[iDC] digital possessive

[Eric Gordon]

In response to Trebor's post about "situated advocacy," I wanted to  
share a chapter from my upcoming book called The American Urban  
Spectator.  In this chapter, I explore a concept called "the digital  
possessive" - ultimately arguing that cities are mapped through  
personal, and externalized, interfaces.  Below is an excerpt, and the  
full chapter is attached to this post.

Best,

Eric



The digital possessive is the network manifestation of radical  
empiricism.  It can be described in two parts. It is the  
transformation of relation into observable and lasting objects: in  
digital networks, relations are material.  And it is the ordering of  
those objects within personal interfaces.  For example, at any given  
moment, a MySpace page is the externalization of the subjectivity of  
the user (boyd 2006).  It is where objects, broadly conceived, are  
organized into comprehensible experiences.  To be clear, this  
externalization does not replace the experiencing subject; it only  
extends the processes of experience into networks.

Indeed, the need to order relations should be considered a product of  
modernity, rather than a product of the Internet.  As I’ve been  
describing throughout this book, the impulse to order and possess  
have been central to urban spectatorship since the end of the 19th  
century.  But thus far, outside of setting crowds at a distance from  
the individual, urban spectatorship has largely been concerned with  
ordering and possessing the appearances of the built environment.   
Digital social media has extended that process to include other  
individuals.  Of course, that impulse is not new either.  In 1913,  
Marcel Proust wrote the following in the first volume of Remembrance  
of Things Past:

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us  
can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for  
everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book  
or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the  
thoughts of other people.  Even the simple act which we describe as  
‘seeing someone we know’ is to some extent an intellectual  
process.  We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all  
the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total  
picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have  
certainly the principle place (1989, p. 20)

Well before the Internet made it possible to plot one’s personal  
thoughts and physical navigations, the social need to order was  
apparent.  Speaking of a social personality that is comprised of tiny  
bits of information stored in the minds of the multitude of people we  
come across, Proust asserts that an objective self is impossible.  It  
does not exist; it is assembled again and again in every context.   
Thus, ‘seeing someone we know’ is a complex process whereby we  
aggregate memories and impressions into a singular experience.   
Imagine if those impressions, for Proust merely relegated to the  
minds of observers, were externalized and uniformly available.   
Imagine if one’s private thoughts as well as public actions could  
compose the impressions on which others relied to assemble your  
social personality.

		Digital social networking is ostensibly transforming the social  
personality as such.  Instead of relying on the whimsy of others,  
users can manufacture their own data to be ordered by others, and  
likewise, they can obtain greater control in ordering the data of  
people and places with which they come into contact.  But these  
external processes require maintenance.  As every personal action  
leaves a data trace, what once was only a fleeting sensation to be  
immediately experienced by another subject, is now materialized into  
the network to be ordered by human and machine.  From reading to  
driving to dating, data, even if not always accessed, is always  
accessible.  As a result, the ordering of the “plural world of  
things in interaction” has become the primary task of network  
navigation.





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