Like photography before it, social media changes the way we perceive the world

Emile Zola famously stated back in 1901, “In my view, you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.” Today, some make a similar joke: “it did not happen unless it is posted on Facebook.”

For those who use Facebook, whose friends are on the site and logging in many times a day, we have come to experience the world differently. We are increasingly aware of how our lives will look as a Facebook photo, status update or check-in. As I type this in a coffee shop, I can “check-in” on Foursquare, I can “tweet” a funny one-liner overheard from the table next to me and I can take an ‘interesting’ photo of the perfectly-formed foam on top of my cappuccino. It is easy; I can do all of this and more from my phone in a matter of minutes. And, most importantly, there will be an audience for all of this. Hundreds of the people I am closest with will view all of this and some will reply with comments and “likes.”

Simply, I have been trained to see the world in terms of what I can post to the Internet. I’ve learned to live and present a life that is “likeable.”

Many have rightly criticized Facebook over how the site turns the unquantifiable beauty of human experience into something that fits into a database , or how Facebook misuses that database to earnfantastic profits. These are valid critiques; however, my concern is that the ultimate power of social media is how it burrows into us, our minds, our consciousness, changing how we consciously experience the world even when logged off.

Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal wrote about how technology changes consciousness. For example, the invention of the railroad changed our perception of speed. He writes, “humans had to learn to look at the landscape, instead of trying to focus on the foreground.” The photograph Zola spoke of did the same. Invented some 150 years ago, photography caused a global sensation around the new possibility: to document ourselves and our world in new ways, in greater detail and in lasting permanence.

Today, social media has also provided a new, more social way to document ourselves, lives and world. Never before was it possible to record and display to all of our friends a stream of photos, check-ins and status updates filled with our thoughts and opinions in such quantity and with such ease. The transformative power of social media surely is of similar magnitude and consequence as the invention of the photograph.

The photographer knows well that after taking many pictures one develops “the camera eye”: vision becomes like the viewfinder, always perceiving the world through the logic of the camera mechanism via framing, lighting, depth of field, focus, movement and so on. Even without the camera in hand the world becomes transformed into the status of the potential-photograph.

Today, we are in danger of developing a “Facebook Eye”: our brains always looking for moments where the ephemeral blur of lived experience might best be translated into a Facebook post; one that will draw the most comments and “likes.”

Facebook fixates the present as always a future past. By this I mean that social media users have become always aware of the present as something we can post online that will be consumed by others. Are we becoming so concerned about posting our lives on Facebook that we forget to live our lives in the here-and-now? Think of a time when you took a trip holding a camera in your hand and then think of when you did the same without the camera. The experience is slightly different. We have a different attachment to our present when we are not concerned with documenting.

Today, social media means we are always traveling with the camera in our hands (metaphorically and often literally); we always can document. When going to see live music I notice more and more people distracted from the performance in order to take photos and videos to post to Facebook and YouTube. When the breakfast I made the other week looked especially delicious, I posted a photo of it before even taking a bite. The Facebook Eye in action.

Susan Sontag once wrote that “everything exists to end in a photograph” and today we might say that more and more of what we do exists to end up on Facebook. The tail of Facebook documentation has come to wag the dog of lived experience.

This essay was originally published in Italian for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. You can find it here . The essay is reprinted here in English with permission.

There is a good conversation to have on just how leaderless the Occupy movement is. It is more networked and decentralized, but, of course, not perfectly so. Structures and hierarchies always emerge. Unfortunately, this important conversation is derailed when some try to create fictional leaders for a movement that, for the most part, does not have them. Articles like, for instance, John Heilemann’s New York Magazine expose on Occupy, again and again force leader-language on the movement. And they do so unsuccessfully.

The traditional media wants to tell a traditional story, and this is why they get Occupy so terribly wrong. It is easier to describe a movement of leaders, of charismatic personalities and of specific ideas, messages and demands. The media momentum favors retelling the type of story they have told before.

But the reality for Occupy is much more complicated. Yes, the movement is not completely leaderless. Participation and efficaciousness are not evenly distributed across the 99%. For instance, the term “occupy” was not arrived to by some consensus but instead the creation of Adbusters. However, the magazine has claimed that they “have no interest in a continuing leadership role.” Instead, the magazine’s role has been aesthetic: to come up with good memes.

While pure leaderlessness may not be possible or even wanted for Occupy, the bigger story is that it is more decentralized than previous political movements. The high degree to which Occupy is leaderless continues to be a defining characteristic in how the movement operates.

I think we have a good idea of what Occupy-with-leaders might look like: the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. And much of the movement which supported Obama-the-candidate with vigor has become disappointed with Obama-the-president. The energy has drained from him towards something new. And it may not be coincidence that it is a movement not driven by a grand, charismatic leader-of-leaders, but instead an Occupation that is largely the opposite. Occupy evades easy dismissal of specific demands not universally made and easy take-downs of leaders that do not exist.

That is, unless the media attempts to create leaders where they do not exist.

The strategy is simple: without a head, neck and throat to dig into, one must create the figure easy to attack. Here, Fox News calls an occupier who spoke to TMZ about Miley Cyrus a “leader of the movement.” Using the term “leader” cuts straight to the heart of Occupy by implicitly saying a fundamental premise of the movement is false. Or take this article that claims leftists academics are the leaders of the movement. Many more examples, usually from the right, could be given.

In a profile of the Occupy movement in The New York Magazeine, John Heilemann says,

“The people plotting these maneuvers are the leaders of OWS. Now, you may have heard that Occupy is a leaderless ­uprising. Its participants, and even the leaders themselves, are at pains to make this claim. But having spent the past month immersed in their world, I can report that a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logisticians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists—has emerged as essential to guiding OWS.”

The argument is clear: Occupy has leaders, but claims to be leaderless. Heilemann makes important insights, specifically the way that hierarchies always emerge, what is sometimes called the “iron law of oligarchy.” However, the point that some are marginally more influential does not refute the ways in which Occupy remains so radically decentralized. It only shows how a more decentralized movement does not achieve impossibly pure leaderless perfection.

I understand that writing an expose is easier and more compelling when you have human-interest characters, and all the better if you get to call them “leaders” and “prime movers.” How exciting to unveil hidden leaders thought to be non-existent! This unmasking makes for compelling fiction.

The individuals identified by Heilemann do seem to have more influence within the movement than the average protester. However, the so-called leaders in the article attempt to make Occupy about clear goals and are instead trumped by the consensus of a crowd that supported a “glorification of…vagueness.” The “leaders” wanted clear demands, the decentralized crowd did not. Demands were not given and “leaders” they were not.

In another instance, Heilemann states that many people could step up and fill the leader void, “if only the rank and file will permit it.” But if these folks are leaders, then there should be no void to fill. If the rank-and-file are making the final decisions, don’t we have a model closer resembling leaderlessness?

Ultimately, Heilemann’s portrayal of Occupy as being leader-driven but dishonestly claiming leaderlessness is unsatisfying. Moving forward, media need to allow themselves to be confused by a purposefully vague movement. Over time, one victory of the Occupy movement will be the way it forces the creation of new space, new thoughts and new language. And this is an important victory for any progressive movement.

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

a "leader" of the occupy movement. photo by nathan jurgenson, zuccotti park.

It often seems that Occupy is all about transparency, that there is a fixation on the image through documenting every action from every conceivable angle and spreading the media as far as possible.Tim Pool, who I will discuss later and has been called ”the eyes of the movement”, states “transparency our principle of solidarity.” But there is clearly another position within the movement, one that rejects pure transparency and holds onto the value of anonymity.

I want to distinguish these two positions within the Occupy movement: (1) those who most valuetransparency and (2) those who most value anonymity.

It is easy to make the case that Occupy is centrally about transparency. The value of livestreams from protests has even drawn the attention of The New York Times business section. Think of all those police brutality videos that have gone viral from the Occupy movement. In the footage, the number of cameras focused on the action from every conceivable angle is almost as striking as the police actions. Flashes go off and arms struggle to hold video-enabled phones high; all while the crowd appropriately screams that “the whole world is watching.”

That which happens at the general assemblies in the parks and the protests in the streets easily flows online to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Livestream, Ustream, YouTube and Flickr. Occupiers have been so successful at making various actions and events visible that there is even a debate about whether images of police confrontation have gained too much publicity, possibly obscuring the income-equality message with anti-police resentment.

Indeed, much of what has been written about Occupy focuses on this newfound transparency, especially as we attempt to grasp the explosive rise of Livestream and Ustream as big new technologies of protest transparency.

The first star of this new technology is Tim Pool. Armed mostly with just a smartphone, he brought many of us into the Zuccotti Park for 21 consecutive hours the night of and day after New York City cleared Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park. I witnessed Pool’s stream climb over 25,000 viewers as he was rebroadcasted on the websites of Time and Al Jazeera. Some watching were inspired to come to the park; some of them finding him and providing food and batteries to keep the stream going.

But Pool’s Livestream also captures what many who have attended Occupy actions already know: that there are many who do not so openly embrace this transparency. We know that this same transparent visibility can be used to repress individuals. Certainly, the police apparatus is using similar technologies of transparency to surveil the movement. Individual protesters might be identified and subsequently arrested, as we saw with the UK Riots earlier this year.

The debate comes to a head in this tense exchange between Pool and other Occupy protesters:

http://www.ustream.tv/embed/recorded/18531950

Go to about the 28:25 mark in this clip pulled from Pool’s live stream from November 15th around 4am. Pool is walking down a street near a major crowd at the intersection of Pine and Broadway in Manhattan when a small sub-group of protesters get angry at Pool for filming them. These protesters believe that if they ask not to be filmed, Pool should honor that request. Pool responds that it is a public street and he has the right to record.

The exchange becomes heated. “Keep them off camera or you lose your fucking camera!” one says. Another protester yells at Pool, saying “Get the fuck out of here; you have no respect.” Pool responds by asking them to stop advancing on him and asks, “isn’t transparency our principle of solidarity, from day one?” He goes on to say “that if you break that, you should not be a part of this movement.”

Pool argues, “when you have anarchists draining the air on police vehicles and they say don’t film me because I’m breaking the law, I’m going to film them.” Another protester responds, “Well, I think that is really fucked.” Pool responds, “Everyone deserves to know the truth. Information is free. End of story. Transparency is what brings me here.” The protester responds, “I also think that people’s personal safety is really important.”

This clip is important for a number of reasons. It features the new protest technology (live streaming) as well as its biggest current star (Tim Pool). Most importantly, it features members of the same protest action literally hiding from each other. They are aggressively debating the true principles of the movement and both sides want the other to go away.

Pool said of the exchange, “When people were vandalizing police property, which really had no strategic value whatsoever, and then attacked me for it, it was very obvious they were not part of Occupy Wall Street, and most likely had their own political motives and needed to be documented.”

These last words, that these people “needed to be documented,” demonstrate the commitment to transparency: if it happens in public, it needs to be captured, recorded, documented and disseminated. (However, Pool is not so radical to support enforced transparency on the personal lives of individuals. As he says elsewhere, “personal privacy, public transparency.”)

Opposed to Pool and the absolute authority of transparency are those who support more anonymity. At Occupy actions there certainly are protesters who demand, sometimes angrily, for cameras to be moved away. This is especially obvious to me as I usually have a camera in-hand when I’ve been at these events. There is a minority of protesters who wear scarfs or masks over their faces, afraid that authorities will identify them, perhaps using increasingly sophisticated video surveillance and face-recognition technologies. See these unofficial protest instructions handed out at Occupy Oakland advising people to cover their faces. Further, there is a contingent in the multi-faceted Occupy movement that is skeptical of our modern economy of transparency, an economy that most often benefits private companies in the name of bigger profits for companies or easier surveillance for governments.

This is the story told less often, which is unsurprising given that those who purposefully want to remain anonymous would be less visible for analysis about the movement. While Tim Pool preaches transparency, there are fewer voices that would or could visibly preach invisibility. Instead, those who want to be anonymous within the movement purposefully remain in the dark.

The transparency folks are certainly in the majority of the Occupy movement and have good reason to be skeptical of protest anonymity. Zeynep Tufekci has been especially eloquent describing the importance of not wearing masks and using real names on Facebook during protests and uprisings. Those wearing masks are easier to disrupt and provoke and are more quick to become violent and destructive. That Occupy actions involve mostly unmasked protesters makes the movement look less fringe and more like “us” (versus the “them” of Wall Street). A movement without masks is a movement of concerned citizens instead of anarchist rebels.

But some at Occupy actions do cover their faces and demand to not be photographed and the video above demonstrates how heated this debate is. Occupiers feelings about transparency and anonymity — as principles and tactics — are much more complicated than most reporting has indicated.

screenshot of a living photo - click to view it come "alive"

I wanted the photo above to be an example of the new so-called “living pictures” that have garnered much recent attention. However, Lytro has not provided proper embedding code so I can only post this screenshot of a living photo. I highly recommend clicking on the photo or clicking here before reading along.

Okay, by now you have experienced a living photo. You see it, but you can also make it come alive; touch it, change the focus, reorient what is seen and focused on. Some might even argue that you get to decide the meaning of the story the image tells. This post asks: what would it mean if we start posting living pictures across social media? Might it change how we take photos? How might we differently interact with social media photography when we can manipulate the faces of our friends and engage with the images in a new way?

It has been my contention that photography can teach us quite a bit about social media. Not just because there are so many photos online but because photography serves as a familiar and grounding reference point to the newness of social media. Photography situates the novel and sometimes disorienting ways we are documenting ourselves online with a technology that did the same offline more than a century ago.

I have written about Susan Sontag’s description of photographers being always at once poets and scribes when taking photos to describe how we create our social media profiles in a similar way. I have used the concept of the “camera eye” photographers develop to discuss how social media has imbued us with a similar “documentary vision.” I also described how the explosion of faux-vintage photos taken with Hipstamatic and Instagram serve as a powerful example of how social media has trained us to be nostalgic for the present in a grasp at authenticity.

Here, I want to discuss what many are calling “revolutionary” and the next “big thing” in photography: the so-called living pictures linked to above developed by the Lytro company that have just entered the consumer market with cameras shipping early next year.

Lytro “Living Picture” Technology

This is not an essay so much about the technology but instead the implications of how it might become manifested across social media. Indeed, this is highly speculative since consumers have not yet even used the technology. Further, I am not writing here about the potential implications of Lytro technology for professional photographers but instead how it might be used in everyday, mainstream social media environments. If writing about professional photographers, one might focus on how living pictures make explicit that all photographic images are always co-creations between photographer and audience; or how these photos also make explicit that images are never the objective capturing of reality but also a creative endeavor via what is photographed and how the image is produced. Let me pull myself away from these tangents and briefly explain what Lytro’s “living pictures” are.

Lytro is the first company to bring “light-field” technology into a small consumer device. Light-field, or “plenoptic”, camera technology captures all the light–its color, intensity and direction–that makes contact with the internal sensor. It does not select a single focus point but captures all possible focus points at once. To understand the result, one needs to know just a little about what is called “depth of field.”

The Lytro camera has a constant aperture of f/2. This is simply referring to the size of the hole through which light travels from the world into the camera. A small f number (or “f-stop”) means a wide opening and f/2 is considerably wider than what one usually finds in point-and-shoot cameras. Besides capturing more light, the wide aperture means that either that which is near the camera or that which is far away will be in focus, but certainly not both. Objects in the foreground will be in focus and the background blurry, or vice versa.

And the Lytro camera lets one choose what will be in sharp focus and what is blurry after the photo is taken. This is brand new. Tellingly, Lytro put this technology not in professional cameras but in a point-and-shoot camera priced within the grasp of a large consumer demographic. Clearly, the primary intention is to create a new “living” type of photo to post online across social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on.

I will mostly skip over the stuff you might get in a consumer review of a new gadget. For instance, the editing one can do to a Lytro photograph is more limited (e.g., no faux-vintage filters, yet). The process to get the photo from the camera to Facebook is a bit awkward (from camera to a cable to a computer to Lytro’s software to Lytro’s website and then finally to Facebook) relative to a smartphone that can post non-living photos directly to various social media sites. And given that these cameras are not yet even on sale (let alone popular; I will not predict if they will be or not), there are many obstacles between now and some reality where we see lots of “living photos” in our Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr streams.

But if Lytro is successful and these self-shot living pictures do start to appear in our social media streams then we have at least the potential for a new type of a social media object. And this is why living pictures deserve conceptual attention here.

Living Pictures

The viewer of a living picture seemingly has a new sort of control with respect to the photo-object. By clicking around inside of the photo and brining things in and out of focus, others are now more active in choosing what story the photo is telling. They might feel that their own perspective, taste and aesthetics can now determine what they ultimately see. Further, the experience might be more intimate because rather than just seeing a friend’s face, one is reaching out for, touching and manipulating it and its relation to other objects in the image.

All photos are to be understood as a conversation between the photographer, the photo-object and the viewer. The living picture asks us to slightly rebalance this delicate relationship by granting more power to the viewer; observing becomes more like a game when the image is placed in our hands as something to play with.

Is this a new paradigm in how social media content is engaged with?

Think of the content we post on Facebook or Twitter. Once posted, the productive role of others is not at the level of the content posted but to create new content peripherally around the original content. The productive potential for those interacting with content posted by others comes in the form of comments, likes, +1’s, thumbs up, retweets, rebloggs, etc. (social media vocabulary tends to proliferate beyond what it signifies). The status update, link, photo, geographic “check in” all remain largely unedited. It is nearly impossible to find mainstream examples of the content itself being interacted with. Status updates are rarely rewritten. Sometimes tweets are edited when retweeted (often using the MT or “modified tweet” indicator), but even these attempt to dutifully replicate the original meaning of the tweet being modified.

Photos in social media streams are typically to be stared at and scrolled through, not changed and manipulated. The interactivity with living pictures might be a meaningful, if subtle, change in the role of the viewer with respect to social media objects. These photo-objects ask more of those who encounter them.

These Living Pictures are Barely Alive

So far, I have described what is new about these images; what the “life” in “living pictures” refers to. However, this position is easy to overstate. Ultimately, these photos are barely alive and “revolutionary” this is not.

I’m reminded of my favorite essay by Theodore Adorno. In The Stars Down to Earth, he asked what are the pedagogical functions of technology? What does technology teach us to do?

The answer for those who purchase a Lytro camera is pretty simple: living picture technology teaches users to take photos that will look good at multiple focus points.

This answer is a counter-point to what I think might be a popular criticism of Lytro technology: “why would I want others choosing what is in focus? I took the photo wanting the focus a specific way.” No, living pictures are not the ability for others to alter what the photographer intended. Those using the Lytro camera will take photos with the various focal points in mind, positioning objects both in the foreground and background. Notice the photo-set on the Lytro website. The photos all contain something near and distant that both look good either in or out of focus.

examples from Lytro's website - notice objects placed both near and far

Having objects at varying depths-of-field will entice others to click around in the image; precisely the process that breathes life into a so-called living picture. Learning to take photos in this style will maximize social media participation for those posting living pictures. The photos will generate more comments and will be more “like”-able.

What this implies is that while living pictures are slightly more interactive they certainly are not an example of photographers giving up control over the images they post. The amount of control turned over from the photographer to the viewer is quite minimal.

There is a very limited universe of possibilities provided to the viewer by the Lytro photo. The number of ways in which observers can bring “life” to (that is, refocus) the Lytro photo is quite minimal and because of this the photographer is well aware of the few different ways in which others will refocus the photo.

Yes, the Lytro photo can be seen in more than one way unlike other photos posted to social media. However, the new possibilities are quite minimal. Clicking through the current crop of living photos reveals that the user can choose between two or perhaps three significantly different focal points; all of which the photographer very likely had in mind either when shooting or at least when uploading the image.

What Would a Truly Living Photo Look Like?

The photo would have to take on a life of its own beyond what any one photographer or viewer intended. Writing in late-November 2011, the example seems obvious.

collage of some different mutations of the Officer Pike living picture

The now-infamous photo of Officer Pike pepper-spraying peaceful Occupy protesters at UC Davis serves as an example of an image come to life. The image of the “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” has become a viral meme, taking on new forms no one could have ever imaged (a few examples are shows above). Instead of this, Lytro photos are still predetermined by those who took and shared the photo. A living picture contains more than just the creative energy of the photographer, but is fundamentally remixed with the energy, aesthetic and meanings of others; something that the Lytro photo does not achieve.

To conclude, the label “living picture” has been misapplied to Lytro technology. These photos are not alive and do not seem so revolutionary after all. However, they do mark a new way in which users might experience photos on social media: instead of leaning back, scrolling and clicking-through, viewers are enticed to lean forward and manipulate. Looking forward, will we see a larger trend towards sharing on social media becoming more remixable and interactive? Most people did not remix the pepper spray cop, and few of the photos we post on social media get such treatment, but Lytro’s technology begs the question: might more social media content one day truly come alive?

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

The prevalence of smartphones, social media, videostreams and the like may be the dominant technological narrative told about Occupy Wall Street, but to focus only on high-tech is to tell a very incomplete story. The reality is that Occupy has also embraced non-electronic low-tech; not just out of necessity but politically and symbolically.

Examples are most obvious at the various occupation encampments. The low-tech vibe, partly born out of a structural necessity, has come to be symbolic of the movement itself. If Occupy is a thought experiment in questioning society and envisioning new possibilities, then the story of technology and Occupy is also about questioning the role modern technology has in our lives.

• The obvious example of non-electric technologies used at most protests are the ubiquitous hand-painted signs.
• The Occupy Wall Street Journal print newspaper and other newspapers for other occupations demonstrate the continuing power of print media. That many occupations have libraries filled with print books makes the same point. So powerful are print books that the mostly-destroyed 5,000 volume People’s Library became an important rallying point after the November 15^th raid on Zuccotti Park.
• The human-microphone, where the crowd repeats what one person is saying, is a low-tech solution to bullhorns being banned from Zuccotti Park.
• The drum circles are an analogue technology that gets attention, attempts to build community (though, some argue that it does the opposite) and can keep you warm in the cold (a point that hits home when at an occupation).
• Vintage cameras. Most discussions about photography and Occupy talk about high-tech smartphone cameras and livestreaming and miss the small but noticeable presence of vintage cameras at the occupations (I took photos of some at Zuccotti Park).
• While much has been made of how Occupy utilizes the Internet to organize, much is done offline as well. The original message to choose Zuccotti Park as the home for OWS was spread by word-of-mouth. “We decided that low-tech communication methods would be best,” an organizer told The New Yorker. ”If we’d used a mass text message, or Twitter, it would have been easy for the police to track down who was doing this.”

More conceptually, space and time are important technologies because the name “occupy” specifically refers to occupying physical space for an extended period of time. A march takes up space, but an omnipresent occupation with tents also takes up time. With the recent wave of police effort clearing occupations of their infrastructure, this balance of space and time becomes increasingly important and something I hope to expand on in a later post.

I am not arguing that these non-electronic examples are the whole story of technology and Occupy, but instead that this is an important and often neglected angle. For example, TIME’s Matt Peckhamdescribes ”the high-tech behind Occupy Wall Street’s low-tech message.” While Peckham does not articulate what that low-tech message might be, we can use his high-tech example, Tumblr, to discuss what might be the most interesting example of low-tech: the way in which Occupy hasatemporally imploded high and low-tech together.

Most of us are aware of the “We are the 99%” Tumblr stream featuring people delivering Occupy-related messages. High-tech, right? But what I find most interesting is that these online photos are of hand-written messages on physical paper. Any one of these photos make the paradigmatic example of technology and Occupy: the meshing of the power of electronics to give oneself voice with an appreciation of the potency of personal low-tech.

Other examples of this implosion are easy to find. Solar panels and this bike-powered electricity generator are preferable ways to generate electricity at occupation camps. David Banks discusses the intersecting roles of Wi-Fi and tents in this essay.

Smartphones, laptops, webpages, online social networks and other high-tech tools remain a very important part of the story of Occupy and technology. But the full picture must take into account the central role of both high and low technologies, the on and offline and, most importantly, thepoint where all of these intersect. This is augmented revolution.

So, why does Occupy embrace low-tech?

It’s not simply necessity. That does little to explain why those on Tumblr are hand-writing signs. It does not explain why I was told “we don’t need electricity!” by many folks at Zuccotti Park. The People’s Microphone is used even when electronic microphones are nearby (as I saw when observing an Occupy Toronto General Assembly). More than a clever workaround to a lack of electricity, the people’s microphone becomes a powerful form of solidarity, it is a spectacle that gets the attention of the Occupy Tourists and it comes to stand for the resistance of the movement itself.

The contemporary logic in modern capitalism is a fixation on the high-tech: more, better, faster, smaller, cooler. In the name of consumer capitalism and corporate profits Apple has mistreated workers in China, dangerous e-waste from the West piles up in the developing world, Google gobbles up and often misuses our private data and Facebook continues its insidious march into our private lives, potentially burrowing into our consciousness.

Occupy does not completely abandon any of these occasionally problematic technologies. But embracing low-tech does serve as an implicit, and sometimes explicit, critique of the logic of high-tech consumer global capitalism. My own sense is that the mood at various occupations is that humans are the most important technology and that we have collectively created a culture that places humans as subservient to new technologies rather than the other way around.

Many worry that we are becoming a society addicted to gadgets, disconnected from our surroundings on phones and trading real contact in favor of Facebook “friends.” Instead, Occupy serves as a reminder that people are not giving up the offline and the physical for the online and the digital. New technologies are being woven into our lives, sometimes awkwardly and painfully, in ways that suit our needs. The generation devouring mp3′s has also brought a new life to vinyl as a format. Those with their faces buried in the Facebook screen are also interacting more face-to-face. Questions about whether the Web promotes revolution or repression often miss the point: high/low-tech and on/offline all augment each other, utilized side-by-side rather than through displacement.

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

As this blog often points out, we are increasingly living our lives at the intersection of atoms and bits. Identities, friendships, conversations and a whole range of experience form an augmented reality where each is simultaneously shaped by physical presence and digital information. Information traveling on the backs of bits moves quickly and easily; anchor it to atoms and it is relatively slow and costly. In an augmented reality, information flows back and forth across physicality and digitality, deftly evading spatial and temporal obstacles that otherwise accompany physical presence.

When Egyptians dramatically occupied the physical space of Tahrir Square this past January (as they do, again, at this very moment), the events unfolded live before the eyes of the world, despite considerable geographic barriers. The authors write this post in one browser tab and, in another, watch live streaming footage of protests in Tahrir Square thousands of miles away. Less dramatically, but still important, we get a first-hand perspective of several #Occupy encampments being dismantled, despite police efforts to diminish visibility by performing the raids under the cloak of night. With an eye on the Twitter streams of protesters exchanging information and strategizing movements, it has become clear that physical events transmit digitally, and vice versa. Our augmented reality is an atmosphere increasingly capable of documenting and transmitting information fluidly across atoms and bits.

When information transmission becomes less costly both in terms of resources and effort, documentation becomes more ubiquitous. An obvious example is the invention of the digital camera. Photographers not so long ago had to be judicious in an attempt to save film for the 24 or 36 best shot. In the digital paradigm, the photographer has virtually unlimited resources to capture nearly everything and only retroactively selects the best images. Digital photography gives new meaning to the cliché “shoot first, ask questions later;” our capacity to document well exceeds our capacity to process those documents in real time.

Once captured, we tend to share and disseminate much of our documentation of ourselves and others. Indeed, this is what social media is: (1) the documenting of ourselves, our lives and others, and (2) sharing, interacting and collaborating with those documents in a social way.

The ease of digital documentation and our desire to gain social benefits from sharing these documents creates an environment where documentation is nearly ubiquitous. The default assumption—even when in a semi-private location such as a house party—is that cameras are rolling. Most every action is potentially just one smartphone click away from becoming a (quasi-)public document, and those around us often have a vested interest in creating such documents, be they photos, tweets, check-ins, or status updates.

We are increasingly in the spotlight even if we are unaware that we are performing. When online, many of our searches, shares, and clicks are registered in innumerable databases; sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly. The abundance of documentation mechanisms means that simply existing implies that we are leaving a trail of recorded information behind us. Ambient documentation is what we call the condition of documentation that occurs as result of one’s mere presence in an environment.

As such, we are constantly confronted with the means of documentation (e.g., cameras, phones, keyboards, etc.) as well as the documents themselves, leading us to assume that we are always being recorded. As Nathan has stated before, the consequence is that our present is increasingly lived as a potential document; the present is now always a future past. A condition that can be described as “documentary vision.”

Spotify, the music streaming service that syncs with one’s Facebook account, offers an excellent example of the pathway by which ambient documentation leads to documentary vision. Spotify users sign up using their Facebook profile, and then watch as what their music choices are published to Facebook in a stream that also includes what their friends are listening to, watching, and reading. Friends can then comment on a user’s choices, serving as a constant reminder of pervasive documentation.

We, of course, make choices with this in mind. What music makes me look good? What selections, when documented for all to see, will make the best impression? This could mean, for example, Top40 is out and Pitchfork darlings are in—or vice versa—depending, of course, on the social circle one is performing for. Newspapers such as the Washington Post and The Guardian are now similarly tracked by Facebook. Will I click on a certain newspaper article if I know my choice will be documented and disseminated? Or, will my reading habits change? Similar questions can be asked in light of Foursquare or Facebook Places: Will I choose the same bar whether or not I intend to “check in?”

The point is that we weigh decisions differently in environments that are capable of documenting much of what we do. With new technologies, from smart phones to social media, the atmosphere of documentation is far more pervasive than ever before.

As it always has, documentation takes on new cultural forms and norms. None of this neglects the important point that much of what we do and think remains anonymous, hidden, and undocumented. But we are living in a state of heightened publicity; one where the fact of our existence guarantees public documentation, and public documentation guarantees our existence.

In the 36 hours since the Occupy Wall Street raid removed protest infrastructure from Zuccotti Park, much of the conflict strikes me as the tension between the informational (the symbolic; media; ideas) and the material (physical; geographic). It runs through how New York City carried its actions out (at night, blocking journalists), the ensuing legal fight (does occupying physical space count as speech?) as well as the new strategic challenges facing an Occupy movement where camping is decreasingly an option.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that much of my work lies at the intersection of (1) information, media, technology, the online and (2) materiality, bodies and offline physical space. At this intersection, our reality is an “augmented” one. Part of the success of Occupy (and other recent protest movements) has been the awareness of just this point: by uniting media and information with the importance of flesh-and-blood bodies existing in physical space, our global atmosphere of dissent is increasingly one of an augmented revolution. Indeed, these are not protests centered online, as Jeff Jarvis tweeted this morning, or Zuccotti park, but in the augmented reality where the two intersect.

And this intersection of the power of the image and the power of the material dramatically came to a head about 36 hours ago as I write. In the early morning of November 15^th, the two-month long occupation of Zuccotti Park was eliminated by the City of New York.

The Raid

The City and the NYPD were certainly thinking of both the material and the symbolic: in the grasping of physical property (Zuccotti Park), they simultaneously disallowed journalists to cover the raid; some of them arrested for trying. The New York Times, Huffington Post, and other newspapers are running stories about the so-called media blackout. The Committee to Protect Journalists has shunned the way coverage of the raid was largely prohibited. Rosie Gray, a writer for the Village Voice, tweeted that she yelled, “I’m press!” and an officer responded, “not tonight”. [Here is another good summary of press suppression at the OWS raid.]

The move on the part of the city in this information-war was to create what Agamben might call a “state of exception”; one where many traditional rules do not apply. Striking by surprise late at night and arresting journalists, it is clear that the strategy behind the raid had as much to do with controlling information as it did the park and the occupiers in it.

The symbolic upshot of all this will not, I think, fare well for the City or the NYPD. The unintended consequence of arresting journalists that night, of course, is that the vast majority of footage of the raid comes from the protesters themselves. The news articles above talk about a “media blackout” when, in reality, media was being produced. Photos and videos spread like wildfire when morning broke.

The narrative, the symbolic framing of the event specifically and the movement in general, once again, is in the hands of the protesters themselves. Unsure how to cover the movement, much of the traditional press has largely ignored Occupy with respect to the issues at stake. However, police brutality filmed by the protesters themselves has proven to be a powerful tool to capture national attention and sympathy on behalf of the movement.

The police, once again, treated the crowd as if they only existed in physical space. But the crowd took photos, livestreamed and once again took charge of the symbolism. The lasting images of the raid have massive symbolic power: hundreds of officers dressed in heavy riot-gear looking prepared to handle terrorists or a dangerous drug cartel were barreling down instead on a couple hundred unarmed peaceful campers. The draconian and seemingly hyperbolic display of force proves powerfully symbolic in further reifying the “us” versus “them” framework Occupy has so far successfully pushed.

Perhaps the only smart symbolic move on the part of the City was not destroying the 5,000-book People’s Library, but saving it and reportedly releasing it back to protesters today after heavy outcry over the possibility that it was destroyed. [EDIT: While Mayor Bloomberg's office claimed to have preserved the People's Library, new reports are claiming much of the library is still missing. If it turns out that the library was mostly destroyed, this further demonstrates the symbolic mismanagement on the part of the City and the NYPD. Books, of course, are highly symbolic of knowledge and the People's Library a symbolic point of pride for OWS. Destroying books is symbolic of highly repressive and totalitarian control, again furthering the "few versus the many" rhetoric Occupy has provided from the start.]

The Current Legal Battle

The legal battles between Occupy and various cities also land precisely at this intersection of the material and informational. The issue at hand is the legality of having or evicting mass occupations of physical space, an issue that rests on what counts as “free speech.” On the one hand, some view speech as largely informational and mostly separate from occupying physical space. Others are arguing that occupying space is itself symbolic and is itself informational speech and should be equally protected. The case against Occupy is the conceptualization of the material and the informational as separate whereas the defense of Occupy believes that the two come together.

The fight has everything to do with this tension between the material and the informational. Part of New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s justification for the raid stated,

“Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”

Again, the case against Occupy has been to split physical space (the park) and informational space (ideas, arguments, symbols, etc). I believe these are the grounds by which legal fights and protest strategies have been and will continue to be carried out.

Moving Forward

Opposed to what Bloomberg states above, as we know, occupying parks has been part of the argument the movement has been making all along. The symbolic power of sleeping at the park was immeasurable and now the movement increasingly has to face the reality that in some ways access to physical space is becoming scarcer.

Police efforts to clear Occupations across the United States continue to grow (so far, occupations have been cleared in Atlanta, Denver, New York City, Oakland, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Halifax in Canada). Thus, the Occupy movement has come to an inflection point: how can it continue to operate at both the level of the symbolic and simultaneously at the level of the physical? That double-punch has been a key to the movement’s success thus far.

The movement still has the #ows hashtag on Twitter, and, as @OccupyCincy tweeted, “Even if you remove our physical bodies, we are still here; in the psyche!” However the power of a hashtag can only be understood by acknowledging how it is fundamentally anchored by the physical offline occupations where human bodies are organizing, sleeping, yelling and marching. The Occupy movement going forward cannot forfeit either physical space or informational space but must remain fixated at the intersection of the two.

Earlier this year, there was a spat that was both silly and superficial over the terms “Twitter” and “Facebook Revolution” to capture protests in the Arab World. On the one hand, those terms offensively reduced a vast political movement to a social networking site. On the other, Malcolm Gladwell’s response — that there was protest before social media, therefore social media had no role — was equally unfulfilling.

Neither view captured the way technology has been utilized in this global wave of dissent. We are witnessing political mobilizations across much of the globe, including the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and South America. Riots and “flash mobs” are increasingly making the news. In the United States the emergence of the Occupy movement shows that technology and our global atmosphere of dissent is the effective merging of the on- and offline worlds. We cannot only focus on one and ignore the other.

all photos in this post by nathan jurgenson

The role of new, social media in the Occupy protests near Wall Street, around the country and even around the globe is something I’ve written about before. I spent some time at Occupy Wall Street last week and talked to many folks there about technology. The story that emerged is much more complicated than expected. OWS has a more complicated, perhaps even “ironic” relationship with technology than I previous thought and that is often portrayed in the news and in everyday discussions.

It is easy to think of the Occupy protests as a bunch of young people who all blindly utilize Facebook, Twitter, SMS, digital photography and so on. And this is partially true. However, (1) not everyone at Occupy Wall Street is young; and (2), the role of technology is certainly not centered on the new, the high-tech or social media. At OWS, there is a focus on retro and analogue technologies; moving past a cultural fixation on the high-tech, OWS has opened a space for the low-tech.

What I want to think about there is the general Occupy Wall Street culture that has mixed-feelings about new technologies, even electricity itself. I will give examples of the embracing of retro-technology at OWS and consider three overlapping explanations for why this might be the case. I will also make use of some photographs I took while there.

Entering the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan, I was surprised how much old-school, retro, analogue and other “low-technologies” are embraced.

• The obvious and not-so-surprising example is the hand-painted signs that are so ubiquitous that they come to define a protest as separate from other types of gatherings.

• Importantly, there is the popular Occupied Wall Street Journal print newspaper. In the age of the so-called death-of-print, young people are designing, printing, trading and reading this print newspaper.
• The human-microphone (previous discussed on this blog), where the protesters chant what one person says so that the whole crowd can all hear (bullhorns have been outlawed at the park).

• The drum circles are an analogue technology that gets attention, attempts to build community (though, some argue that it does the opposite), and, this point hits home when you are actually at the park, drumming can keep you warm in cold weather.

• The expanding library filled with print books.

• Surprising to some might be all of the vintage cameras. Be they early-model Polaroid’s or old Kodak brownies, ancient cameras are popular at Occupy Wall Street. A statement that alone justifies this further analysis. Perhaps this trend is the analogue version of the popular faux-vintage smartphone photo apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic that I have written about before.

• I also saw this bike-generator, where the rider pedals power to various electronic devices.
• The Occupy Tourists have themselves been turned into a technology, something Rob Horning and I discussed while in the park (in fact, I probably owe him credit for this idea). The protesters do not necessarily have to hold the camera or post the photos any longer because the park is nearly over-run with people holding cameras; new and old, photo and video. The Occupy Tourists do the work of documenting, all the protesters have to do is pose (and they do; more on this below).

• And, of course, the whole movement to “occupy” means “occupying” physical space; the primary and very analogue form of protest we know best.

To be clear, I do not mean to say all technology at Occupy Wall Street is retro. There are laptops, a Wi-Fi network and smart phones uploading and responding to content across the web. Sometimes there is even a monitor/webcam setup that live-streams activity at the park (pictured below). Occupy utilizes both old and new technologies. And as I previously argued, they utilize both the on and offline; indeed this is an augmented revolution. However, the precise form of this technological augmentation needs to take into account how the OWS protests have an atemporal embracing of analogue and retro technologies and general distrust of the logic behind new technologies.

I spoke to many people at Occupy Wall Street about the technology situation in the park. I talked with various protesters and paid special attention to those dealing with technology and those whose role it was to provide general and press information. I should note that each person I talked to, be they a person who spends lots of time at the park or an “official” press contact, provided me with slightly different information; perhaps the result of the contradiction of having a spokesperson for a very decentralized group. However, as hours passed and people cycled through the park, I spoke to more and more individuals and a complicated picture developed.

I would hear two seemingly contradictory things, sometimes from the same person: (1) ‘I would be uploading more stuff to Facebook and Twitter if my phone was charged, but it is dead’; and (2) ‘we do not need electricity!’

So, why is this? Contradiction? Why the embracing of retro-tech? Does it have to do with ideology? Necessity? Both?

I want to provide three possible explanations. [*this list is not all-inclusive]

I. No Electricity, Duh

Perhaps the most obvious answer to why there is a love-hate relationship with new technologies has to do with the structural realities of the park itself; namely, the lack of electricity. There were some (at least 4) generators at the park when I was there. These were recently taken away and there is a fight to get them back. However, even with generators, electricity was sparse. The generators powered the media table (a modest amount of technology: laptops, printer, Wi-Fi router, webcam, TV) and charged some cell phones. Also, nearby food and newsstands were generally okay with letting protesters charge their phones (the protests are generating tourists and business in the area; I’ll have to force myself to leave ‘the commoditization of Occupy’ for another post).

But the story cannot be as simple as ‘there is little electricity so the protesters are using analogue tech.’ This does not explain why there is an embracing of analogue and why I was told over and over that “we don’t need electricity.”

Perhaps the structural reality (i.e., scarce electricity) has created a necessity to go analogue, which then has come to be embraced retroactively as something done intentionally? The ends required a new means, and now the means have come to be valued in and of themselves (to make a Simmelian argument).

A thought experiment: if electricity suddenly became abundant in Zuccotti Park, would more protesters be using their smart phones more of the time? Would there be more laptops open? I think so. In fact, I was told as much. However, would abundant electricity kill the retro-tech zeitgeist in the park? No, I do not think it would. And this is because there are other reasons for this mood.

II. It’s Politics: Rejecting the Logic of Consumer Technology Capitalism

To argue that the protesters embrace retro-technology only because there is little electricity misses the larger political reasoning that many, but probably not all, protesters in the park may have a general distrust of the role modern technology plays in our lives.

The contemporary logic of technology is a fixation on the high-tech: more, better, faster, smaller, cooler. All in the name of corporate profits. This has resulted in Apple’s treatment of workers in China, Google’s monopolistic, data-hungry capturing of more and more information, Facebook’s insidious creep into our private lives and the mounting piles of hazardous e-waste that we in the Global West export to the developing world. While new technologies are not fully abandoned at OWS, there is at least a questioning of the logic of new, shiny tech-toys as it relates to all of these growing problems.

There is the general mood at Zuccotti Park that humans are the most important technology that we have and that we live in a culture where we have become subservient to non-human technologies rather than the other way around. Instead, people, bodies and physical space are prioritized at the park. And when technology is needed, the embracing of low-technologies becomes a symbolic statement against this logic of high-technology-driven consumer capitalism.

For example, when engaging in the human-microphone, one quickly realizes that it becomes more than just a substitute for bullhorns, microphones and speakers. It becomes a powerful form of solidarity, it is a spectacle that gets the attention of the Occupy Tourists and it comes to stand for the resistance of the movement itself.

I should admit that no one protester told me all of this in plain language. This is my own extrapolation based on my general feeling of the protests and I invite others to disagree with me here. I think it is a plausible explanation given what Occupy is all about, but cannot claim I heard this directly from the protesters in any systematic way. More research would need to be done on this point.

III. Protesters Need Only to Pose

A third explanation for why there exists a love-hate relationship with new technologies at OWS goes back to one of the bulleted points above: those in Zuccotti park do not have to document themselves as much anymore because there is a crowd to do that for them. Again, tourists, journalists and other visitors have themselves been appropriated as a technology of documentation.

So much new, digital and social technologies center on documentation. A photo, status update, tweet, and the rest all are about documenting something: voicing your opinion, spreading news, giving detail or passing some other kind of information around. When the Occupy Wall Street protests were smaller, and this is still the case with most regional Occupations, the protesters themselves were organizing on Facebook, spreading the word with Twitter hashtags and shooting photos and videos of their numbers and suspected police brutality.

Things have changed a bit for OWS. Today, Zuccotti Park is a major tourist destination. Massive crowds with fully-charged cameras are snapping away. Journalists and other interested parties have increasingly been documenting the movement. And there are loads of photographers around every corner shooting the scene (I was one of them). Occupy Wall Street has much of the attention they asked for and this has positioned themselves on the other side of the camera lens.

And this is why the protesters have gotten very good at posing. The drum circle is set up facing the crowd of tourists; separated by a metal gate just like a rock concert. They drum, put on their show, and people stand at the gates with cameras. One scene I saw over and over again in the park was a protester seeing someone point a camera at them and immediately freeze staring off into space. The protester attempts to pose as unposed, the camera-person attempts to pass the photo off as spontaneous. Simply put, the protesters are very aware that their every move is being documented and react accordingly. Like reality show contestants or modern famous-for-being-famous celebrities, those in Zuccotti Park adhere to the logic of ubiquitous cameras by becoming photogenic.

To be clear, I say none of this as a put-down to the protestors. I know that, typically, “posing” is a word used pejoratively (“poser” is an insult). However, it strikes me that the protesters are effectively using the power of the gaze: they use the power inherent in being watched to portray what they want. Lacking electricity, the OWS protesters have turned tourists into Twitter. Instead of having to shoot their own photos, post them and hope for an audience, the OWS protester learns instead to be photogenic, luring the cameraperson to compose, snap, post and disseminate; an efficient and effective strategy in the image-economy.

To conclude, all of this is only my initial speculations about the very interesting role technology plays in the Occupy Wall Street protests. The technology of the movement is not just how they have utilized the new and the high tech but also the embracing of low-technologies. Much more could be said and other perspectives should be entertained. Further, it must be the case that all of this plays out quite differently at different local Occupy protests. Hopefully that is a discussion we can have on this blog in the near future.

follow nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

(Or: How we’ve come to be micro-celebrities online)

Facebook’s recent introduction of “frictionless sharing” is the newest development in a growing trend: data is being increasingly produced passively as individuals conduct their day-to-day activities. This is a trend that has grown both on and offline. We will focus on the former here; especially “frictionless” sharing that involves syncing Facebook with other sites or apps. Once synced, much of what a user listens to, reads or otherwise accesses are automatically and immediately published on Facebook without any further action or approval.  Users may not even need to “opt into” frictionless sharing because many services are changing their default setting to automatically push content to Facebook. In short, we can say that users play a passive role in this process.

Contrast this to more active sharing: when we “like” or “+1” something (by clicking the eponymous buttons that have spread throughout the Web) it requires the user to make a conscious and affirmative action to share something with others in their network. Nathan Jurgenson (one of this post’s co-authors) previously described these two models as types of “documentary vision:” We actively document ourselves and our world around us as if we have a camera in our hand (“liking”, status updates, photos, etc.), or we can passively allow ourselves to be documented, curating our behaviors along the way (e.g., reading a magazine article so that you can present yourself as the type of person who “likes” that sort of magazine) much like a celebrity facing a crowd of paparazzi photographers.

Let’s make another layer of complexity to this documentary model: In many cases, we not even aware that we are being documented. For decades, A-list celebrities have had to live with the reality that every time they go out into the  world, someone may be documenting their every move from afar.  Today, the experience is becoming universal. The Internet is full of digital paparazzi; that is, invisible data collection mechanisms that track and surveil users. Google has long collected data about users behavior-patterns to improve its page-rank algorithm. Without such data, the algorithm would be largely ineffective in predicting what sites best respond to the users’ inquiry. The paparazzi-like invisibility of the documentation is significant because users have less opportunity play as active of a role is shaping the documentation produced about them. We could come up with many examples of this passive, invisible digital-paparazzi: from Amazon tracking user habits to make recommendations to the iPad tracking your every behavior and location to send statistics to the company and app developers. What is clear is that much of the data we produce comes from something like a paparazzi hiding in the bushes, rather than from the posed self-portrait.

Of course, the subject of invisible digital-paparazzi documentation is not always completely inactive in the documentation process. Many of us know, to some degree or another, that we are being tracked. Celebrities know that paparazzi might be present at any time and place and learn to behave as if they are always being watched. We might think of the residents of the Real World or Big Brother houses: they are engaged in a perpetual performance for an invisible, omnipresent audience, giving new meaning to Shakespeare’s declaration that “all the world’s a stage” (or, at least, a red carpet or confessional room). These tabloid-darlings who stroll through public venues with the express purpose of being seen and documented are no longer a separate caste. All of our lives are increasingly resembling theirs.

Some have argued that social media has turned the average person into a “micro-celebrity,” to use Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s term. Let’s differentiate between celebrities who (1) embrace documentation; the Paris-Hilton-like famous-for-being-famous celebrity who exist to be documentable; and (2) those J.D. Salinger or Howard Hughes types that attempt to avoid the spotlight, (which, of course, makes documentation of them all the more valuable). The former is active while the latter are much more passive in their own documentation. We-micro-celebrities on Facebook have generally been active as own documenters. We choose what photos we post and de-tag ourselves from the non-flattering ones others post of us. The interesting change brought about by this new so-called frictionless sharing is that act of documenting has gone from being active to much more passive. And, at the same time, frictionless sharing has made this passive documentation more visible.

And, as such, we are increasingly aware that we are being documented, and thus increasingly calibrate our behaviors as such.

The issue at stake here is whether social media users are content to accept this newly-assigned role: the Paris-Hilton-like-micro-celebrity who is highly active, visible, but not allowed behind the camera? Are we willing to be the production while handing the role of producer to some paparazzi behind the digital bush?

Perhaps not entirely, as the reaction to Spotify has demonstrated. Spotify, a music-streaming service, can sync to Facebook and passively publish what you listen to on the live-ticker-like space at the top-right of the Facebook screen. When Spotify made it mandatory that all users sign-in via Facebook, users rebelled and more privacy options have been included. Nevertheless, the logic of frictionless sharing remains intact and is likely to expand into other sectors of the Web.

Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) | PJ Rey (@pjrey)