Dear Alexander, I have enjoyed hearing you speak on this topic numerous times and there is one thing I have long wanted to ask regarding the idea that:
"those who use The Internet to their own advantage and who strengthen their power by successfully creating social networks within which they pursue their social intelligence and trained social skills" What I wonder is how does this become quantifiable and meaningful? By your logic, Justin Bieber (51 million followers on Twitter) and Lady Gaga (41.3 million) are the most powerful people on the planet. Is this what you believe? I question this logic. I believe power is not held, it is either resisted or complied with: "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ?general politics? of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true?" (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). In this sense the so-called 'netocrats' are not the agents of power, but are its instruments, its police. Celebrities online are authored by millions of people contributing to their personae via a propagated interest realized materially, in this case in a fan-based production composed of images, text and audio. The acceptance of these figures as meaningful and important does not bestow power to anyone. It locks people, (including the celebrities themselves) into webs of trivia and brand-based marketing. Alongside the misrecognition of frequency for agency, Power has always operated in networks. The Medici could not have been the most powerful family in Tuscany without a network of communication, media and bureaucracy that was based on 'Truth' to support and exercise that power. With a massive media system now in place globally we are not seeing a revolution in the network. In fact I would argue that your logic follows a similar path to Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks: "Benkler tends to overstate the novelty of social production. Firms, for example, have long employed internal markets; delegated decision rights throughout the organization; formed themselves into networks, clusters, and alliances; and otherwise taken advantage of openness and collaboration. Many different organizational forms proliferate within the matrix of private-property rights. Peer production is not new; rather, the relevant question concerns the magnitude of the changes." - http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=721 I would go on to argue it is the small, the unknown, the rare, secret and the enclosed where power is more likely to be realized in terms of autonomy that can lead to more definite social change and new ideas. Finally in a slightly more paranoid observation, I do not believe the most powerful organizations and people on earth are on Twitter and Facebook. Those that use social media and have roles in powerful organizations, for example the World Economic Forum, (which actually has no policy and decision making powers but does include major stakeholders) are not the superstars of social media. I support this idea with the attached graphic from the last WEF in Davos that shows the tweeting was pitiful - 12 278 in total and most of them coming from the USA (from http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2014 /social). The smokescreen of truth in the form of mass attention to something that says very little and does not share Power with anyone. Critique remains all we have. /James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Ume? University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett ________________________________________ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org