[-empyre-] collective capture, distributed identity

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Simon, dear all

thank you for re-reading the stipulation on the pervasion effects of what you call the "real virtualisation" --

[Simon Taylor schreibt]
>A real virtualisation of collective experience as it is represented by popular
social media means to distribute mind, agency and identity.

I apologise for taking the time to re-read the statement and my
re-reading is highly tendentious but I think it at least listens to the
assumptions under which such a stipulation is being made since there is
a ready dissimulation already in process, that is, a given illusion,
given that the logic of inescapability of collective experience of VR
captures - like a war photograph or snapshot of conflict, or dramatic
(and critical) image - us, both lurkers and discussants, in its view.
Has the discussion captured the collective virtual experience enough? I
would humbly answer that it has been captured by it.>


Well, this is hard work now, how to get out or try and get out of the spell of such ready dissimulation (the l'effet Baudrillard was long overhauled, I thought)
if one were to assume that social media were indeed pervasive and the corporate operations (say by google or facebook) underneath the aforementioned "social physics" (Morozov's article on
digital surveillance) constituted a logic of inescapabilty. As to the inescapability, I remember that earlier in the month we mentioned the covert Facebook "experiment to influence the emotions of more than 600,000 people",
and Susan Kozel and Sue Hawskley and other comments on it,  Sue asking -
>Is it possible people could giving up more of their privacy as they put their 'movement signature' out there in the view of giants like Facebook etc.? I wonder if/how our distinctive movement patterns and rhythms might be collected, collated, forged and what might be done with them? It’s alarming to think of movement data being acquired, but almost worse to think of being rendered into some ersatz version, bad copies of ourselves.>

and to some extent our discussion did focus on distinct and isolated "embodiment" in arts and performance practices, even somatic and internal experiences (e.g. I could pick up here on my posting yesterday on inward migrations of gestures, on internally resonating gestures/movements that are more about adaptive performance faculties [in my bones, skeleton, organism] that I doubt are controllable by social media technologies or even capturable -- and did you not mention, Simon, the natural political of time-images in live embodied theatre, your work with Minus Theatre ("....rehearsal of the unrehearsable .. before white flower premiers"   , your set list is most intriguing, including buried flowers and the beach...!). Please tell more (I note that Minus Theatre announces things on facebook), and why you fear a beyond, a "beyond that is found in the virtual embodiment of a crisis which is brought to us in art".

The social physics promoted by economists like Mr Pentland seem to indicate an end to politics; thus a "distributed mind agency identity" would be thoroughly disagreeable, and even if Morozov is right in laughing at the small outrage at the facebook scandal (he writes: "Der Zorn über eine neuere Studie, bei der Facebook glücklichen Nutzern positive und unglücklichen Nutzern negative Posts zeigte, erscheint recht naiv. Schon einige Monate vor dem Skandal hatte ein Datenwissenschaftler von Facebook erklärt: „Wir führen täglich mehr als tausend Experimente durch. Während viele dieser Versuche zur Optimierung spezieller Ergebnisse dienen, sollen andere die Grundlagen für langfristige Designentscheidungen liefern.“ Übersetzt heißt das: Sie sollten sich besser Sorgen wegen der vielen tausend täglichen Experimente machen, von denen man uns nichts sagt."), I am not sure that you would argue that facebook's daily and undisclosed experiments on "us" have affected your performance faculties. facebook barely registers in my life, certainless less than the flowers in the garden. 

In fractured and (still) politically divided or contested societies or in (Western Europe or North  America, as far as I can speak; Chris Domingo had also told us his story from Whyalla, Australia) only superficially integrated and non-isolated cultures and cultural communities, what would "distributed identity" mean -- would not such a term capture only an illusion?

regards
Johannes Birringer