mejias networked proximity

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The frank abolition of all distances brings no nearness... Everything gets lumpedtogether into uniform distancelessness. Heidegger: Poetry, language, thought.

Ulises A. Mejas

Photo: Hobvias Sudoneighm, http://flickr.com/photos/striatic/271100458

2006, Creative Commons


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ABSTRACT

NETWORKED PROXIMITY: ICTS AND THE MEDIATION OF NEARNESS

Ulises Ali Mejias

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored

metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is

transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model

for organizing them. The large-scale adoption of information and communication

technologies is producing new architectures of networked participation in which the

social subject becomes a decentralized node, unbound by location or physical space.

Nearness (in terms of social proximity) acquires a new significance, since the distance

between two nodesregardless of their physical locationis practically zero, while the

distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Thus,

physical proximity is replaced by informational availability as the basis for experiencing

social nearness, resulting in a form of networked proximity characterized simultaneously

by a sense of renewed connectedness to the local (hyperlocality), and a sense of

distancelessness that makes any point in the network readily accessible. Hence,

critiques of networked sociality need to account for the fact that the network is neither

anti-social nor anti-local: it thrives on making social connections, and is indifferent to

where nodes are located in relation to the social subject (physically near or far). Instead,

critiques need to focus on the epistemological exclusivity engendered by the fact that

nodes are only capable of recognizing other nodes. In other words, the network imposes


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a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the

network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a

paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can

acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to

the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that

prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality. In this context, the

paranodalthe space between nodesbecomes an important site for disidentification

from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of networked sociality and

providing alternative models of social engagement.


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NETWORKED PROXIMITY: ICTS AND THE MEDIATION OF NEARNESS

by

Ulises Ali Mejias

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Robert O. McClintock, Sponsor

Professor Hugh F. Cline

Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education

Date___________________________

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in

Teachers College, Columbia University

2007


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Acknowledgements

Deleuze observed that "We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the

border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into

the other" (1968, p. xxi). If through the writing of this dissertation I managed to explore

some of those frontiers, it was only through the opportunity granted to me by God and

the help and support of a number of people without whom this process of inquiry and

growth would not have been possible. I feel fortunate to have been the vector on which

so much experience, inspiration and love converged.

To begin, I could not have asked for a better environment to undertake this work

than the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education program at Teachers

College, Columbia University. In particular, professors Robert McClintock and Hugh

Cline provided thoughtful feedback, kind encouragement, and institutional support.

Additionally, faculty examiners Frank Moretti and Charles Kinzer contributed valuable

insights during the dissertation defense. I am truly and deeply thankful to all of them.

At a broader level, I feel this work is really the outcome of a great collaborative

effort involving colleagues (from my as well as other institutions), as well as online and

onsite friends and acquaintances from all over the world. I am thankful to those who read

the dissertation drafts I posted on my blog, commented on them, or merely linked to

them because they thought they were interesting. Given what I learned from the process


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of maintaining a blog during my graduate studies, I highly recommend the practice to

anyone embarking on a similar journey.

This dissertation is likewise the product of the endless and unconditional support

of family and close friends, foremost amongst them Gil Harris and Madhavi Menon, who

have always inspired me intellectually and as a human being. It is impossible to name

everyone else who deserves mention here, but my heartfelt thanks goes to all the people

who encouraged me.

My friend Lisa Dundon, an expert editor of the written word who volunteered to

proofread this dissertation, deserves a special note of gratitude. She patiently made

small but precise corrections that made this work easier to read. Of course, all remaining

errors in this work are my own.

I am particularly indebted to my parents, Manuel de Jesus Meja Zepeda and

Elizabeth Margarita Butrn de Mejas, for always believing in me, for taking my

education as a very serious responsibility, and for instilling in me an inexhaustible love of

learning, combining a systematic curiosity for how the world works (Dad, the engineer)

and a sense of wonderment towards its mysteries (Mom, the artist). This work is

dedicated to them as well as to the future embodied in my young nieces: Ana Elena, Ilse

and Abril.

Finally and most importantly, there are no words to express the gratitude I feel

towards my beautiful wife, Asma. My sense of what it means to be a scholar has been

deeply shaped by who she is and how she approaches her work and life. As a

committed intellectual, she has shown me the importance of providing a critical voice. As

a person of unfailing integrity, she has taught me that critique must always begin with

oneself. And as someone having gone through the doctoral process, she was able to

understand and patiently endure my self-absorption, albeit only to a degree: I am


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fortunate that all these years she continued to assert the need to enjoy our togetherness.

She has provided me with the very definition of nearness and shown me the sublime

appeal of the paranodal, of what lies beyond what we take for granted. In no small

measure, my work was made possible by her love.

-UAM


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ iiiTable of Contents........................................................................................................... viIDistancelessness v. Hyperlocality ...............................................................................1II--Networks as Metaphors and Models ...........................................................................8III--Agency in the Network .............................................................................................21IV--The Social Agency of Code .....................................................................................31V--The Networked Public Sphere ..................................................................................38VI--Networks and Social Change...................................................................................47VII--The Local as Paralogy ............................................................................................55VIII--Virtuality and the Near ...........................................................................................65IX--Nodes and the Terror of Becoming..........................................................................78X--Desire and Sociality..................................................................................................90XI--Networked Proximity: A Research Agenda ............................................................105XII--Conclusions..........................................................................................................121Bibliography ................................................................................................................125


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IDistancelessness v. Hyperlocality

Harish lives in Chennai, India. He works for a company that has outsourced most

of its operations to the Subcontinent. The companys clients are located in the U.S.,

while those who provide them with services, like Harish, are in India. His daily routine is

not atypical for someone in similar circumstances. After spending the day training new

recruits, the other part of his job begins:

At seven-thirty in the evening, when its 9 a.m. in New York, he confers with theAmerican banking clients for whom he tailors his training, to insure that he is

emphasizing the right skills. And then he turns to a slew of computer-programming

challenges that may show management his greater gifts. He often goes home aftermidnight. (Boo, 2004, 40)

Harishs rhythm of life has to accommodate two environments: Chennai and New

York. Both environments can be said to be equally relevant to Harish, and thanks to

information and communication technologies (any electronic-based technology used to

process, store, transmit and retrieve information; known also by the initialism ICT), both

can be said to feel equally immediate or real to him. However, the co-existence of these

two geographic spaces does not come without tensions. Harish worries that what feels

nearto him is becoming increasingly disembodied, detached from his immediate

surroundings: "Already, we are half of the time in New York, just our bodies are left

behind... I worry that nowadays anything near us seems unimportant, while anything we

cant see becomes larger than life" (Boo, 2004, 65). Harishs participation in these


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intersecting networks shapes his perception of social belonging, making it more

conceptual and less determined by geographic location:

Lately, he considered community less a function of roads and roofs and tea shops

than of imagination. Even the solid presence of his grandmother could dematerializeat the late-night ring of his cell phone, the urgent summons of American clients. Andwhile his parents rolled their eyes at the constant needs of the world beyond Chennai,Harish saw the calls as tidings of cultural integration... (Boo, 2004, 59 )

Detachment from one kind of nearness (immediate environment) is accompanied by

attachment to another kind (mediated environment), and Harish attempts to integrate the

benefits of one form while not letting go of what is important for him to retain of the other.

Eliot (a bloggers pseudonym) lives in Charlottesville, United States. She is a

professional Web site designer, and one of her leisure activities is to co-author a blog

called Red Inked (www.redinked.com). ICTs have fundamentally redefined her

relationship to the near, also, but in a different way than it has for Harish. Commenting

on the fear that the Internet replaces face-to-face with mediated interaction, that it makes

distant people and places accessed via the Internet more important than ones

immediate surroundings, and that it foments anti-social habits, she writes:

Im not chatting with people in New Delhi; nor am I stuck at the computer, turning

pale and cutting my wrist to Emo music. Because of the following lists, all on YahooGroups, Ive gotten connected to and made friends with people in my localgeographical area I would not have otherwise met. (Eliot, 2006, 9)

She then lists online discussion groups related to recycling, church activities, and

networking with working moms. Instead of severing her connections to the near, ICTs

have augmented Eliots links to what is socially proximal:

So, my very busy social life, my identity with the town in which I live, and my sense

of community all have been enhanced if not completely created through theweaving of various strands of the web. I have made more linkages and ties to thepeople in my immediate vicinity than I ever have done in my whole life... (Eliot, 2006,

16)


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Of course, Harish and Eliot areliterally and figurativelythousands of kilometers

apart. It would take a lengthy study to discuss the differences between these two cases

and their significance. One could start by considering the history and present position in

the worlds economy of India and the U.S., and the particular effect that globalization has

had in each location. One could then go on to discuss Eliots and Harishs social class,

cultural background, gender, family structures, professional and personal goals, etc. All

this information would perhaps eventually help us understand what accounts for the

distinct ways in which ICTs are being adopted and adapted in each case. We might look

at Harishs case and derive the following generalization: the spatially near is becoming

irrelevant to us, and ICTs are to blame. But then Eliots case would prevent us from

making such broad accusations. We would realize that we also need to take into account

the way our use of these technologies engenders new types of nearness or social

relevancy within our immediate surroundings, and how this can contribute to new

understandings of the world.

One thing is certain: it is not possible to argue that new media leave our sense of

relevancy, our sense of what is near and far, untouched. As Silverstone (1999) argues:

"This dialectic of distance and closeness, of familiarity and strangeness, is the crucial

articulation of the late-modern world, and is a dialectic in which the media are crucially

implicated" (p. 151). And yet, there is anything but certainty about the values that are

emerging from this process.We are familiar by now with arguments from both sides:

those that praise the new social relevancy that ICTs give to the spatially far (the death of

distance arguments), and those that critique the loss of social relevancy that ICTs effect

on the spatially near (the devaluation of the local arguments). Through technological

mediation, ICTs make it possible to increase our social inclusivitybeyond the normal

reach of what our bodies and senses allow. But as the cases of Eliot and Harish


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suggest, different circumstances can yield qualitatively different results when the kind of

mediation that ICTs apply to the spatially far is applied to the spatially near. In some

cases, that mediation might engender a decreased relevancy of what is spatially near (a

form of social exclusivity), and in others it might engender an increased alignment to it (a

form of social inclusivity).

Thus, ICTs are reshaping the social realities of those who use them, redefining

what counts as proximal or relevant. Nevertheless, it would be premature to conclude

that people are less socially inclined or have fewer social needs than before. People

continue to fulfill their social desires, but they do so through new communicative

practices, through new mediations of their social realities. As suggested in the examples

above, one important aspect of these new mediations is that the notion of the near as

what is spatiallyproximal is being remodeled into a notion of the near as what is socially

proximalwhat we feel is relevant to us socially, regardless of whether it is spatially

near or far. For people on the privileged side of the digital divide, the near is no longer

bound by space, but instead is something that is constructed through our participation in

ICT-enabled networks. These networks are not anti-social, but highly social. They do not

necessarily attempt to do away with the spatially near, the local, but in fact promise us a

renewed relationship with it (in addition to new relationships with the spatially far, or the

global).

But what are the implications of re-approaching the local through the same

mediated distancelessness that networks afford, and what new forms of being and social

participation are engendered in the process? The purpose of the present study is to

suggest a framework for understanding the emerging social formations of the digital age

through this new form of networked proximity, of nearness mediated through ICTs. This

work begins, in chapter 2, with a critique of the network as favored metaphor for


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explainingand model for organizingsocial formations enabled by ICTs. The thesis is

that while networks are extremely efficient at establishing relations between nodes

(nodocentrism), they exclude knowledge ofand prevent participation inanything that

is not a node or cannot be incorporated into the network (the paranodal). This is not

exclusively a function of the design of the network, the affordances of the technologies

used to build the network, or the motivation of the participants. Rather, it is a function of

the combination of all three.

The question of who acts in a network is dealt with in chapter 3. The three major

theories of technosocial agency (Realism, Social Constructivism, and Hybrid

Constructivism) are discussed in the context of how social nearness is defined in terms

of the network, and the inherent tensions in attempting to use networked proximity as a

means to re-approach or re-encounter the local.

What rules does technology establish for participating in networks? The agency of

the code that drives Social Media (ICTs that facilitate collaboration, exchange, or group

organizing; examples include blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking systems) is explored

in more detail in chapter 4. This agency is more complex and represents more

sophisticated models of shared control than previous forms of delegation. The relevancy

or nearness that Social Media code facilitates is explored in this section in terms of an

object-oriented form of sociality: individuals interacting indirectly through a digital object,

the meaning of their collectivity understood only through the aggregation of individual

acts.Some of the implications of this process are discussed in chapter 5 in the context

of the debate surrounding the impact of Social Media in developing a networked public

sphere.

We must take seriously the charges that networked interaction promotes the

commodification of sociality (taking things that are not part of the economy and making


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them available in the market) and reduces human interaction to a self-interested

exchange of information. However, chapter 6 re-evaluates the potential of networked

ICTs to be used in authentic opportunities for acting outside prevailing systems of

authority and driving social change. But while this potential might exist latently in the

affordances of the technology, the argument is made in chapter 7 that only by

incorporating the paranodal, the space beyond the nodes of a network, can we think and

act outside the approved parameters of the system.

This requires an altogether different understanding of the relationship between

reality, virtuality, and actuality, which is proposed in chapter 8. Early attempts to make

sense of emerging online social formations conceived of virtuality as a space detached

from the local, and this alternate reality was endowed with a social relevancy of its own.

With the advent of Social Media, however, the distinction between online and onsite

realms of reality is becoming less important, as it is now evident that action can involve

and encompass the two realms. Using the work of Gilles Deleuze, a definition of the

virtual is presented that can help us situate the near within networked sociality, in the

paranodal. This is contingent, however, on whether we manage to avoid the insecurities

related to the erasure of the self that nodocentrism perpetuates, as is argued in chapter

9.

Contrary to common critiques of networked sociality, the virtual does not

undermine the social, and the ways in which virtuality can be a productive component of

the social is discussed in chapter 10. Here, desire (as articulated in the philosophy of

Deleuze and Guattari) is presented as the force that can help us engage the paranodal

and embrace the virtuality of social relations. Unfortunately, current applications of the

network model obstruct the paranodal and commodify social desire. Thus, the last part

of this work, chapter 11, proposes a research agenda for better understanding


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networked proximity and the pro-social forms of engagement with the paranodal it can

afford. This section will also suggest ways in which the paranodal can inform the design

of networks and guide our participation in them.


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II--Networks as Metaphors and Models

Networks have become a powerful metaphor for explaining the social realities of

our times. A network, defined minimally, is a system of interconnected elements or

nodes, where each node represents an intersection of flows within the network.

Everywhere we look there are attempts to explain all kinds of social formations in terms

of networks: citizen networks, corporate networks, gamer networks, terrorist networks,

learning networks, networks of production, networks of distribution, and so on. The

metaphor of the network can be superimposed over just about any form of multiplicity,

including non-social forms (for instance, cells in the brain can be described in terms of a

network). For the purposes of this study, however, every reference to networks, unless

otherwise specified, is meant to allude to technosocial assemblages in which ICTs

facilitate social relations between humans unconstrained by the physical distance

between them. If cognitive science attempted to explain individual consciousness by

adopting the metaphor of the brain as a computer, with its inputs and outputs, social

science is extending the metaphor a step further by attempting to explain the social in

terms of networksor, in this context, sets of interconnected computers/brains.

Cybernetic technologies and the structures they engender have greatly influenced

not only how we imagine the individual and the social, but how we order and organize

them. In fact, we can retroactively trace the development of society in terms of

increasingly complex networks. Let us begin by framing the evolution of society in terms


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of the relationship between nature and culture (cf. Castells, 2000). If we make certain

linear and Eurocentric allowances, we could say that for most of humanitys history

nature dominated culture. Wellman (2002) describes the networks necessary for survival

at that time as densely-knit and location-specific. Later, with the advent of the Industrial

Revolution (to put a date to it) culture begins to dominate nature. We begin to see more

sparsely-knit but still location-specific networks, which eventually give way to glocalized

networks (global and local at the same time). The cityconnected to other cities and

non-urban spacesis a prime example of this glocalized kind of network. It is with the

development of modern communication and transportation technologies that

accompanied the evolution of the city, Wellman suggests, that we begin to see social

ties distributed across space, and not primarily determined by spatial proximity. In cities,

individuals arent required to form social links with neighborsthey can use

transportation technologies to go see friends in another neighborhoods, or

communication technologies to get in touch with relatives in other cities.

Following the domination of nature by culture, we enter a purely cultural pattern of

social interaction and social organization (Castells, 2000, p. 508). Social formations are

unconstrained by any natural elements such as space, and are constituted not by co-

location, not even by the distributed (but still location-bound) ties of glocalized networks,

but by the free and instantaneous flow of information within the network. These networks

are loosely knit (flexible and dynamic) and unbound to any specific physical space; the

flow of information is determined not by the landscape, but by individual interests, giving

rise to what Wellman calls networked individualism: "people remain connected, but as

individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household"

(Wellman, 2002, p. 5). Information becomes the social glue that allows networks to

transcend distance. Thanks to ICTs, it can flow between any two nodes, regardless of


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whether they are spatially proximal or not. According to Castells (2000, p. 508), this is

why information is the key ingredient of our social organization and why flows of

messages and images between networks constitute the basic thread of our social

structure. This also explains why ICTs have become such an important component of

sociality in the digital age: they are the carriers of information in the networks, the

backbone that gives them shape. Networked sociality can thus be said to represent the

next step in the evolution of urban societies,

which have tended more and more to an indifference towards the physical place

and also evolved to links of interest with other people regardless of where they are.

According to this picture of the evolution in community building and human

relationships within communities, todays tendency in the Western world is towardsloosely-bounded and fragmentary ties. Rather than having to blend into the same

group as those who are around them, each person has his or her own personalcommunity inside a grid of networked individualism. (Yus, 2005, p. 6)

Our age is indeed characterized by the internal contradictions and tensions in what

would be otherwise dismissed as mere oxymorons: networked individualism personal

communities These concepts describe social scenarios in which the individual can be

simultaneously connected to communities of unprecedented size and scope, while

remaining in physical isolation from them and/or in complete control of the terms of

engagement. But does this level of individual control negate the very essence of

community? Do communities which revolve so completely around the needs and

interests of the individual lose their meaning? Silverstone (2003) offered a critique of

these forms of sociality on the grounds of what he saw as a bias towards narcissistic

individualism: the idea of the personal community is possibly, perhaps, the ultimate

step: an appropriately postmodern narcissistic move in which community becomes

conceptually and empirically, and without irony or reflexivity, both a projection and

extension of the self (p. 20).


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A defining characteristic of this networked individuality is the overcoming of

physical space, which involves a paradigmatic shift to our notion of distance. The

networks indifference towards space has led many to announcesometimes with glee,

sometimes with regretthe death of distance. But networked sociality reconfigures

distance rather than eliminating it. As Borgmann points out: "Information technology in

particular does not so much bring near what is far as it cancels the metric of time and

space" (2000, p. 98). Nearness comes to be defined in terms of inclusion in the network,

and farness in terms of exclusion:

The topology defined by networks determines that the distance (or intensity and

frequency of interaction) between two points (or social positions) is shorter (or morefrequent, or more intense) if both points are nodes in a network than if they do not

belong to the same network. On the other hand, within a given network, flows haveno distance, or the same distance, between nodes. Thus, distance (physical, social,

economic, political, cultural) for a given point or position varies between zero (for any

node in the same network) and infinite (for any point external to the network).(Castells, 2000, p. 501)

When nearness is defined in terms of zero distance within the network and farness in

terms of infinite distance outside it, what we have is a shift from physical proximity to

informational availability as the principal measure of social relevance.

A central question to my argument is: What kind of social significance does the

local acquire under this redefinition of the near? Surely, the body and its surroundings

cannot simply vanish, even in the spacelessness of the network. As Latour (1993) points

out, a network remains local at every node, and the body is the node where the network

becomes locally situated (and is what remains after the network has been shut off). Even

the most immersive VR (Virtual Reality) simulation requires the physicality of the body as

interfacea body that remains attached to a material environment from which it derives

its sustenance. But although it is not possible to completely disentangle the body from

the social forces exerted on it by the local, its true that physical closeness does not


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mean social closeness (Yus, 2005, p. 8). In other words, we are capable of denying the

local a particular social significance, and of pretending that something nearby is not

socially relevant to us. This is what happens when nearness comes to be defined in

terms of informational availability and network inclusion, not physical proximity: the local

acquires social significance only to the extent that it can be situated within the network,

and only aspects of the local that are translated into the code of network acquire social

relevancy. Rather than lamenting this shift, venerating the local qua physical proximity

and blaming ICTs for undermining it, we need new ways of accounting for the social

influence that the local continues to exert on the networked body, of asking how the

virtuality of the network is inscribed over the actuality of the local. Asking this is

important because there are more and less sustainable approaches to actualizing

networked proximity.

As illustrated in the Harish and Eliot examples above, the mediation that networks

effect on our immediate surroundings can be interpreted in both positive (pro-social) and

negative (anti-social) ways. On the negative side, one could argue that the more the

local is mediated by the network, the more irrelevant it appearshence the numerous

warnings against the obsolescence of location-specific forms of sociality. The fear is that

authentic community (defined in location-specific terms) will be lost, and that networked

sociality will substitute the real with the virtual (more on this later). A more positive

interpretation would argue that networked proximity facilitates new kinds of spatially

unbound community, and that these emerging forms of sociality are equally or more

meaningful than the older ones. Community is thus liberated, unhinged from space,

and can be maintained regardless of distance. Furthermore, since this zero distance

applies to all nodes within the network, and some of those nodes canif we wishbe

part of our immediate surroundings, networked proximity can also encompass the local,


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increasing our engagement with the spatially near. As in Eliots case, networked

proximity can facilitate initial engagements with our surroundings which can then be

developed as meaningful relationships (presumably without much intervention from

ICTs). It is the best of both worlds, so to speak: what was once far can now be near, and

what is near can be reapproachedthrough the network. Nearness, in other words,

encompasses not only new forms of global awareness, but rediscovered local

solidarities as well.

But even if we take this benign interpretation of networked sociality at face value,

and put to rest some of the concerns about how mediated forms of nearness are bound

to destroy location-based community, there is still a lot about this new form of nearness,

this networked proximity, that we need to understand. As I have already suggested, the

social meaning of the local undergoes a significant transformation in the network.

Reapproaching the local thorough the network is not simply a case of arriving right back

at where we started after a process of dislocation and re-location. It's not simply

reaching our nose around the back of our head. The mediated near that the network

delivers is a slightly different near, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This is

something that deserves to be explored a bit more.

Basically, nearness in a network is constituted on the basis of nodes recognizing

other nodes, i.e., a node can only acknowledge and recognize other nodes. If I am part

of a network, the local is visible and available to me only if it assumes the role of a node

in the same network. In other words, social reality is mediated through a nodocentric

filter, and since the distance between me and something that is not in the network isfor

all practical purposesinfinite, only elements in the immediate surroundings that enter

my network are rendered as near. This explains why someone in my vicinity who wants

to communicate with me while I am online may opt to send me an email or IM instead of


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having to cross the great distance between non-intersecting networks. The field of

pervasive or ubiquitous computing is precisely devoted to figuring out how to incorporate

elements and events outside the network into the network, so that they might be

perceived as being near. The assumption is that everything is a potential node and can

be added to the network.

The fact that nodes can only acknowledge other nodes makes them neither anti-

social (they thrive in forming links to other nodes) nor anti-local (they can link to other

nodes in their immediate surrounding just as easily as they can link to non-local nodes).

However, a network by definition must privilege nodes and discriminate against the

space between them. Keeping in mind that the network is a metaphor, not a map, the

space between the nodes represents what is invisible and extraneous to the nodesthe

far, the Other. Instituting a nodocentrisman exclusive concern for the nodesthe

network does not allow the nodes to touch directly, to share boundaries: they must be

surrounded by space, which gives them their individuality. No matter how many nodes

we add to the network, we will not be able to completely fill thatparanodalspace.

The term paranode is used in neuroscience to define a very specific type of

cellular structure that, while not part of the neuron itself, plays an important role in

excitatory signal transduction. Here, I am using the term paranodal to refer to what

surrounds the isolated nodes of a social network, what borders and abuts the nodes

while not being considered part of the network, but which nonetheless plays an

important role in actualizing the sociality of the network (as we will see). The paranodal

negatively defines the network just as neighborhoods negatively define the system of

roads and highways that traverse them. One networks paranodal space might be

populated with other parallel networks, but the only way for two networks to intersect is

through their nodes, not through the dark space between nodes. As far as the network


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is concerned, the paranodal exists only to be bypassed or collapsed in the act of

reducing the distance between two nodes to zero.

What does it mean for paranodal space to be collapsed by the network? Lets

return to the example of the highways that connect two locations by allowing the

commuter to bypass the neighborhoods between them. Those neighborhoods may be

locations in other networks, but from the perspective of the two nodes being connected,

they do not matter, except as space that must be overcome. The privileging of nodes

means that one can have all the interlinking of nodes one wants, both at a local and

global level, but one must remain within the network; one must adopt the network's rules

of what constitutes a node and how links between nodes are to be established.

The paranodal is admittedly an elusive concept, but we must resist the initial urge

to simply name or locate it in relation to the network. Providing examples of the

paranodal too readily becomes part of a nodocentric compulsion. If we pose the

question: What is not part of the network? and answer X is not part of the network, we

end up somehow linking X to the network, making it a potential node. But the point of

studying the paranodal is not simply to locate and identify what is outside the network to

bring it inside the network (that is the domain of nodocentric disciplines such as

pervasive computing). Rather, the point of studying the paranodal is to uncover the

politics of inclusion and exclusion encoded in the network. An example might help clarify

this point. We can think of a canona collection of works considered essential or

fundamental to a fieldas a network. Each book is a node which exists in relation to

other works, and often contains links or references to them. The paranodal in this

instance would be the other worksnot considered part of the canonwhich

nonetheless inform it. Why were they left out? Who decides what constitutes the canon,

and through what processes? What politics informed the decisions of inclusion and


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exclusion? Insights into the paranodal would help us question, for instance, why Galileo

is part of a canon but not al-Baruni, a Muslim astronomer who theorized that the Earth

rotates on its own axis five hundred years before Galileo.

In short, the purpose of the paranodal is to help us see the ways in which the

network is an episteme, a way of understanding and interpreting the world, a model for

organizing reality. In this nodocentric episteme, nearnessdefined in terms of social

relevancyis a function of the economics of the network. Nodes recognize other nodes

in terms of the potential value they hold; the space between nodes is populated by

things which hold no value, and which remain invisible until some form of value can be

identified in them. According to Vandenberghes (2002) humanist (and humorously

mocking) critique, the scientific application of the network metaphor to explain social

realities reduces interaction to causality, to economic exchange governed purely by self-

interest:

Being-in-the-world among humans and non humans is systematically displacedby a formal, atomistic, intellectualistic and pseudo-economic analysis of the vulgarinterests of humans who link up with other humans and non humans, translating their

interests in a reciprocal exploitation of each others activity for the satisfaction of thepersonal interests of each of the parties involved. Humans are thus no longer seen asco-operative ants, but as egoistic r.a.t.s i.e. as rational action theorists who behave

like centres of calculation, strategically associating and dissociating humans and nonhumans alike, pursuing their own political ends by economic means. Conclusion:when science enters in action, meaningful action disappears and all we are left with is

a pasteurized and desymbolized world of strategically acting dehumanized humans,

or humants. (p. 55)

When self-interest becomes the only measure of social value, "the economy is no

longer embedded in the society... society is embedded in the economy" (Vandenberghe,

2002, p. 58). Since social relevancy in the network is a function of informational

availability, we could say that in this economy social transactions are informational

transactions conducted exclusively on the basis of self-interest. To put it bluntly,

shoppingor consuming information that benefits me as a nodegets redefined and


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reified as the last frontier of public activity, of social participation. In other words,

shopping becomes the means of actualizing a social identity; the informational

transactions that unfold in the network become the essential building blocks of

personhood. Or as Misik writes: in lifestyle or cultural capitalism, in which commodities

differ far less with respect to their practical utility value and far more with respect to their

cultural features, shopping is simply the way to purchase an identity (2007, pp.1-2).

Nodes purchase their identity through the information they exchange. Of course, all

economic transactions are social, but what is interesting in this case is the degree to

which the social is circumscribed entirely by economic demands. It is interesting to note

the similarities between the institutionalization of the network as a privatized public

space and the dynamics Misik describes with regard to the shopping mall:

In the mall, one can simulate normal social life around the commodityform, to

which the place owes its existence in the first place... The experiences offered for

consumption must be reconcilable with the images of the brands represented and

with the image of the mall as brand zone. The mall, then, is a pseudopublic space or

a gigantic private space. It is a private space because it is privately owned and is only

the backdrop of the social, although in all practical respects, of course, it is a publicspace. (Misik, p.3)

We can think of online social networks as privately owned spaces in which social

practices unfold according to certain rules which, although perhaps invisible to nodes,

reflect the demands of an economy based on private ownership. Networks are not like

shopping malls in the sense that all we do in them is shop (although thats a large part of

it); networks are like shopping malls in the sense that all socializing happens in a

privatized space. We could say, then, that networks model subjectivation (how the self or

subject becomes what it is) according to the principles of capitalism. As Lazzarato

(2006) reminds us, capitalism is not so much a mode of production as it is a machine of

subjectivation, and the network can be seen as a machine for modeling subjects whose


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social practices unfold within the boundaries of an economy based on private ownership

and self interest.

In what specific ways does the self-interest of nodes shape networked sociality?

Essentially, it makes social interaction based on anything but equal exchange practically

impossible. Although this might sounds extremely egalitarian, there are instances when

quid pro quo might not be the best approach to sociality. As Silverstone (2006) suggests,

morality might sometimes need to be grounded on an asymmetry of social relations, on

the recognition that an action (such as charity) need not be returned in kind. While

discussing Silverstones theory ofunconditional responsibilityin the context of mediated

social realities (of which online social networks would be an example), Orgad (2007)

asks: Can a communicative space, which is fundamentally, if not exclusively, based on

reciprocal relationships, be welcoming to those who may not be able to engage in

exchange? Can it foster responsibility to the distant other, if she does not return in kind

what has been given to her? (p. 37) To use my own terminology, the distant otherwould

be the paranodal: distant not so much physically but because it is not part of the

network, and incapable or unwilling to engage nodes in equal exchange.

The impact of an economy of self-interest on networked sociality can also be

explained by making a comparison between gift exchange and the exchange of

commodities (commodities are things that can be bought or sold in the market).

Jonathan Lethem (2007) writes: The cardinal difference between gift and commodity

exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale

of a commodity leaves no necessary connection (39). I would argue that exchanges

between nodes are market-driven, and do not establish an authentic bond between

people, because the gift-giver is alienated or isolated from the gift-receiver. This is true

of other forms of altruism, of course (I can do something for the good of my community


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in general, not for the good of an individual in particular). But networks act as single-

point mediators or gatekeepers in all exchanges. As a result, the only bond created is

that between the isolated individual and the network. Individuals keep the network

running through participation, and the network converts this participation into a

commodity which it can offer to other individuals in exchange fortheirparticipation. But

the network must ensure that the individuals remain isolated: if individuals can exchange

gifts with each other directly, then they stop needing the network.

This does not mean that gifts are impossible in the network. The interesting thing

is that nodes can operate simultaneously in a gift and a market economy. After all, isn't

the Wikipedia editor or the Creative Commons contributor offering a gift, not a

commodity? Don't Open Source or Open Content projects operate outside the market?

Indeed, they do (more on these leakages later). But the point is that networks

subordinate gifts to the marketand the social to the economicby making it possible

to quantify (and expect) reciprocity. Even if a node expects nothing in return from other

nodes, it can expect something in return from the network (in the form of increased

popularity or incoming links, for instance).

In essence, while nodes are part of vast collectives, the goals of a node are

entirely individual. Networks remove the inconvenience of having to negotiate shared

interests by making it possible for individuals to cooperate without having to collaborate

(as Scholz, 2006, points out, cooperation makes it possible for individuals to retain their

personal goals and account for gain or loss individually, in contrast to collaboration

where the group must account for gain or loss as a whole). All the individual has to do,

then, is to participate in the network by being and acting like a self-interested individual.

The network does the rest through search, aggregation, and matching, without requiring

that nodes modify their goals in any way. The social becomes subordinate to the


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economic in this process because, by giving primacy to self-interest, the network

reduces social exchange to the exchange of commodities that fulfill our self-interest. And

whereas before the local impinged on nearness by exerting a certain degree of influence

that could oppose or curb our self-interest, now the local can be conveniently filtered out

(transformed into the hyperlocal), giving self-interest free reign to operate. Without the

influence of the local, nearness or relevancy is completely determined by the availability

of information within the network. Therefore, it would seem that ICTs assume an

important role in determining what kind of social interaction is possible within networks.

However, as Munster and Lovink (2005) remind us, there should be limits to our

reification of networks and the allocation of social agency to technologies:

Networks are not models to be transposed from one social or political situation or

conflagration to another. It is certainly the case that technology provokes networking.

But then this provocation is not the be all and end all of the network We need amore complex conception of the network sociality than the concept of "socialsoftware" that is currently attached to descriptions of networks of friends or lovers in

an online dating database. We need a more complex understanding of the visual

plane of information than the pictorial map of the network. Networks are not gluedtogether by software and software does not make us social. (10, 18)

In what specific ways, then, does technology participate in the construction of

networked sociality? Is the agency of technology, i ts capacity to act, in alignment or in

conflict with sociality?


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III--Agency in the Network

One of the questions in the study The Future of the Internet II, conducted by the

Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006), concerned the potential threat of

autonomous technology, or technology that is capable of acting on its own. The scenario

described in the question suggested that by year 2020, intelligent agents will dispense

with direct human input, and that as a result technology will acquire autonomy, moving

beyond our control and generating irreversible dangers and dependencies. Forty two

percent of the participating experts agreed with the statement, which suggests there is a

real fear that we are nearing a point where technologys agency will match or

overshadow our own.

These doomsday scenarios, usually the stuff of dystopian science fiction, look at

the issue of agency (the capacity for action) in simplistic zero-sum terms: there is a

struggle for control and either we humans retain agency, keeping technology subservient

to us, or technology entices us into surrendering our agency to it, allowing it to become

our master. This polarism, somewhat mirrored in the two major theories of agency and

technology (as we will see momentarily), frames the struggle in a Hegelian Master/Slave

dialectic that, according to Winner (1977), has colored the modern discourse of agency

and technology. Briefly, in the Master/Slave dialectic the sense of Self is acquired by

forcing the Other to validate who or what I am. A struggle for recognition ensues. The

party that succeeds in forcing the Other to issue that recognition becomes the Master,


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while the weaker party is forced to choose between becoming the Slave (validating the

Masters sense of self) or being eliminated altogether. Thus, the Master forcefully

acquires the temporary and conditional recognition of the Slave (which is, however,

insufficient because the Slave is just a Slave, not an Equalbut thats another story).

While modern history has positioned humans as Masters and technology as the

Slave (a symbol of our mastery over Nature), dystopian critiques have presented a very

different picture, with humans as the Slaves of an autonomous technology. But can

technology act on its own? There are three theoretical approaches to allocating agency

between humans and technology: realism, social constructivism, and what Brey (2005)

calls hybrid constructivism. Each approach attempts to answer in its own way the

question of who acts.

Realism, also known as technological determinism, establishes that technology

shapes individuals and society. Technology prescribes behaviors and determines social

practices. Think, for example, of the behavior prescribed by the car that will not start until

the seat belt is buckled. Or the way in which social practices are redefined when indoor

plumbing replaces gathering at the communal well to obtain water and also local news.

Technological determinism ascribes internal properties to technologies, and therefore

grants them the ability to shape their environments. Thus, agency is an a prioriattribute

of technology, to the extent of treating artifacts as autonomous agents. Under this view,

technology is Master.

In the social constructivist perspective, it is we who shape technology: society's

behavior and practices give technology its meaning. Agency can't be attributed to

artifacts, because the supposed acts of technology can always be traced to the actions

and interpretations of social groups. For instance, the contraceptive method known as

the pill is a technology that has been given different meanings by different societies at


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various times and locations: how the pill was viewed in the 1960s was the result of social

constructions very different from the ones that inform our view of that technology today;

likewise, how the pill is constructed in a First World society might be very different from

how it is constructed in a Third World society, and so on. Under this view, we are the

Master, and technology the Slave.

These two approaches deliver us into a conceptual paradox. Which comes first:

technology that creates social circumstances, or social circumstances that give shape to

particular technologies? As a way out of that paradox, most philosophers of technology

have abandoned the Master/Slave dialectic altogether and align themselves with a third

approach: hybrid constructivism (Brey, 2005). Hybrid constructivism avoids making a

discreet distinction between society and technology when it comes to the ability and

opportunity to act. Technologies possess, indeed, innate properties or capabilities. But

these properties translate into an ability to act only when they interact with other

elements in social assemblages. This is a crucial point: the innate capabilities of artifacts

(or humans, for that matter) are actualized only when they are part of a networkof

human and nonhuman actors. In hybrid constructivism, there are no clear-cut Masters or

Slaves, since it is not possible to neatly apportion agency exclusively to one party given

the dependencies and interactions created through network transactions. In short, actors

acquire their agency only as nodes in the network. Agency cannot exist in a social

vacuum; without each other, human and technological actors cannot actualize their

agency. To repeat:

Agency is not, to be somewhat precipitous, rooted in the properties of entities-in-themselves, but rather in the properties of entities as elements of networks (orstructures). And those networks/structures are invariably concatenations of both

human and nonhuman actors. (Disco, 2005, p. 58)


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The most representative example of the hybrid constructivism approach is actor-

network theory, or ANT (cf. Callon, 1987; Latour, 1992). In short, ANT establishes that

Artifacts and their properties emerge as the result of being embedded in a network of

human and nonhuman entities. It is in this context that they gain an identity and that

properties can be attributed to them (Brey, 2005, p. 62). Earlier, I suggested that

networks have become the favored metaphor to explain and organize social realities.

But the truth is that networks go beyond describing socialconstructs by incorporating

nonhuman actors. ANT provides us with the conceptual tools to assign agency to

elements that are not human and therefore not social, thus enriching our understanding

of how social interactions can be influenced by technological elements, natural

elements, etc. Since everything can be an actor, hybrid constructivism in general, and

ANT in particular, introduces a certain generalized symmetry in accounting for agency

within a network:

The term hybrid constructivism can be taken to refer to any position that adoptsthe principle of generalized symmetry. This is a methodological principle according towhich any relevant elements referred to in an analysis (whether social, natural, or

technical) should be assigned a similar explanatory role and should be analyzed bythe same (i.e. e., symmetrical) type of vocabulary... (Brey, 2005, p. 74)

Callon and Latour (1981) suggest that actors are isomorphic, which does not mean that

all actors have the same size [i.e., importance], but that a priorithere is no way to decide

the size since it is the consequence of a long struggle (p. 280). But isnt it possible to

arrive at the exact opposite conclusion: that because the size of the actors is the result

of a long struggle, we cannot use a symmetrical vocabulary to explain their agency but

at the most immediate and superficial of levels? In other words, while ANT invites

nonhumans to the party, and establishes a common language for speaking about

agency across all actors, it is not so well equipped to explain how agency is always

already the result of a long struggle.


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The metaphor of the network and the language of symmetry may be appropriate to

visualize the relationship between nodes frozen in time, but not to describe their history.

Paradoxically, what is supposedly an empirical attempt to describe things as they are,

ends up having to black-box any explanation of how the nodes got formed in the first

place. Social theorists end up confusing what they should explain with the explanation.

They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one should end with them

(Latour, 2005, p. 8). As Disco (2005) suggests, ANT is flawed by its preference for

metaphysics in favour of history (p. 59). The description of the network serves as

starting andend point; the distribution of agency is traced, but not explained, or

explained by black boxing motivations under the name of various social forces. But as

Wise (1997) puts it: Agency cannot be so unquestioned. How do we account for

differences (even similarities) in agency, in the distribution of agency? And how do we

do this without recourse to abstract macro-actors such as social forces? (p. 58). In

more recent writings, Latour (2005) clarifies that the purpose of ANT is not simply to

draw a network, but to try to explain the associations formed within it without resorting to

black boxes:

Using a slogan from ANT, you have 'to follow the actors themselves', that is try tocatch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what thecollective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated

to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the associations that they

have been forced to establish. (p. 12)

Stated differently, we can say that the role of the network is to represent or

visualize the relationships between actors based on the distribution of agency at the time

the picture of the network is taken, not to account for the location in a historical arc of

each actor. To say that agency is not evenly distributed is to recognize that the long

struggle of history endows actors with different capacities for action, and that to assume

that their capacity for agency can be explained in symmetrical terms is a bit naive.


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Whereas the actions of technologies can be predictable to an extent (their affordances

are materially circumscribed), ANT commits a certain reductionism by obscuring the fact

that humans can act in unpredictable ways:

Human actants have a richer behavioural repertoire by which they can respond toprescriptions, and humans may have various intentions, beliefs and motivations thatmay be relevant in the analysis. In a hybrid vocabulary, these differences between

humans and nonhumans are obscured in the interest of symmetrical treatment.(Brey, 2005, p. 79)

In short, networked proximity, with its symmetrical treatment of nodes, obscures the

polysemic nature of human agency as well as the history of human actors.

At this point, anyone attuned to the nuances of ANT and the motivations of its

authors will protest that I am guilty of misinterpreting it and reducing it to a set of

principles contrary to what it sets out to do. My intention is not to provide a detailed

summary of ANT in this space. Instead, I have chosen to focus on how the theory is

applied. As someone interested in theories and how they are applied, I should be the

last one to proclaim the uselessness of ANT. What I would like to call attention to is

merely how the theories of ANT are actualized in a way that results in a certain

epistemological exclusivity. My goal is not to prove that ANT is more reductive than other

theories (all theories have blind spots), but to identify its particular reductionism and try

to interpret what it means in the context of technosocial systems. In other words, my

critique is not meant to vilify any and all networks, or invalidate the usefulness of all

social theories that use the imagery of the network, but to explore specifically the

epistemological exclusivity that results when the network is used in computer/software

design to give shape to social systems.

This epistemological exclusivity is particularly evident when the metaphor of the

network, which functions as a topological map, is applied to the typological territoryof

the local. What was before a metaphorical map suspended over a flat nothingness is


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now laid out over the bumpy and unstable terrain of local space. Previously, the space

between nodes was inconsequential, a conceptual placeholder for zero distance. Now,

in the act of masking out everything that is not a node, we black-box the vibrant local

space between nodes (populated by everything from non-intersecting networks to other

things that a network cannot recognize). This space is important because, while it is

ignored by the network itself, it gives nodes their history and identity: changes within it

translate into changes in the relation between nodes, and consequently into changes in

the nodes themselves. In short, the instability of paranodal-local space is what animates

the network, and to attempt to render paranodal space invisible is to arrive at less, not

more, complete explanations of social realities.

This is, in short, the bargain we make in re-approaching what is spatially near

through the network: in delegating to ICTs the ability to organize some aspects of our

social lives, we participate in new forms of networked proximity, but we also place

certain constrains on the kinds of relations we can form with our immediate

surroundings. Networked proximity becomes a form of epistemological exclusivity

(nodocentrism, or the exclusive focus on nodes) that suppresses and dislocates

paranodal-local space. Whether we remain dislocated from the local or reclaim through

ICT-mediated connections becomes not just an issue of technological design or

application, but one of exercising moral principles: while agency might be more or less

evenly distributed between humans and technology, the responsibility for the effects of

technology rests squarely with us. Speaking of the relational distribution of agency

between humans and technology, Harbers (2005) asks: to what extent does this

distribution of agency imply a corresponding distribution of responsibilities? Do the

distributions of social and moral agency run parallel? (p. 18). He suggests that they


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dont. While we might choose to delegate some of our agency to technology, we cannot

surrenderour responsibility for the impact that these technologies have on the world.

Of course, one option would be to not delegate agency to technology. But how

realistic is that? The reason we let technology act on our behalf is that technology can

create associations in the world in ways that we cannot. Technology, in other words, can

inscribe or encode social realities in innovative ways, which is why we delegate action to

it. Some of the types of associations enabled by our delegation of agency to ICTs, for

instance, can be characterized as more diverse, more meaningful, more efficient, etc.

But delegation implies moral responsibility: we remain accountable for the immediate

and apparent repercussions of that delegation, as well as the not-so-immediate and not-

so-apparent repercussions. It is true that values are co-produced by humans and

technologyin other words, that technologies play a part in ascribing values to the

actions that unfold in the network. If we can no longer say that humans shape

technology, we can also no longer say that humans are solely responsible for ascribing

values to acts that involve technology. Furthermore, humans and technology can alter

the values inscribed originally in each other's actions: a human act can be re-inscribed

with different values by a technological act, and a technological act can be re-inscribed

with different values by a human act. But the delegation of agency to technology

requires that we remain aware of the consequences of our delegation, even (or

especially) when technology inscribes different values to our original act (as when, for

instance, our desire for nearness results in an unintended alienation from the local).

Delegation should not devolve into abnegation, transforming technology into a license to

forget what is encoded in those associations (Winner, 1977).

As a way to summarize some of the points made in this section, I present the

following principles related to agency in networks:


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1. Co-determination: Society and technology co-determine each other. There are no

Master/Slave dependencies in their relationship.

2. Networked action: The metaphor of the network is useful to describe how things

do not act in isolation. Technologies have innate capabilities, but their agency

only acquires meaning through interaction with other humans and nonhumans. In

other words, technologies can act, but only as part of networks.

3. Limits of symmetry: The symmetry proposed by ANT does not adequately

account for any unevenness in the distribution of agency. For that, we need the

historicity that a picture of a static network cannot provide.

4. Reading between nodes: Paranodal space gives actors their history and identity.

To conceal that space, especially when the network is used to re-approach the

local, is a form of epistemological exclusivity, and merits asking: What is being

excluded?

5. Delegation is morally charged: While agency is distributed amongst humans and

technology, the responsibility for how technology is applied rests with us. It is a

moral responsibility to remain critically aware of the process of delegation of

agency to technology.

While in the future we will probably continue to see computers replace human

labor in an attempt to lower costs and maximize profits, the issue of autonomous

technology will probably resolve itself in more practical terms than those described in the

Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006) scenario. Intelligent agents with a will of

their own and beyond our control belong to the realm of Science Fiction. A more realistic

and immediate concern are the new models of shared agency that emerge out of the


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interactions of individuals and code in networked sociality. These models represent

nodocentric forms of sociality that privilege the nodes in a network and devalue the

paranodal, what exists between the nodes. And these models are not a futuristic vision,

but a reality of the present.


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IV--The Social Agency of Code

Technologies acquire their agency by becoming part of networks in which humans

delegate certain social functions to them. A traffic light, for instance, performs a social

function in lieu of a person standing there directing traffic. Of the technologies we

delegate agency to, software code is one of the most sophisticated ones, since it has the

power to coordinate complex forms of sociality based on the laws or instructions

programmed into it. What we call Social Media (also known as Social Software, Web

2.0, Participatory Media, and a variety of other terms), is a set of networked ICTs that

have reached a critical mass in terms of users, and that engender complex forms of

networked sociality that transcend traditional location-bound forms. In this section, I will

elaborate on the object-oriented forms of sociality that the code of Social Media

facilitates, and identify some of the implications that this form of social relevancy can

have for how we experience nearness.

The code and the users of Social Media mutually shape one another by

participating in a hybrid network, giving shape to diverse forms of sociality. The principle

of co-determination makes the following statements simultaneously true: a) users

surrender their agency to Social Media and are transformed into aggregated

components of networks whose actions are coordinated by code; and b) users impose

their agency on code and make it do things which it was not originally intended to do.


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Disco (2005) explains both sides of this seemingly contradictory relationship. On the one

hand,

in a pragmatic sense, humans cannot simply be defined as agents. They can

rather easily be made into components of artifacts as indeed the history ofindustrialisation amply attests. These artifacts act, but not according to the will of thehuman components, but if all goes well as projections of the interests of theirdesigners and masters. (p. 42)

Thus, humans can become clogs in the machinery of code, acting not according to their

own will, but to the intentions or motivations embedded in the technology by its

designers. At the same time, to look at technologies simply as executors of the agency

of their masters is to revert to a realist interpretation of agency. According to Disco,

even the new technology studieshowever salutary their redefinition of

technology as an inherently sociological phenomenondo not escape this

instrumentalist horizon. Even here, technologies are seen as products of instrumentaldesign, of efforts to produce specific use-values for specific social groups. According

to Shields, the way out of the instrumentalist trap is to look at technologies in use.The social meaning of a technology is not what its designers claim it to be, but in

what users make of it. (2005, pp. 48-49; emphasis in original)

Only by looking at technologies in use, beyond the intentions defined during theirdesign,

can we get a complete picture of the simultaneous surrender and delegation of agency

taking place between humans and technology. This is indeed one of the benefits of ANT,

to be able to see the associations created by actors as they are, not as they were

designed to be. But design intentions should not be ignored altogether. In fact, by taking

them into consideration we can avoid limiting ourselves to the reduced view of rational,

uni-motivational actors that ANT imposes on our analysis. Disco (2005), for instance,

makes two astute observations about what we can learn by weighing design intentions

with actual use:

This suggests two untested and speculative first approximations about the

relationship between design intentions and ultimate use: First, the complexity of anartifact is something like inversely proportional to its flexibility-in-use. Second, the


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more context-bound an artifact, the less likely actual use will deviate from the useenvisioned by designers. (p. 50)

In other words, the more complex the technology, and the more specific its design in

terms of addressing a particular situation, the less freedom its users will have to find

diverse applications for it. Another way of expressing the tension between design and

use is to say that agency is both intrinsic and extrinsic to the network (from now on,

whenever I say networkI mean an ICT-facilitated Social Media network): it is the result

of transactions determined by an actors opportunities for action within the network, and

the result of design choices (influenced by economics, history, culture, and so on) that

might not be captured by the freeze frame metaphor of the network. When looking at

the agency of code, therefore, we have to take into consideration not only the intentions

encoded into it by its designers, but also the emerging intentions created through the

use and application of the code.

The site where human agency and the agency of code intersect, co-determine

each other, and get distributed in a particular way is the digital object. Engestrm (2005)

characterizes social interaction in a Social Media network as revolving around the digital

object, which is why he terms it object-centered sociality(I prefer object-oriented

sociality since, in my opinion, what is central is the action, not the object itself):

Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other

and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set ofpeople whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is commonsense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that

most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think

that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist

of people who are connected by a shared object. (Engestrm, 2005, 4)

Of course, to the extent that there is a material component to culture, all forms of

sociality could be said to be object-oriented. But if a job or a date can be an object, we

might protest that Engestrm is defining objects in a very broad way. However, he is


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actually making an important observation by pointing out that in a network, sociality is

organized around either an actual digital object (such as a digital picture around which

people post comments) or a digital object that acts as an avatar for an entity or event in

the real world (for instance, an entry in an online calendar for an offline event around

which people share information and plans). Thus, the object around which sociality is

organized online can be anything from more concrete objects such as a digital text (e.g.

Wikipedia), a video (e.g. YouTube), or a location in the real world (e.g. Platial) to less

concrete objects such as an identity (e.g. MySpace) or a goal (e.g. 43 Things). But what

does object-oriented sociality mean in terms of the distribution of agency in networks?

To try to answer this question, lets take a closer look at the social agency of the

code of Distributed Classification Systems (DCSs), also known as social bookmarking or

tagging systems (two common examples are del.icio.us, http://del.icio.us, and Flickr

http://flickr.com, both of which started as small independent companies and are now

owned by Yahoo!). A common characteristic of DCSs is that they allow individuals to

classify objects (such as URLs or pictures, in the two examples just mentioned)

according to keywords or tags of their choosing. A picture of a cat, for instance, can be

classified with the tags cat, kitten, cute, mr_whiskers, etc. Instead of imposing a pre-

defined taxonomy, DCSs provide a way to define an emergent taxonomy. The code of

these applications conducts social operations based on the tags used by users. For

example: it can display items that have been classified by users with the same tag, or it

can display other tags that have been employed by users to classify the same item; it

can visualize whether the tags someone has used are unique or are being used by

others; it can allow users to perform searches by tag or group of tags; it can try to find

similar or related tags; etc. All without users having to do anything but assign to an

object whatever tags make sense to them in order to classify it.


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The greatest strength of DCSs is also their greatest weakness: the way in which

the social act of negotiation of meaning during the process of classification is delegated

(or surrendered) by humans to code. Decisions which before were collectively

undertaken by humans are now carried out by humans individually, while the code

aggregates and visualizes the results of those individual decisions. If we see this as a

replacement for a system of classification in which one group of people imposes a

classification scheme on another group, then the openness and horizontality of this

approach might be seen as an improvement. But if we see this as a replacement for a

system in which individuals come together to negotiate and share meaning in the

process of deriving a classification scheme, then the outcome might not be as

meaningful to a community. This is because DCSs assume consensus without involving

humans in the process; users have no discussion whatsoever about how categories

should be defined, or what they mean, or their relation to each other. In essence, the

code of DCSs removes the need for humans to negotiate and share meaning around

classification. This can be liberating as well as alienating. Liberating because, as I have

just suggested, there is no governing body dictating what the classification scheme

should be. Alienating because, without the mechanisms for deliberation, meaning

becomes atomistic, a reflection of what the software has parsed and aggregated from

detached individuals, not what has emerged through consensus and deliberation.

Social Media performs certain social operations on behalf of its users, but the

scope of these affordances is defined by the code, and the community (consciously or

unconsciously) relinquishes some of its agency in exchange for individual freedom in

classification and the scale of aggregation that only the Internet can provide. There are

both supporters and critics of this dynamic. Shirky (2005) for instance, says of

del.icio.us:


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[A]ggregate self-interest creates shared value... By forcing a less onerous choicebetween personal and shared vocabularies, del.icio.us shows us a way to get

categorization that is low-cost enough to be able to operate at internet scale, while

ensuring that the emergent consensus view does not have to be pushed onto anygiven participant. (9)

On the other hand, Locke (2005) is critical of the way this form of sociality

obscures the politics of meaning construction (he uses the neologism folksonomy to

refer to the practice of collaborative categorization that happens in DCSs):

There are no politics in folksonomies, as there is no meta-level within the system

that allows tagging communities to discuss the appropriateness or not of their

emergent taxonomies. There is only the act of tagging, and the cumulative, amplifiedproduct of those tags. (2)

Classifying resources is one thing. But what happens when similar dynamics are

applied to the forms of participation in the public sphere that supposedly define Western

democracies? There is, understandably, a heated debate going on about the ways in

which object-oriented sociality can impact civic life. Some see networks as the engine

behind a renewed interest in social activism and the source of new forms of participation,

while others see these very forms of participation as little more than the ineffectual

aggregation of individual self-interest that, when interpreted as vox populi, becomes a

potential threat to meaningful participation in a democracy. Can networks increase civic

participation, or do they offer only a reduced form of participation that diminishes the

value of authentic contributions and leaves society more prone to undemocratic

manipulation? In short, the debate can be framed in terms of whether object-oriented

sociality facilitates the formation ofpublics ormasses: whether it can engender

democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the

sum of its members, or whether it will merely support the production of anti-democratic

masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, different technologies

applied in different contexts can provide very different answers to these questions, but


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while features and applications might differ, the debate is obviously focused on the

overall impact that networks and Social Media are having on our societies.

The effects of networks on the public sphere are arguably most visible in the

emerging forms of discourse and collaboration that they facilitate. Given that our notions

of democracy are closely tied to the ability to voice one's opinion and to the ability to

organize collective action, this is not surprising. Discussion and democracy seem to go

hand in hand, at least in theory. The more opportunities for discussion and collaboration

(such as those allegedly generated by networked ICTs like blogs and wikis), the

healthier the public sphere and the healthier the democracy, goes the argument.

Mills (1956) summarized, with a touch of dry humor, this model of democratic

"authority by discussion:"

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them.They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. Oneviewpoint 'wins out.' Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are

instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do. (pp. 299-300)

Idealists believe that networked ICTs improve the processes described above by

giving us more efficient tools for discussion and for 'acting out' what comes out of these

discussions. But the problem is that, in practice, democracy does not unfold so neatly.

An unequal distribution of power and knowledge allows a small elite to impose its

viewpoint on the population (through the media, for instance) while convincing them that

it is the people's will that the elite is carrying out on its behalf. Authentic democracies

require an informed public to operate. Conversely, oligarchies require the consensual

passivity and ignorance of a mass. Can networked ICTs contribute to the formation of

informed and engaged publics?

Next, I would like to consider some aspects of the ongoing debat

mejias networked proximity

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