The Digital We by Greg Niemeyer UC Berkeley Departments of Art Practice and Film Studies niemeyer@uclink.berkeley.edu Greg is a UCDARNet researcher: more info After directing SUDAC for 3 years, Greg Niemeyer became a professor for Digital Media at UC Berkeley. There, he continues to teach and to pursue his creative research in the area of digital media installations. Supported by the prestigious Intel Art and Technology Research Grant, he completed several digital media installations, which explore novel experiences with computing.

UC Berkeley American Cultures College, June 2002

Like photography expands our experience of vision, the Internet expands our experience of community. This expansion challenges traditional notions of the community and the individual. Recent, conflicting events regarding the Internet demonstrate which participants in our society are absorbing this expanded experience productively, which participants are exploiting it, and which participants are fighting it.

The question remains what can be gained through the expansion, and what can be lost. Is the Internet a new propaganda apparatus, designed to create an army of enucleated individuals whose agency has been subsumed by glowing simulations of global homogeneity? Is it rather the only medium capable of reflecting the multiplicity of cultures, values, and ideas of our time? The web provides us with so many manifestations of individuality that it causes an inflation of individuality.

Individuality is no longer a definition of who we are which was won the hard way, through explorations of the social and economical boundaries of survival. Individuality is more and more a definition of who we are which was acquired through countless hours of mediated experiences through television and the web. The resulting individual is optimally adapted for survival in a room with a large TV, a fast Internet connection, and a deep refrigerator. That individual is no longer distinguishing between the real and the ideal. There is a smooth continuum, for example, between that person's real friends and the people that person knows from television.

The pressing question is, what kind of community does such a person form? Half the people that person interacts with exist only on TV. The other half are connected, to that person through a network, with rare physical contact. The world outside the screen is foreign terrain, not to be inhabited. Is that person the ideal cow for the corporate farmer? Is that person still capable of class, ethnicity, and gender, or does ha person exist in terms of a marketing profile? Is that person not the ideal target of the propaganda machine of the world wide web?

The casualties tell the story best: Privacy, we are told, is simply a non-existing notion online. Privacy is the basis for an individuality. Personality is what the login screen offers us as a consolation. It's the Ibook, the My Documents, the Screensaver which form the individualized surface of an apparatus designed to steal that which defines us as individuals: the control over the information which makes us who we are.

Perhaps, this is good riddance: What has the concept of individuality provided for us besides ruthless competition, egotism and one car with six empty seats for each and every one of us. But what will replace it? If we de-emphasize individuality through total networking, there is a hope that a newer, stronger sense of community will emerge. An excellent case study is the rise and fall of Napster.com. This site provided a radical approach to sharing music files, which mostly affected recording company revenues. Through Napster, music suddenly traveled as freely as acoustic waves travel trough the air, and the companies seeking to make money with music saw their revenues suffering. In principle, Napster acted on the promise of the web to remove the temporal and physical boundaries between computers, for the common benefit of all who enjoy music. This principle is also at work when corporations collect private data about network users. However, the innovation of Napster was not accompanied by changes in the status quo as maintained by the music industry. The lawsuit which ended Napster also marked the beginning of the dotcom crash. In the lawsuit, it became clear that our status quo is not ready to accept the new paradigm of a community stronger than the financial need of a system.

It is also clear that very few people are ready to relinquish the constructed allegiances which define their individuality, be it gender, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. Through the web, they perform their identity in increasingly mediated ways, which leave the tangible factors of survival free for the asking. The more time we spend online, the more likely it is that interested parties increase their control over the areas in which we are no longer performing our individualities: our neighborhoods, our work, our relations, our bodies.

If we made better use of the Internet, we would realize that it is the medium of collective action. It is the medium which allows us, in real time, to see the cumulative effects of our individual actions on the world. We can, for example, watch the ozone layer tear while we drive to work. We can watch the smokestacks of power plants, the pumps at the oil well, the traffic on bridge, and we can see who votes Republican, we can see what price we put on clean air by comparing the real-estate prices in Hercules to the real-estate prices in Berkeley after another accident at the refinery. We can do all this today, and in real time. However, we prefer porn.

The Internet can make an enormous contribution to our understanding of the world we live in, and thereby to the formation of our individualities, if we use it as a collective organ, an organ which reaches beyond our own nose. It would allow us to see causes and effects we arrogantly ignore.

If the logic of perception, cognition and action is transferable from a single person to the Internet, the expanded collective perception of a digital we would lead to an expanded collective consciousness. Then, the net would help us to think, feel and operate beyond the boundaries of our stereotyped selves, it would be the medium which allows ants to become aware of the ant heap, and which allows individuals to become aware of society.

However, the current Internet usage looks more like Germany at the time of the Radio, in the 1930's. The radio became a site for the performance of democracy, nationality, and individuality. Not the neighbor, not the job, not the body, but the nation, the great community of like-minded people, who sang along with the radio, across the entire nation.

Whether we repeat history, and sing along, this time world wide, with the tune of global economy, or whether we use the Internet as a tool for understanding the complex reality of a connected world, is a matter of personal culture: Are we, the digital we, going to make the effort, this time, to follow all causes and effects from the world through the Internet to the home and back again, or are we going to let the world end where the propaganda ends?

1. Actuality of the Net
Demonstration of net technology, metaphors used, and examples of media-centric applications.

2. Mediated Identity Formation
Identities formed through mediated experiences, effects of chronic media exposure, culturally diverse modalities of online identity performances, simulation of identity through individual surfaces, log-in's and simulated skins on the desktop

3. Loss of Agency
Internet privacy acts, marketing profiles, and the creation of the global economy subject

4. Substitution of Individuality with the Collective Imperative
Radio and the history of fascism and communism, examples of simulations of individuality in mass marketing.

5. Searching for a Collective Agency
Examples of Internet content which generate and sustain diverse models of collectivity, new models of individuality within a collective, collective experiences and collective actions.

6. Case Study
Interpret a recent change in Internet policy and its effect on the mediated performance of self and collective.

7. Reference Texts

Berthold Brecht: Radio as an Apparatus of Communication
Marshall McLuhan: Global Village
Leslie Marmo Silko: Almanac of the Dead
Al Gore: E-Commerce (1997)
Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
Gilles Deleuze: A Thousand Plateaus
Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra
Frederic Jameson: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
John Ashcroft: Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet (1997)
Hippy.com: Internet Manifesto(1997)
rhizome.com: Starmap
John Barlow: A Declaration of Independence for the Internet (1996)