Category: attention

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Your email address is worth 100 tea lights…

Ikea Family mailshot: 100 tea lights for your email address

How much is personal data worth? How might that be calculated? These are hard questions. Nevertheless, personal data does attract particular kinds of value, often determined by those harvesting and selling it on, such as Facebook, Google and so on.

These are rarely visible calculations, probably necessarily so – data is sometimes only worth something when it is part of a larger set. We are both an individual and part of one or more populations (which can be variously defined and derived in data). When you make up a ‘segment’ of a given population, your data, and what can thereby be inferred, has a particular value.

For example, the email marketing company Topspin apparently calculate the pecuniary value of a person’s email address to a band harvesting it based upon the amount of money that person (fan) will, on average, go on to spend on their music.

In a recent piece for the New York Times website, Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group, offers an example:

“Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. You can slice and dice markets, like women 25 to 35 who live in the Southeast and are fans of ‘Breaking Bad,’ … The new Atlas platform, she said, “can track people across devices, weave together online and offline.”

The data collected by various market research companies carries a notional value that is sometimes rendered visible in stark ways. Another example illustrates this: In a 2011 article for Huffington Post the price list for marketing data company Rapleaf shows for how much particular pieces of data were sold.  Age and gender are given away free, whereas ‘Likely smart phone user’ is $0.03.

We are thus worth something insofar as we are represented (accurately or otherwise) as a collection of data in one or more databases. We individually value our own data variously, depending on its use, context and so on. An email address, then, may be valuable if it is private, or not valuable if it is used for any old competition entry – this is often contextual and that can, of course, be missed by the marketing data companies (perhaps this is a good thing).

Nevertheless, we, or, more accurately, the data that are used to variously represent us, are commodified – our data-selves are products. Any sense of a unified ‘self’ is possibly too neat, our physically bodied selves rendered endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations, what Deleuze referred to as ‘dividuals’ in his excellent ‘Postscript on Societies of Control‘. There is a real sense in which, thought in this way, we are variously rendered separate from and without control of our representations in data.

The Ikea flyer, pictured above, soliciting an email address for a notional inducement of 100 tea lights made me think through the above and back to the excellent Paying Attention conference of 2010, concerning the idea of attention economies. At the conference, and in other contexts, the redoubtable Tim Kindberg formulated his ‘Facebook data provocations‘ – encouraging others to speculate about what would happen if we (the users) charged Facebook for our data. Thinking back over the academic moment of worry over privacy it seems necessary to continue to think about these things. While the horse has bolted and the stable door has long since been the portal to an upmarket barn conversion, I argue that these  questions remain pertinent.

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Reblog> Steve Hinchliffe on the ‘badger politics’ played out on twitter

Over on our nice shiny new website for the Contagion project, the PI, Professor Steve Hinchliffe, has written a timely blogpost concerning the formations and formulations of concerned publics with regard to the 2013 ‘pilot’ cull of badgers in the South West of England.

In the blogpost Steve highlights the social networking analysis being undertaken as a part of the broader Contagion project, through some interesting case studies, to work through how we can understand the data available in relation to particular issues, the tools that can be used to interrogate them, and the theoretical frames we can use to epistemologically anchor and deepen what can be said about these data.

Steve is also writing, in part, in response to a recent presentation/report by the IpsosMORI Social Research Unit, who are engaging in research around ‘social listening’, which focuses on fracking and the badger cull. The social network analysis undertaken by the Contagion project team arguably deepens and nuances the broad brushstrokes of the temporal analysis undertaken by IpsosMORI and highlights the messiness of the ‘modularity’ of the network convened around the topic of concern – the badger cull. As Steve suggests:

…issues are performed or issue-led publics are generated in ways that involve a key role for social media and for twitter in particular.  What we are starting to explore is how those publics are constituted – they aren’t always partisan, they tend to be heterogeneous rather than homogeneous (a standard assumptiion in social network theory is that people of like minds clump together, but this homophilly as it is called, is not so clear cut in public issues – clumping is somewhat conditional on other relations and roles).  Moreover, there are suggestions here of key actors and sub-groups that confound any simple sense that social media simply relays a message – communication is messier than that.  There is a roughness or spatiality to the social.

 

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Morozov on selling personal data

In a piece over on New Republic, Evgeny Morozov (author of To Save Everything Click Here) outlines a version of ‘the attention economy’, in which, because it is mediated through digital media, everything that we do, every way we interact with people, places, services and things becomes an ‘asset class’, and traded in bulk. Ultimately, Morozov’s argument is not dissimilar to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of a ‘generalised proleterianisation‘ insofar as the grammatisation (capturing, storing and sorting as data) of ever-increasing parts of our lives we become subjectivised through systems of calculation at an industrial scale that results in a kind of ‘incapacitation’. As Morozov suggests:

[T]o sell our intimate data in bulk is to fully surrender our quest for autonomy, accepting a life where the most existential choices are shaped either by the forces of the market or by whatever war–be it on climate change or obesity–the government has enlisted us (rather than corporations) to fight. In this world, whether we become vegetarians, and even whether we end up thinking about it, might ultimately hinge on which player (the steakhouses, the supermarkets, the bureaucrats) has the most to gain from this switch. Our data constitutes our very humanity. To voluntarily treat it as an “asset class” is to agree to the fate of an interactive billboard. We shouldn’t unquestionably accept the argument that personal data is just like any other commodity and that most of our digital problems would disappear if only, instead of gigantic data monopolists like Google and Facebook, we had an army of smaller data entrepreneurs. We don’t let people practice their right to autonomy in order to surrender that very right by selling themselves into slavery. Why make an exception for those who want to sell a slice of their intellect and privacy rather than their bodies?

Worth a read anyway, in spite of being a bit dystopian…

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Tweets about Ernesto Laclau

[Amended: 15/04/2014 22:24 to reflect better stats on the links being shared]

As a number of other bloggers have highlighted, and as I noted on Twitter, the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau sadly passed away on the 13th of April. There is an excellent obituary on the publisher Verso’s blog, which is worth reading.

Like, I think, a lot of others I discovered this news on Twitter and, as is the modus operandi of the tweeter, I re-tweeted the tweets through which I discovered the news. I certainly do not intend to trivialise this news, but what is quite interesting about the spread of this sad news is that while the English spread of the news on twitter was largely driven by retweets, a lot of which linked to a story in the English language Buenos Aires Herald, the Spanish spike in tweets was not wholly driven by retweets.

There was, therefore, a muted version of a @BBCBreaking sort of effect in English tweets, in the way that there was for example with the news about the death of Peaches Geldof (again, I’m not seeking to trivialise that news or intervene in the discussions about whether or not there was genuine grief being expressed). So, for a ‘concerned public’ (in this case those who are at least partly familiar with Laclau, his work and the topics it addresses) social media became a conduit and key actor in the movement of the information in different ways.

I ran a quick search on ScraperWiki, from yesterday, that encompasses the relevant dates and used some of the tools we have been developing for the Contagion project to look at the time series of tweets and in particular the movement of the news between Spanish and English. We can see how the initial spike of tweets in Spanish leads the spike in English by approximately an hour (please bare in mind that the Spanish tweets are more numerous by an approximate multiple of ten).

Now, the spike in tweets in English can be mostly, but not quite wholly, attributed to retweets of the link to an English language article posted on the Buenos Aires Herald. Yet, there remains a majority of the tweets in the Spanish spike that are a case of other forms of ‘passing it on‘. Tweets featuring a direct link (some as shortened URLs) to the Buenos Aires Herald article account for over a half (at various moments in the spike) of all English tweets between 8pm and midnight on 13th April, and a few more of these tweets link to Stuart Elden’s blog post that links on to the Buenos Aires Herald.

So, its interesting to see how the combination of an emergent ‘public’ convened around that news and the somewhat phatic interaction of re-tweeting once the movement of easily shared links begins (this is related to what Martin Thayne discussed in a paper about Facebook in the issue of Culture Machine I co-edited with Patrick Crogan). This speaks to what Steve Hinchliffe and I have been trying to get at with the definition of ‘contagion’, inspired by Tony Sampson’s Thrift-ian reading of Tarde, as the ‘movement of movement’ – the sense in which the various intersecting constituents of a public / a network, propagate and in some senses ‘accelerate’ the iteration and mutation, hence difference, in repetition.

Obviously, there’s more to what we do, and, indeed, more to do, in this kind of critical theory-inflected analysis of virality in social media and that’s what I’m busy working out with both Steve and our diligent research fellow Rebecca Sandover, who has recently presented some initial ideas from the project at the AAG (the abstract linked here isn’t quite what was presented but it gives you a flavour!).

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Stiegler on “The Pre-individual Eye”

From a really interesting essay in which Stiegler offers an engagement with aesthetics:

[p. 231]V. The Pre-individual Eye

Manet, facing the rejection of his painting by the academicism of the Sec- ond Empire, said one day: “Their eye will yield” [se fera]. This phrase came back to me one day when I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid–in that great collection of Western painting wherein one of its major traits is brought to view: we see Spanish painting develop between Islamic culture and what would become Flemish painting. At the Prado, we see the eye yield through space and time; we see it open, constitute itself, and deploy itself: we realize that the eye is a milieu.

We see through a milieu. Aristotle called the milieu of vision the di- aphanous. But the diaphanous of the noetic eye is symbolic: over-saturated by history–by a History of the eye–it constitutes what Simondon calls a pre-individual milieu, the pre-individual foundation of vision, which is to say, of the eye that is not in the eye socket, but rather like that which consti- tutes the symbolic process of transindividuation giving us to see the visible as it has never been seen. This trans-formation of the eye–always already projected outside the eye socket just as the tongue in the mouth projects itself between the ears–is called the history of art. And this transformation occurs under organological conditions.

Symbolic milieus must be analyzed along three organological levels. What makes possible the transformation of the retinal eye into a noetic eye is the possibility for the body of the sensitive soul to organize itself and to reach noetic activity by assembling its organs (including its memory and therefore its brain) through inanimate beings such as carved flints, pigments of paint, earth, ash, which thus become organic (I have called this, else- where, the organized inorganic) and form the organs for the transindividuation of the eye as milieu, whose history is also that of art.

[p. 232]

How did the men of Lascaux paint? They transformed matter that they sublimated, and this sublimation is the transindividuation of the eye as the milieu of the visible, of which the history of art is the diachronic display of sediments. Every museum gives us to see this condition of seeing, and at the same time a genealogy of the eye that regards and is regarded–like its paleontology–even while it teaches the eye to see that to which it has yet to open.

This transformation, which is the enlargening of the body by non-living organs that form a noetic and associated milieu, produces organa, artifices, works as well as tools and things (which are all, always, tools in some man- ner).4 These artifices hold together bodies and put them in relation (the first among them is the transitional object discovered by Winnicott) and form along with them, as a linkage pervaded by the energy of the circuits of transindividuation, the symbolic milieu, the milieu wherein appear those symbols constitutive of the human that are works, traces of a passage to action in the noetic world. In this mesotès, which is a symbolic system– to once again appropriate and divert one of Aristotle’s terms–thus appear three organological levels:

the natural organs of the body,
the organs that are artifices (materials, tools, things, works),
the social organizations that give access, by forming social rules that enable the transmission and writing of the history of psychic and collective individuation and transindividuation.

Aesthetics is then the constitution of a milieu, or as James Ash has it an atmosphere, which Stiegler argues is constituted organologically, that is to say it is formulated in forms of technicity which are the mutually constituting ‘extensions’ of the human/technical, in three veins, described above. Furthermore, aesthetics is (per)formed in the actualisation of the potentials that are present in the eye (in combination with what the eye sees), as always already projected beyond the eye socket: the gaze of the artist is contemplative but that contemplation is enabled and nurtured by that which is contemplated and then shared in the medium of expression (oil on canvas and so on):

Our eye does not spontaneously see the noetic [ which is to say intellectual, spiritual, contemplative –sk] milieu it weaves when, seeing by that noetic act that is “to see” for, say, a painter, it brings to sight what it has seen, making visible the very motifs of seeing. [p. 228-229]

In this way, we can read Steigler as arguing that aesthetics fundamentally consists in our processes of being-with, of becoming together – of transindividuation.

Worth a read if you can get a copy”¦ (happy to help 😉

Full reference:

Stiegler, Bernard, 2011 “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”. trans. Arthur, T., in: Khalip, J., Mitchell, R. (Eds.) Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 222-236.

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Three new translations of books by Stiegler in 2014

Amongst the books to look out for this year are three translations of books by Bernard Stiegler.

The first to come out, in February, is an interesting collaborative critique of consumer capitalism by members of the Ars Industrialis association, fronted by Stiegler. In The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, and following the Ars Industrialis manifesto, Stiegler (et al.) argues against the proletarianization of the subject into an unthinking and passive consumer and for the renewal of life skills (savour-vivre) through an ‘industrial populism’.

The second, coming out in April, will be the final volume of the Disbelief and Discredit series, which offers a critique of the effects of the development of industrial technologies on our capacities for rest, considered reflection, leisure, the development of skills and, importantly, care for one another and for society. In the final volume, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, Stiegler advances his argument for a new ‘industrial spirit’ by fostering a ecology that not only looks after the planet but also renews the exploited energies of human desire. This is another excellent translation by Dan Ross for Polity.

The third, coming out in August, is the first volume of the important series: Symbolic Misery. The Hyperindustrial Epoque will be the first appearance of Stiegler’s work concerning aesthetics in an extended format and contains some of his critical work concerning cinema. In particular, Stiegler advances his critical articulation of cinema as the industrial temporal object in order to argue that it is the aesthetic experience that can combat the creeping conditioning of experience on its own territory. Again, Dan Ross brings his detailed knowledge of Stiegler’s oeuvre to provide a valuable and timely translation.

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Bernard Stiegler [video] – Digital Studies as an organology of the mind

Bernard Stiegler recently gave a talk at the Institute for Digital Media Culture and Aesthetics  (ICAM) at Leuphana furthering his exploration of the idea of Digital Studies. Stiegler provides some really nice discussion of his reading of phenomenology, in particular his advancement of Husserl’s scheme of retention/protention. He moves on to (broadly) reiterate some of the key parts of his argument in Taking Care.

In the introduction to Stiegler’s talk, Goetz Bachmann offers some interesting observations and context to Stiegler’s work, which is nice. Bachmann was one of the members of the Goldsmiths Cultural Studies team that has hosted annual Stiegler’s Professorial seminars there.

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The New Circulations of Culture – David Beer

Over on his blog Thinking Culture, David Beer has highlighted his recently published essay on Berfois concerning what he has called ‘the new circulations of culture’:

My short article ‘The New Circulations of Culture’ has just been published in Berfrois. It’s a piece about the way that data circulations and new media infrastrcutures are reconfiguring culture (based upon my recent book).

In the essay David offers some key points on which to focus when considering the increasing mediation of everyday life through contemporary social and spatial media. These points echo many of the issues that have arisen in broader debates being convened as ‘software studies‘ (not least in Kitchin and Dodge’s Code/space) and critical engagements with digital mediation in the guise of ‘the attention economy‘. This paragraph is particularly valuable:

First, we need to generate a greater understanding of how algorithms filter data, and shape cultural encounters. Predictive recommendation systems are a common feature of cultural consumption, but we have little understanding of the algorithms that shape the recommendations these systems make. Nor do we have much of a sense of how these recommendations shape cultural encounters and the formation of tastes and preferences. Second, there is a need to get a greater understanding of the way that people are now playing with data. Playing with data is an increasingly common part of cultural participation. APIs are frequently made available to enable these data playgrounds to operate. Indeed, there is even an emergent culture of visualization with individuals using available data resources to create visualizations. Alongside this, data aggregators allow for real-time insights into cultural trends – allowing us to see what is ‘trending’, ‘buzzing’ or ‘hot’ at that moment. Finally, we also need to think of the way that the body might be implicated by circulations of data. It would be too easy to get carried away with the power of new devices and new software, but we need to give more attention to the ways in which these devices and data circulations are incorporated into bodily routines.

This makes a compelling case for Stiegler’s argument that we should be engaging in what he calls ‘digital studies‘ as a matter of urgency.

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Facial tracking to be built into screen-based advertising in the UK

For those with an interest in such things, this has been a long time coming. The company Quividi, who have been hawking their facial tracking system for a little while now, have teamed up with Amscreen, the owner of a network of advertising screens in convenience stores, petrol stations etc, to measure, in real-time, the attention paid to adverts screened in particular places. The problematic of the ‘attention economy‘, or the commodification of our capacity for attention within particular settings–mostly online, is being brought into more everyday settings as so-called ‘smart’ technologies become smaller and cheaper.

Here’s the thinly veiled sales pitch the BBC ‘Click’ programme were only too happy to share:

Which contains a lot of the footage Amscreen have filmed themselves for their own corporate video celebrating this new venture. Here’s Quividi’s own video explaining (and selling) how their technology works:

In the UK, already a highly surveilled country, there may be little reaction other than a shrug of the shoulders. However, should one wish to counter this kind of technology there have already been some nice experiments with forms of camouflage. Probably the best known example is the CV Dazzle project by Adam Harvey (for a Masters project in the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Programme). It would be entertaining if this became a sort of avant-garde fashion for make up…

CV Dazzle, facial recognition camouflage