What Has Grass Got To Do With The Web?

Well, to answer the question the title posits, we need to turn to Deleuze & Guattari and their concept of the rhizomatic structure.  It’s such an interesting theory, particularly as, written in 1980, it seems to foretell much of the way the Web has grown, and indeed, continues to grow.

In the introduction to their important work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze & Guattari compare the arborescent structure of trees with the rhizomatic structure of grass, claiming that

The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.  The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and’  This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’

This structure in which one is ‘always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo‘ is one which travels horizontally and consists of a series of plateaus: ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’.

A good online example of this is the blog.  Constructed of a series of posts, it offers an articulation of the rhizome through its refusal to begin and end.  When we sit down to read a blog, we rarely read it chronologically – we are encouraged through tagging and links embedded within the text to move freely through the blog.  Unlike the codex, which traditionally constructs the reading experience from cover to cover, the blog offers a more organic understanding of the text.

Similarly, the way we are choosing to narrate our own subjective experiences through online tools appropriates the rhizomatic structure.  One only has to look at a lifestream aggregator such as FriendFeed or StoryTlr to see that we are generating multiple narratives in multiple locations, through multiple media.

If we compare our current interaction and the articulation of our own narratives with the Web as it existed in its earlier incarnation, we can see a correlation to this juxtaposition of the arborescent and the rhizomatic.  In the past, we were presented with static websites that offered no invitation to connect, collaborate or co-create.  These sites existed as complete and finished texts that kept their reader at arms length.

In stark contrast, our experience of the Web as it currently exists is one in which we are always in the middle.  We are never outside the text, regarding a finite textual structure; we are invited in to share, contribute, participate with the text.  Our narratives form a thread within the fabric, refusing the isolationism of old and embracing the richness of hybridity.

Now, as with my thoughts of Bourdieu and De Certeau, these are purely musings which are not intended to stand, as with the web of old, as finite, complete and closed.  I want to invite you in to co-create by asking you to engage with some of these thoughts and to see if some of the connections that I’ve sketched out here resonate with you.

Do you think they’re valid observations?  Are the images of the tree and grass appropriate, effective metaphors for your experience of your relationship to media and, in particular, the Web?  As a reader, how has your reading experience changed with the advent of blogging and other online media designed to help you articulate your own narrative?  What do you believe are some of the reasons for this shift?

Feel For the Game

I tried it, but I just don’t get it.

I got an account last year, but I’ve never used it – seemed like a waste of time.

Why would anyone be interested in whether I chose a tall decaf caramel macchiato or a skinny hazelnut latte?  I don’t see the point in telling the world what I’m doing every minute of the day.

These responses may seem familiar to you.  You may have uttered a variation yourself, or it may be the response you often get while trying to explain social media to friends, family and colleagues.  The reason for these type of responses can indicate a) resistance, b) confusion, c) frustration d) fear.  However, the source of all these emotions is a lack of understanding.  They reveal that those who exhibit them are yet to develop a feel for the game.

One way of exploring this contrast between those who ‘get’ social media and those who don’t is by turning to the theories of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.  He posited that society consists of a multiplicity of fields with each field operating according to intrinsic logics pertaining to hierarchical strata, and the practice of position-taking in relation to those hierarchies.

One example that we can look at in order to illustrate this is the field of literary production; in this field there are a variety of agents such as publishers, authors, readers, booksellers etc. and they are all invested in the practice of producing literary texts.  Their success is then measured in two ways: economically and symbolically (cultural kudos).  In order to participate within this field, Bourdieu argues that we need to gain, through knowledge and experience, a set of dispositions which affect our practices, perceptions and prejudices.  Our habitus needs to develop in order for us to interact with others in the field – we need to gain that feel for the game.

If we then transpose this example from literary production to social media, it begins to explain why social media is intrinsic to the daily lives of some and a total enigma to others.  Those who understand social media to the degree that they can function quite happily within its structures have developed the habitus necessary to that field.  Those who don’t ‘get’ it, have yet to acquire that knowledge and experience which would facilitate their participation.

So how does one develop habitus to enable participation in the field of social media?

I would like to suggest that one of the best ways is through immersion.  It’s all very well reading blogs about social media, talking to social media ‘experts’ or enrolling in a social media degree, but it’s only when you give yourself the freedom to sit down, start an account, and begin to play with your medium of choice (FaceBook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn) that you begin to understand.

After all, it’s all very well learning the rules of the game, but it’s only through playing the game that we develop a feel for it.

- This is the first time I’ve tried to articulate these ideas, and where I’ve tried to simplify it, I can already see gaping holes in it.  However, let’s think of it as a jumping off point.  I’ll be exploring this theory further over the coming months and those explorations may ultimately render previous musings obsolete.  But, I’m looking forward to see how it evolves though!

If you have any questions or theories of your own – please do leave a comment.  I may not be able to answer your questions, but then maybe we can look for answers together.

Tales of a Digital Flaneuse

The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins… These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.  The paths that correspond to this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.  It is as though the practices of organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.

Walking in the City  – Michel De Certeau

As I move around cyberspace I am reminded of this quote from De Certeau derived from his essay Walking in the City, which itself is from a larger work called The Practices of Everyday Life.  First published in 1984, it sets out to interrogate the validity of the ‘increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry [that] privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details – parts taken for the whole’.  It is at turns a philosophical, sociological and anthropological narrative that stalks the ordinary individual as they move through space, time, society and culture.

As I embody this figure, strolling around social media, inscribing my mark on digital palimpsests, generating paths and route maps through previously uncharted cyberspace, I inhabit the role of the digital flaneuse: a woman wandering.  Elusive, and yet traceable by my movements online, I evade apprehension by those who attempt to control through panopticism.  I operate at a level ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’.

And yet, as De Certeau qualifies, ‘it is as though the practices of organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness’.  As I engage in these practices, I am graced with a privileged viewpoint – a subjective understanding of the ways in which this space functions.  I, in collaboration with all other practitioners, organise this space.  We manage this amorphous city of bytes and ether, unhindered by those who would seek to control our movements.

We are the ordinary practitioners  – ‘the murmuring voice of societies’ – ‘a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one’.  It’s our connections to each other, those bonds between one individual to another, that defines cyberspace in the 21st century.

As one of those individuals, I connect, I create, I communicate.  I am a digital flaneuse: at once a part of the crowd and apart from the crowd.  An individual unto myself and a member of the masses.