Post-Modern Secrets

It's been a while since I've posted anything here at Peasant Muse, so why not break the silence by discussing the new kid on the social media block- Secret.

I discovered Secret via Dan Frommer's 'SplatF' and decided that if it was worth his time to mention it, it was worth my time to at least check it out. What's funny is that I tried to download the app myself by searching for 'Secret' on the App Store. That gave me returns like this:

Turns out you have to search for 'Secret - Speak Freely' in order to find the app, making efforts to download this new attempt at freeing yourself from the constraints of traditional social media an ironic proposition from the start- you have to know the secret of how to download Secret.

The premise of Secret is this: you reach into your soul and uncover a hidden truth or pithy pearl of wisdom and reveal it, anonymously, to your other friends who also use Secret. If enough of these other Secret friends (more like Secret Contacts, since that list is what the app asks to consult on your first use) 'love' your shared secret (expressed by tapping a heart icon), then that secret will begin to permeate the screens of your friend's friends (contact's contacts) who also use the app. There is also some sort of 'magic sauce' involved (algorithms stewed in 21 secret herbs and spices) for determining the exposure of any given secret revealed.

I want to share a few thoughts about Secret, and what I think it means in the larger trend that is social media evolution.

- Anonymity, that 'warm blanket' as Max would say, is nothing new for social media, but finding a way to make anonymity stable enough- or, more properly, finding a stable way to channel the latent forces behind anonymity- is something Secret is trying to do. Social media is fast moving out of what I will call its 'Classicist' era, best characterized by static pages broken up into discrete identity fields (my timeline, my photos, my messages). Twitter was an early force that signaled the waining influence of Classicist thinking, despite the borrowings from Classical elements of form and design, and its new conception of asynchronous following and correlating firehose-like delivery of content suggested a new way for social media to grow.

Instagram became the exemplar of what I will call the 'Modern' era of social media that Twitter presaged, a definable shift from the previous period made possible due to mass adoption of smartphone technology. It demonstrated that a narrow focus- in this case, photography- could generate a level of engagement on par with more traditional, 'Classical' social media platforms.

Snapchat, in my opinion, heralded another shift in social media. To keep the metaphor going, I would call the ephemerality Snapchat offers a clear indicator signaling the emergence of a 'Post-Modern' era. We know what a big network (Facebook) looks like and we know what a niche network (Instagram) looks like; the pressing question, at least to me, now lies in exploring the aesthetics of our social media use. Ephemerality is one such aesthetic turn. Anonymity, or at least the sort of channeled anonymity offered by Secret, is another.

(I should mention that my use of the 'classical/modern/post-modern' metaphor is intentional. There is no doubt, in my mind, that the crisis of identity encountered at both the emergence of the modern in Western society, roughly 18th-20th centuries, and the emergence of the post-modern, roughly the late to early 20th-21st centuries, bears a striking resemblance to the crisis of identity associated with social media use in the past decade. These labels might not be appropriate given the short and dynamic timescale involved, but their loose meaning here more than suits my rhetorical need.)

- That being said, the anonymity of the sort pedaled by Secret seems to me to be nothing more than a veil. When you see a secret that originated from someone in your contacts list, you can't help but engage in a modern day version of 'Guess Who?'. Remember the search term I had to use to find 'Secret' in the App Store? 'Secret- Speak Freely'? The directed aesthetics of the app suggest you can 'speak freely' through use of anonymity, yet if the only people who see your 'secrets' are your contacts there are questions of just how warm a blanket Secret's anonymity provides.

Photo via Stian Eikland

Again, it is an issue of the aesthetic design. You could post something truly secret, something no one could possibly know, but unless it is something that can generate 'love' (clicks) that 'secret' is going nowhere. I suppose part of the 'magic sauce' mentioned above helps pluck announced secrets from obscurity and promotes them to the mainstream, but then that brings up essential questions related to the sort of 'secrets' the 'magic sauce' favors.  In fancy terms, knowledge of how the 'magic sauce' works would constitute an evaluation on the epistemic hierarchy Secret uses to categorize a 'secret'. It would be an insight into the aesthetic judgement 'Secret' renders on secrets.

But I digress- my main point here is that there is, to a point, an imbedded game involved with Secret's anonymity. You want to post revealing things, or maybe just something fun, but you want to do so in a manner that clues your immediate readers in on your true identity. It is an identity puzzle you place before others. The fun of solving the puzzle- or trying to solve it- can then be expressed by clicking the 'love' heart. 

You could avoid this game and post something truly cryptic, something no knows about you. Yet, again, the aesthetic design of 'Secret' will render its judgment. If it doesn't generate reaction among your contacts via clicking of hearts, the shared secret goes nowhere and it is almost as if it were never uttered at all. I could definitely see some cathartic use for Secret, but something tells me the designers of the app don't want this to become a *heavy* atmosphere. They want it to be light and fun and the aesthetic expression of anonymity Secret allows reinforces this ideal.

An actual secret from one of my contacts.

Keep in mind what I said above- the real challenge Secret faces is making the anonymous experience engaging and, above all, stable.

- Last observation: since I'm talking about aesthetics, I think it is interesting to contrast Secret's anonymity experience with that provided by Snapchat's ephemerality. Snapchat gives you an image, a moment, and then you have fading, unreliable memories of that image. Secret gives you an ongoing unreliable fragment, a clue, and asks you to reconstruct the image of the original sender. With Snapchat, images lead to words as you try to describe the moment. With Secret, words lead to images as you try to uncover the blanket of anonymity.

My Theorizing the Web 2013 Presentation

Here are the slides I used for my Theorizing the Web 2013 presentation: "Creating a Modern Feudal Order".  Feel free to download the slides and listen to the audio track, explaining these slides in greater detail, found below.  If you want to download these slides, you'll need to visit the Slideshare page and click on the 'save' button just above the slides.  There is some ghost writing on slides 3 and 4, which I cannot solve via re-uploading, so if you would like an uncorrupted copy of these slides, get ahold of me on Twitter (@jsantley) or leave a comment below.  The audio track can be downloaded as well.

Data Serfdom in the Modern Age from Jeremy Antley

Update: Below is the rough cut of the Theorizing the Web 'Room B' recording.  Cue up to 43:05 to see my presentation.

Also, the Slideshare above does not include a video clip on slide 20 that I intended to show during my presentation.  Because I was rushed for time, I didn't play it.  However, you can find the clip below.  My point in showing it was to demonstrate how a scene played for pure hilarity in 2003 now has a more sobering meaning for 2013, when one considers the data serf situation.  But it's also still very funny.

Ephemerality is a Snap...

Photo by Steve Bailey

…but the truth certainly is not.

Preparation for my upcoming Theorizing the Web presentation on data serfdom has me reading about notions of truth and comparing those notions to how various data platforms guide users in constructing their data selves.  While I have a good handle (at least, in my own mind) on how Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk create conditions favorable for the development of data serfdom, novel services/platforms like Snapchat introduce a new variable in the data self equation that, I believe, has interesting implications on both the development of the data self and the 'lived reality', or verisimilitude, the data self supposedly projects and provides.  That factor is ephemerality, and it's implementation forces us to consider how 'Snaps' alter the role of truth in the social media landscape.

In the post 'Why does Snapchat Matter?', Sam Ladner addresses a central issue the picture-sharing platform obviates through its service, that being the existence persistence of photos, likes, and comments shared on the Internet.  "Snapchat allows you to turn the Web back into regular conversation, shared with only those “present,” and not recorded for anyone else to hear," Ladner argues, as she frames the function, or affordance, of disappearing content as enabling a return to pre-Web discursive practices.  Instead of deciding 'Should I take a picture of this?', Ladner states that Snapchat allows one to make the perfectly acceptable choice that something is of little archival value, hence the desirability of ephemerality, and that this lack of 'documentary pressure' (what Nathan Jurgenson has termed the Facebook Eye) reduces the cognitive load associated with other platforms and their existence persistence stance on shared content.

Granted, the disappearing nature of Snaps (the term used by Snapchat for the photos you take and share) certainly reduces cognitive load- but it also has additional, far-reaching effects regarding the ability of the user to engage in parresia, or truth-telling.  This is something I would like to explore in greater detail below.

To begin, what is parresia?  Here I am utilizing discussions crafted by Foucault for his 1982-1983 lecture series on 'The Government of Self and Others', in which he both elaborates the meaning of parresia and charts its evolution of use through antiquity and up to the modern era.  Paressia  is actually a Greek word which describes the quality of free-spokeness, although it means much more than having a glib tongue.  It denotes that the one with free-spokeness speaks the truth, even to the point where utterance of such truth means possible mortal danger to the speaker.  Foucault states that parresia is "a truth-telling, an irruptive truth-telling which creates a fracture and opens up the risk; a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality." (63) Those who engage in parresia form truth on two levels; the statement itself is true, but the one uttering parresia thinks, judges, and considers that the truth expressed is genuinely true.  It is not rhetoric, whereby one arranges facts to persuade another to accept a position- it is an expression of pure, believed truth, which is beyond rhetoric and situated more properly in the realm of philosophy.

Another characteristic of parresia is that one does not come equipped, naturally, with the ability to use such a discourse.  It has to be proven, fought over, so that the utterer of parresia is assured that others will listen to them and heed the truth they bravely proclaim.  Yet, parresia is not so above reproach that it cannot be subverted, cannot be twisted to suit needs that are less than altruistic.  Plato, himself, questioned how Democracy could co-exist in harmony with parresia, given that such pure truth-telling might not be accepted by the representative bodies summoned to debate the pressing issues of the polis.  It is entirely possible to have bad parresia, he concludes, false truth-telling that borders on flattery.

Foucault stipulated that bad parresia contained three elements.  First, it allowed anyone to speak.  Ascendency, the process of jousting with others for recognition, no longer matters in those places where bad parresia reigns.  While this was a necessary precondition for those who utter good parresia (one needs to be heeded, after all, for the truth to have any effect), in the converse situation ascendency is moot because anyone can speak.  This leads to the second element of bad parresia, that being the situation where speakers won't give their 'true' opinion but, rather, they sustain the prevailing opinion.  Foucault notes that, "the bad ascendency of anybody is achieved through conformity to what anybody may say and think." (183)  The third, and final, characteristic of bad parresia extends from the conformity found in the previous characteristic; by pleasing others, the utterer of bad parresia ensures their own safety and success, thus circumventing any potential danger.

"Such is the mechanism of bad parresia, which is the elimination the of distinctive difference of truth-telling in the game of democracy." (183)  Foucault states that this is the real danger of bad parresia before elaborating what Plato saw as the main consequence of democratic man lacking a logos alethes, or discourse of truth:

"In the anarchy of his desires he will want always to satisfy greater desires.  He will seek to exercise power over others, power which is desirable in itself and which will give him access to the satisfaction of all his desires." (201)

While there is quite a bit more to the analysis by Foucault on the notion of parresia, (highly recommend you check-out the entire lecture series) there is enough here to begin asking questions about how parresia, or rather how bad parresia, operates on a social media platform where ephemerality is the central feature.  Let's return to the analysis of Ladner, described above.

Without complicating this post with the particulars of data serfdom on non-ephemeral platforms (NEP's), like Facebook or Twitter, one essential point must be made regarding the nature of data self verisimilitude promised by these platforms; they trap users in unchanging expressions that promote stasis and formation of the ossified self, so as to make marketing easier and more accurate (even as this ossification creates asynchronicity between the data self and the lived self).  Conflict arises when users question the veracity of their data selves, because we have reached the point where shareable information can be accessed and indexed to such a degree that the resulting amalgamation alienates users from the platforms they dutifully toil upon.

Photo via Mark Smith

This is what Ladner means when she discusses the lessening of 'cognitive load' associated with NEP's, the fact that persistent existence routinely exposes users to embarrassment and even greater liability.  There is no longer the question of 'should I document this?' or 'what is the best moment to document?', questions inherent to actualization of the 'Facebook Eye', but rather a general freeing of the self to engage in frivolity, to rest assured that the ridiculous (or not) Snap just sent won't be around for others to critique tomorrow, or the whole sequencing of tomorrows that will inevitably follow.  The benefits are immediate for Ladner:  

"Snapchat came and took out the garbage that you put in a particular pile.  You don't even have to think of that pile.  It is simply gone.  How liberating!"

Yet, I ask, what are the implications?  It's fine that Ladner sees Snapchat, and ephemerality in general, as a sort of automated trash pickup service, but this begs the question: if you liken it to garbage, what does that say about the content and its purpose to begin with?  Granted- this is the larger point Ladner is trying to make.  But I also think this garbage analogy hints at a general condition on the type of information ephemerality will promote.  

The genius of Snapchat, and ephemerality in general, is that it frees the lived self from the constraints of the data self.  Whereas NEP's continually have users conflate the truth of their utterances encoded in likes and retweets to that of their lived reality, producing disruptive asynchronicity, platforms that embrace ephemerality tell users, "Don't worry about the conflation of your data and yourself- the data will disappear, leaving only your true self behind."  However, while ephemeral platforms may claim to solve the data self conundrum, in reality they provide only a more ameliorating experience for the user to engage in bad parresia.

As it stands now, most uses of social media don't promote the practice of parresia- they promote forms of communication that claim legitimacy in the name of parresia.  In actuality, social media promotes bad parresia because marketers, who pay the bills for many social platforms, demand flattery over truth.  But the linkage of legitimacy to what parresia stands for, the unabashed, total belief in what someone is uttering, is what all social media platforms will claim to exercise.  For NEP's, this linkage comes from their claim that the data self is symphonic with the lived self, that the data will reveal a truth of your existence that was once completely unknown.  Ephemeral platforms point out the flaw in this reasoning, as persistence existence of data will continually pose as a liability, and suggest that the way to actual parresia is through elimination of the data itself.

Thus, when Ladner claims that Snapchat allows users to "turn the Web back into regular conversation" one can see the sort of validity these ephemeral platforms derive from linking themselves to notions of parresia.  But I would counter Ladner here, and suggest that ephemeral platforms only feel like a more authentic, digital version of ourselves because they present a novel way for us to engage in bad parresia.  Snapchat doesn't encourage one to send photos of value, only photos of frivolous value.  There is no ascendency involved with Snapchat.  Sure, you might be selective in who you decide to send or receive Snaps- but there is no preferring one over another, no quality meaningfully marking one as anything more than an equal of another.  It's all so frivolous, so YOLO, that anybody can speak, anybody can take a snap and send it to anyone without a care for anything more.  

Of course this ephemerality, while very liberating in practice, also means that there are no consequences tied to the data shared.  This is how Snapchat directly contributes to the formation of bad parresia.  The data you send melts away after mere seconds, leaving only a vague notion that any data was shared at all.  Recall what Foucault, quoted above, said was one of the central characteristics of parresia, that is "a truth-telling, an irruptive truth-telling which creates a fracture and opens up the risk; a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality."  Ephemerality eliminates this fracture, or at least seals it far, far quicker than NEP's.  There is no danger, no undefined eventuality in sending a Snap.  

Recipients of Snaps may, if they are quick enough, take a screenshot, but here Snapchat upholds its ephemeral teleology and informs you that your picture has been kidnapped from the palace of forgetting and locked away in the dungeon of existence persistence.  This reinforces Snapchat's linkage to notions of good parresia, as the ephemeral platform tells those whose Snap's have been captured, "There is a traitor in your midst, one who would violate the true expression of yourself in order to possess a shadowy, asynchronous piece of your data self."  And since ephemeral platforms hold claims to veridiction through opposition to the data selves created by NEP's, this 'informer' aspect of having Snap's captured completes the false-loop of presumed good parresia.

As an evolving feature, we will have to wait and see how Snapchat (and the inevitable emergence of cloned services) continues to play with notions of verisimilitude tied to the larger issue of truth-telling.  Given that ephemeral data has a low value to marketers, one wonders how Snapchat will monetize its service given the demands of profitability in the marketplace.  It's not entirely out of the question that Snapchat is using ephemerality to lure in droves of potential data serfs, and once the demesne has reached suitable size who knows what gates will be shut and what data will take on a less than ephemeral existence.  Regardless, ephemerality represents a new take on the social media question.  We should be careful to not overlook its impact on how we see social media integrated into the notion of parresia.