The more vitriolic reactions against the mass popularisation of online participation from (mostly male) early adopters and the technorati frequently take a modernist tone – usually involving the trope of such participation being ‘meaningless’, ‘trivial’ etc; and all too frequently matching up neatly with dismissals of everyday popular culture. How often have we heard negative assessments of Facebook (and earlier, YouTube, and before that personal blogging) lumping the handy metonym “Britney Spears” in with some rant about narcissism and the pointlessness of sharing details of everyday life. In fact I noticed that round about the time I started blogging. See sweetly naive thoughts about that here. It’s OK to talk about these new sites once they’re Big Business, though. You only have to be a casual reader of Techcrunch (one of the main culprits) to realise that.That was exactly what I was arguing with Axel about a few months back.

So I certainly would be disappointed if it appeared that I was trying to valorise the ‘use value’ of knowledge sharing and technological mastery above modes of online communication based around friendship and intimacy, but I also don’t want to lose sight of the potential for personal social networking and everyday creative expression to articulate to more democratic modes of cultural participation precisely *not* predicated on capital-k Knowledge, and capital-p Politics.

What I do want to very critically think about is the terms of participation in particular commercial and non-commercial contexts; where participation is *always* bound up with particular business models, technological constraints and affordances, IP arrangements, and forms of surveillance and control. What enables and constrains participation and what enables and constrains agency and creativity aren’t the same thing. And there are always trade-offs between various competing dynamics in each scenario. I just can’t swallow the FB formula anymore. It’s not the terms of access that come with mass participation I can’t take, it’s the terms of access that come with Facebook.

Gosh, that got long. Sorry. But it’s a core problem in my work as in my own little online life!

Is this some new kind of digital divide?

I used to use newsgroups heaps and heaps when i was first on the internet a lot at home (mid-1990s), but not really for social networking – mainly for advice, info and peer learning purposes around web design, computer music, composition, and other stuff I was into. There were always trolls and long, long argument threads and flame wars though, wherever you went. In fact by the time it was all dying in the arse there was nothing much but flame wars left. There was a move to Yahoo groups for a while, too.

I think Google bought the entire usenet archive, which had previously been bought be Deja. Isn’t that where Google Groups started?

BTW at the time I’m describing I was at uni for the second time and was reading heaps of stuff for my communications subjects about CMC, the WELL, fan communities and so on, but remember thinking that those more personal social networking uses were quite alien to my own experience – maybe because I really didn’t know anyone else using the internet that much, except for geeky tech-nerd blokes in the US somewhere! Plus: I was and remain a bit of a nerd.

Anyway, like Glen is saying with the car enthusiasts, I guess those kinds of knowledge-sharing activities have become distributed across a range of forums, blogs and practice-specific sites, where it’s now a lot easier to showcase work, engage in practice, reflect, critique, and discuss in a more connected way.

And yet the story covers similar experiences to those recounted by Netta “grayarea” Gilboa in her piece, “Elites, Lamers, Narcs and Whores: Exploring the Computer Underground”. She vividly describes the anarchism of these subcultures, where ‘power shifts from day to day and hour to hour. You become instantly “elite” depending on who your friends are, what item you possess that everyone wants a copy of, or whom you just humiliated…’:

Hackers gain credibility either by hanging around long enough to achieve seniority, by breaking the law in front of key people or by acting tough and picking on people so that no one will notice they have no skills. (103)

Sounds a bit like any underground subculture, doesn’t it? Anyway, Gilboa goes on to say that ‘ethics don’t exist in this community because hackers never know what they will stumble across next and once something is perceived as possible there will always be those with the urge to accomplish it’ (110).

Good luck with the Scientologists, and all that.

Note in the Wired article how so many appeals are made to seriousness now that money and business interests are at stake. To expect that capital could offer a more convincing code of ethics or morality for these actors surely misses any lesson hackers have taught us over the past few decades.