The Quit Facebook Day movement and the YouTube video war over Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla reveal the opposing potentials of Web 2.0
Giselle Beiguelman (@gbeiguelman)
Social and content-sharing networks have become central to our daily lives. The protest against Facebook (Quit Facebook Day) and the YouTube video war surrounding the Freedom Flotilla confrontation are two recent events symptomatic of this process.
Politically very different in nature—the first opposing a company’s privacy policy, the second opposing and supporting Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip—they point to the ambivalence of Web 2.0: its potential both to domesticate and to challenge the public sphere.
Quit Facebook Day drew attention to the lack of clarity about how this social network uses its users’ data and makes it available to the service’s advertisers.
Held on May 31, the protest challenged Facebook’s weak privacy policy and its ties to a business model based on targeted advertising.
This system, also used by Google and other services, allows information associated with users’ profiles to be linked to advertisements.
In Facebook’s case—the world’s most visited website according to Ad Planner—the fuel for this machine consists of the countless applications and social plug-ins offered to members.
They encourage users to post information about their tastes and behaviors, enabling the mapping and distribution of advertisements from companies that buy advertising space on Facebook.
Informational bodies
In a world mediated by databases of every kind—from search engines to social networks, via the Amazons of this world and the turnstiles at work and school—we are a kind of platform that makes information and habits available as we construct our public identities across services related to consumption, leisure and work.
In short, we are becoming informational bodies. This is likely to intensify as methods of genetic investigation and their distribution over the internet become more widespread.
After all, this is what the Genome Project did: it transformed our understanding of the body, previously understood as an arrangement of flesh, bones and blood, into a map of information sequenced on a computer.
Artist and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) professor Victoria Vesna highlights the political dimension of the issue when she states in Database Aesthetics that the race to patent genes brings us to a crossroads where we must consider whether life is becoming a corporate matter.
Taken to its limit, this situation makes me think that one day we might suddenly find part of our genetic code on Google or hack someone’s DNA through a torrent-based sharing site.
But until that happens, it is important to make clear that we are already informational bodies that discharge and receive data over the internet, and that the internet that matters is increasingly the one that travels through mobile devices, combined with services involving locative media.
This combination explains advertisers’ excitement about mobile culture. Programs installed on a device make it possible not only to know where its owner is, but also to share that information, combine it with databases and point to what is nearby.
All of this is mediated by the charms of social networks, where we are constantly encouraged to measure our popularity by competing over friend counts. More disconcerting than this quantitative approach to sociability and emotional relationships is considering how these identities are constructed.
With profiles based on the videos we watch, the music we like, the places we frequent and the cool and annoying things that happen in everyday life, our personalities become anchored in what we consume.
As a result, personal identities become corporate identities, as Douglas Rushkoff in Life Inc. and Richard Sennett in The Corrosion of Character have shown from different perspectives.
Communication and cultural change
It is hard to deny that this is one outcome of life mediated by social networks. But the clash of accounts and documentaries accompanying the confrontation between the Israeli navy and Freedom Flotilla activists, which left nine dead, also shows that networks are a privileged space for contemporary political debate.
As Brian Stelter commented in The New York Times, when Israeli commandos attacked the flotilla, “both sides were well armed—with video cameras.”
Activists sent images broadcast from the Mavi Marmara via Livestream, a system for broadcasting live video over the internet. Likewise, the Israeli military posted several videos documenting its account on its YouTube channel.
Needless to say, the images contradict one another: those of the activists show them being attacked by the Israeli navy; those of the Israeli military show it acting in self-defense.
The political use of image manipulation is neither recent nor exclusive to the internet. We need only recall the famous photographs of the Russian Revolution in which Trotsky appeared, and from which he was erased on Stalin’s orders. Despite the importance of that subject, image manipulation lies beyond the scope of this discussion.
What matters in this article is drawing attention to resources such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which, while opening unprecedented possibilities for promoting consumption and control, also become tools for the critical and creative use of existing media.
They therefore point to different political conceptions and tendencies in today’s media ecology. Investigating the zones of tension that emerge as these tendencies clash and accommodate one another allows us to understand their procedures and make their dynamics less opaque.
These tensions are integral to the possibilities of cultural change, changes put into practice by social movements as they propose and trigger breaks with the power relations embedded in institutions of various kinds.
Social movements, however, are not mere collections of individuals. They are groups acting in public space; and today, in the network society, as Castells has shown, that public space is the space of communication networks.
Occupying them, and putting their purely advertising functions into perspective, is therefore a fundamental political question today.
Follow the links
Top 1000 sites – DoubleClick Ad Planner – http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/
Quit Facebook Day – http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
Douglas Rushkoff – Life Inc. – http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/
Published June 7, 2010