Communities and Crisis

“The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds – which is to say, they produce producers” (Hardt and Negri – 32)

“Technology-mediated consumption practices” require work on part of the consumer. Lillie clarifies the immaterial labor of e-commerce by dividing it into “symbolic-analytic services” (brokerage) and “affective labor” (helping each other out). eBay’s community of workers is a prime example of a networked, mediated marketplace where the boundaries between consumption, “play,” and “work” start to blur. Members of the eBay community do not only take on the roles of seller and buyer, but of monitoring, marketing, customer service, etc. – actual business administrators or “pinks” participate very little in the community. While branded in a utopian rhetoric of the empowered individual and communities of shared interest working together, Lillie points out that “rather than circumnavigating the retail sector, then, eBay should be seen as actually extending their reach” (101)…a reach vast enough to pull partial-luddites like William Gibson out of net-hiding.

The reach is not only external, but internal as well. Desjardins shows how members of eBay social networks, specifically fan communities, construct identities through the exchange of objects in relation to those communities – eBay member IDs, narrative pitches constructed around commodity objects (what Desjardins calls divestment and possession rituals), self-identity through display of objects, etc. She argues that the community experience of fans/collectors, characterized by these mediated fan practices, parallels the embodied experiences of these communities, and in that sense eBay is able to make claims to a “humanized” marketplace; at the same time, transactions between fan communities on eBay are often ephemeral and ultimately centered around commodity exchange.

 

Affective labor is a key ingredient in the networked society of e-commerce – netflix, amazon, etc. – as well as advertising – facebook, widgets, etc. It can both reinforce and challenge the “dominant paradigm of material production and consumption” – we see challenges put forth in the Creative Commons and Wikipedia communities. Lillie suggests using the collective knowledge “about how material value is created, as well as product manufacturing, pricing, retailing, and so forth” (103) created by the eBay community to promote “critical consumption literacy.” Shaviro claims that in the network society, “collective collaboration and cutthroat competition both flourish”; he warns – “The ‘pirate utopia’ of freewheeling experimentation gives way to a carefully ordered regime of capital accumulation” (248).

“The absence of any cognitive grounding for our actions is precisely their condition of possibility” (224)

I find really interesting the tensions between expenditure and scarcity, equilibrium and crisis that Shaviro discusses. Crisis and desire perpetuate themselves, keeps us coming back for more, and “the system is driven, in spite of itself, to the convulsions of unproductive expenditure” (222) or extravagance. The spaces of flows are characterized by unpredictability – influencing networks from the market to evolutionary biology – and there is resistance to this variability, where it is easy to “reject the idea that anything found in nature or society could ever be arbitrary, meaningless, or irrational” (213). There is a sort of paradox between networks as fundamentally self-organizing and volatile. The tensions between pattern recognition and tracking movements as methods of analysis relate to understanding these tensions; I also think it’s so much easier to fall into the static methods of pattern recognition than it is to practice following fluid and ephemeral movements. Shaviro says these are the metaphysical conditions that properly conceptualize the network society, where “crisis remains the condition of possibility for change, the metaphysical extravagance that alone can open up chinks in the otherwise impenetrable armor of the real” (224).

Possible Discussion Links

-Memes are ideas that are culturally spread – transmission is enhanced by the network, but unlike viruses, they are changed during transmission – which allows for bifurcations or irregularities – intense connectivity means the network can be thrown by something small – a small event can elicit a large consequence i.e. run lola run

-How do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) mediate not just your consumption practices, but your social practices in general?

-How does scarcity affect your experiences in virtual environments such as Second Life?

-What does it mean to track movements or flows as opposed to recognizing patterns? How do you go about doing this?

-What do YOU use online social networks for?

- Do you engage with electronic organizations and businesses (networks) such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, etc.? How do you participate and/or contribute in the affective labor associated with these entities?

-How do you feel about the blurring of boundaries between work, play, and consumption?

-What are some things that contribute to your own understanding of what it means to live in the “network society”?

~ by glycerine517 on November 14, 2007.