Mediated Interfaces

The Body on Social Media

Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, Carolina Cambre, Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, Carolina Cambre, Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, Carolina Cambre

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501356193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Images of faces, bodies, selves and digital subjectivities abound on new media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and others-these images represent our new way of being online and of becoming socially mediated. Although researchers are examining digital embodiment, digital representations, and visual vernaculars as a mode of identity performance and management online, there exists no cohesive collection that compiles all these contemporary philosophies into one reader for use in graduate level classrooms or for scholars studying the field. The rationale for this book is to produce a scholarly fulcrum that pulls together scholars from disparate fields of inquiry in the humanities doing work on the common theme of the socially mediated body. The chapters in Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media represent a diverse list of contributors in terms of author representation, inclusivity of theoretical frameworks of analysis, and geographic reach of empirical work. Divided into three sections representing three dominant paradigms on the socially mediated body: representation, presentation, and embodiment, the book provides classic, creative, and contemporary reworkings of these paradigms.

Part One

The body mediated

Introduction

The first part of this book is titled ‘The body mediated’. In fact, all the chapters in this book are about mediated bodies, but there is something particularly curious and creative about the manner in which the body is mediated in these chapters. Rather than focusing on what happens to the material body when it is mediated – something we will explore later in the book – this part looks at what happens when our conception of the classic fleshy and material body is made, by the forces of mediation, to be something other than or more than simply flesh. This part is about the matter of the body but also how the body comes to matter. For instance, Chapter 1 is an extended piece by Vince Miller. The purpose of this deeply theoretical contribution is to encourage us to think about the ways in which mediated bodies become of less values than our offline material selves through the powerful forces of discourses via the evolution of technological phenomena. In the chapter, Miller discusses what effects mediation has on our treatment – conceptually – of the material body, the ethical body, the political body. He takes as his focus the theme of privacy and discusses how various forms of and manifestations of ‘abstraction’ have contributed to our loss and reworking of privacy in the digital age such that the way we come to think about the body has come to be virtually weightless and thus devoid of moral and ethical value and concern. In Chapter 2, Emily van der Nagel pivots from theoretical to material to consider what happens when the material body – and not classic modes of citizenship – becomes the means by which identity is both verified and obscured in order to permit online bodies to perform non-normative acts. Here the body, which classically was aligned with other modes of identity making, is cut away from, separated from, ‘named’ identity markers, and in that act the material body provides a sort of freedom to act outside the confines of social norms and socially regulated identities. In Chapter 3, Hattie Liew shows how bodies become mediated collectively as ‘fans’. Through platform specifics but also networked vernacular practices, individual networked bodies come to move as one and define the practices and codes of the shared community. Importantly these practices are co-produced, dialogic, and iterative, folding in on one another such that the cooperative of unique individuals also works diligently and creatively to craft a unique and singular collective distinctiveness. Chapter 4, by Carolina Cambre and Maha Abdul Ghani, examines the celebrification and commodification of children’s bodies via the process of becoming a YouTube celebrity. What is most interesting about all of these chapters is the manner in which we can observe socially mediated forces flowing through bodies to relationally produce individuals, identities, discourses, and communities.

1

‘Find love in Canada’: Distributed selves, abstraction, and the problem of privacy and autonomy

Vincent Miller

In April 2013, Rehtaeh Parsons, a teenager in Nova Scotia, Canada, committed suicide after a more-than-a-year-long struggle with depression and online bullying. The previous year she had been sexually assaulted by three boys while drinking at a small party. To make matters worse, one of the boys took a photograph of the incident on his phone and this was circulated to others at her school and into the community, where it ‘went viral’. The spread of this photo prompted a year of abuse and harassment online and offline, resulting in school changes, family moves, a stint in a mental health unit, and, ultimately, the taking of her own life. Perhaps even more astonishingly, a number of weeks after her death, digital images of Miss Parsons once again became the subject of controversy when advertisements for the Ionechat dating website, featuring photographs of the deceased girl (at the age of 15), appeared on Facebook with the caption ‘Find Love in Canada! Meet Canadian girls and women for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!’ Twice, this girl had been the victim of an Internet culture of free-floating images and information.

When it was first discovered that images of Rehtaeh were being used in dating advertisements, it was speculated that these dating ads with her image were a tasteless gimmick to draw attention and more hits to the Ionechat website. However, the reality was more mundane, the result of the common practice of ‘image scraping’ or ‘data scraping’, where software indiscriminately grabs pictures on the Internet given a set of search criteria for use in advertisements and on websites. An Ionechat website administrator was quoted as saying: ‘I simply used a tool to scrape images randomly on Google Images and inserted it into the ad campaign … I sincerely apologize’.

This practice is widespread, even though it is problematic in terms of copyright and privacy legislation. The person responsible for the ad merely uploaded a decontextualized image of a girl for a dating ad. He had no idea who this girl was and what her story might have been. The image of the girl had been completely separated from the characteristics of the person it represented.

Three things stand out here:

• The separation of the meaning of the photo of the girl from the girl herself. In that respect, the image has been washed of meaning transformed into ‘data’ to create value – a kind of social abstraction.

• The role of machines (image scrapers, phones) in this process – a kind of technical abstraction.

• The demonstration of the distribution of self digitally into networks.

Based on these, this chapter considers the uneasy relationships between what is viewed as human rights to privacy and the connected nature of social life in contemporary digital culture. Rateah Parsons’ privacy was grossly invaded on two occasions. First, when graphic footage of her assault was taken without her permission and spread among and beyond her peers; and second, when her image was used, without her permission, in a commercial manner and in grossly inappropriate circumstances. Parsons had no control over her image, over its abusive capture and distribution, or over the proliferation of media images of her after death, given their location in image banks worldwide. If a ‘crisis of presence’ exists in contemporary culture, one of its clearest manifestations can be seen in terms of issues around privacy and autonomy.¹

My aim is to frame the problem of privacy and autonomy in digital culture, not as a legal or technical problem but as a problem of ethics related to presence – in this case the ethics of an absent presence resulting from the abstraction of information generated from persons. I begin by positing that the notion of abstraction is at the heart of issues around privacy and autonomy in digital culture. I am going to suggest that contemporary digital culture consists of five modes of abstraction: informatization, commodification, depersonalization, decontextualization, and dematerialization. I argue that personal information when treated as abstract ‘data’ can be easily divorced from the person and therefore from ethical obligations associated with personhood, effectively allowing the removal of such information from the social sphere of ethics and morals, making it ethically ‘weightless’.

Secondly, I suggest that when addressing the problem of privacy more productively it is worthwhile considering not only privacy and what rights humans have to a private life but also what it means to be ‘human’ in an era of digital communications and networked environments. Being-in-the-world now often involves the spreading of our presence into a myriad of places and how the increasing virtualization of social life has extracted (and abstracted) our presence and our very being into bits of data which are free-floating: both beyond our control or even our awareness.

As a result, the second section will examine what it is to be a ‘self’ in online culture through Rotman’s (2008) concept of the parallel or quantum self, as well as Stiegler’s (1998) concept of exteriorization. I conclude by suggesting that new consideration needs to be given towards digital or immaterial components of self (i.e. personal data) as matter of being or part of the self, not as ‘representational of’ or ‘information about’ persons. Such a shift in thinking is necessary to give personal data ‘ethical weight’ and thus maintain any prospect of privacy and autonomy.

Abstraction and the separation of information from people

To be abstract is to consider something theoretically. One can think in abstract terms or deal with abstract matters, meaning that one is engaged in the realm of ideas, and not dealing with concrete matters or events. Abstraction also refers to the removal or withdrawal of something from its setting or context. Indeed, the Latin root of abstraction (abstrahere) means ‘to draw away’ (OED). In computing science, abstraction refers to reductive processes of removing all but the relevant characteristics of an object for the task at hand with the usual goal of reducing complexity and enhancing efficiency. The ‘abstraction’ at the end of such a process of reduction is a representational object consisting of the relevant qualities of the original, with all irrelevant information withdrawn.

It is my contention that the notion of abstraction is at the heart of issues around privacy and autonomy in digital culture. In what follows, I am going to suggest that contemporary digital culture consists of five modes of abstraction: informatization, commodification, depersonalization, decontextualization, and dematerialization. Three of these (commodification, depersonalization, dematerialization) can be considered more ‘social’ forms of abstraction, having their roots more in the machinations of contemporary capitalism, while two (informatization and decontextualization) can be seen as more ‘technically driven’ forms of abstraction. I posit that all these modes of abstraction combine to create a distance between information about people and the people themselves, and that this works to remove data from any sense of meaning in terms of the social and thus any moral or ethical responsibilities shown to others. Personal information gets transformed into valuable ‘data’, which opens it up to all forms of economic, instrumental, and exploitative use, discouraging ethical links to real persons and their rights to privacy and autonomy.

Informaticization

The formulation emphasizes the reification that information undergoes in the Shannon-Weiner theory. Stripped of context, it becomes a mathematical quantity, weightless as sunshine, moving in a rarefied realm of pure probability, not tied down to bodies or material instantiations. The price it pays for this universality is its divorce from representation (Hayles, 1999: 56).

Claude Shannon is often called the (reluctant) ‘father of the digital age’ (Waldrop, 2001). Through the publication of his 1948 paper ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, he is largely responsible for what is referred to as ‘information theory’, upon which almost all modern electronic communication is based, and it is still considered one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. Shannon was confronted by the need to formulate a model of communication to facilitate the design of technologies that would reliably transfer signals and messages across a variety of media and conduits (such as telephone wires or satellites) at large volumes. Shannon recognized that the properties of information could not change from one medium or context to the next; otherwise the reliability of that information getting from one place to another could be compromised.

Shannon approached this by redefining ‘information’, not as a symbol or mark which carries ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ (the conventional way we think about information) but as a ‘probability function’, essentially an expression of the likelihood of the occurrence of a particular set or sequence of symbols as opposed to another alternative set. In the words of Warren Weaver (1949), who popularized Shannon’s work:

To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message … a logarithm of the number of choices. (4)

As such, information is reduced to a mathematical object of probability produced through a narrowing down of a series of ‘choices’ of what a message is, or not, out of a range of possible messages or message elements.

For Shannon (1948), the technical problem of the accurate transmission of symbols outweighed the semantic problem of whether the transmission conveys the desired meaning. Thus, the issue of ‘meaning’ took a back seat to the problem of ‘reliability’. Conceiving information in this way allows circuits to handle greater volumes and variety of messages; however, by giving information a definition which reduces everything it sends to the same value, the concept of information, at the very foundations of digital culture at least, becomes divorced from meaning, context, and materiality (Hayles, 1999; Roszak, 1994; Thacker, 2003). According to Hayles and Roszak, the implications for contemporary culture are quite profound.

Hayles suggests that this shift illustrates the foundations of ‘how information lost its body’. The story of the redefining of ‘information’ from something meaningful and contextual, a useful fact about a particular thing, to a decontextualized mathematical quantity (essentially the transformation from information to data) becomes the story of the separation of information from matter, context or meaning as the technical basis for digital culture (Thacker, 2003). Roszak suggests:

For the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are ‘information’. The word comes to have vast generality, but at a price; the meaning of things communicated comes to be levelled, and so too the value. (1994: 14)

Distinctions between communications – what is public or private, what is right or wrong, what is personal or impersonal – are lost in this quantitative understanding of information. Such decontextualization erases the distinction between what ought and ought not to be communicated. Human meanings, human standards, human ethics become more difficult to apply in such an informational landscape, which makes little or no acknowledgement of the character of what is being communicated.

Commodification

For Marx, ‘an abstraction is made every day in the social processes of production’ (Marx and Engels, 1987: 272; cited in Prodnik, 2012: 277). The commodification of labour is chiefly accomplished through its abstraction, wherein, under the market process, the bodies, labour, talents, and abilities of individuals become commodified as market relations, which come to define all social relations in society. Labour becomes abstract when it is removed from the realm of the concrete (where labour is conceived of as a useful activity for creating things which have use values) into something that can be rationalistically measured and calculated. For example, one can see this in conceiving of labour cost in terms of dollars per hour. This abstraction reduces all forms of labour, unequal as they may be, into an equivalent objective measure, which allows one to think abstractly about human work, separating it from the worker him(her)self. Such abstraction allows a ‘labour market’ to function in a context independently of the social relations of the workers themselves. This abstraction becomes articulated in the process of ‘commodity fetishism’, where the social relations of the products of human labour are manifested in our perception only in terms of the exchange value of the objects themse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Mediated Interfaces: The Body in Social Media Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre, and Crystal Abidin
• Part 1 The body mediated
• Part 2 The body politicized
• Part 3 The body felt
• Index
• Imprint