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242 | 17 Between Democracy and Spectacle The Front-End and Back-End of the Social Web Felix Stalder As more of our data, and the programs to manipulate and communicate this data, move online, there is a growing tension between the dynamics on the front-end (where users interact) and on the back-end (to which the owners have access). If we look at the front-end, the social media of Web 2.0 may well advance semiotic democracy, that is, “the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in public cultural discourse.”1 However, if we consider the situation from the back-end, we can see the potential for Spectacle 2.0, where new forms of control and manipulation, masked by a mere simulation of involvement and participation , create the contemporary version of what Guy Debord called “the heart of the unrealism of the real society.”2 Both of these scenarios are currently being realized. How these relate to one another, and which is dominant in which situation and for which users, is not yet clear and is likely to remain highly flexible. The social meaning of the technologies is not determined by the technologies themselves; rather, it will be shaped and reshaped by how they are embedded into social life, advanced, and transformed by the myriad of individual actors, large institutions, practices, and projects that constitute contemporary reality. Unfortunately, much of the current analysis focuses primarily on the front-end and thus paints an overly utopian and very one-sided picture. There are, of course, critical analyses that focus on the back-end, yet they also paint a very one-sided picture of technological dominance.3 Both of these are characterized by extensive biases which are the result of two very common , if unacknowledged, assumptions. In a nutshell, the first one could be stated like this: all forms of social life involve communication; thus, changes in communication (technology) directly affect all forms of social life. This idea, first advanced by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s, has been a frequent theme in the techno-utopian (and dystopian) perspective ever since. Between Democracy and Spectacle | 243 Rather than considering how social actors are able to appropriate new technologies to advance their existing, material agendas, the changes in the organization of the digital are taken to be so powerful that they simply impact on the material reality. Understanding the properties of the new modes of communication provides a privileged vantage point from which to understand a broad range of social transformations. Thus, the vectors of change are unidirectional . Such an analysis presents a simple dichotomy between the old and new, with the new replacing the old.4 The other very common assumption could be stated like this: conflicts are the result of miscommunication and a lack of information about the other side. Thus, improved communication leads to cooperation. This could well be the oldest utopian promise of communication technology. Just two years before the outbreak of World War I, Marconi famously predicted that his invention, radio, “will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous .”5 Today, building on the fact that it is individuals who have a vastly increased array of communication technologies at their disposal, this second assumption has inspired a new wave of communitarianism, envisioned as a blossoming of bottom-up, voluntary communities. This provides the current discourse with a particular populist character, different from earlier manifestations of techno-utopianism which focused on the technocratic elite’s6 influential vision of the postindustrial society. Yet, like these, it is the result of a rather linear extension of a technological property into the social. This time, the focus lies on the fact that in the realm of the digital, sharing means multiplying , rather than dividing as it does with respect to material goods. Since digital data is nonrivalrous, the social relationships mediated by the digital are assumed to exhibit a similar tendency.7 At its best, such a perspective is perceptive to early changes in the modes of social communication. Yet these two underlying assumptions limit our ability to understand the issues necessary to turn the semiotic possibilities into democratic ones. A case in point for the current, utopian discourse is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, widely lauded in the blogosphere as a “masterpiece,”8 because it expresses elegantly the widely shared beliefs within this community. His central claim, memorably phrased, is that “we are used to a world where little...

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