MRTHOMASWHITEHEAD

There are some wonderful collective endevours and advancements to be made through efficient social networking- “crowdsourcing” applications, like Mechanical Turk, have minaturised the units of economic exchange of work for income to mere button presses. The community shares the load of dull, unedifying activity, rather than allocate it to a serf class, and shares in its benefits.

Other systems, like Recaptcha have utilised collective human effort for more noble ends, repurposing prosaic interactive activity, like passing through a Captcha test, into something useful, namely using the translation of impossible-to-recognise-by-computer words by humans to complement automated work in a massive initiative to scan and upload all the world’s books into online format.

Extended even to the creation of art, projects exist where such minute incremental efforts, carried out by a group, provide a data set on which to hang all kinds of interpretative art. A good example of this was where the Processing community calculated together the movement of Michael Jackson’s white glove across a whole performance, and then used the data set to create a weird and wonderful variety of animations. All these activities are using the collective decision making faculties of the crowd as a massive stochastic problem solving computer

On a personal level, I have absolutely no problem with using some of these systems to improve the efficiency and fluidity of my interactions with the outside world.

The public-facing, corporate self, which needs to earn money; find new professional openings; channels to distribute and monetise artwork, needs, if one is grown up enough to admit it, either blind luck or a lot of potentially ghastly social networking anyway to survive, with or without computing. As we watch, cautiously, but with mostly approval, the divisions between our work and leisure lives dissipate, the ability to negotiate in a friendly and sociable manner becomes prized. Dedicated professional networking sites like Linked-in give us the confidence we need in our capacity for professional mobility and infrustructural support in uncertain and anxious times. Blog engines and media distribution services like Youtube and Flickr help broadcast our public information wares to the widest audiences possible, Render unto Caesar what is unto Caesar

But within all this, there is a real danger of surrendering our entire self, beyond the super ego, to the cloud / crowd. The massive popularity of online communities devoted to fetishistic desires and fantasy role playing demonstrate this blurring, where private fantasies and desires become explored in public forums. But what happens when the “real world” persona becomes reduced to an Avatar? Are networks like Facebook and Myspace not just MMORPG’s on a far more immersive scale?

Ludic in nature, these systems are not just trivial, they are reductive. While at an atomic level, human activity, persona and interactions, may appear brownian and chaotic, in all systems where the behavioural tendency follow a path of least resistance is embedded, patterns of pathways will crystallise- be it in the flow of water towards a ocean or in the neural pathways of a brain. Popular channels are reinforced, etched, ossified. The behaviour of an individual becomes so much more predictable when these networks are mapped, in fact the very act of mapping and remapping itself, further scribe itself on the topology itself.
The convenience that social networks give us to connect to people, arrange meetings, form groups, solicit sex, also gives us complacency and disregard of the individual worth of our interpersonal relationships as we take them to market. The “Pattern recognition” that Marshall Mcluhan noticed, forces a personal re-evaluation of quite how unique and valuable those things that are one might consider,against ones own intellectual suspicions, unique to the making of oneself.

So the cautious must always ask- do I really want to open my relationships, my friendships, family to this? My indulged quirks, my confided failings? My private jokes? My awesome mixtapes? Culture, as the comics writer Alan Moore said, is turning to steam, and one must be careful about losing the shape of cherished off-line relationships and intellectual property in the steamcloud,

EDIT: I am now on Facebook.