shift — which deals with slippery phrases and ideas, such as identity and information — effectively both strips users of control over what happens to their digital footprints, and hides that control in Google’s prerogative to maintain a vast, persistent, and deeply centralized set of records. Since only Google can benefit from those records, and only users can be harmed by their use and abuse, the policy can seem to value privacy only when Google’s corporate interests are in question. So we enter the late stages of a technology monopoly’s rise: their consolidation of control over their users’ decision-making.

Turning to specific issues in the policy, we find a less obvious, but no less serious conundrum. It arises in the unexpected distinction between what counts for data, as opposed to information.

content vs information. sensitive personal info

content vs data. user uploaded content

what counts for which where determines what is sold and what is kept hidden. what is kept hidden is not deleted including server and search logs by ip addresss.

Foucault – Position – Epistemic Limits

Whether coursing through archival data or meditating on turns of language, Foucault’s early works — the History of Madness, the Birth of the Clinic, the Order of Things, and the Archaeology of Knowledge — each address ways of knowing how and what we think. Based on the approach in those works, we can refocus their efforts onto a tertiary question. While lacking the familiar modulus of power, this approach can still maintain a close attention to the thought of thought as such. It helps elucidate how we conceive of the conditions to this reflexive thought, and thereby to sketch contemporary epistemic limitations. The motivating impulse here, then, is: What exists outside our conditions of possibility of thought, and how can we know it? Continue reading →

Yep, that's all electronics.

Internet – on Waste

A simple question sometimes opens unexpected complications. In this case, what counts for the garbage of the internet?

(tl;dr: It can be tempting to swerve into digressions here about wastes of time or wastes of attention a la cat videos. Sorry – instead, this post focuses instead on the production, distribution, circulation, use and deprecation of those media artifacts, their platforms, and the machines on which we view them.)

One way to approach the question is to ask how we measure the energy efficiency of the internet. The factors that influence that measurement include the rate of electricity consumed by mobile devices and their chargers, personal computers, modems and routers, servers, and data centers. Most significantly, the energy required to cool those machines can stagger the mind. A proper study of this use must also account for the amount of energy invested in the production of the same machines.  Efficient consumption of resources serves the interests of the largest discrete consumers and of the utility providers who make the resources available to aggregate consumers, but without discriminating between economic and ecological criteria. For example, GreenPeace’s recent “Dirty Data” report, which embroiled Facebook and other companies in P.R. and legal battles, argues that large IT firms, especially data centers, continue to consume energy in 19th- and 20th- century industrial factory patterns, rather than embracing “clean” energy as wholeheartedly as efficiency. While new facilities constructed over the past few years by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft certainly deserve their accolades for efficient design. Efficiency, however, only provides one lens onto the original question of garbage or waste. Continue reading →

Internet – Geography, and Africa Introduced

We expect no clean equivalence between infrastructure, labor, capital, and internet development. Still, we know that the growth of a robust modern internet takes vast amounts of time, skilled labor, and knowledge — all elements of advanced capital. So, when we consider the rise of today’s African internet, we must ask, first, who builds it — and then, where its infrastructure overlaps or clashes with existing geographical patterns. Heavily visual organization and logic help think through these issues of backbone, traffic, and investment. Their combination leads to some interesting insight to the specific challenges facing the continuation of Africa’s internet-building. Continue reading →

Internet – On the Markets

We turn now from contextual summaries of broad topics to more specific analyses of focused problems. The case in point this week is the curious interplay of market and economic themes in discourses and studies of the internet. There are several fascinating phenomena associated with the rise of the internet as a platform for trade as well as communication and computation. These, however, have roots that run deeper than their own emergence, in the economic and historical conditions that undergird the internet’s development. As trade and commerce proliferate online, they mimic (at least at first) the structure and behavior of their non-internet predecessors, which themselves must shift or extend their positions to accomodate this competition. As internet markets continue to grow and find their own forms, their effects on their non-internetted counterparts deepens. And as financial instruments and economic models become more closely attuned to internet machinations, it becomes easier – from a cultural or social standpoint – to overlook the most obvious historical and global correlations to this situation.

internetlightboard

A silly image for a spammy post on webtech-team.com

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Via http://afis.ucc.ie/

Internet – On the Histories

This series digresses here to review and consider internet history. This includes, of course, the well-documented series of events and interactions and innovations and and and … that led to what we see when we go online these days. It also includes the conditions under which those events and interactions and innovations and so on took place, to inform ongoing research into internet development in other parts of the contemporary world. And, these posts stemming from the skeptical position of cultural scholarship, it also questions who gets to write the history of the internet, and with what sources. This line of questioning leads us back, cautiously, to the major themes of the semester.

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Foucault – Order of Things

We have no words for things. Rather, words are things that make other things. Concatenated discourses — words in their material aggregation — actively shape more than signification and syntax. Foucault’s principal argument throughout The Order of Things attacks the commonsense notion that words merely represent, or that mimetic functions are language’s sad destiny as medium of communication, after we enter epistemic formations of knowledge that structure such notions. Granting deeper, nigh on originary, primacy to language, as progenitor of ways of being and of making things in the world, he shows us how such a notion arose in shifts between Western historical eras: the Renaissance, Classical, and modern periods. Continue reading →

Foucault – Key Concepts – Archaeology

Foucault

Foucault

These weeks I’ve turned from biographical and summary readings to Foucault’s early works. From here on, these posts will proceed at conceptual levels as much as is possible. Today, we turn to archaeology. In its simplest reduction, the concept denotes a history of discourse. In books such as the History of Madness, the Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Order of Things, Foucault undertakes examinations of discursive formations ranging from health and madness to scientific understanding to aesthetics and perception. Throughout each of these, he frames the conditions of knowledge in a given time period as constrained by the characteristics of that period, a general way of organizing and thinking about the world in each that he names an episteme. So, archaeology is the study of “epistemae,” and an episteme places discourse in historical context.

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