Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World

Notes

. 163 N O T E S Acknowledgments 1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xxi. Introduction 1 Kiss, “Facebook.” 2 Warren, “Quit Facebook Day Falls Flat”; Spring, “Quit Facebook Day Was a Success Even as It Flopped.” 3 White, “Facebook Suicide.” 4 From the banner at Quitfacebookday.com. Ironically, in 2009 the website Seppukoo (www.seppukoo.com), whose goal was to “assist your virtual identity suicide,” received a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook accusing them of malicious appropriation of the personal data of users. 5 Wellman, Networks in the Global Village. 6 Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of rhizomatic thinking, for instance. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 7 Tryhorn, “Nice Talking to You.” 8 Eskelsen, Marcus, and Ferree, The Digital Economy Fact Book, 6. The exceptions are Mexico, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland. 9 Eskelsen, Marcus, and Ferree, The Digital Economy Fact Book, 6. 10 Tryhorn, “Nice Talking to You.” 11 Eskelsen, Marcus, and Ferree, The Digital Economy Fact Book, 60 12 See for example Scoble and Israel, Naked Conversations; Micek and Whitlock, Twitter Revolution. 13 See for instance Feld and Wilcox, Netroots Rising; Roberts, How the Internet Is Changing the Practice of Politics in the Middle East. 14 Weis and Andrews, The Business of Changing Lives. 15 Bonk, The World Is Open. 16 Ellul, The Technological Society, xxxiii. 17 Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science, 169. 164 . N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 1 1. The Network as Method for Organizing the World 1 In order to elaborate on attention capital, a basic understanding of attention economics is needed. Attention is “the action that turns raw data into something humans can use” (Lanham, quoted in Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies, 111). Thus attention economics treats attention as a scarce commodity. What information consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon, quoted in Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies, 109). 2 Giannone, “World’s Rich Got Richer amid ’09 Recession.” 3 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 295. 4 Andrejevic, iSpy, 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Smith, “Mobile Access 2010.” The same survey found that minority cell phone owners were taking advantage of more of their phone features compared to white mobile phone users. 7 See “Harper’s Index,” 11; Allegretto, The State of Working America’s Wealth, 10. 8 Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. 9 Andrejevic, iSpy, 7–8. 10 Mejias, “Between Google and a Hard Place.” 11 Details are hard to glean for those not privy to the negotiations and contracts, but apparently, due to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the content of students’ e-mails will not be mined for data while they are enrolled, although Google can still track the “signaling data” (web links within e-mails, activity between people, etc.). If students wish to keep their Gmail accounts after they graduate, then their e-mail contents will presumably be open for mining. 12 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. 13 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 14 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 501. 15 This is reminiscent of the old colonialist model of cultural diffusion (cf. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World) and more contemporary theorizings of a normal inside and a queer outside (cf. Fuss, Inside/Out). 16 Hardt and Negri, Empire. 17 Ibid., 211. 18 Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, 29. 19 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 20 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 21 Ibid. 22 Benjamin, “The Work of Art.” 23 It is also interesting to note the role of war in occupying the masses according to Benjamin, for “[w]ar and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 241. N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 2 . 165 2. The Privatization of Social Life 1 It should be noted that Benkler’s argument is more nuanced than others that present the collaborative and peer-to-peer models of production and sharing that the Internet makes possible as the most important challenges to capitalism in modern times. See for instance Kelly, “The New Socialism.” 2 Ibid., 7. 3 DeTar, “Bike Maps.” 4 O...