My Abstract for Theorizing the Web 2012

Photo by Nic McPhee

Recently, I've been very engaged in the discussion over concepts of augmented reality and digital dualism as debated and refined by the talented writers of the Cyborgology blog, in addition to other notable voices like Rob Horning on his blog Marginal Utility and Mike Bulajewski, a.k.a. Mr. Teacup.  One reason I'm fascinated with these topics is that I find in them an enormous potential to view interactions between Russian authorities and their subjects during the Imperial period in a new light.  One position I've started outlining and investigating is the idea that Russian history can be viewed through an augmented reality framework that utilized textual platforms and practices, instead of digital counterparts we rely on today, to achieve its augmented effects.  

My post examining the empirical roots of digital dualism pointed towards examples in which Russian peasants confronted textual dualist claims made by the Imperial state with augmented claims to reality informed, in part, by rumors or idealistic concepts found in folktales.  Beyond peasants, my post reviewing Eugene Martin's 'Jews and the Imperial State' demonstrated that Imperial authorities also used textual dualist  conceptions when trying to  document and identity the Jewish population in an individual context.

Now it looks like I'll have the opportunity to discuss these ideas, and more, at the Theorizing the Web 2012 conference (search #TtW12 on Twitter) being held at the University of Maryland campus in College Park on April 14th.  I found out a few days ago that the conference organizers accepted my abstract proposal, and I wanted to post that abstract here so as to give people an idea of what I want to talk about.  The title of my proposed talk will be 'Charting the Waves of Augmentation: Textual Dualism & Augmented Reality in the Russian Empire'.  The abstract is reproduced below:

While the current focus on how digital technology alters our conception of the self and its place in the broader perceived reality yields fascinating insight into modern issues, there is much to be gained by analyzing the presence of augmented reality in a pre-digital era.  In a period, not far removed from our present, where moveable type and increasingly individualized documentation fueled the textual wave of augmentation, it was largely governments- not corporations- that sought to harness the informative potential offered by these analog technologies.  Western European powers, like France, Britain and Prussia/Germany, fostered impressive civil bureaucracies that utilized growing literacy rates in order to create a disciplinary regime based on documentation, while another great power, Russia, struggled to achieve the same results with its meager supply of trained civil servants.  If Russian authorities wanted to build a foucauldian gaze of panoptic power through documentation, they had to make compromises in order to do so. 

One essential compromise of Russian documentary practice hinged on embracing a stable and conservative textual dualist conception of reality with regards to tracking populations or promulgating laws.  On the individual level, this meant that lived identity and the identity held by the 'gaze' of documentation consistently remained asynchronous when conflated for the purposes of military conscription, admission into university, acquiring a passport, etc… On the national governance level, textual dualism provided the absolutist regime a means to utilize aspects of the liberalistic program without ceding any measure of real power to representative bodies or embracing truly civic concepts of citizenship devoid of ethnic or religious qualifiers.  Again, the textual reality espoused by tsarist documentary practice did little more than provide a thin veneer to justify inequalities among the estates and could do almost nothing to mitigate the asynchronicity between the document (in all its various forms) and lived experience, which could include use of rumors, 'everyday resistance' or even outright revolt. 

The interplay between textual dualist conceptions of identity and the augmented reality those conceptions measured up against thus largely framed many social conflicts experienced by the Russian empire over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Yet this interplay contained significant variance along the spectrum between dualist and augmented perspectives.  Sometimes peasants embraced textual dualism for the strategic benefit it could provide, but they were just as comfortable in arguing an augmented perspective to vex authorities when required.  Authorities often granted some space for augmented claims to exist, simply because efficiently enforcing a dualist conception through discipline proved beyond the capacity of the ruling regime.  The unique blending of documentary dedication on behalf of the state, a malnourished bureaucracy mostly incapable of enforcing disciplinary desires and a largely illiterate population canny enough to exploit the inconsistencies of both, give the Russian experience unusual depth in terms of an augmented analytical perspective.  Charting the wave of textual augmentation in Russian history helps explain the interplay between digital dualism and augmented reality, including the spectrum of strategic potential between both, in our present day.

It looks like the conference will be livestreamed and recorded, and when I find out more specific information regarding when I will be speaking (as well as the list of the other, no doubt, awesome presenters) an update will be posted here.

Between Reality & Cyberspace

(Author's Note- Mr. Teacup responded to my piece on his blog.  PJ Rey also posted a response on Cyborgology, addressing points made by myself and Teacup.  Both are excellent and I recommend reading them to see this conversation continued.  JA)

What does the term 'cyberspace' mean?  Does this Gibsonian construct adequately fulfill the task, currently asked of it by many, of defining the digital/physical realm interaction in terms of its scope and function?

Photo by aagius

Attempts to frame new social interactions spurred by digital innovations in communication, documentation and self-actualization (just to name a few) generally encounter problems of word choice when describing the effects these advancements bring to our growing conceptions of reality.  Literary terminology, often built upon antiquated notions reconfigured to suggest a potential or future state of being, sometimes suits the purpose of analogy when looking at these phenomena.  Yet there always comes a time when our understanding of an event or construction of reality demands that we re-evaluate our word choice, lest our future analytical efforts be hindered by its, perhaps, outmoded or misleading operation.  PJ Rey and the internet persona known as Mr. Teacup produced just this sort of re-evalutation of the term mentioned above, cyberspace, through two excellent pieces titled 'There is no Cyberspace' and 'There is Only Cyberspace', respectively written.

PJ Rey argued that the term cyberspace, first coined by William Gibson in the short story 'Burning Chrome' and defined as a 'consensual hallucination', is deeply problematic in describing our contemporary social web because the web is neither consensual nor a hallucination.  Thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones, pervasive documentary practices (something Nathan Jurgenson calls the 'Facebook Eye') mean that even if someone does not participate in the social web their actions are nonetheless captured by it to some degree, thus shaping our actions on the individual and societal level.  Many of us cannot control the degree to which this 'Facebook Eye' documents our actions (Could you stop every friend from making comments or posting pictures of your embarrassing moment from last week's party?  What about last year's party?) making the web far from a consensual space.  In many ways, because the web is not consensual it is also not a fantastical or a hallucinatory space either.  It is a part of reality- the web is as real as reality itself.  Actions taken offline impact online relations and vice-versa, allowing Rey to state that, "causality is bi-directional.  We are all part of the same human-computer system."

For Rey, 'cyberspace' is merely the continuation of dualist thinking inherited from the Western philosophical conception of the mind-body separation.  Because the web always held a dialectal relationship with the physical world, Rey suggests that new vocabulary be created to more accurately explain the web/reality interplay, the augmented reality encompassing it all.

Affirming several of Rey's assertions through a decidedly different analytical embrace, Mr. Teacup first dissects what he calls 'augmentism', a view attributed to the stance taken by Rey and others who write on the Cyborgology blog, before tackling the main issue at stake in the piece; what if there is no reality and only cyberspace?  Teacup expresses a very nuanced critique in both sections of his response, one that makes a compelling yet, ultimately, flawed case for why augmentism and augmented reality claims fall flat.

Let's begin with the presentation of augmentism.  Teacup states that, "One thing that seems to be often implied is that digital dualism leads to exaggerated fears and anxieties, and augmented reality does not…augmentism effects a kind of naturalization or even domestication of technology."  He goes on to bring up the example of parents concerned with their child spending too much time playing World of Warcraft.  While on face, the concern expressed by the parents would appear to enforce a digital dualist perspective of reality (Our son is spending too much time in the virtual world and ignoring the real world), Teacup accurately demonstrates that an 'augmented' perspective is actually at work as the parents are essentially stating that while the son may only feel like he's in a virtual world, he is, in fact, very much a part of the real world and that ignoring real world concerns to play immersive games has impact.  The parents concern reflects a belief in the dialectal relationship between the web and reality- a conception Rey argues for in his piece.

"Many moral panics are centrally concerned with the threat of confusing fantasy for reality," writes Teacup, who later adds, "by this definition, the criticism of moral panics is itself a moral panic."   When Rey criticizes conceptions of reality rooted in a digital dualist discourse (like those espoused by the media concerning issues of internet addiction, violence in video games, etc…) he is engaging in a moral panic that is similar to the moral panics criticized in the first place.  Yet Rey plays the trump card in asserting that there is no other space, no other fantasy world or virtual reality, for a digital dualist moral panic to build upon- there is no 'alternate world' that can be confused for reality because the web is as real as reality itself.  The augmentist perspective, with its soothing naturalization of technology, presents a conception of reality in which the web seamlessly integrates and becomes a part of the everyday.  One can't have panic over frictional issues between the web and the real- the web is real so there is no friction and thus no panic.

Happy Days thanks to Augmentation!
Photo by New England Secession

Teacup presents this view, the idea of a frictionless augmentation, in order to set up the contrast between Rey's augmentism and Teacup's own assertion that there is no reality, there is only cyberspace.  Making clear that this Lacanian inspired view is a subjective viewpoint to be explored and not an ontological statement like the title of Rey's original piece, Teacup executes a cunning act of rhetoric.  Attacking conceptions of reality by means of asserting alternate subjective viewpoints allows Teacup to not only turn Rey's argument on its head, without necessarily invalidating its central thesis, but also insist that fantasy is the only means we have to experience reality.  "This is because the Real is too strong, we cannot confront it directly," posits Teacup, who then summons a list of traumatic occurrences in which participants report an 'in a movie'-like experience when asked to describe their perception of events.  Thus, Teacup's title, 'There is Only Cyberspace', should be understood as an acknowledgment of the traumatic real repressed.  Furthermore, Rey's title, 'There is No Cyberspace', can be understood as a similar repression of the traumatic real that, Teacup says, "is disclosed through fantasy."  For this to be true, as a subjective viewpoint, the sort of assuagement of technology with reality brought about by an augmentist perspective cannot be accepted.

Why?  Because, as Teacup asserts in the second-half of his argument, there is an alternative between a dualist construction of reality, embodied by the mind-body debates, and an 'augmented' perspective of reality (Teacup calls this an 'embodied cognition'); there is the Lacan inspired 'antagonistic opposition' perspective.  He writes, "to put it another way, our subjective self-consciousness feels like it has been grafted on, and sits in an uneasy relationship with the body."  As such the self exists in some degree of friction with the body, making augmentist claims impossible to assert.  In denying the hybridity involved in 'antagonistic opposition', Rey ignores what Teacup labels the "simultaneously horrifying and compelling" nature of the modern cyborg.  This is why Rey must refute the term 'cyberspace'- to accept its existence would be to face the traumatic reality head on.

The reason Teacup makes such a compelling argument is that he attacks Rey's 'augmented reality' conception at its assumed weakest point; the idea that web/reality dialectal relationships, through their interplay, are devoid of friction that could lead to panic.  Yet I'm not sure that is an accurate assessment on the workings of an augmentist perspective.  For example, there are questions related to the degree of permeation the digital wave of augmentation holds on any given space or situation.  I live in Oregon and it is entirely possible for me to drive into a vast forest and lose all cellular connection, making my Galaxy S phone (my personal connector to the 'Facebook Eye') useless in documenting my experience.  Say I go on a hike and see an amazing waterfall.  When I return home, reentering the potential gaze of the 'Facebook Eye', the composition of my self is asynchronous to the self connected to and expressed through the web.  I could remedy this asyncronicity by posting an update, or perhaps uploading and posting photos I took of the hike with my old point-and-shoot camera.  But, I may choose not to post an update or upload photos.  If I never tell a single person about my hike, then no matter how good the 'Facebook Eye' becomes it will always possess an asynchronous composition of my identity as compared to the lived experience.  Smart phones and digital platforms make documenting life very easy (even non-consensual, as Rey observes), but in this ease I am reminded of the Philip K. Dick quote from 'A Scanner Darkly':

"What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too." (185)

Photo by Denis Mojado

This, to me, is the main conundrum in trying to assert that the web is reality.  We must address this issue of whether or not the 'Facebook Eye' operates as a scanner darkly or a scanner clearly when engaging in pervasive documentation.  If it indeed operates as a scanner darkly, then there can be no denying the presence of friction in the web/reality interplay found in an augmented reality.

There is also the question regarding the order, or level, of augmented documentation.  I'm not on Facebook but it is still possible for my life to be documented there through discussions people have about me, pictures taken with me in them that are then posted, etc…  Yet, I would generally have no knowledge of this documentation unless those who saw the post or produced it informed me of its existence.  In a strange way, the web connected self, in this case, would be asynchronous to the self of lived experience, but only when the two are conflated.  Also, because I'm not registered as an official entity on Facebook there is no publicly available collected 'timeline' through which to view my web connected self.  I have become a ghost, one that is asynchronous to the lived self.  In the pre-digital era, such asynchronous meetings of one's self occurred with the spread of rumors or reputation (I am reminded of that classic phrase by Twain, "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated), yet the limits of communicative speed provided some measure of delay for the impact of their effects.  Today, thanks to nearly instantaneous communication platforms available to an increasing number of people, rumors or reputation can spread quickly and in a very organized fashion.  Unless one dedicates a great deal of time to managing their Web-connected self, there will always be moments of asynchronicity when the lived self and the web-connected self are called upon to account for each other.

Photo by Miles Tsang

This is not to say that a dualist conception arises between the lived self and the web-connected self, merely that augmentation of our reality is limited to permeation and penetration of its augmented effects.  If we accept the premise that the Web is reality, then we must also accept that primary loss of connection to the web will create asynchronous gaps between our experience and the experience pervasively documented on the web.  Even if others note our absence through Web platforms like Facebook or Twitter, this documentation is on a secondary order (sometimes bordering on speculation) from that attained by the primary view of documentation.  In short, even an augmentist perspective contains elements of friction that can lead to panic, but more accurately asynchronicity.  With this viewpoint, debates over the alien nature of the self to the body become largely moot, as they, too, primarily deal with asynchronous concepts.  However, Teacup is right to question the 'naturalization of technology' perhaps glossed over in current augmentist conceptions, as there is much ground to explore on the nature of the web/reality interplay.  And, of course, while Rey dismisses and Teacup only obliquely mentions it, the fact that a digital dualist conception can still be used in contemporary discourse at all needs to be more fully investigated.  As I've noted with Russian peasants during the late 19th century, the era of textual augmented reality, there were situations when an augmentist perspective proved most effective (i.e. using concepts of Justice found in folktales to challenge the law or treatment under a landowner) and other situations when a dualist construction (eschewing traditional rights in a court proceeding in favor of written statutes) suited needs better.  As Rey states in his post, the durability of the term 'cyberspace' to describe the web clearly indicates that a digital dualist discourse continues to hold sway.  This strategic selection of dualist vs. augmentist perspective demands further investigation if we are to better understand the relation of the self to the larger augmented reality.

Just like Mr. Teacup, I agree with Rey's argument that the web is reality and not a separate sphere of activity.  However, just as I cannot accept Teacup's view that 'augmentism' equates to a frictionless, panic-less, 'naturalization of technology', I also cannot put full faith in a conception of augmented reality that does not account for the asynchronicities inherent in documentation, which is something Rey's 'augmentist' position does not address.  To be fair, elaborating the workings and composition of relations that go into an augmented reality is still in its infancy, and posts like those written by PJ Rey and Mr. Teacup do a great service in deepening our understanding of this phenomena.  As I have tried to demonstrate above, there are many aspects of this conception of reality that need to be explored.  Ultimately, Rey is correct when he calls for a new vocabulary to explicitly describe our affirmation that the Web is not a separated sphere from our reality- our current terminology is too vague.

Compromised Reality in 'Jews and the Imperial State'

I've spent a fair amount of wordspace discussing topics related to augmented reality, especially how the current digital wave of augmentation can be informed by analyzing the impact of textual augmentation in the pre-digital era.  As someone who studies Russian history, I find investigating the question of how textual practices altered perceptions of reality especially interesting.  The tsarist government, over the three hundred years of its rule, held a fascination with documentation that rivaled any Western European power.  And just like Western Europe, tsarist authorities recognized the power documenting subjects of the realm could bring to their grander designs of glory and empire.  However, unlike the powers of Western Europe, one problem that chronically plagued tsarist ambitions was lack of available manpower.  If Russian authorities wanted to build a foucauldian gaze of panoptic power, they had to make compromises in order to do so.  Eugene Avrutin's Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia describes the effects of this compromise by analyzing Imperial efforts to document Jewish identity.  His work sheds light on how we might better understand the interplay between textual dualist conceptions of identity and the augmented reality those conceptions measured up against.

"While Jews could be easily identified visually as a collective group or defined in legal terms, authorities found it much more challenging to document Jews as individuals," writes Avrutin, as he later identifies three factors that contributed to this problem.  First, building " a legal-administrative order capable of accommodating the empire's remarkable juridicial distinctions and confessional diversity", second "the ordering of clear and distinct cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews" and third "containment of Jews in their permanent places of residence."  During the first half of the 19th century, Russian authorities found it increasingly difficult to accurately document a population under once satisfactory categories of social estate and religious belief.  By turning away from census records towards passports, city censuses, and metrical books in the second half of the 19th century, the ruling regime began to rely more heavily on ethnic conceptions of identity for categorizing and policing diverse subjects.  Passports were handy for regulating internal movement of populations.  In contrast with empire-wide census efforts, city censuses were far easier to carry out and contained very valuable information on the inhabitants of urban centers.  According to Avruitn, it was use of the metrical books that constituted a novel method in documenting the legal status of a subject.

Photo from Rude Cactus

Metrical books recorded the births, baptisms, marriages and deaths that occurred in a community and their maintenance fell to clergymen who acted as an intermediary between state and subject.  Since 1722, when Peter the Great issued his first statute on registering vital events, clergymen of the Russian Orthodox Church kept records of their confessional community, but it wasn't until 1835 that Jewish 'crown rabbis' also found themselves in charge of performing the same tasks.  Avrutin states that, "the recording of vital events allowed the state to recognize the population not only as a religious community but as individuals with distinct civil identities."  This approach, using functionaries of religious faiths as proxies for civil servants in record-keeping tasks, possessed several advantages in the eyes of Russian authorities.  Not only did the state find a way to augment its often meager presence amongst diverse populations across the empire, but it also felt that the information it received from religious authorities was more 'accurate' and complete than otherwise could be attained from trained civil servants.  Unlike census records, which collected data primarily for tax use and military conscription quotas, metrical books delineated identity by acting as a record of an individuals denomination, legal status, ethnic origin and place of residence.  Yet the regime also knew how fickle and prone to error record keeping could be, particularly with the Jewish community in the matter of transliterating Hebrew names to Russian or when rabbis recorded different names for birth and death records.

Over the course of five chapters, Avrutin makes a very compelling analysis come to life with several examples drawn from the multitude of records and archives surveyed.  The footnotes alone are worth reading, as they bring the somewhat narrow focus of the work (Jewish populations) into line with the larger backdrop of imperial record keeping practices across the empire.  As a work of Imperial Russian History, I give Jews and the Imperial State high marks.  Instead of performing a more standard review, I would like to spend the remainder of this post exploring a theme I mentioned above- the interplay between textual dualism and augmented reality.  While never using such terms, Avrutin nevertheless provides intriguing examples that demonstrate how these modes of perceiving reality clashed and modified the terms by which the Imperial Russian state understood the meaning of identity.

Bexley police in the UK hold up fake ID cards

Take this observation by Avrutin on the metrical books in the chapter 'Making Jews Legible':

As a fundamental marker of identity, the document (a metrical book entry) followed individuals as they changed place of residence, marital status, and even religious denomination.  The document's civic importance- as the most important tool by which the state obtained knowledge of its population- ensured that officials took much time in enforcing proper registration while continuing to devise new administrative methods to improve record-keeping practices.

By placing so much importance upon an interpretation of reality as espoused by the document, a textual construction of identity, the Imperial Russian government essentially cultivated a textual dualist position with regards to individual identification.  The individual and the gaze the state held on that individual became separated under this interpretation of reality.  When the two differed, as could be the case if a rabbi transliterated a Hebrew name into Russian or if an individual used a Russified version of a Hebrew name in everyday life, then the individual in question would find themselves in an asynchronous conflict between the reality of the lived identity and the identity recorded in the book.  This could prove advantageous, as when Jews resisted being conscripted into the Imperial Army on claims of confused identity, or it could prove a hindrance, as when Jews sought to prove to Imperial authorities that their sons who died in infancy could not fulfill the call for conscription.  There was also the issue of gendered imbalance found in the metrical books, as many crown rabbis did not usually attend a females naming ceremony- the designated time when registration of births occurred.  Avrutin notes that omission of birth registration of females led not only to difficulties for said females as they grew up and began to interact with the social and legal system of the empire, but also to a statistical myth that among Jewish communities a gendered imbalance skewed towards males existed.  Again, the textual dualist conception of reality found in the metrical books, the primary conduit for the state to exercise its documentary gaze, often encountered asynchronous contradictions when individuals operating in an augmented reality conception of reality (which could be said to contain both oral and textual knowledge) disputed the record at hand.

Photo by Awed Job

However, as is often the case with documentary power, a record can be amended thus ameliorating asynchronous conflict between the lived reality of the individual and document that purports to know vital characteristics of the individual.  But true to its absolutist form, the Russian government placed severe restrictions on making changes to recorded events in the Jewish metrical books.  To correct a mistake, crown rabbis were forced to submit petitions in order to receive an exemption and be allowed to amend the records.  Even if interested Jewish parties sought to correct the official record through legal efforts, Avrutin states that the courts would rule that they did not have the legal authority to mandate a change in the official record (as that would be the prerogative of the absolutist central government, embodied in the tsar).  "For the imperial government, a change in the document- however small or inconsequential it may have appeared- undermined the integrity of the entire record-keeping system'"  This insight by Avrutin describes the Russian authorities proclivity to inject absolutist content into the documents used to identify and surveil the population.  While the imperial regime desired to harness the power of individual documentation, inability to consistently maintain a disciplinary apparatus (like those produced in Western Europe and examined by Foucault in his analysis of power) forced authorities to adopt a conception of reality based on stable (to them) textual dualist notions over a more chaotic (for them) augmented reality conception.  This limited the Russian governments ability to integrate religious and cultural differences into its own sense of imperial identity.  As the individual and the gaze held on that individual through documentary power increasingly diverged, the asynchronous conflicts between textual dualist identity and augmented reality identity grew to greater and greater proportions.

While Avrutin's work looks only at a particular group within the multi-ethnic Russian empire, the Jews, it does a superb job of examining how "knowledge-based technologies" impacted the conception of identity at both the individual and panoptic-authoritative level.  I believe that further examination of Imperial Russian use of these 'knowledge-based technologies' could benefit from using a conceptual framework that puts central the conflict between textual dualism and augmented reality in establishing the veracity of the individual.

Can There Really Be Identity Stasis?

Yesterday I read an interesting piece titled 'Mechanisms of Stasis in Identity Prosumption' by Jenny Davis on the equally interesting Cyborgology blog, from which I have drawn many sources of inspiration for my own work.

Davis sought to disentangle "the liberating and constraining potential of digitally enabled identity prosumption" in her post, arguing that the increasing prominence of 'nonomous online environments' force participants to pursue increasingly accurate representations of self that ultimately result in 'identity stasis' due to the moral imperative such authenticity (or rather the specter of being called out for in-authenticity) demands.  This moral imperative is found on both the individual and cultural level, presenting unique challenges for either side.  Engaging in "digitally enabled identity prosumption' requires both sides to "overcome the challenge of lateral surveillance and pervasive documentation", with the individual additionally tasked to find a path towards a more abundant identity construction potential while the cultural must seek to do provide the same abundance in the potential for categorical construction.  This task is not easy, according to Davis, as paradoxically the pursuit of 'abundant potential' through digital prosumption often leads to a decrease in fluidity and tendency to resort to identity stasis, be it through the need to have historical layers of 'status updates' displayed in Facebook congeal or through institutionalization of a culture prompted by categorization and normalization inherent in the documenting process.

Despite provisos that "identity negotiation…is a continuous process" and that "digital technologies…facilitate the acquisition of new identities both interpersonally and culturally", Davis asserts that once these identities engage in the act of digital prosumption their progression towards stasis is all but certain as the very categories the identities create trap those who created them.

Photo by NukelarBurrito

I agree with Davis in the need to examine the prosumption of identity both on the front and back end.  The issues raised by her investigation ask important questions of new processes now being integrated into the constructions of the self.  Yet, I cannot believe fully in the idea that digital prosumption of identity triggers mechanisms of stasis.  My objections lie in two areas.  First, while both the individual and the cultural are increasingly interacting with 'nonomous online environments' their moral imperative for authenticity does not solely occur in the digital realm because, second, the representations of the self as seen through the new Facebook 'Timeline' or documentation of a culture via Wikipedia or Newspaper articles are, at best, snapshots of a highly mobile identity potential or, at worst, Soma filled idealizations of the self that are as authentic of the creator as the shadows cast from the forms found outside Plato's cave.

Take the Facebook 'Timeline', a much talked about user interface that the pre-eminent social network recently debuted.  Just as it sounds, the 'Timeline' chronologically organizes your status updates, photos, events, etc… in order to give the once various islands of data a more human-friendly narrative form.  Davis uses this change in interface as an example demonstrating the limiting potential digital prosumption of identity, represented by the sum total of events displayed in the 'Timeline', forces upon the individual as they strain to maintain a verifiable authentic self that gives coherence to what is and what can be displayed.  But if we maintain the belief that our digital activities intermesh with our physical activities, it seems lopsided to say that only the digital maintains a say in the authentication of the self.  Augmented Reality demands that information- in this case ascertaining the validity of authenticity driven by moral imperative- flows between and amongst both physical and digital realms.  I can accept the influence of the digital only if the physical is given equal measure.

Intersection of influence found in Augmented Reality

Of course, there is no denying that activity on Facebook, in addition to other means of digital reflection or documentation, possesses discernible influence on the activity of the physical.  But I would be cautious of making claims of authenticity based on Facebook posts, as often those posts are what I would term 'highlights' of one's day or thought.  There is a strong disincentive to post anything with a negative alignment, not only because it provides a strong contrast to the general commentary of unbearable lightness many willingly display but also because the very architecture of Facebook itself rewards positive commentary via ranking algorithms tied to 'Likes' and comments produced.  No one posts photos of their difficult moments of solitude, at least not to any great degree.  If an integral part of digitally enabled prosumed assemblage of identity relies on documentation of, or anchoring to, activity of the physical, then we cannot put full confidence in an interpretation that does not account for the sum total of the augmented experience.

But even if we grant digital prosumption platforms like Facebook power of total documentation, there is another reason why solely relying on one sphere of activity to explain the results of an augmented reality is not sufficient to enable detection of 'stasis mechanisms'.  Status updates, photos, comments on blog posts, even 'Likes' are essentially one-off snapshots of the self expressed at that moment.  If we took a chronologically-close cluster of these one-off moments captured, patterns of continuity and correlation would no doubt be detectable.  Under the right conditions one might even be able to witness the digital prosumption process underway in shaping identity.  But if we took a chronologically-distant gathering of moments there would most likely appear very discernible differences in disposition or tastes, to name only a few qualities, marking the change of identity over time.  While Facebook posts might act as a milepost on the road of life, they do little to tell you the grade of asphalt or bumpiness encountered along the way. 

If it appears that I am working to discredit the role of Facebook and other digital prosumption platforms in identity, I do so not to eliminate its presence all together in the digital prosumption of identity but rather to place it within appropriate terms so that its effects are not overstated.  To be fair, Davis does leave room in her analysis of digital prosumption of identity to allow for escape from identity stasis, although only obliquely, in stating that the abundance of identity categories do not inescapably trap one in the categories constructed.  Yet how one escapes the prohibitive obstacles of lateral surveillance and pervasive documentation, mentioned by Davis as the challenges "digitally enabled identity prosumption must overcome", is largely left unaddressed.  It is my belief that the framework of ‘mobility potentials’ can answer questions presented by potential activation of 'stasis mechanisms'.  Not only does 'mobility' point the way towards a more fully reckoned account of the various interactions occurring in our larger augmented reality, but it can also uncover why claims of 'identity stasis', or really any stasis at all, simply cannot be true.

Let's take a look at 'digitally enabled identity prosumption' under the mobility potential framework, beginning with the type of mobility potentials created by posting entries on the Facebook 'Timeline'.  When anyone uploads a status update, photo or makes a comment on Facebook, they are engaging in documentation of low mobility potentials.  Knowledge constructs with low mobility potential, by their very nature, engage in little change through the act of transmission.  The photo you post will look the same to anyone who views it, regardless of when they view it.  The same applies to status updates and the like- the act of transmitting that update will do little to change the composition of that update.  Now it is entirely possible that someone will view your photo or update, internalize its content, and then create their own response.  'Mobility' states that the low mobility status update is transmitted to the mind of the viewer which acts as a transition point for the transformation of the low mobility knowledge (status update) into high mobility knowledge represented by thought-reaction (response to status update).  This reaction is then transformed into a low mobility construct (posting one's response to status update) that is registered by Facebook.

What makes Facebook so valuable, in a mobility perspective, is that it allows production (or prosumption) of low mobility constructs anchored to our everyday events to occur in a very rapid manner, reducing the asynchronous effects personal documentation (to name a single documentary mode) often encountered in eras before digital communication networks existed. (And in places where the digital wave of augmentation has yet to fully permeate, one can see these asynchronous effects occurring more often- especially in claims of identity) This reduction of asynchronicity is what provides the illusion of 'pervasive documentation'- when it becomes extremely easy to create low mobility 'mileposts' of one's life it can appear as though the definition of self consists solely of low mobility constructs, thus achieving the perceived effects of a 'stasis mechanism'.

But in an augmented reality perspective, we must accept that other low and high mobility constructs encountered by the individual (reading a book or editing a wikipedia entry, respectively) in both the physical and the digital world alters that individuals activity in both spheres.  A person might have a conversation, compelled by the moral imperative to authenticate, discussing the finer points of their belief when presented with a fact, or argument, that proves persuasive and forces them to alter the presumptions upon which rest their identity.  Or they might read a book, or blog post, and decide that a new perspective should be included in the constellation of ideas that go into making an identity.  If anything, digital prosumption reduces the asynchronous effects between the self's actualization in forming identity and the projection of that identity in an augmented reality.

Short Thoughts on 'Gutenberg Galaxy'

I just finished reading Marshal McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in preparation for an abstract I'm planning to submit to the Theorizing the Web 2012 Conference, and there was a line of argumentation brought up in the work I wanted to discuss.  It comes from a quote McLuhan selected from James Frazer's Golden Bough for its commentary on the accelerating effect literacy and visuality introduced to the oral world:

"Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition, the testimony of ancient books on the subject of early religion is worth very little.  For literature accelerates the advance of thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word of mouth at an immeasurable distance behind.  Two or three generations of literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand years of traditional life…and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the superstitious beliefs and practices that have been handed down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race…"

Using the example (drawn from a different work) of 'folktales' and 'traditions' found in the play of schoolchildren as a corollary to the quote above, McLuhan declares, "In communities widely separated in space and time there is a continuity and tenacity of tradition quite unknown to written forms."

One of the themes I want to address in my abstract is the need, in my opinion, for a new conceptualization of information that will allow us to more accurately map the augmented reality presence infused in our daily lives.  While the points addressed by both Frazer and McLuhan are, on face, correct they do some disservice in their perpetuation of an informational framework dependent on speed as the indexer of change.  With the advent of the digital wave of augmentation, the interaction between supposedly slow atoms of oral knowledge and the fast bits of digital knowledge increasingly level each other out in their interoperability making distinctions of speed between the separate domains of knowledge increasingly moot (under what McLuhan calls the 'pressure of simultaneity') and even illusionary once an augmented reality perspective is pursued.  The question can no longer be, "what is the speed of this accelerating effect?"  It must instead shift to, "what degree can this knowledge be modified through transmission?" as this qualifier, this focusing of informational pursuit, will allow us to move away from harmful dualist modes of thinking towards a more realistic augmented reality perspective.  

This is helpful not only for interpreting the effects of the digital wave of augmentation, but also the previous waves and the waves to come.  My attempts to define knowledge in terms of high and low mobility potentials, as seen in my examination of the debate on usage of oral citations on Wikipedia and the new website Small Demons, denotes small efforts towards this larger goal.