Suggested reading: online friends and intimacies

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 3 Comments

Just in time for my course outline, a fantastic manifesto addressing the limits of online social networking on Geert Lovink’s blog. A taste:

Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

And this:

Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

I’m looking for more provocative readings like this for my course on Intimacy, Love and Friendship next semester. This course was previously taught using classic readings in philosophy, but I’ve decided there’s little point me trying to replicate that version. Instead, I’ll be encouraging students to reflect on the ways intimacy, love and friendship are enabled and performed in media they use – particularly online media.

This the first course I’ll be teaching with my own content, so I’m slightly more excited than daunted at the moment. My aim is to create a cultural studies course that is sensitive to gender normativity and that makes use of online material as much as offline – any suggestions towards this end would be very welcome.

Of course I’ll post the outline here when it’s ready.

Category: Reading, Teaching
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Comments

3 Responses to “Suggested reading: online friends and intimacies”

  1. glen
    June 16th, 2009 @ 1:59 pm

    Babel? That is a great exploration of the complexity of intimacy in different contexts. It sets up a weird relationship between causality and intimacy.

    And Punch-Drunk Love? The phone s3x line thing, lol! and Sandler’s charcater’s inability to be intimate. I may have written an essay about this *cough*

    I am really interested in this stuff, as I guess most quasi-asbergers geeks are!

  2. Rachel O
    June 18th, 2009 @ 9:19 am

    There’s a whole history of net.art and electronic fiction that theorises and performs networked intimacy – fluctuations of forms and thematics in accordance with changes in platforms. A simple one-to-one but evocative work that comes to mind is Two Solitudes. I can only find it here, where there is a link to a download of the whole piece combined (not ideal). http://interconnected.org/home/2009/02/18/carl_steadman_opened
    Is there love in the telematic embrace? i.e. Roy Ascott and his aftermath? There is also Susan Kozel, ‘Closer’, useful for thinking about the performance of online intimacy and embodiment by a ‘trained’ performer, which I suggest because it’s v. interesting writing to view outside of/beyond performance theory as a challenge to academic writing/thinking _about_ online intimacy and scholarly expertise.
    Also, check this out – a lighthearteded social networking spoof by the dynamo govcom group here in amsterdam – http://www.elfriendo.com/ Put together very quickly but great swift programming and capturing 2.0 malaise perfectly.

  3. melgregg
    June 19th, 2009 @ 10:11 am

    Thanks both of you. Any advances/ similar sites to ElFriendo would be good to know about.

    But I think I’m going to leave the media texts up to students to choose and explore, since I think using specific examples can be a bit risky. I’m more interested in accessible conceptual writing that they might then use to think about their everyday media choices. Still thinking out loud for a few more days…

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