IS52026 Social Computing Week 19: Critical Theory - can mad French philosophers help us understand social computing?

dan mcquillan

How can some philosophers writing (sometimes) before ARPANET help us understand the net?

power FOUCAULT Foucault - power does not simply operate as a pyramid but in myriad multifaceted directions and relationships. Foucault said One doesn't have a power which is only in the hands of one person who exercises it alone... it is a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power as much as those over whom it is exercised.. it becomes a machinery that no-one ownsi. http://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=JB49i2qazTY#! 00:50 to 02:30 http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=W9S1CiGPX2Q&feature=related 02:15

panopticon One of the techniques/regulatory modes of power/knowledge that Foucault cited was the Panopticon, an architectural design put forth by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th Century for prisons, insane asylums, schools, hospitals, and factories. Instead of using violent methods, such as torture, and placing prisoners in dungeons that were used for centuries in monarchial states around the world, the progressive modern democratic state needed a different sort of system to regulate its citizens. The Panopticon offered a powerful and sophisticated internalized coercion, which was achieved through the constant observation of prisoners, each separated from the other, allowing no interaction, no communication. This modern structure would allow guards to continually see inside each cell from their vantage point in a high central tower, unseen by the prisoners. Constant observation acted as a control mechanism; a consciousness of constant surveillance is internalized. The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between 1.) systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2.) the power-knowledge concept. In his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility - a normalization of sorts, stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to conform by the internalization of this reality. For Foucault, the real danger was not necessarily that individuals are repressed by the social order but that they are "carefully fabricated in it" (Foucault, 1977), http://www.moyak.com/papers/michel-foucault-power.html

Moreover, just as, in the panoptical prison, where inmates monitor their own behaviour (on the assumption of their constant surveillance by warders with full visual access to them), indications are that individuals are increasingly engaging in a form of normalising self-monitoring of behaviour via voluntary self-exposure on internet sites such as Facebook. It is not difficult to grasp such self-monitoring in terms of the three mechanisms of disciplinary power distinguished by Foucault (hierarchical observation, normalising judgment and the examination, discussed in earlier posts). Posting information on oneself on Facebook in the form of selected photographs and textual descriptions of likes and dislikes regarding movies, clothes, cosmetics, friends, food, books and more, is subject to hierarchical observation in so far as it conforms to notions of what is cool (or, ironically, hot), that is, acceptable to, and desired by, ones peers. The same is true, in a related manner, of normalising judgement and the examination. While Facebook is also a means for family members and friends to keep in contact, and share photographs of trips, places visited, and so on, normalising judgement (which probably even functions among family and friends in a keeping up with the Joneses-fashion), operates through evaluating-judging comparisons, which have the result of setting up certain norms (of appearance and choice of merchandise and services, for instance). http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/bertolivier/2011/01/04/panopticism-facebook-the%E2%80%98information-bomb%E2%80%99-and-wikileaks/ He wrote that power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" (Foucault 1980,30). Virilio extends Foucaults interpretation of the panoptical, disciplinary society with farreaching consequences in The Information Bomb (2005) panopticism demands a new global optics, capable of helping a panoptical vision to appear.

DELEUZE & GUATTARI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIus7lm_ZK0

in my experience, large organisation spaces are best characterised by D&G's term 'striation'. marked by linear boundaries, restricted to a particular plane of activity in the space of all possible potentials. Striated spaces act to capture energies. Possibilities are codified. This is sometimes useful, but always against innovation. striated space include state structures, institutions. Definitely NGOs. Territorialisation / deterritorialisation c.f. Student role In Two Regimes of Madness, Deleuze states that "one of the principle goals of schizoanalysis would be to look in each one of us for the crossing lines that are those of desire itself: non-figurative abstract lines of escape, that is, deterritorialization."
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The line of flight is the affordances of tech the different openings / constraints not tech determinism (a digital revolution) but altered possibilities we saw untapped affordances in tech for social change The alternative is is a system marked by flows, connections and zones of intensity. In the abstract terminology of Deleuze & Guattari, an innovative system would include smooth as well as striated spaces. Smooth space is occupied by intensities and events, by the continuous variation of free action. The characteristic experience of smooth space is short term, up close, with no fixed points of reference. Rhizome: hops, asparagus, ginger, irises, v arboreal: uni, gov, is52026b

DE LANDA In this project a landscape urbanist approach to mapping was engaged to map the municipal gardens of Montreal against De Landas assemblage schema, in order to unfold some of the spatial, social and material component parts and contingent relations of the Montreal place assemblage. Assemblage theory assemblage theory. relations of exteriority. We may have exhaustive knowledge about an individuals properties and yet, not having observed it in interaction with other individuals, know nothing about its capacities De Landa, Manuel (2005). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. we cant know a priori what the components can do when assembled in a particular way. Working with an ontology of assemblages lets us think our way past the potential choke points, both theory and practice, whether technical, organisational or social. we cannot reliably predict emergent wholes simply from knowing the properties of the parts.

It is not enough to observe the world as it is, and expect this to say much of interest. In doing so, we can only come to know that which is actualised in the present, missing the vast hinterlands of possibilities... the virtual field, Todd May: The realm of multiplicity is one of pure difference, a realm that cannot be grasped directly, but which can only be palpated...(through the creation and use of concepts) (May, 2005: 20).5 social active entities not neatly defined i.e. the council, the social media [contingent constructions assembled out of components, that might be semi-permanent but also subject to re-arrangement by external disruption] The significance of the concept of assemblage to the project is that it allows us to understand the multiplication and diversification of both social values and social relations as emerging out of processes of coming together, or assembly, An assemblage can be described as a way of understanding an entity such as a network in terms of processes of re- and disassembly, as always in a dynamic process of coming together. can then ask - how could we re-arrange? It opens the possibility of re-assembling this stuff hacking

PAULO FREIRE brazilian educator whos work became well know in the 1960s Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. For Freire, abstract thought was the principal barrier to transformative engagement. This is because conceptual abstraction allows for the resolution of social contradictions at the representational level while, at the same time, concealing the necessity of elaborating a politics rooted in production p2p. Problem centred. Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
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A practical apps course

1: Problem definition

5: Build & test

2: Market research

4: Product design 3: Solution design

Educational philosophy dialogue, reflection and real-life problems CDIs network globally has successfully established a problemdriven learning model that was initially inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and strongly focuses on problem-driven learning that is supported by local action and critical reflection. Every CDI course is based on a 5-step framework: To understand the world and each other. To define a project theme and research data. To plan an action. To mobilise and take action. To evaluate the path taken. Students collectively identify a common challenge facing their community and prepare an action plan to overcome it. Issues can range from sexual abuse, pollution, violence, crime, and drugs, to lack of healthcare or schools. Students then take the technical skills theyve learned in class to tackle the problem, mobilize their communities, engage in advocacy and awareness campaigns, and work together to solve that specific problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=aFWjnkFypFA 02:25 http://www.freireproject.org/content/critical-pedagogy-tv 02:57

BOURDIEU Habitus; how agents dispositions to act are formed by exisiting social contexts a range of 'generative structures' that shape dispositions

Chapter 3

FIGURE 3.1

A NodeXL social media network diagram of relationships among Twitter users mentioning the hashtag #WIN09 used by attendees of a conference on network science at New York University in September 2009. The size or each users vertex is proportional to the number of tweets that user has ever made.
27 May 2012 Copyright 2011, Elsevier Inc. All rights Reserved 14

NETWORKS... The main thread of criticism concerns the inadequate conceptualization of human agency and culture. In that respect, network analysis is often criticised for its structural determinism, which neglects altogether the potential causal role of actors beliefs, values, and normative commitments (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1425). Instead, it produces network snapshots of social structure through time, paying insufficient attention to the historical mechanisms which dominated their emergence. Another problem of social network analysis is [t]he abstruse terminology and state-of-the-art mathematical sophistication which seems to have prevented many of these outsiders from venturing anywhere near it.

MATT FULLER

ALEXANDER GALLOWAY This type of materialist media studies shows how the question how does it work? is also the question whom does it work for? In short, the technical specs matter, ontologically and politically. As a cultural metaphor, networks only raise general issues of interrelationality. On the one hand, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) enables the Internet to create horizontal distributions of information from one computer to another. On the other, the DNS (Domain Name System) vertically stratifies that horizontal logic through a set of regulatory bodies that manage Internet addresses and names. Understanding these two dynamics in the Internet means understanding the essential ambivalence in the way that power functions in control societies.

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2417/2240 It follows that it is important to acknowledge a problem with accounts of technology that imply or argue that technologies do not have specific material and determinative effects. Hutchbys work is relevant here [15] and he suggests the concept of affordances provides an answer. different technologies pose different affordances, and these affordances constrain the way that they can be read. The concept of affordances is associated with the work of Gibson in the psychology of perception. For Gibson, humans, along with animals, insects, birds and fishes, orient to objects in their world (rocks, trees, rivers, etc.) in terms of what he calls their affordances: the possibilities that they offer for action. Affordances may differ from species to species and from context to context. However, they cannot be seen as freely variable. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford which the tree cannot, and vice versa. [16] Hutchby suggests that while technologies can be read or utilised in variable ways, they also possess affordances that constrain the range of actions that can be taken with a particular technology. This is useful for this account of hacking because captures the sense in which technologies both are and are not open to social influence and it reasserts the influence of technology on society. It is this mutual sense of determination and redetermination that is at the core of hacking. A further aspect of Hutchby is worth drawing out as, though he does not use the term, the everyday seems to be the site of these mutual determinations. the uses and the values of things are not attached to them by interpretative procedures or internal representations but are a material aspect of the thing as it is encountered in the course of action. We are able to perceive things in terms of their affordances, which in turn are properties of things; yet those properties are not determinate or even finite, since they only emerge in the context of material encounters between actors and objects. [17] It seems reasonable to connect Hutchbys locating of affordances in the moment when action is taken to the notion of the everyday. In this way, we can retain the overall conclusion of social studies of technology, which make a strong case for the difficulty of distinguishing society and technology at a macro or conceptual level, while retaining the interrelations of affordances (or determinations) that we can see at work in the everyday.