Attentional Capital

and Emerging Social Architectures

Myspace.com and the Future of Life as Art

 

 

 

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Table of Contents:

Introduction

Rapid Evolution of Communication Media

Rapid Evolution of Communication Infrastructure

 

Attentional Capital

Attention is Scarce

Attention is a Resource

Attention is Exchanged

Attention is Reciprocal

Attentional Acts can be Accrued, Traded

Attention is the substance of social networks

Relationship between Time and Attention

Attentional Capital Summary

Gifts of Attention

 

Researching Myspace

Studying Myspace

Methods

Deconstructing Myspace

Identity construction

Commenting

Social Games

Digital Gifting

Myspace Pages as Empathic Visualizations

 

Identity Representation

Distributed Cognition and Online Identity Representation

Shared Representation of Identity and Spam Protections

Recombinant Media and Informational Hharmony

Relative Value of Information

Importance of Identity Representation

 

Reciprocity

Reciprocation as Driver for Media Distribution

Sharing Attention

Pleasure of Shared Attention

Exchanging Social Gestures to Coordinate Emotions

Attentional Posturing

Social Capital

Reciprocity as basis for social ethics

Ethics of Socially Relevant Media

Copyrights and new economies

Digital Friendships are built on sharing

Relationship of Aesthetics to Ethics

 

Social Architectures

Social Architectures and Social Dynamics

Media as Architecture

Media as Social Architecture

 

Conclusion

New Uses of Art and Aesthetics

Life as Art

Social Movement

 

 

 

Attentional Capital

and Emerging Social Architectures

Myspace.com and the Future of Life as Art

 

 

Introduction

Significant changes to the mediating infrastructures of human communication are taking place. This essay seeks to identify several of these trends and discuss their importance.

 

Rapid Evolution of Communication Media

Over the past 25 years, and primarily in the past 5 years, tools for the production of communicative media forms have expanded in power and have drastically fallen in price. It is not at all uncommon for a personal computer to have nearly the full capabilities of a (decade-old) recording studio, film production studio, and graphic design studio. Thus, the primary media types in contemporary 21 century society--music, film, graphics, and text-- are all newly available for massive collective manipulation and recombination.

 

Rapid Evolution of Communication Infrastructure

As important as the development of new tools for media production are the tools for media distribution. Paper can be handed from one individual to another, but music? This required record production factories or radio broadcast towers—far outside the reach of single individuals. Within the past decade and particularly within the past 2 years, the infrastructures necessary for mass distribution of media have been radically transformed by the internet, and have been made available to the masses. All media forms that can be digitized can be distributed widely. It is not an uncommon expectation today that kids can upload a video to Youtube that could potentially be viewed by millions—it just has to be good enough, and strike the right nerve.

 

Technologies for social exchange

 

In this current condition, it is no longer the material limitations of our technology, but our own limitations as humans that constrain the overall movement of media¹. What are these human limitations that are constraining and cultivating the new forms of mass information? Primarily, the constraints are those of our own attention.

 

ATTENTIONAL CAPITAL

 

Attention is Scarce.

The past 50 years have generated a wealth of psychological knowledge about the limitations of human attention, which is essentially the shifting priorities of cognitive processing within the mechanics of the human brain. While psychologists have well established that humans can remember 7 items, plus or minus two, they have virtually no theories with predictions about the limitations of human attention when it comes to media distribution. How many youtube videos can a person possibly watch? How many friends can one adequately respond to on Myspace? These are the new attentional factors, ones which are primarily social, that are governing the generation and distribution of media as of 2007.

 

Of course, it is worth mentioning that the limitations of human attention are nothing new (the average length of sentences, books, meetings, and movies are all testament to this). Further, these ‘limitations’ are perhaps better characterized as ‘structural constraints’, as they by no means prevent progress or expansion. The human attention has taken mankind from the open savannah to the skyscraper, and that any further progress must take place within our biologically constrained attentional apparatus does not imply that we have reached our ‘limits’ as humans.

 

Attention is a resource.

Humans achieve goals by putting our attention to different tasks during the day. Humans also achieve goals by coordinating the attention of others to perform tasks.

 

why should attention be such a ubiquitous drive among humans (or at least those that populate Myspace)? From a distributed cognition perspective this seems clear: gaining attention is essentially gaining access to the cognitive processing resources of other humans. This drive develops with infants, who can obtain optimal access to resources by crudely manipulating the attention of caregivers. The manipulation and command of attention is also essential to non-human cognition: at least mammalian and avian developmental caregiving is based around the manipulation of attention, both on the part of the infant and the caregiver. Commanding attention is also a predominant goal of sexual selection behaviors—song birds do appear to sing to attract the attention of a mate.

 

Attention is exchanged.

The exchange of attention underlies human society.

 

Attention is reciprocal.

 

Attentional acts can be Accrued, traded, etc.

The reciprocal nature of attention enables its potential to be built up and stored, to be released at a later time.

 

Different from financial capital

 

Attention is the Substance of Social Networks

Social Exchanges are information exchanges. Social Exchanges are attentional exchanges. The flow of information through society is the flow of attention.

 

Attentional Capital

Attentional capital basis of value between people exchange of cognitive resources

 

 

Attentional capital is that which attracts, maintains, or controls attention. Financial capital can be converted to attentional capital. Attentional capital is situated capital.

 

Relative... Advertising media capital? Attentional capital of high art? Novelty. Aesthetic progressions, and evolution.

 

importance of understanding value exchangges outside of traditional financial markets

 

This is fungible, meaning it can be applied flexibly, and nearly interchangably, like money. We can spend our attention on almost anything, and we make economic decisions about what we spend it on. We may not ever think: "I'm pretty good at drawing and not math. If I spend my time drawing, I will probably get more out of the time. But if I spend time on math, I might get better at doing it"

 

Relationship between Time and Attention

Time and attention are nearly synonymous. There is only a certain amount of processing that we can apply in a specified period of time. There is a time scale to human cognition. But some people can apply their attention to a task, and complete it in a fraction of the time of another person.

 

Gifts of Attention

Gifts as mechanism for economic exchange, based upon tendency to reciprocate. Gift Economies

 

 

Gifts of attention as mechanism for exploring reliable social ties through evaluation of reciprocal response.

 

 

 

RESEARCHING MYSPACE

Useful to study quantified Social Engagements, attentional exchange and attentional capital. Ease of mass data collection. Simplified Social structures.

 

Myspace- valuable as mechanism for the ambient capture and quantification of social engagement.

 

What are the tasks people are performing on Myspace? What are people’s goals?

 

The exchange of online social media represents a great opportunity in the study of human social cognition.

 

Studying Myspace:

I started identifying unique characteristics of myspace that help identify and illustrate potentially fundamental characteristics of human social behavior. Recognizing that everyone is producing digital media, what are the effective mechanisms for distribution and exchange? Social networks as information networks within the academy, and seeing how your social ties could act as a higher bandwidth for media exchange. As opposed to creating a repository, you are faciliating the exchange of media between socially connected individuals, enhancing the access to relevant information by social relevance. SCAPE. For classroom teaching, and teach for america. to faciliate social connectivity between teacher the design of online infrastructures for social engagement. Myspace. Hypersocial.

 

 

Methods:

When you take a screen movie of a person using myspace. good for the micro analysis of people's decision making process. Either be in the room, or stand outside of the room. And have them talk through their actions. Useful to get at some of the unconscious things that people may not bring up in conversation but are conscious of at the time.

 

Deconstructing Myspace

 

Provide illustration of Myspace page

Identity representation, comments

 

"Myspace Comments" are a novel form of online communication, and act as the predominant form of communication within the largest online social network. Myspace comments are observed to construct a shared identity between and among individuals. Certain types of Myspace comments can be classified as gifts, and may be described within the context of anthropological studies of gift exchanges. Digital gifts vary in significant ways from physical gifts, but retain key attributes.

 

Massive networks of comment reciprocation articulate a living community online, with emergent cultural norms and interaction rituals. Myspace comments are an important new form of human communication, one that is governed as much by software affordances as it is by the normative social behavior that is observed and imitated throughout the network. Using evidence from a detailed contextual analysis of a sample of Myspace interactions, large-scale patterns of gifting can be identified across Myspace using data visualization and social informatic techniques. "Gifting" is a major driver for the social distribution of digital media online.

 

(d) Myspace.com is the largest "social networking site" (website that allows explicit public articulation of social ties). However, the social network analysis in this paper relies not upon the software-based designation of friends, but rather upon active reciprocal exchanges between Myspace participants.

 

Digital Gifting:

Looking at the exchange of comments on Myspace as a sort of gift economy where the ecoonomic value is soley that of attention. Looking at how those attentional exchanges enable people to maintain dynamic networks of trust and reciprocity with their peers. The nature of that attentional reciprocity.

 

The attentional economy is perhaps best considered in conjuction and comparison to athropological depictions of social gift exchange. The exchange of media engenders reciprocation, and this appears to be based upon the assumption that an

 

Gifts are explicit representations of social attention.

 

Receiving pleasure from myspace

 

Myspace Pages as Empathic Visualizations:

Each person attempts to create a mediated representation of themselves that allows other poeple to develop an empathic sense of who that person is. But you try through whatever forms or representations you do put up to let other's fill in the details.

 

When we view a person's Myspace page, we begin to construct a cognitive model of the individual out of the media elements on their page. We can get some sort of sense about the person--valid or not. And it can be very important for an individual to represent themselves carefully. People will spend hours changing their profile, and try to get just the right mix of design and 'casualness' (you might want to conceal how much time or effort your put into your page by having strategic sloppiness, lol).

Myspace games

Hunting, Gathering and Fishing for Compliments

The next game-like behavior that Myspace users engage in is collecting friends and media. Users find friends who are already on Myspace and ‘Add them as friends.’ Users spend a significant amount of time reading the profiles of their friends. Users may decide to hunt and gather for other interesting friends, beyond what they already have. Users visit thousands of pages (each representative of a real person!), evaluate the content of the pages, and invite a select few to be their friend or send them messages.

 

An interesting user-type is the ‘Myspace Whore.’ These users devote themselves to the accumulation of as many friends and comments as possible. Users will sign up for ‘Whore Trains,’ where 50 people sign up to add all 50 as their friends.

 

It is rather common to see good girls posting revealing pictures of themselves as a way of attracting comments. Everyone desires validation of their attractiveness and social prestige, and many people find this validation by posting photos or blogs (both of which can receive separate comments) or on their main comment section. On each person’s page there is a large space for friends to post messages, photos, video, and other media. All of these comments spaces have a counter, such that people can receive discrete quantifiable social validation (Holland and Skinner, 1986).

 

Playing Reciprocity

In fact, the most predominant interactive social activity on Myspace is page commenting. Because humans are naturally predisposed to reciprocity, users know that by posting comments onto other people’s pages, they will likely receive comments back. So it appears that this gift economy of reciprocally exchanged social capital exists –-but why is this the predominant social activity?

 

Furthermore, there is an e-mail-like ‘messaging’ system on Myspace that allows private messages to be sent, but people prefer to post even many personal messages within the public comment section of a person’s page. The reason for this is that by posting the comment publicly, both the recipient and the giver of the social capital receive more attention as a result. See the attached flier entitled “Messaging vs. Commenting.”

 

Although most people are driven to attract and maintain social attention, youth are particularly concerned with their ability to attract positive attention. Myspace offers users the opportunity to experiment with and evaluate different identity signals and gestures.

 

Users feel ‘good’ when they receive a discrete signal of attention, which may come in the form of a ‘friend-request,’ a private message, or a public comment. Users grow accustomed to a regular stream of these validating social signals. Users also know they can comment on another person’s page and the recipient will often return the favor. Therefore, users are incentivized to comment on other people’s pages. The included illustration shows why this public exchange of social capital dramatically multiplies the amount of attention a user can receive.

 

 

 

IDENTITY REPRESENTATION

 

Distributed Cognition and Online Identity Representation

An individual's friends and social contacts constitute a significant component of a person's identity online and off. The rapidly emergent socio-technical architecture of 'commenting' on Myspace.com allows for a dynamic representation of online identity, produced through distributed, peer-based effort. Explicit representations of shared attention have always been a component of the social practice of 'friendship': i.e. groups of friends in public, in shared spaces, sharing conversation and other social capital. Myspace users report that the comments act as important displays of a person's identity; in other words, a good way to get a sense of a person is by what their friends say about them.

 

The nature of these attentional exchanges is a highly meaningful representation of a person's social status and identity.

 

Shared Representation of Identity and Spam Protections

There is something incredibly important to notice regarding the nature of these comments on a person's page. These comments represent an important, dynamic component of the person's identity. Look at any Myspace page. We learn a lot about the person from the comments on their page. The comments are a meaningful component of this overall representation of the person's identity.

 

A person's myspace page is their representation of their identity, 3/4s of their myspace pages are not created by themselves, but created by other people through the posting of comments. And so it is the shared identity representation that gives a person their legitimacy. So its by your real friends posting of comments on your page that you can assert yourself. It is also how people see through these fake spammers and such. Because you can go onto those pages, like musicians and comedians asw well as spammers, (like that kid at the comedy club who has 500 friends and spams them as much as possible) or 3000 friends. Because there is a certain kind of social promiscuity on Myspace where individuals will just add anyone they can, they'll get on these whore trains, and get anyone they can, but the result is that the people you just made friends with are all spammers! So your page is then filled with all this spam and whatever, so it is still through your shared representation that your trustworthiness is esablished, or deconstructed. More an more on myspace, because of all the spam, social networks have reduced themselves mostly to the people that you actually know. So it used to be on myspace that people would be comfortable meeting people that they didn't know, or just messaging and befriending random people. But there has been so much spam that people have become much warier of uninitiated contact with others. So when a person introduces themselves, others will assume they are a spammer, and they are not as receptive. as a result, the social networks on myspace have essentially reduced themselves to those real world social networks, particularly in high schools and your work contacts.

 

Anyone can be a spammer on Myspace

Myspace is the place where everyone can be a spammer. That is one of the implications of the socially structured media distirbution network. When everyone has such easy access to an audience, it is so much easier to be unethical about the promotion of X product/serive that you are pushing. Whether you a re a band, a porn star, or an evangelical, you have people... all of this advertising is done through fake identity. So a girl in a low cut shirt messages you... and you are excited, because you are getting attention from a cute girl, and so now you have to evaluate whether this is real or not. It is interesting because the way that people establish trust is quite effective, it depends on how late at night it is and how horny the guys is, because it is pretty easy to see through this stuff. But it is very difficult to fake it. what people rely on are these subtle cues about the profile. If it is very sparse, if there is no design, if there is only one image, these are indications. But critically, it is what their friends are saying about them in the comments. If you go to some porn spammer's profile, the types of comments that they get are are a dead give-away that this is not a real person. It is through that social representation of identity, the shared representation of identity that many people acheive their legitimacy as social actors by the shared representation of themselves through other people's comments.

 

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

 

Remixing Identity:

Media is remixed as elements of identity, used to create empathic models of individual cultural preference. The cultural schemas of a 'goth' are displayed only in part, but are extended through empathic modeling. Individuals use media, in music, images, and video to build these empathic identity constructions. These are certainly not built as a nefarious play to attract and manipulate attention, but certainly this is their impact. Because of the importance of shared identity construction, individuals find it necessary or fun to engage in the reciprocal exchange of comments, which could be termed triadic media elements. While primarily dialogical, used the the exchange between two persons, these elements acheive their full contextual meaning based upon their intersection between a giver, a reciever, and a generalized 'public view'. It is this public display of attention that enables the full capitalization (appreciation) of the media exchange as a social gift.

 

 

Recombinant media and Informational Harmony

Richard dawkins crewshell. Genes selected based upon the harmony they produce in the boat.

 

Images and media are selected based upon the same factors.

 

Relevance of Information. Info aesthetics as cognitive artifact and social architecture.

 

 

Importance of Identity Representation:

Why is it so important to be able to represent identity? Because it greatly affects the kind of attention we receive from the world around us (and by extension, how successful we are in the world around us). We all want to maximize the amount of positive attention we receive, minimize the amount of negative attention, and attempt to control who we receive the attention from. We don't want attention from just anyone! We wear certain clothes, ride certain skateboards, and put on different 'identity acts' in order to most attract the types people we most want attention from, and deter the types of people we don't want attention from. We not only express our identity through our looks, of course, but most especially through our acts. The way we talk, the way we carry ourselves-- what we talk about, and where we situate ourselves--these are some of the most expressive components of our identity. And it is through the deployment and negotiation of these personal attributes and artifacts that we interact with the social world. It is through our identity that we find our socio-ecological niche. Furthermore, our identity evolves by attracting success or failure.

 

Representing your interests is a funny thing to do, because in real life, they tend to express themselves more subtley. We still create representations of our interests through our actions, but they aren't as explicit as an endless list of indie bands and favorite stuff to do. Instead, we dress in particular ways and deploy social capital.

 

Why is identity formation so important to the individual? We feel an enormous need to be validated as an individual. We can easily feel meaningless and worthless if we feel we do not contribute to the larger social group. We contribute by providing social capital. Think of the high school cliques you just left: depending on the group you are in, a well timed reference to the simpsons can make everyone laugh. Making people laugh is a wonderful feeling-- this is strongly motivating. Remember, pleasure drives our activities through very basic processes of conditioning--our brains work a lot like dogs, birds, and monkeys.

 

 

 

RECIPROCITY

 

Reciprocation as Driver for Media Distribution

Just as conversations push ideas through society, reciprocal commenting pushes media through Myspace. The dynamics of these systems of exchange are specifically dependent on the highly variant cultural forms of the situation. People always exchange social capital, but while at an academic tea, even a dry neuroscience paper can become social capital—in another setting, not so much.

 

Sharing Attention

The exchange of media on myspace is an act that explicitly demonstrates the sharing of attention. Furthermore, when a person shares media with another person, it implies that the other person was expending attention on the person. It makes us feel good to know that another person was thinking about us. Having other people think about you can be very useful, ecologically speaking! As much as it might get annoying, having parents who think about you comes in handy! Similarly, one of the psychological drives for a boyfriend or girlfriend is that it is nice to know there is another person who is thinking about you.

 

And so Myspace is this wonderful place where it is so easy to pay attention to a large number of people in a highly economical way. there are tons of cues, there is tons of opportunism in the environment. you can pay attention to large numbers of people, and you can receive a lot of attention. It feels really good when a person leaves a comment for you--it feels good when someone thinks about you. These comments are like little digital gifts. We give gifts, essentially, to show that we care about (and think about) the other person. It is the thought that counts, right? And like gifts, we feel driven to reciprocate. If someone leaves us a comment, we tend to give one back.

 

 

Pleasure of Shared Attention

In fact, we feel a strong motivation just to share attention with other people. Let me say that again: we can derive a lot of pleasure simply from knowing we are sharing attention with other people. This is why we gossip, this is why we talk about our days, this is why we see movies together. We smile, and look at each other--a look of understanding can be very comforting and pleasurable. Conversely, a look of confusion or even just a blank look, (especially from a person who just doesn't 'get' what you are saying) can be distressing. And a person arguing with your point of view can be downright upsetting. In otherwords, we are built to receive pleasure when we share understandings and attention, and built to feel stressed when other people don't understand us. This may seem obvious, but these words don't even apply to monkeys.

 

Shared attention leads to shared understanding. HABERMAS

 

Tommicello spoke yesterday, and he had some fascinating studies about the effect of culture on cognition, and vice versa. For instance, he played a video of a 24 month old boy wandering around, watching a lab assistant. The Lab assistant picked up a large stack of magazines walked to a closet, placed them inside, and then close the door. The child was watching all this. Then lab assistant retreived another large set of magazines, and began walking to the closet, and paused because the doors were closed. The child sensed the problem, and opened the door. He even then pointed into the closet where the magazines should go. This demonstrated that the child understood a model of the lab assistant's goal. But the important thing that you could only get from watching this charming video was the fact that the child was obviously having a great time. The child received a great deal of pleasure, just from knowing that he knew what the lab assistant was thinking. It was like a game, and he was having lots of fun.

 

Where do we get this feeling of pleasure? It is from the harmony we feel when our bodies and minds are in synch. Neural harmony. When we interact with other people, our bodies and minds are mirroring their bodies. This is a very basic and important aspect of cognition. When we are interacting with other people we are constantly trying to represent them in our heads in order to understand them, and their intent. But this mirroring is deeper than many of you might realize.

 

For instance, scientists like Piotr Winkleman have measured electro-muscular activity in the faces of subjects listening to another person speaking words and found that the patterns share similarity to the patterns that would be occuring if the subject were saying those words.

 

The apparant neurological reason for this is presence of the so-called mirror-neuron system. There are neurons in your brain that fire both when you make an action and when you see another person making the same action. This is in Monkey's, too. So for instance, when a Monkey sees another Monkey reach for a raisen with his fingers, a pattern of neurons fires in the same ways as when the Monkey itself reached for the raison. The neurons won't fire if the Monkey is seen simply grasping at nothing--the neurons seem to (at least partially) encode intent, not just the physical action. And what is even weirder is the fact that a set of mirror neurons will go off even when the monkey simply sees the raison--indicating that the raisin invokes a neurological response to the 'affordance' of the object. And this response extends all the way to the electrical activity in the grasping hand of the chimp that's seeing the raisin.

 

So what does this have to do with people and human interaction? Humans are constantly

 

 

HABERMAS

 

Exchanging Social Gestures to Coordinate Emotions

Academia is the exchange of social capital. But it is also fueled by another kind of less 'functional' capital, the kind of content-less exchange of shared emotional affect. We look at one another, and we trade feelings. If I look upset, it is something that is felt by the people around me. If I am agitated about something, people aren't just able to recognize that fact, they can feel it. Talking to other people is intensely emotional, in so far as we don't just go around exchanging facts all the time. Most of what we say to one another is what the british might called "niceties." These are just little tidbits of social pleasantry that keep us on the same page. We say things like 'how are you' just to have a pleasant emotional reciprocation for another person: The person asking "How are you" has indicated that they are interested in the other individual's well being, which would make anyone feel good. The other person usually says something like "fine, how are you?"-- Extending the exchange and expressing positivity. These little social protocols are

 

 

Comment Etiquette on Myspace:

Commenting is the primary mode of social communication on Myspace. Only friends can leave comments on another person’s page, and they can embed images and other media.

 

People comment on others as a way of indicating that they are thinking of them (reference from Video).

“The main point of comments to let someone else know that you're thinking about them. Like, yeah it was really great to see you last night, or tell funny stories.

I communicate with my coworkers because we don't necessarily work on the same days So I'll be like "Hey yeah, work was really shitty today"

-“Mary”

 

It is common etiquette to comment back if someone comments on your page. People can comment on other people’s pages as a way of generating a reciprocal response.

 

“I respond to other people's comments. I reply to other people's comment.

I feel like if someone leaves you a comment on myspace, like you in turn should leave them a comment as well. And look all of these are from girls. Its really interesting to see.

 

I think girls leave comments a lot more, a lot more than guys do.”

-“Mary”

 

Myspace and the Flows of Social Capital

When a person comments, they decide upon a piece of content (text or other media) that is expected to generate positive attention. In the attached example, “Roy” posts a picture of Cupid shot dead on “Jane’s” comments. Roy assumes that image will make Jane ‘feel good’ because it means he is thinking about here—and because the image itself is ‘consonant’ with Jane’s cultural identity. This media gesture may be reciprocated, or it may just strengthen feelings of goodwill between Jane and Roy.

 

However, because the comments are public, there is a further benefit to both Jane and Roy—if they like attention.

 

When other people look at this image of cupid, they may really like it. They may even copy the image location and paste it on to someone else’s page (memisis). This appreciation will be conferred to Roy for having posted the image. Other people may develop the impression that Roy is both a humorous person and has an admirable cultural aesthetic. Similarly, these outside viewers will appreciate the fact that Jane has an interesting page, which makes it worth their time to check her page out. Together, this gives the impression of Jane that she is an interesting, high status individual that other people want to pay attention to. Additionally, because Roy has posted on Jane’s page, people visiting Jane now have a salient link to Roy’s page (through his comment). People very often visit the pages of people who post comments, because their comments make them seem like interesting people. In sum: the public nature of Roy’s comment resulted in a multiplication of positive attention bestowed upon both Roy and Jane.

 

Notably, it was not the content of the image that is important, but the fact that Roy and Jane both engaged in a positive, structured, shared experience. By exchanging social capital like this, Roy and Jane can evaluate how likely it is that they share the same or similar values and aesthetics.

 

Social Capital Evaluation

This image of Cupid was posted for Valentines day which makes the image pretty funny and relevant. However, Roy needed to cognitively evaluate how Jane would react to this picture. How did he know that the image would be funny and appropriate? How did he know that Jane would identify with the cultural aesthetic embodied in the image? We can infer that Roy shares a large number of cultural schemas with Jane, given that they both appear to be members of a “goth-punk” subculture. Roy might then reasonably assume that his appreciation of the dead cupid would be shared by another goth-punker.

Imagine a scenario where “Roy” posted the picture with the expectation that it would be dark and subversive, but Jane already saw the image and believes it to be silly kitch. In this case, the same media can have significantly different social capital value.

 

The value of a particular piece of social capital is very context dependent. As another example, if this same image were posted by “the school dork”, it may have elicited a different reaction.

 

A New Media Gestural Discourse

Observe the human heart posted on “Ryan’s” page. His friend includes the text “From my heart to yours.” The gesture of posting a graphic human heart on Valentines day is something that cannot be approximated with text. There appears to be a nonspecific emotional social reaction that this gesture intends to cause.

 

When a person extends social capital, there is usually an expectation that others will respond in a particular way (such as laughing)². But to develop this expectation, one must create a cognitive model of the audience.

 

Creating a Cognitive Model of your Audience

To effectively direct human attention using social capital, we must create a cognitive model of the recipient. This model of peer cognition allows us to predict the behavior of another person/group in response to the particular social capital we extend.

 

If one is writing an email, and one decides that the language will not produce the intended impression, one may end up editing multiple times. This ability to effectively express one’s self as intended is therefore dependent upon being able to predict how another person will react to one’s behaviors. This is an incredibly difficult cognitive task (to model an entire human, or even a human group), and yet we do it all the time (often without even thinking about it).

 

Social Capital, Shared Cultural Models, and Networks of Affiliation:

We tend to congregate and cohere with people who share our cultural models. This is due to multiple socio-political factors, but it is important to note that it is significantly easier to communicate with people who already share a significant proportion of our references and cultural schemas. (Holland and Skinner, 1987) A simple phrase can express a very complex idea, if there are shared cognitive schemas and references. We deliberately associate ourselves with people who present identity signals that suggest the presence of shared cultural understandings. (i.e. Hippies and Preppies).

 

The exchange of social capital is one important means by which cultural schemas are spread throughout human populations. Exchanging social capital can solidify the cultural identity of a subculture, such as when friends play each other music or recommend films or other media. At an individual level, the exchange of social capital can develop intimacy that results in more effective communication.

 

 

Playing the ’game of reciprocity’ appears to be the basis for the massive movement of media throughout Myspace. The urge to reciprocate fuels the memisis (copying and reproduction) of other social capital. Latour would be interested to see the human identity representing itself online through a mutable series of inscriptions.

 

Myspace promotes a non-linear distribution of media. Instead of a centralized media distribution system (Like television), Myspace has the capacity to distribute taste and cultural forms rapidly and meaningfully via word of mouth. Myspace is a massively distributed marketplace for the exchange and valuation of social capital. With the engagement of consumers with ever-cheaper creative digital tools, we can expend to see a massive explosion of user-generated content over the next 5 years, now that people will always now have an audience.

 

 

Attentional Posturing:

People who receive the most positive attention are said to be popular. There are many markers of social presteige, but gaze and body posturing are very important--think of how you might stand around someone that you really respected, versus how you would stand next to someone you thought was a loser. You would make very different facial expressions and gestures, too. These are markers of presteige. The same sorts of posturing can be found on myspace. Boys may be leaving comments on a girl's page as an attempt to impress her. People may try to attract a lot of friends and comments as a way of showing how many people like them and give attention.

 

 

Social Capital:

Social Capital is the net value of social relationships within an organization or community. It is the value embedded within the social network. According to…

 

 

Reciprocity as basis for ethics:

Within your framework of ethics, would you consider social obligations?

from my perspective I see reciprocity as the basis of ethical social behavior, in general. and you can move from reciprocity to a single individual to reciprocity to society as a whole. collective reciprocity, social oblications to larger groups of people. Where you are reciprocating towards a larger social form. So if you are ina group, There are certain intuitions that indiviudals will have about what is the right course of action towards the perceived goals of the group. So you dont do certain things that woud through off the vibe of the group, right down to the music you put on.

 

Here we see an interesting connection between ethics and aesthetics. By and large I would think that most of the ethical considerations that people make have to do with the obligations taht people feel socially on myspace. It is more like what is a good course of action, as oppse to more traditional philosophical ethical considerations. because frankly there is not that many important things goingon in myspace that have serious external repurrcussions. So when a person puts something on your page, even if you don't particularly life them, do you respond? Then do you take the chance of them getting upset with you, and what do you put?

 

So all of these things are quite important in so far as this is what people are thinking about when they use myspace. Because the primary game of myspace, what people are doing, is that they are commenting on each other. It is personal messagin taking place in public space. its not like just sending a message to another, where it is just an expression in private. by putting it in public, by saying what you want to say in public, there is a definite impact. With a digital media gift, if you put something on someone's page, like a funny picture or something, the value for you, giving the gift, and the value for them, receiving the gift, is multiplied because of its public nature. An individual receiving something from a friend on the network looks good because it shows they have friends on the network willing to expend attention on them. And that they have funny friends. And for the person who posts, it signals their willingness to engage socially, and they are putting an inbound link tonot their page. So it is all a combination of self-motivated and socially/ethically motivated behavior. An empathic behavior.

 

So what I am trying to say is that they things people think about, and they types of decisions they have to make primarily have to do with the fulfillment of the social oblications at the time. A maintenance of the social group or network, if this can be considered ethics, are the primary ethical considerations made by individuals.

 

 

Ethics of Socially Relevant Media:

Another issue of ethics: a sort of blending of ethics and aesthetics. Selecting socially relevant media. but they don't just put any image. Anything they are giving the other person is done such that it is relevant to the other person and their social situation. So this becomes obvious if you visit a goth-punk girl's page. cupid being shot in the back with an arrow and bleeding, aesthetically styled to her page. If this had been put on another person's pages, a cheerleader type, it would not have been received in the same way. I think people give a great deal of thought to how their gestures are interpreted. We think about how our actions are interpreted. It becomes eithical at a certain time. Not much of an ethical dimention to posting racist statements, but they tend to only put the stuff on the pages of others who they think will appreciate it. Like there was this big swastika made of out white power, and at the bottom it said, but remember, it is about heritage not hate. And they put this on one of their buddy's pages. Versus the propriatey they might have felt about putting it on someone elses' page. So that is an example of the social ethics that I believe people engage in quite a bit

 

Copyrights and new economies:

So one things that is NOT an ethical conisderation on myspace is copyright. It doesn't exist. the primary exchange of media on myspace is done with hotlinking. This is where you embed a link in your page, like a video object or an image in your page. so you are always linking to something else that exists on the net. As a result media has become something that flows like water, you can grab whatever you want, put it where ever you want, use it how ever you want, and you copy and paste it, and that is just how it works. If anything it is instilling the idea that copyright doesn't have a place in social exchange. You don't play music at a party and think 'is this appropriate, copyright'. Copyright is not even on people's minds as an ethical consideration.

 

The thing is that there is a whole economy of websites that cater to the media needs, these emotional comment exchanges, these little images, on myspace. These are the hallmark of myspace, like freeweblayout, skeme9, blingybob, pimpmypage. all of these give the ability to change the look of your page, and they provide images that you can embed. You copy the code and you paste it on a friend's page. there will usually be a link here in the image back to the site. But often people just copy the image location and link it onto another person's page, without the hyperlink.

 

Digital Friendship is Sharing

Otherthan bandwidth considerations, it is difficult to understand what would be wrong about sending a friend an image. It is like playing music for a friend, or showing them something cool, "that is what friends do. " It is interesting that the exchange of media is so much of what online digital friendship entails. it really is a value and an expectation that this exchange of media takes place.

 

Relationship of Aesthetics to Ethics:

Aesthetics must be based upon ethics at some point, at least to establish what is 'good'. Disjoint between good aesthetics and good ethics. Fascist Aesthetics.

 

Are Myspace Aesthetics Good? Aesthetics of a dive bar. Exclusionary aesthetics. Affect of Aesthetics. History of Composition. Possibilities for Evolution

 

 

SOCIAL ARCHITECTURES

 

Social Architectures and Social Dynamics:

Structure of myspace structures engagement. Attentional cost of comparing interactions over time (vs. Wall-to-wall).

Designing for spontaneous social exchange. Design can act as exclusionary factor. People connect around people they don't like. Flow patterns.

 

Media as Architecture:

Media forms need to be considered in the context of architecture, that is, in the construction of living space. Paintings on a wall or frescos are critical elements in the experience of a room. New Media architecture incorporates wall-sized screens, but even a small television can radically shift the architectural flow of a space like the family living room. And as for information architectures, certainly the incorporation of images will change the flow of a page or the interaction of a user.

 

Nietchze called architecture ‘frozen music.’ Would that then make music ‘liquid architecture?’ It would appear so—the music playing in a space can strongly change the perception of that space.

 

Media as Social Architecture:

If we tentatively accept that media can act as an important architectural element, let us consider the role of media as a social architecture. Those frescos on the wall become more than a solitary aesthetic experience; they become a conversation piece, a statement of prestige, and an object of shared attention.

 

The liquid architectures of music become a rich space for human interaction, enabling the coordination of experience, attention, and movement. The emotional affect conveyed by a living room can be drastically altered through the introduction of the structures of music. Music acts as an interplay with existing architectural elements, enabling them to be reconfigured and contextualized.

 

As social architectures, it is hard to find a media form that does not fit our definition of “forms and structures that act as scaffolding for social engagement.” Movies, wherein the viewers are not even allowed to communicate, will still culturally and attentionally coordinate its viewers at a later date, by acting as an object of social capital,. That the form of a film requires that one attend a theater is a form of social architecture, where individuals must coordinate their actions and their evenings to attend.

 

On Myspace, media forms are seen clearly as architectural elements that constrain and support the dynamics of social engagement. First consider that social interaction is essentially taking place within a media form—the web page. Secondly, because media elements act as the building blocks for identity, individuals interact with one another based upon their display. In this sense, clothes and personal style can be seen as a social architecture, and rightly. How much does the existing style of people within a space generate an affect, as you may have experienced walking into a bar?

 

Social Architectures need not be physical constructions. They can be digital constructions, sound waves, even cultural practices.

 

CONCLUSION

 

New Uses of Art and Aesthetics

From the industrialized society and the danger of mass media, reference grant Kester. It has been argued that the use of art as a communicative tool for the progression of aesthetic and social thought was disrupted by the commodification of visual design.

 

The Primary media forms are now capable of being decomposed by mass participants and reshaped for personal communication. This communication is primarily emotional and cultural coordination.

 

In this case, the application of mass media by the people both projects the aesthetics into new reflective media forms as well as transforms the role of the citizen into information processor and replicator. Noth that there is a strong distinction between this role and the role that was more traditionally held by individuals in society who must be able to apply memetic strategies for the replication of cultural forms. However, by incorporating the interfacial experiences and techniques of digital computers, human beings themselves are extended and transformed as a cognitive species.

 

Life as Art:

Egalitarian Production

 

Social Movement:

Representing a structural phase shift, it will be some time before culture reaches an equilibrium state. There are a number of possible outcomes that could emerge with this digitally embodied cognitive evolution. Society could embrace a statist control that is aware and reactive to every individual divergence, potentially resulting in a hyper-communist cognitively unified society, but one that sacrifices individual choice for collective choice.

 

Another possibility, more likely from our narcissistic perspective found within America's southern californian individualism, but perhaps less sustainable, is a hyper-capitalism where everyone is aware and reactive to others as individually competative entities, vying for capital resources and increasingly, attentional/cultural access. Roboticized industrial production results in a loss of material scarcity.

 

Already, myspace offers a glimpse into a highly competative attentional economy and media ecology.

 

Is the quality of high art as important as the degradtory quality of low art?

Mental hygene--adbusters

Maccluhan technology as extention of our self, of our perception, of our motor system, now, of our cognition.