Cyborg Identities: In what ways can identity be
reimagined in light the emergence of social media.
University of Amsterdam
International Dramaturgy
Table of Contents:
1) Introduction
a. Reassessing a Digital Utopia b. Scope
2) Cyborgs Beyond Sci-fi a. Future Bodies 1.0
b. Cyborg Extensions of Identity c. From Catfishing to Identity tourism d. Cyber-politics
e. Schizophrenic Cyborg 3) Twice Behaved
a. Curating a Window Shop b. Free Reign
4) A Corporate Affair a. The Data Harvest
b. GDPR Gallery of Horrors
c. Sponsorship Smoke and Mirrors
d. Re-examining our Cyborgs in Imagined Realities
5) Hypertext on Hyperdrive: Jon Rafman and the Human as a Corrupted File a. A-historicity
b. Dark Corners and the Algorithm c. Dark Corners of the Algorithm 6) Filiciak on MMORPGs
7) Undead and Undying in the Internet Age a. Staging the Undead
b. Undying
c. Future Bodies 2.0 – Death and the Cyborg d. The Dark Ages
8) Conclusion 9) Bibliography 10)Appendix 1
1.
Introduction
This investigation delves into how a shifting culture that has undergone radical change due to the emergence of new information technology in the past twenty years has had an effect on conceptions of identity. Historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari predicts that the ‘the next stage of history will include… fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity’1 as a result of our relationship with digital technology. This investigation identifies the ways in which this has already become the case.
1a) Reassessing a digital utopia
Heralded as a democratic space and a platform for diverse voices, the reality of the internet is that access is, comparatively, severely lacking in less economically developed countries. Therefore, voices shared and voices heard on the internet are already not
representative of global voices. It is a fallacy that the online world connects everyone. A platform for free inclusive speech is not the only utopic vision of the digital world. The reality is that men and women in less economically developed countries are the people producing the technology, often in exploitative conditions, whilst it is more economically developed countries who benefit from information technology, access to Wi-Fi and connectivity at the touch of their fingertips:
‘If cyberspace is produced at the expense of millions of men and women all over the world who are not able to enjoy its conveniences, how can we make claims that [these technologies] are changing the world for the better?’2
Even within the scope of those who have ready access to the internet and social media, online space promises more than it delivers. Catherine Bernard explains this reality:
‘The idea of digital space as a space of great equality is supported by the entrepreneurs of the New Economy, who present cyber-economy as a place of equal opportunity and cyberspace as nonhierarchical… one that nevertheless respects and even protects cultural and historical differences. This idyllic image takes into account neither the digital divide, nor the fact that cyberspace, as any economic space, is regulated more by laws of profit than by cultural enlightenment.’3
Jessie Daniels concurs with the reading of the internet explaining why the internet seems to reproduce prejudices at play in an offline context:
‘Race matters in cyberspace precisely because computer networks are social networks.... And those who spend time online bring their own knowledge, experiences and values with them when they log on… The fact that race matters online, as it does offline, counters the oft-repeated assertion that gendered and racialised bodies can be left behind’4
It seems a simple logic that online users bring with them their prejudices. It is this concept of online avatars or profiles as simply an extension of the people’s identities which will be the focal point of this paper. In the first section of this paper I consider the proliferation of a cyborg identity and throughout the rest of the essay I consider what effects this has on how we understand identity itself in contemporary culture.
The effect of social media is powerful. People, often young women and girls, can be drawn to the allure of disembodiment as they use editing technology to change their appearance and
transform their bodies. Causing them to identify less and less with their appearance in the 1Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, (London: Harvill Secker, 2015) p 463.
2 Radhiki Gajjala inJessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 37, no.½ (2009): 105.
3 Catherine Bernard, “Bodies and Digital Utopia,” Art Journal 59, no. 4 (2000): 29.
4 Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, no.½ (2009): 116.
physical world. This is a movement beyond viewing other beautiful women in glossy magazines causing the feeling of inadequacy and potentially body dysmorphia. There is now a phenomenon known as “Snapchat Dysmorphia” encountered by plastic surgeons who are noticing a drastic increase in patients wanting to look like their “filtered” images. Whereas celebrities in glossy magazines had been the symbol of unachievable beauty, now image editing tools and filters are creating false images of the “almost self” making the unachievable appear achievable.5 Engaging with images of a you-but-not-quite-you constantly creates a fraction between the physical world and fantasy.
The promise of a utopic platform for equality has been unfounded in reality. The internet still remains an interesting playing ground for postmodern, Marxist and feminist discourse.
1b. Scope
The effect of social networks on young adults is often a hot topic in media. This
investigation attempts to avoid the sensationalist fear mongering headlines that dismiss much of my generation as iPhone addicts, and instead muse on the shifts in how we can re-consider identity. Throughout this investigation I have used examples from the real world and from the Arts. What I have found is that the way I consider these two categories of examples within this investigation is surprisingly similar. I am led to attribute this to the unprecedented manner in which digital technology and social media and their advancements is making life increasingly similar to science fiction.
To preface this investigation, I would like to identity to what precisely I refer to when I write of social medias. José van Dijck goes through a process of:
‘distinguishing between four different types of social media. The first involves what she calls ‘social network sites’ (or SNSs) such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google
+
¿
: ‘sites [that] primarily promote interpersonal contact, whether between individuals or groups; they forge personal professional, or geographic connections and encourage weak ties.’ The second category features sites that host UGC [User Generated Content]: they ‘support creativity, foreground cultural activity, and promote the exchange of amateur or professional content.’ This category includes sights such as Youtube, Flickr, and Wikipedia; Van Dijck does not mention blogs, but they too could appear under this heading. A third category involves sites that allow users to exchange or sell products: these include Amazon, eBay and Craigslist. And the fourth includes play and games sights that facilitate the creation of characters who occupy virtual worlds. These include FarmVille, the Sims, Angry Birds, and others.’6 Van Dijck’s third category, of sites used to exchange or sell goods, is a category that I do not refer to in this paper. I am concerned with how online users behave in each of these platforms, and in what way the manner in which individuals perform their identity online changes between these different categories. Specifically this paper considers the online profiles that users generate, whether a personal, professional or a fictitious profile, or for a character, as is the case in van Dijck’s fourth category, and in what ways these profiles are an extension of the user’s identity.2.
Cyborgs beyond Sci-fi
5
Shona Ghosh, “‘Snapchat Dysmorphia’ is a disturbing new phenomenon where people want to look more like their filtered selfies,” Business Insider, written August 11, 2018, accessed December 11, 2018 athttps://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-plastic-surgery-selfies-2018-8?r=UK
6 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media. (London: Palgrave, Macmillan Education, 2016) p6, referencing José van Dijck. The Culture of Connectivity: A critical History of Social Media. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p13.
The Cyborg as a human-machine hybrid has become both a symbol and reality of our developing relationship with an increasingly technological world. The concept of the cyborg is extended in Steven Dixon’s Digital Performance. Dixon considers the two routes to the robot:7 one course being the humanization of technology, via Artificial Intelligence, and the other the technologisation of humans, as in the cyborg. Despite the cyborg being an image of dystopian science fiction, the cyborg is an image of our present reality. Testing these boundaries, in 1997, Edwuardo Kac implanted a computer chip into his leg for ‘art’s sake’ in Time Capsule. Kac later explains that scanning this implanted chip ‘remotely via the Web reveals how the connective tissue of the global digital network renders obsolete the skin as a protective boundary demarcating the limits of the body.’8
Already from 1964 Marshall McLuhan claims ‘the contours of our own extended bodies are found in technologies.’9 This is decades before the explosion of portable computers and smartphones onto the global stage and instead examines the cultural impact of new electronic media, rather than the media's content. In his text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan proposes that media has an impact on personal and cultural behaviours and impacts our bodily systems. To illustrate this, McLuhan offers the example of Western clothing which reduces the amount of food an individual needs to eat by forty per cent as the energy needed to keep the body warm is no longer required.10 McLuhan explains:
“By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electronic media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are… extensions of our bodies -including cities -- will be translated into information systems.”11
McLuhan presents the body that is hybrid with the technologies around it. Now in an age of prolific information technology, one can imagine this hybrid body on hyperdrive. In many ways, McLuhan’s extended body is the cyborg body that I’m examining. Harari describes the how new media impacts our bodily systems: mobile phones and computers ‘relieve our brains of some of their data storage and processing burdens;’12 birthdays and anniversaries are no longer required to be memorised, instead Facebook will helpfully remind you. Dixon argues that ‘the question of whether or not we are already cyborgs (or the extent to which we are) must rest on individual perceptions, in common with Katherine Hayles’s analysis that people become ‘posthuman when they think they are posthuman.’13 Therefore, theoretically it is productive to consider the
boundary of the self as incorporating the technology we use to interact with the world and not to stop at the boundary of the skin in considering oneself as a cyborg. In contemporary culture, it is increasingly difficult to interact with the world without technological aids. Whereas Kac surgically implanted a computer chip, in contemporary society it is common to go about the day with earphones in your ears as well as sharing a bed with your smartphones after a day filled with interacting with these devices as a means to access information and contacts not
immediately physically available to them. Not as prolific: “smart” glasses, an up and coming technology, already well established in science fiction, allows an individual to have digital information enter into their vision as if a direct feed into the conscious. It is difficult not to imagine a symbiotic techno-human relationship that is formed just beyond the boundary of the skin but almost in constant contact with it. The ‘connective tissue of the global digital network’14 creates a cyborgic relationship with the connective tissue of the skin. We can adopt one
7 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007): 278.
8 Kac in Dixon (2007): 307. 9 Ibid,. 219.
10 Marshall McLuhen, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995). 11 Ibid.,
12Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, (London: Harvill Secker, 2015) p 453.
13 Hayles in Dixon, 305. 14 Kac in Dixon (2007): 307.
posthumanist approach of considering the tools of an individual as part of the individual’s network of subjectivity.
2a. Future Bodies 1.0
The Performance Future Bodies, a HOME and Unlimited Theatre co-production in collaboration with RashDash,15 is about this concept of the hybridisation of Man with machine. Specifically, the performance reimagines definitions of the human body and considers the question “what is human?” in a world where the human body is becoming increasingly hybrid with technology, in other words, increasingly cyborg. Future Bodies takes the form of a series of vignettes with characters playing out various “new” ethical dilemmas set in the not-too-distant future where people are offered microchips and enhancements or upgrades.
Questions of what it is to be “me” have long been asked. It is, though, within this new context of hybridisation with information technology that these questions are re-ignited. Despite the “futuristic” subject matter, the form of the vignettes and the contrasting forces between ethical positions, between steadfast commitment to technological progress versus a more protective viewpoint towards personal and collective human identity, Future Bodies is surprisingly traditional and occasionally borders on cliché. “What is it with you lot and your me-ness” asks a business woman pressuring her staff into an upgrade.
“The skull, drilling into it, is just semantics” “My Skull is real, not conceptual”
“You are not your brain!”
Future Bodies is most successful in highlighting that the impetus for aggressive progress continues to be financial gain. Furthermore, returning to the introduction of this investigation, the performance begins to suggest the polarisation between those who can benefit from technological advancement, and those who are not able to. This is highlighted in a musical number:
“I don’t have the money for your
tech-I don’t have the money for your tech-no-lo-gy …
You can sure depression in ways I can’t afford yet”
The future, as presented by Future Bodies, does not seem to offer any solution to the socio-economic rifts in the access to technological advancements.
2b. Cyborgic Extensions of Identity
But what does a cyborgic relationship with smartphones consist of? Returning to
McLuhan, he writes “In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving towards the technological extension of consciousness.”16 In today’s age I would argue that it is the creation of online profiles and accounts which become integrated in a sense of self. A self, or consciousness, that is translated into digital information. Although it may be impossible to accurately represent an individual in their online counterpart, instead we might consider these online accounts as a cyborg extension. These created personas are incorporated into notions of the self. When a site offers the opportunity to record personal data of interests, habits and personality types, the process of self-identification causes a feedback loop whereby declaring oneself as “outgoing,” for example, through a self-fulfilling prophecy, one takes on this characteristic.
It is becoming increasingly common for individuals to forge relationships, romantic or otherwise, with others that they have only encountered in the online world. The formation of 15 Future Bodies, a HOME and Unlimited Theatre co-production in collaboration with RashDash, HOME, Manchester, October 10, 2018.
complex friendship and relationships are traditionally a distinctly a human process, yet this notion is undermined by relationships being formed solely online, interactions between online entities, unless we consider these online interactions as part of an individual’s cyborg network. Indeed, these online relationships have no less intensity as their offline or semi-offline
counterparts. The internet hosts a myriad of online platforms for creating online profiles and identities. Immediately what jumps to mind when referring to online profiles are social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Beyond these social networks, however, exists, for example, Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). These MMORPGs are alternative online universes where users “role-play” a character in this world and interact with other characters being controlled by other users creating a universe which is a much more of a social platform than other gaming.17 MMORPGs are the online version of Live-Action Role-Playing (LARPing) where, individuals adopt a character and role-play scenarios with other individuals socially invested in the universe. In both these cases, players are usually faithful to a character, or a couple of characters. Indeed, players find a certain affinity and affiliation with their online personas.18
2c. From Catfishing to Identity Tourism
This raises an interesting question when considering online profiles as part of a cyborg identity. In the case where an online profile is a character, or in cases where a profile is a fabrication, what does this mean when reconsidering the premise of online profiles as a cyborg extension of identity. Especially when the fabricated profile is not necessarily an identifiable fabrication, as in a fake Facebook account. To consider this I will approach it from a couple different angles. The use of fake online profiles presented as genuine, is commonly known as catfishing, a term popularised by the US series Catfish.19 In the show Nev Schulman helps people suspicious of the identity of their online partners to discover the truth. The show is successful in the way it uncovers the myriad of motivations behind the manufacturing of online identities. These include revenge, boredom, to fulfil an unrequited love, loneliness, or general malicious intent.20 In Theatre & Social Media Patrick Lonergan21 uses a case study of a fourteen-year-old boy who creates an older false online identity to be taken seriously as a football aficionado by others online. In this example, Lonergan explains how ‘the construction of his online persona was an act of creativity, but it was also an act of self-expression, a revelation of something authentic about the real person.’22 This is key. Lonergan is describing a scenario where an individual is able to be more themselves by, counterintuitively, lying about their identity.
This brings us to the term “identity tourism” used in cyberfeminist discourse. Identity tourism refers to the possibility for individuals to perform identities beyond the limitations of biology and the physical world. What immediately comes to mind is the ability to perform different genders in online spheres, a potentially liberating opportunity for members of the transgender community. Some cyberfeminists celebrate the potential of the digital sphere as a space liberated from the physical world where individuals are no longer subject to
discrimination based on appearance. Instead they are free to practise “identity tourism”23 - an opportunity to try out and adopt different identities online as an act of liberation. The discourse suggests that by escaping embodiment, online platforms allow a space outside the hierarchies of 17 Miroslaw Filiciak. “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” in Wolf and Perron (eds). The Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003), 87-102.
18 Ibid.
19 Catfish, programme creators Nev Schulman, Max Joseph and Ariel Schulman on MTV network, first aired November
12, 2012.
20 Molly McHughs, “It’s Catfishing Season! How to Tell Lovers from Liars Online, and More,” Digital Trends, posted August 23, 2013, accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/its-catfishing-season-how-to-tell-lovers-from-liars-online-and-more/
21 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media. (London: Palgrave, Macmillan Education, 2016). 22 Lonergan (2016): 2.
23 Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, no.½ (2009): 101-124.
power and patriarchy. Sasha Sassen argues that digital technology ‘enables women to engage in new forms of contestation and in proactive endeavours in multiple different realms, from political to economic.’24 Beyond feminist discourse, the liberating digital technology potentially offers is equally relevant to postcolonial discourse Mark Hansen elucidates on the internet counteracts ‘racial oppression linked to embodiment’25: ‘ “the suspension of the social category of visibility in online environments transforms the experience of race… fundament[ally] by suspending the automatic ascription of racial signifiers according to visible traits, online environments can in a certain sense, be said to subject everyone to what I shall call a “zero degree” of racial difference.”’26 Here we find theory complicating the popular contemporary trope of the catfish.
2d. Cyberpolitics
Made popular by Donna Haraway’s noteworthy essay: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’27 where Haraway uses the image of a Cyborg ‘to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism’28 the “cyborg” represents a means to bypass the struggles of womanhood, liberated from the biological “obligation” of childbearing. Haraway considers the concept of the cyborg from an intersectional perspective as a means to promote the
fragmentation and subversion of ‘organic wholes,’29 promoting instead hybridisation. Hence the cyborg offers itself as representative of the postmodern subject.
Before getting carried away with the emancipatory power of the internet via the means of identity tourism, it’s important to take heed of the following. The equalising tool of identity tourism and Harraway’s cyborg in cyberfeminist theory looks at using the subversive power of the internet for feminist causes. In her essay Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender and Embodiment, Jessie Daniels critiques the claim that ‘the internet shifts gender and racial regimes of power through the human/machine hybridity of cyborgs... identity tourism... and the escape of embodiment.’30 The essay explores how, despite the possibility of a potential “third space” to exist beyond gender constructs ‘digital technologies reproduce rather than subvert white, heterosexual masculine cultures and hierarchies of power’31 as Lori Kendall, scholar in identity on online communities, researched. Therefore, whereas a perhaps more naive cyberfeminism considers the cyborg and the online sphere as a “utopic vision of a postcorporeal woman”32 - a symbol of subversion, in reality women have gained no more social or political traction than in the real life (IRL).
2e. Schizophrenic Cyborg
Perhaps it is possible to go as far as to imagine the cyborgic online identity as inclusive of online profiles which are constructed as entirely fictitious as in the case of catfish. If an individual still interacts extensively with the world through their fake profiles, using their own thoughts and words to communicate, if it is their tool to communicate with the outside world, surely this could still qualify as a component of the cyborg self. In the case of MMORPG characters, it is the faithfulness of players to their characters and the ability to act out their whims through their character, that leads me to the conclusion that these profiles are still a component of the cyborg self. In the case of identity tourism, it is easy to correlate the ability to 24 Sassen in Daniels (2009).
25 Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, no.½ (2009): 110.
26 Hansen in Daniels, 2009, p 110.
27 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Siminians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 291-324. (London: Routledge, 1984.)
28 Haraway (1984): 292. 29 Haraway (1984): 294.
30 Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, no.½ (2009): 101-124.
31 Ibid.,
more freely explore hidden and restricted components of one’s identity on online platforms, as the extension of the self through cyborgic means.
Beyond the motivations of a fabricated, fictional or curated online profile, the reality of a multiple online profiled existence is that it is that is bears symptoms of the postmodern subject as a schizophrenic experience, as described by Frederic Jameson.33 To be clear, this is a diagnosis divorced from a medical perspective. I wish to re-examine Jameson’s schizophrenic in light of ten years’ worth of development in information technology, specifically in the context of the proliferation of online profiles.
To illustrate this, I will consider some of the symptoms of the postmodern schizophrenic subject as outlined by Jameson and Louis A Sass.’34 Jameson describes the schizophrenic as a breakdown in the signifying chain; as a ‘rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.’35 This scattering structure, a break from the classic linear conception of the signifying chain, is mirrored in the rhizomatic, hypertext structure of the internet. In this way, the internet is a productive tool when illustrating postmodern theory. On the internet, composed of scattered and layered codes, an individual leaves ghostly traces of their explorations in the online sphere. Which leads me to the schizophrenic as ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.’36 Regardless of any form of linear time IRL, in terms of the sequence an individual encounters and responds to things in the real world, the traces of these actions live simultaneously in an online field. On different social platforms comments and images and “likes” exist simultaneously and on separate platforms.
Finally, the schizophrenic postmodern subject is primarily one where the boundary between the self and environment is lacking.37 This is evident in the cyborg relationship between the self IRL and its online extension. The boundary is burred beyond a simple relationship between individual and online profile. Instead it becomes a relationship between individual and technology on a larger scale. Information technology changes and adapts our way of seeing and interpreting the world. It changes the speed in which we can send and receive information. Considering this, our cyborg extension can be considered as a much larger network than I initially propose. Furthermore, online profiles are rarely singular. Our online presence exists in many iterations online. Therefore, in the simplest sense, the postmodern schizophrenic as the fragmented and multiple individual caused by a fast-changing society, is both illustrated and perhaps a result of a society that increasingly performs their identity in online spaces.
3. Twice behaved
33 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the CUltural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
34 Louis A Sass. “Introspection and the Fragmentation of the Self, ” Representations, online article available at: Jstor http://www.jstor.org.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/stable/2928529, Accessed March 9 2016, (California: University of California Press, 1987) 1-34.
35 Jameson (1991). 36 Sass (1987). 37 Ibid.,
3a. Curating a shop window
Focusing now on online profiles that are an attempt to faithfully represent the user. The user who does not attempt any deliberate misrepresentation of who they are still must make certain choices over what images they use on their social platforms. Curating a profile, whilst not deliberately a manipulative act, does affect how identity is read: ‘our social media identities are not just a representation of who we think we are, but a performance of how we wish to be seen by others.’38 The nature of social media causes users to be hypersensitive to how they are being perceived by others by creating a mirror to their life through which users can re-examine their life. Lonergan explains what can be read into behind a seemingly simple profile picture.
‘When we choose a profile picture for an account on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, we are making […] a partial statement about ourselves… Users are performing an expression of the relationship between their public and private selves, and perhaps alluding too to their jobs, their families, their environment, their personal income, and so on. ‘39
There is a lot at play when your images are the first things that are seen by others and hence are the initial tools with which to make first impressions. Not only are images and videos carefully chosen to be uploaded in order to control an image that is fed into the world, but also, real life is imbued with this need for curation. As in, whilst experiencing live events, there are often individuals invested in the reputation of their online identities, that invest time and energy into recording evidence of a live experience to create the impression of an idealistic lifestyle, often at the expense of the actual enjoyment of the live event. By posting about attending a live event, an individual is ‘celebrating not just by seeing the show but by being seen seeing the show’40 This can be considered under the lens of Richard Schechner’s term for performance: ‘The selection and presentation of these images can be seen as an instance of “twice-behaved behaviour.”’41 An experience is repackaged to be watched by online viewers using an internet language and a code of signs which is subconsciously recognisable to the average internet scroller.
This lifestyle of considering how your IRL experiences can be packaged and posted online, is not to be undermined. People who have curated a “successful” social media profile by having large following can earn sponsorship and glamourous freebies from companies. As I have previously discussed, successful online profiles can be big business. For examples, hotels can offer social media influencers free holiday getaways as long as they are including their holidays into their social media posting. Pleasure becomes work and there is an incentive to grow a cyborg identity. It is challenging however to come to term with the shifting goal posts of what is valued IRL compared to in online life:
‘Value is determined not simply by the quality of what we post or by who we really are. Instead it is grounded in the reach and impact of our posts, by the connections that we have forged with others. This shifting conception of value in turn places strain on our understanding of the authentic self’42
Fostering these online connections takes an enormous amount of time and effort. The nature of a cyborg viral lifestyle is that it opens up a much larger life network to maintain. Identity is multiple and therefore, it is not an impossibility that an online poster can present an “authentic” self-online, but also a self that is somewhat incongruous with their IRL identity. John Suler examines the effect of online spaces on how people interact. Suler notes a “disinhibition” effect encountered in online worlds.43 Actions carried out online are seemingly disengaged from 38 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media. (London: Palgrave, Macmillan Education, 2016). P3.
39 Ibid, 27., 40 Ibid, 74 41 Ibid., 27. 42 Ibid. 3, 43 Ibid.,31
consequences in the real world. The result of which is that individuals feel less inhibited online than they do IRL. Suler notes that this can be benign, in the case of a, perhaps, shy individual being able to open up and speak more freely to others online, or toxic. It is this toxic behaviour that can give social media such a negative press. Disinhibition in online spaces opens up a space for people to post abuse and hate messages online. It becomes a cesspit for trolls.
3b. Free reign
When interactions are moving more and more to the online sphere, a popular growing concern is the fear for the degradation of human interaction.44 With more and more interactions taking place in online arenas, the fear is that individuals are losing touch with how to create meaningful relationships offline. While there is little evidence of this taking place, there are countless examples of individuals abusing their online anonymity to harass others in online spaces in a manner that they would not offline. Famously, in 2013 campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez received ‘around 50 abusive tweets an hour for a 12-hour period after she successfully campaigned for’ Jane Austen to appear on the ten-pound bank note.45 This is not a solitary example and attacks are often targeted specifically at women. On the 8th of March 2017, SNP MP Mhairi Black gave a rousing speech to the House of Commons identifying the graphic online abuse she continuously receives. 46 Online platforms have unlocked a space where the habitual laws of etiquette no longer apply. Theatre maker, Aliki Chapple approaches this subject in her performance 666 Comments first performed in Lancaster, March 2018.47 The performance consists of her, and another performer reading out the 666 reply comments to a feminist comic posted online. These comments range from support towards the comic, to naive and then to aggressive. These comments were wide ranging but also include a phenomenon mainly only found in these online spaces, that of “trolling”. It is not always clear when an online
commentator is “trolling” as their comments are deliberately provocative statements aimed at riling up other commentators and eliciting inflamed responses, but these comments are written as if they were serious, heart-felt opinions. Heated arguments which involve rape or death threats are not uncommon on the internet. They are not hidden in the dark corners of the internet but on the most popular of online social platforms, such as Twitter. Whereas, although death threats and rape threats are obviously still a problem offline, they are something that are rarely declared publicly due to potential repercussion. The lack of repercussions for what is said in online spaces encourages a deterioration of social interactions.
With a shift in social value towards people who are the most connected in online spaces, as in users with the most followers or the most online traffic in terms of views, online users may, consequently, use tactics to increase their presence. These tactics may include posting things for shock value, as is often the case in trolling, in order to encourage disgruntled online viewers to comment or react to their post.
4.
A Corporate Affair
44 Bill Blake, Theatre & the Digital (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
45 Alice Philipson, “Woman who campaigned for Jane Austen bank note receives Twitter death threats.” The
Telegraph. Last modified July 23, 2013. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10207231/Woman-who-campaigned-for-Jane-Austen-bank-note-receives-Twitter-death-threats.html
46 Ashley Cowburn, “SNP MP Mhairi Black describes shocking misogynistic online abuse received in Parliament debate,” Independant. Last edited March 8, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/snp-mp-online-abuse-mhairi-black-sexist-homophobic-women-parliament-debate-a8245646.html
4a. The data harvest
When examining online spaces as a site for identities and communities, we must identifying the forces at play. The impetus for technological advancement is big business. Some of the greatest profit generating sectors when it comes to the internet are the gaming industry and the adult entertainment industry. Both of which, for example, have invested heavily in Virtual Reality technology to kickstart a new generation of entertainment. More often than not, change is profit led. Returning to the premise that the internet is a platform for free speech for all, Patrick Lonergan explains in Theatre and Social Media48 how it is in fact businesses that profit from a user’s free labour.
Internet sites can profit two-fold from an online user’s activities. Firstly, as previously explored, through the harvesting of their data. However, in isolation, a single user’s data is obsolete. The business of harvesting data relies on millions of users. Only with such a wide pool of data this this can become useful, allowing useful information to be extrapolated. Information that can be sold to other companies to maximise results, knowing which users are most likely to be receptive to an advertising campaign. Lonergan explains the dual-faceted nature of internet sites:
‘There is a distinction between the interface of a social media platform (which aims to encourage users to contribute content), and the “backstage” of those interfaces, which aim to gather private information about users’ preferences, affiliations, beliefs, sexual orientation, health status, and behaviours - often without the users’ knowledge or explicit consent.’49
An individual user can become much more profitable for a company if their social media activities encourage a large amount of online traffic from other users; i.e., a video posted on social media platform acquires a lot of views. This allows sites to profit from placing
advertisement alongside these posts, framing them. Adverts placed alongside popular posts will guarantee more success by generating more views.
4b. GDPR Gallery of Horrors
Astra Taylor elucidates on what the internet’s platform for free speech actually entails: ‘“Free” has a fundamental ambiguity, an ambiguity central on the internet. Free can mean something that no one can own, that belongs to all. It can also mean free in cost… There’s “free” as in speech and “free” as in beer. YouTube is facilitating freedom of speech… but is gaining “freebies” from its users.50
Lonergan expands this point by illustrating the direct way online content is used:
‘...like newspapers with contents written by the readers… users often surrender their ownership of that content to the companies that host it: the “creative effort” begins with the user but ultimately belongs to the social media corporation… companies might profit from the placement of advertisement or targeted posts on [a] feed; they might also profit from the mining of personal data of the users who read or respond to [a] post’51
This issue over ownership came to light recently in one of the Facebook groups that I am part of. The group is called TK Maxx Gallery of Horrors. The page is dedicated to images of the ‘weird, bizarre or just plain awful stuff that can be found in the magical aisles’52 of the high street shop TK Maxx, a shop that sells the end of line items from other brands at a discounted price. For this reason, they have an eclectic stock content. The group is tongue in cheek and despite posts about the “horror” of the items found in the shop, most of the members of the group are big fans of the shop and the images are often of items that they have purchased.
48 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media. (London: Palgrave, Macmillan Education, 2016). 49 Ibid, p. 15.
50 Astra Taylor in Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media, p 25-26. 51 Lonergan, Theatre & Social Media, p.25
Recently, on this group, a post created by a Robert L. Foster was picked up by the Sun, a UK tabloid newspaper. Foster’s post was about finding trousers in TK Maxx with an inaccurate and inflated recommended retail price (RRP). The sun used his photo, his name and snapshots from the post’s thread in their online publication without his permission.53 This led to
controversy in the group about who owns the images and their rights to it.54 Adding fuel to the fire, The Sun is a controversial tabloid in the UK which has an especially problematic history involving their controversial manner of reporting on the Hillsborough Disaster, 1989 as discussed by Foster in his posts, Appendix 1. This ignited debates within TK Maxx Gallery of Horrors with many angry that the Sun could pluck posts from a group to create content for their online newspaper.55
Discussions on Mr Foster’s rights over his content were varied and confused. Mr. Foster himself was initially convinced that he had no right over his content and it was owned by
Facebook, but this was called into question when reminded that the group was a “closed” group. This murky water over who owns your data, how it is used and how it is safeguarded is
especially topical due to recent changes in EU regulations on General Data Protection
Regulations (GDPR). In fact, these regulations are not a massive jump from the regulations that were already in place to protect data, however they do outline the requirement for transparency to individuals on how their data is being used, stored and shared.56
4c. Sponsorship Smoke and Mirrors
A growing reaction against dodgy dealing “behind the scenes” of internet platforms has led to the change in policy, for instance, in how YouTubers can endorse products. People with a large online following founded purely by their online content are often called “Influencers” as they influence their fan base encouraging a certain kind of lifestyle, and encourage certain values. This term, is most often seen with positive connotations as Influencers are often encouraging people to adopt positive lifestyles such as healthy living. If a popular online
Influencer endorses a product it can result in a significant number of sales. Therefore, a number of regulations have had to be put in place regulating big businesses using manipulative tactics to reach the ears of young users. YouTube set new regulations in 2017 requiring YouTubers to label
53 Lydia Hawken, “Pulling your Leg: Shocked Shopper finds £15 Primark jeans in TK Maxx for DOUBLE the price”,
The Sun, originally written February 14, 2019, updated February 18, 2019 to blur the names of the original post
commenters after controversy.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/8424848/primark-jeans-tk-maxx-double-price/
54 See Appendix 1
55 Tk Maxx Gallery of Horrors, Facebook, accessed at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1543998352559682/
56 Baines Wilson LLP, talk on GDPR, February 13, 2018 at the Print Room Cafe Bar, the Storey Institute, Lancaster.
Figure 1 and 2: websites are required to be more transparent in when and how they collect and use an online searcher’s personal data, these are two requests for data a received within minutes of each other
their videos as “ads” or “sponsored” within the title of their video in order to retain a
transparency as to whether their video contains a genuine review, or if it has had any monetary influence.57
Considering this issue of trying to keep track of genuine versus sponsored
endorsements, recently, on the content sharing platform Reddit “drama” has broken out over one “redditor’s” corporate support. Reddit is a place for people to post, share images, links and stories. This content is voted on by other users. Reddit is organised into “subreddits” which divides reddit into smaller categories of posts within reddit. There are larger subreddits, such as /r/atheism that has 2.3 million subscribers, and smaller subreddits, such as
/r/blurrypicturesofdogs with 32.6 thousand subscribers, still an impressive following, that offers a platform to share blurry pictures of dogs, as the name suggests. The controversy that arose early February 2019, is that the reddit user /u/Gallowboob submitted a post to the subreddit /r/oddlysatisfying with a link to the new Netflix logo animation. Gallowboob’s post claims that the new annimation was a satisfying graphic. Accusations surfaced from other users that /u/Gallowboob had Netflix as an unofficial ‘corporate sponsor’58 and, furthermore, that this was not the first time that /u/Gallowboob had posted some sly advertising.
On top of that, /u/Gallowboob blocked commenters on his post accusing him of a corporate backing.59 This has opened discussions on how Reddit is run. Especially as a post on /r/OutoftheLoop asking about what the /r/Gallowboob drama was about, was also subject to a lot of deleted comments by moderators. Moderators are the users who are given power in a subreddit to decide whether the subreddit rules are being adhered to and to take action accordingly. /r/Gallowboob himself is a moderator of some subreddits. One redditor, /u/DrPessimism accuses /u/Gallowboob:
He's not gaming the system, he's part of it. The reddit admins have repeatedly permed people for exposing this marketing shill and even have threatened to close entire subs, they just don't want the scam they have going on with him exposed.
This guy is most probably some type of liaison between marketing agencies and the reddit administration that's why he's so protected despite the fact that he's so obviously advertising and botting. And when I say obviously I mean obviously.60
Other posts in a relevant thread on the subreddit /r/HailCorporate, a subreddit which “document[s] times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product” continue to outline how /u/Gallowboob has significant influence behind the scenes of reddit.61 The issue at play is not whether /u/DrPessimism is right when it comes to /u/Gallowboob, or to what degree he is, but that this is a realistic possibility. If not /u/Gallowboob, it is entirely possible that there are marketing agencies using user profiles to subversively promote their marketing messages. This is catfishing on a whole other level. It is not one individual posing as another, whether in this case or another, a marketing company is behind seemingly innocent posts and human interfaces. These cases are often incredibly difficult to prove and regulate.
57 Edgar Alvarez, “YouTube stars are blurring the lines between content and ads,” Engadget UK, written July 25, 2017, accessed February 23, 2019 at https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/youtube-influencers-sponsored-videos/? guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=DddfbVugOav0iNO66p3 nBA
58 /u/TheCaIifornian, “What’s going on with /u/Gallowboob and the accusations that he’s manipulating comments to protect his corporate sponsors? Is Reddit accepting of this?,” Reddit: /r/OutOfTheLoop, posted February 3, 2019, accessed February 16, 2019 at
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/amohma/whats_going_on_with_ugallowboob_and_the/
59 Ibid. 60 Ibid.,
61/u/EVra66, “Netflix pays /u/Gallowboob to advertise on reddit. He locks the comments and removes any mention of it being obvious advertisement.” Reddit: /r/HailCorporate, posted February 2, 2019, accessed February 16, 2019 at https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/amg6kr/netflix_pays_ugallowboob_to_advertise_on_reddit/? st=JRORA8XS&sh=8aa2e41d
Whereas this seems a topical problem, symptoms of the possibility of organisations secretly posing as inconspicuous online profiles have emerged since YouTube began to gain traction. In 2006 budding filmmakers Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders realised that they could use the medium of YouTube to create a series presented as reality. Beckett and Flinders
researched and mimicked the form used by other YouTubers who blogged about themselves and their lives, and used it to present their own channel for a character named Bree under the username Lonelygirl15. The impetus for faking the identity of a teenage girl was to create the first ever web series and gain an audience through this social media stunt when the truth was finally revealed. The duo succeeded in their endeavours. The hoax lasted less than half a year, but what is important to note is that they were the first people to prove that you can make money from YouTube as well as being the ‘first YouTube series to feature product placement’62 which was for the company Neutrogena and Beckett and Miles continued the series for a further two years.
Although their intention was not malicious, but rather a creative exercise in playing and manipulating with the platform of YouTube, for a limited time, it does demonstrate, from early uses of social media platforms, the possibility for groups to take advantage of creating an online human facade.
4d. Re-examining our Cyborgs in imagined realities
I have argued that online catfishers are still attuned to the fabricated identities that they have created. However, now, instead of an individual behind a profile, there is a group of people, an organisation, a marketing company presenting themselves in as an individual in an online space. Trying to rationalise the corporation posed as individual in this cyborg identity framework, I turn to Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.63 Harari describes the “imagined reality” in which entities such as limited liability companies exist:
“Sapiens have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.”64
Harari continue to explain these imagined realities as “inter-subjective” things; things that, rather than being imagined by an individual, are instead collectively imagined within a population. Harari follows this line of thinking by examining the limited liability car company Peugeot SA explaining how in a scenario where:
“All the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold, […] the company itself would remain intact. It doesn’t mean that Peugeot SA is invulnerable or immortal. If a judge were to mandate the dissolution of the company, its factories would remain standing and its workers, accountants, managers and shareholders would continue to live – but Peugeot SA would immediately vanish. In short, Peugeot SA seems to have no essential connection to the real world. Does it really exist?
Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which is operated. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it”65
This scenario of “legal fictions,” where companies follow the same legal parameters as people, exists in the same conceptual world where people can hold years long relationships with people who they have never met before and where an individual’s identity online does not 62Elena Cresci, “Lonelygirl15: how one mysterious vlogger changed the internet,” The Guardian, written June 16, 2016, accessed February 10, 2019 at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/16/lonelygirl15-bree-video-blog-youtube
63Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, (London: Harvill Secker, 2015)
64 Ibid, 12. 65 Ibid, 32.
correspond to their identity IRL. The feelings of the relationship are no less felt, genuine or valid, yet the relationship is constructed, a falsehood. That is not to say that relationships are not an inter-subjective concept in themselves. It only follows that if these legal fictions, abiding by the same principles as a person, can use online spaces in the same way people do.
The internet, a seemingly intangible entity, is able to foster an environment where the abstract nature of “limited liability companies” can thrive alongside fabricated personal profiles. Thus, allows big corporations the opportunity to use these tools and - via sly marketing tactics - subvert the rules to manipulate the public and make profit.
5.
Hypertext on Hyperdrive: Jon Rafman and the Human as a
Corrupted File
5a. A-historicityConsidering that this investigation examines online profiles as an extension of identity, it would be productive to also examine how these profiles organise themselves in online spaces. By this I mean in what ways do people affiliate themselves with online communities. In what ways do communities IRL translate in an online world? When examining online communities, it is fruitful to look at the work of Jon Rafman.
Artist Jon Rafman has been described as ‘a seasoned voyeur and wily scavenger of virtual worlds, both the sacred and profane’66 by James D. Campbell in response to Rafman’s 2015 exhibition in the Musée Contemporain de Montréal. Trawling through the infinite pages of the internet, which for many is a daily recreational activity has become Rafman’s research. He juxtaposes and exposes the ironies of the web in a search for some form of contemporary “sublime.”67 Despite his work spanning less than a decade, with the high-speed pace of the internet, it is not surprising that even in this short period of time - relative to artists working in other fields - Rafman’s work has shifted in a direction which has:
‘drifted away from the “post” in post-internet - the mainstreaming and ubiquity of digital technology, the collapse of any definitive break between “IRL” and online worlds - towards more marginal web communities and subcultures where the fantasy of the virtual as an escape from real life still thrives. Rafman’s recent works blend images sourced from deviant hedonistic micro-communities… with a poignant sense of nostalgia for the visions of the future offered by previous eras.’68
This exploration of these “micro-communities,” these hidden cultures that manifest themselves online, has been described by Campbell as the work of an ‘ethnographer of cyberspace.’69
Rafman explores how identity exists socially within communities, when these communities have no presence IRL.
Online spaces offer an environment for increased representation. One of the more typical communities that has formed online which helps provide individuals a safe space to explore their identity, personal expression and find other like-minded people, something not always possible in an IRL setting, is the online LGBTQIAA+ community. Individuals from a smaller and more homogeneous environment offline may struggle with internal identity politics and it is only online that they might find individuals that they identify with. An online space 66 James D. Campbell. “Jon Rafman: Musée Contemporain de Montréal, Canada.” Frieze. Last modified September 25, 2015. https://frieze.com/article/jon-rafman-0
67 Saelan, Twerdy. “This is Where is Ends: The Denouement of Post-Internet Art in Jon Rafman’s Deep Web.” Momus. Last modified July 9, 2015.
68 Saelan, Twerdy. “This is Where is Ends: The Denouement of Post-Internet Art in Jon Rafman’s Deep Web.” Momus. Last modified July 9, 2015.
69 James D. Campbell. “Jon Rafman: Musée Contemporain de Montréal, Canada.” Frieze. Last modified September 25, 2015. https://frieze.com/article/jon-rafman-0.
allows greater mobility between social groups and an opportunity for greater self-expression. The LGBTQIAA+ is a massive online community and therefore has broken off into many smaller communities. For instance, some offering support and advice to trans people who are
transitioning. Yet, for Rafman’s work, even these communities are large, in terms of followers and visibility, compared to the micro-communities, the subcultures that Rafman mines.
Despite gaining access to a more diverse range of communities with which to identify, Rafman notes that individuals struggle to maintain a sense of self as well as the communities themselves. He puts this down to a-historicity online:
‘The lack of history in this new post-internet age is making it harder to have a sense of self. The internet has already become ubiquitous, that it is now a banal part of reality.
In Internet years things are forgotten so quickly. The importance of history in building a sense of self is one of the main themes running through my work. Many of my projects focus on very marginal sub-cultures such as gaming… They [gamers] feel the lack of a sense of self acutely because their culture can die out any day. The game is everything to them but from one day to the next the culture of the game becomes obsolete.’70
Online communities lack the history that strengthens and preserves communities in offline spaces. This a-historicity manifests itself two-fold. Firstly, the internet has only been around for a limited time, even shorter considering the manner in which people interact with the online world only recently proliferated in the way that it has. Secondly, the downside of the internet creating an environment where people, moments, memes, ideas, or the like, able to become an over-night sensation, is that they can just as easily be forgotten. Moments in the history of internet sub-cultures are short lived, they bubble up and boil over. This exacerbates the fragility of the cultures and identities.
Cyborg identities are further made fragile as explained my Miroslaw Filiciak: ‘there are enough niches in the internet to deconstruct one’s identity, giving it a transparent form through the placing of various identities in a number of environments.’71 This brings us back to online identities as symptomatic of Jameson’s postmodern schizophrenic. When identity is split between different online platforms, it only acts to highlights the discrepancies in the self, undermining a unified sense of self.
5b. Dark Corners and the Algorithm
The niche online sub-cultures that Rafman mines exist as part of the so-called “dark corners” of the web. “Dark corners” seems like an ironic statement when considering the internet’s inherently rhizomatic structure. When “surfing” the web, the journey through web pages via hyperlinks should lead a “surfer” across a wide range of sites and exposed to a diverse range of content. However, this notion of moving through internet content freely and
un-hierarchically is perhaps a naïve or outdated way of considering our online access to the internet. In reality, our online experience is more of a rabbit-hole effect.
In reality, the sites that become immediately visible to an online user, as in what appears on their Facebook feed, or the first choices on their google search, are influenced by algorithms. A cyberflâneur72 cannot have an unbiased online experience. Despite the infinite scope of the internet, one can find themselves caught in an online loop and online crossing into a limited number of spheres.
Two individuals from different parts of the world, at different times of the day can obtain vastly different search results when searching the same words on popular search engines such 70 Mark Feustal. “Interview: Jon Rafman, The Lack of History in the Post Internet Age.” Mark Feustel. Last modified May 4, 2012. http://www.marcfeustel.com/eyecurious/interview-jon-rafman-the-lack-of-history-in-the-post-internet-age/.
71 Miroslaw Filiciak. “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” in Wolf and Perron (eds). The Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003), 91.
72 Cyberflâneur is a term given to individuals who surf the internet. The term derives from the French term flâneur for someone who saunters around observing society: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/flaneur
as Google. Craig and Marc Kielburger at we.org offer the example of a google search for “Venezuela” can result in a range of hits from restaurants to the latest political news.73 Digital marketing company, Tentacle Inbound, explains how online search results are impacted by digital algorithms that are influenced by two factors of an online user’s presence. Firstly, by contextual information, as in, where in the world they are as well as what time of the day it is. This information can help guide the algorithms to predict the type of information that someone in this context would most likely be looking for, or open to. Secondly, personal information, data gathered from online cookies of previous searches, helps a web browser build a database of personal preferences and habits from previous online interactions. It gathers information on what ‘sources you gravitate to’ and what ‘satisf[ies] you as a searcher.’74 To be clear, these algorithms not only influence what is most likely to come up first when a user actively looks up information on a search engine, but also the adverts their frame their web browsing experience, recommendations, and the stories that pop up in their newsfeed when scrolling through social media like Facebook and Twitter. The rhizomatic structure of the internet is creased. A user’s viewpoint is like a weight on the planes of information drawing closer, like a magnet, certain sets of data. One must work harder to access more diverse articles, working against the energies involved in the magnetic pull that are the internet algorithms. Even when an online searcher is not actively creating an online profile, or avatar, they are still leaving a trail of information as they move through online spaces which is collected and collated and can form a pretty clear sense of who this individual is and what their online behaviour is like.
The result of being presented specific sites that have been recommended based on one’s personal and contextual information is that one can end up in what has been coined an “echo chamber.” These algorithms aren’t visible to the general user and they are, therefore, unaware of how the information presented to them is biased. As these algorithms are based on the pre-collected data of our preferences, we are therefore more likely to be presented with information that already agrees with our current views. This is what causes an echo chamber. This is a growing issue as more and more people are turning to online media for their news. Around seventy-five percent of individuals in the UK use the internet to source their news in 2018. Forty percent of those individuals gather that news from social media.75 Accessing a wider dialogue can only encourage empathy. The dangers of echo chambers had been identified as early as 2011 by Eli Pariser in his bestseller The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.76 The book explains how algorithms filter through information that an online user receives leaving them insulated from opposing views, ‘sheltered from opposing opinion’77 causing this bubble effect. Eli Pariser explains: “The danger of these filters is that you think you are getting a representative view of the world and you are really, really not, and you don’t know it… Some of these problems that our fellow citizens are having kind of disappear from view without our really even
realising.”78
Pariser also explains how“If you only see posts from folks who are like you, you’re going to be surprised when someone very unlike you wins the presidency.”79 From here we can begin
to see how in certain circumstances, echo chambers can influence elections and grow 73 Craig and Mike Kielburger, “How the Internet Algorithms are Dividing Us,” We.org. Posted February 11, 2017. Accessed February 2, 2019 https://www.we.org/we-schools/columns/global-voices/internet-algorithms-dividing-us/.
74 Heather Physioc, “The Complex Web of Personalised Searches,” Tentacle Inbound, LLC, Accessed February 7, 2019 http://tentacleinbound.com/articles/personalized-search.
75 Nic Newman, “United Kingdom,” Digital News Report conducted by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Oxford University, Results of Surveys taken in 2018, accessed February 7, 2019
http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/united-kingdom-2018/
76 Jasper Jackson, “Eli Pariser: Activist whose Filter Bubble Warnings Presaged Trump and Brexit,” The Guardian, written January 8, 2017, accessed February 7, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/08/eli-pariser-activist-whose-filter-bubble-warnings-presaged-trump-and-brexit.
77 ibid
78 Pariser in Jackson, 2017. 79 Ibid.
extremism. This has been a hot topic. Recent controversy has examines how data collection, harvested legally or otherwise can be exploited. Specifically, wide news coverage has examined how Cambridge Analytica, a company that used harvested personal data from millions of users, influenced the Brexit vote as well as aided President Trump’s election after whistle-blower Chris Wylie’s testimony. Furthermore, this scandal ties into the recent “fake news” hype, the ins and outs of which are beyond the scope of this investigation. I shall however reference several news articles that I found useful in my research.808182838485 I will recognise and acknowledge, and problematise, the ironies of referring to online articles discovered through using popular search engines when researching the algorithms popular search engines use in creating targeted results for online searchers.
This part of this investigation has sought to identify the links between how the code, creating artificial intelligence behind online platforms and search engines have an influence over how we think and the opinions we hold when we are increasingly moving our lifestyle into online spaces.
5c. Dark Corners of the Algorithm
It is by bending these algorithms into his own tools to aid his cyber-ethnography that Rafman’s work succeeds. It is through countless hours of trawling the internet and changing his viewpoint in the rhizome of the internet that Rafman discovers these micro-communties and “dark corners” of the web. This is poignant in his 2014 work, Mainsqueeze.86 Mainsqueeze is a collation of video footage found by Rafman on the internet and is described by Josephine Van de Walle: ‘Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s thrilling and at times ghastly short film Mainsqueeze embodies the artist’s interest in a world where online subcultures and fetish communities rule.’87 It is this ‘dystopian sublime’88 that Rafman portrays of the grotesque reality of how the internet has become a platform for fetish communities. This is also a theme in Rafman’s Kool Aid Man where Rafman explores the massive multiplayer online role-playing game Second Life. What becomes apparent is the prevalence of the sexual-grotesque in every corner of these platforms.89 The internet as a space to foster the sexual deviant as in “rule 34 of the internet”. The so-called 80 Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked,” The Guardian, written May 7, 2018, accessed February 7, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy.
81 Carole Cadwalladr as told to Lee Glendinning, “Exposing Cambridge Analytica: It’s been exhausting, exhilarating, and slightly terrifying” The Guardian, written September 29, 2018, accessed February 7, 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge-analytica-cadwalladr-observer-facebook-zuckerberg-wylie.
82 Terry Gross (host) and Carole Cadwalladr (guest), “Reporter Shows the Links Between The Men Behind Brexit and The Trump Campaign,” transcript of interview for National Public Radion, Inc [US], broadcast July 19, 2018, accessed February 7, 2019 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?
storyId=630443485&t=1549573479125
83 Jane Mayer, “New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit”, The New Yorker, written November 17, 2018, accessed February 7, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerges-of-steve-bannon-and-cambridge-analyticas-role-in-brexit.
84 Mark Scott, “Cambridge Analytica helped ‘cheat’ Brexit vote and US election, claims whistleblower.” Politico, written March 3, 2018, accessed February 7, 2019 https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-chris-wylie-brexit-trump-britain-data-protection-privacy-facebook/.
85 Olivia Solon and Emma Graham-Harrison, “The Six Weeks that brought Cambridge Analytica Down,” the Guardian, written May 3, 2019, accessed February 7, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/03/cambridge-analytica-closing-what-happened-trump-brexit.
86 Josephine Van De Walle. “Video: Jon Rafman: Mainsqueeze 2014.” Artlead. Last modified November 4, 2016. http://artlead.net/content/journal/video-jon-rafmann-mainsqueeze-2014/.
87 ibid
88 Saelan Twerdy. “This is Where it Ends: The Denouement of Post-Internet Art in Jon Rafman’s Deep Web.” Momus. Last modified July 9, 2015. http://momus.ca/this-is-where-it-ends-the-denouement-of-post-internet-art-in-jon-rafmans-deep-web/.
