[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[Trebor Scholz]

Judith Rodenbeck:

>What I was pointing out was something a bit more intensive, if you will,
>that has to do with gender and labor. I suggested that continual partial
>attention has long existed as one of the determining conditions of a
>feminized underclass (which I hope I don't need to unpack here)--which
>Frazer and Warren rightly link to domesticity.

I completely agree with you, Frazer, and Warren regarding your comments about gender and labor. Participation (and not just online) is deeply gendered! There surely is massive
inequality and a participation gap that needs to be accounted for when addressing an ethics of participation. Thanks for these comments and I will definitely consider that further. 

> To see it described as something "new," then, is to see a gendered history 

Sociable web media (blogs, social networking sites, p2p, etc) expose us to more voices, to more information and this fact has absolutely nothing to do with "rendering a gendered history
invisible." It simply acknowledges a "participatory" (or call it "social") turn. The level of networked sociality is indeed -- new --. Civic participation in meet-space is on the decline (Putnam)
but 73 percent of American adults are currently Internet users and 55% of all American teenagers use social networking sites in general. This massification is a big damn difference to the
early 90s.  Now we hear many Alan Sondheims all at once. In such a participatory culture in which 65.000 new videos are contributed to YouTube every day, enough people bothered to
contribute over one million entries to the English version of Wikipedia alone, kids are leaving email and turn to Instant Messaging, and every half minute we have a new blog, -- attention
economics has changed. I am not saying that this completely revolutionizes education or culture and that we will wake up to a better world... but there is a big change in the media
landscape with regard to the availability of information to 17 years ago.  

>rendered invisible; and then to see it take on a positive valence--"data obesity=good!"

I certainly did not celebrate data obesity. It is, however, a fact that we are living with. Closing our eyes to it does not make it go away. The massification of iterations by people who can
now experience themselves as speakers is indeed -- new -- and it does have positive and yes, -- democratizing -- potential. The number of people who can speak differs very much to the
early 90s when blogs and the sizable cadre of web applications was not available. The media landscape has changed-- it goes far beyond mailing lists and blogs. Networked sociality will
increasingly enter the city, our online friends are already still with us on Union Square. (I simply point this out- I'm not saying that it is a huge gain).

The wealth of information to which I can expose myself effortlessly today is radically different to even a decade ago. That is not inherently great or horrifying. It depends on my ability to
judge a piece of information, or resource. What this highlights is not that "data obesity=good" or "data obesity=evil", but that filtering skills are important. And that this judgment is not a
slam dunk and that addiction and continuous partial attention are not all that easily circumvented, I think, became pretty clear from the previous thread. The grammar of sociable media is
something that we need to learn. 

 >"ADD=good!" "mega-connectivity=good!"--is disturbing. 

I also do not favor mega-connectivity, na... Really, it's not a question of whether we like what happens in the world or not; it surrounds us. (I should think that reading pretty much
anything I wrote should make it abundantly clear that I am basically physically repelled by all that networked capitalist hell.) The question, however, is how we deal with it, how we learn
to use it in sensible ways and change what can be altered. 

>continually suppress bare life in favor of "connected" life, in fact that
>implicitly privilege "connected" life over those other, "slow" things. Any
>"ethics of participation" has to take that into account. 

I don't suppress what Agamben and Butler describe as "bare life in favor of connected life." Those who will not be able to participate in sociable web media, however, will be disadvantaged
as citizens and as professionals. Rheingold and many others argued that and I agree with them. The question is not if I think that this is desirable (it is not) but it's already the case.
Students who are able to use social networking tools like LinkedIn have a higher chance to get hired. Education turned informal-- there is more peer education going on on sites like
MySpace than can be achieved in many colleges. It's an informal education (of course I'm not arguing that formal education is in any way obsolete). But kids in SecondLife teach other
programming. Then there is the culture of help forums, of knowledge repositories, etc... Teens through their participation in sociable web media acquire skills that we may not value as
such because they do not relate to what we know or have experienced. Cutting (especially minority) kids off from social networking is a horrible idea also for that reason-- legislation like
the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) is deeply misguided/ill-informed. The question is not whether or not I favor "slow things| over "mega-connected things" (I do) but the challenge
is which skill sets student need when she or he leaves the university. Judgment & filtering skills, for me, are right at the top of that tool box that kids need to meet the challenges of
today's culture. 

Trebor