Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era

3 | “Location, Location, Location”: Placing Persons, Accessing Information, and Expressing Self

Chapter three “Location, Location, Location” Placing Persons, Accessing Information, and Expressing Self West Virginia Contemporary image-sharing practices that make use of keyword tags provide an excellent opportunity to observe the interaction of conscious choices, nonconscious habits, and technological mediations that make persons, places, and things findable. Scott Nixon’s The Augustas reel allows us to contextualize these current trends in social networking within a longer history of technology-enabled practices of self-recording. The social-networking platforms and tools I consider in this chapter are those suggested by the moment of writing. A decade ago, one would have written about Myspace rather than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Vimeo. This field of practice is rapidly evolving. Nonetheless, it remains possible to discern some common problems contemporary practices share with celluloid home movies and with the forms of “sharing ” likely to follow them. Central among these problems is the issue of image-label relationships : the very labels that enable finding and locating may very well frustrate findability—and, by extension, accessibility. Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic theory of the sign, which distinguishes between icon, index, and symbol, provides a vocabulary with which to understand this issue. Recall that for Peirce an icon 54 Finding Augusta is representational; it signifies by means of likeness or verisimilitude . In contrast, a symbol conforms to rules and conventions that establish the conditions that make signification possible: there is no “natural” or intuitive relation between, for example, a word and its referent. As for an index, it manifests meaning materially, either as a physical trace (a fingerprint or photograph) or a real-time indication of some event (the wind’s direction). Moreover, any kind of sign requires another sign—a thought-sign—to interpret it. To become meaningful, icons, symbols, and indices must interpret each other. Peirce’s semiotic emphasizes that symbolic labels have no inherent capacity to fix, that is, stabilize or secure, the iconic and indexical unruliness of the photographic documentary image. Only through habitual usage does the fact that an image bears a place name suffice to map it. If findability is a central technique of governance, then we can expect its operations to be both habit dependent and open to habit change. Findability In the last chapter, I concluded by positing that the streams of data we disseminate by means of our mobile devices constitute an autography—not an autobiography. We who have been brought up in liberal nation-states might readily transpose the former (autography) into the latter (autobiography). Furthermore, we might characterize such autobiographical practice as belonging to the province of self-expression, which we assume to be personal and essential. We typically understand ourselves as individuals who may decide or not to document where we have been and what we have done. We tend to understand such practice as boasting a style or voice particular to us. For this reason, it makes sense to interpret a collection of home movies as expressive of a particular individual, for example, a man named Scott Nixon. We 55 “Location, Location, Location” rely on an assumption that we express ourselves as self-aware individuals through the artifacts we produce, be they images we collect or narratives we craft. We rarely, if at all, consider that documenting ourselves and our movements helps others to regulate us and the populations to which we belong. Michel Foucault taught us to question and historicize this common sense when he identified a tradition of disciplinary practice that requires “speaking the self.”1 Always-in-hand mobile devices extend and alter that tradition. Not only is self-expression not outside techniques of governance, but also it is not entirely, or even primarily, a function of individual will. After all, as I showed in the previous chapter, much of what we document of ourselves transpires at the nonconscious level of the proto-self (Damasio), at the level of impulse. Nevertheless, we tend to think of ourselves as self-conscious, autobiographically inclined individuals. Thus, even at this late date, it can still seem news that information technologies facilitate the management of persons within and across populations. In March of 2011, the New York Times reported of the ordinary cell phone, “It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know It.”2 Although cell phone companies rarely divulge how much information they collect, they are clearly in the business of tracking their customers’ whereabouts by means...