YOU are the model! YOU are the majority! Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model…as in the Louds’ operation. - Jean Baudrillard, 1994, p.31
OPPOSITE ‘An American Family’ < http://www.alaskapublic.org/ wp-content/uploads/2011/06/AnAmericanFamily.jpg> accessed 2 December 2016 NOTES 1 J Ruoff, An American family, in , 1st ed., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. xv to xxv. 2 J Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, in , 1st ed., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 31
At nine in the evening on Thursday the 11th of January, 1973, the world’s first reality television series was aired in the United States. ‘An American Family’ challenged the documentary format and began a genre in media that we are now all too familiar with. From approximately 300 hours of raw footage over seven months of uninterrupted shooting, the series captured the daily life of the Louds, a white upper-middle class family with five children and two dogs. Over the series, a number of unscripted incidents occurred, including the eldest son Lance announcing his homosexuality and later, the divorce and separation of Pat and Bill – the parents. Unlike reality TV today, there were no prizes, no commercials, no voice-overs, no narrations, and no interviews. As much as was possible, the series was to be a portrait of a real family in the real world. These claims to ‘reality’ were of course as controversial to the Loud’s contemporaries as they are to us now, with critics questioning whether the truth of the scenario was tainted by the presence of the camera, which was seen to catalyse performance rather than encourage authenticity.1 Indeed, producer Craig Gilbert’s choice in who to document was already a mediation of reality, an interpretation of truth. In casting a wealthy, white, Californian family, Gilbert described the model American, in terms of ethnicity, socio-economic status, age and domestic situation. While the Louds were undoubtedly real people, with real emotions, agendas and stories, their televised selves were a model of reality, a simulation sold to You the viewer. It was Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’; where a simulacrum is so complete as to make distinctions between the real and the unreal irrelevant. For Baudrillard, the chronicle of the Loud family revealed the subjective model of knowledge he argued was prevalent, if not already omnipresent in contemporary society.2
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TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY! - Jean Baudrillard, 1994, p.23
OPPOSITE ‘Google Signals’ - author’s original work. Data taken from <http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors> accessed 6 December 2016 *The highlighted signals indicate factors that may be unique to the searcher or at least indicate a dynamic value that shifts with user interaction NOTES 3 Today those signals are estimated to number over 200 as Google tries to optimise its personalised search algorithms 4 E Pariser, The Filter Bubble, in , 1st ed., Penguin Books, 2012, p. 8 to 9 5 Pariser, 2012, p.13 6 Baudrillard, 1994, p.23
On the morning of December 4th 2009, a subtle change in code changed humanity’s model of knowledge forever. Overnight Google’s search algorithm had become personalised. From that day on, some 57 signals unique to any given searcher including location, device type, and browsing history were sampled and used to reorganise what slice of the Internet would be returned and in what order, when given a search term.3 Eli Pariser, author of the ‘The Filter Bubble’, illustrates the phenomenon through an experiment he ran with two of his friends. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he asked both of them to search BP. On Google’s first page, one received extensive coverage of the spill, whereas the other was fed corporate investment information and BP adverts.4 Suddenly, the Internet was accessed not through a universal search algorithm, but through as many search engine variants as there were searchers. The Internet, which had for so short a time been heralded as the great democratiser, an unrestricted wellspring of objective knowledge, had become a self-affirming echo-chamber. It was not only Google that adopting this personalised approach to search. Online retailer Amazon’s initial success was founded on its prediction algorithm that would suggest titles to shoppers based on their (and others’) previous purchases. Today, it is said that Netflix’s software is able to determine within a half-star accuracy how you will rate a film you have never seen before.5 And of course, Facebook – the ultimate self-affirming mirror – uses an algorithm called ‘EdgeRank’ to determine who you like, and what you like, to feed you more of exactly that; it is after all, called the Like button, not the Important button. Baudrillard’s description of the world has gone from provocation to prediction; “Take your desires for reality!”.6
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THE LIBRARY OF YOU A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook E Pariser, “When the Internet Thinks It Knows You”, in The New York Times, , 2011, <http://www.nytimes. com/2011/05/23/opinion/23pariser.html?_r=1&)> [accessed 7 December 2016]. 7 S Rubel, “The Attention Crash: A New Kind of Dot-Com Bust”, in Adage.com, , 2016, <http://adage. com/article/steve-rubel/attention-crash-a-kind-dotbust/117325/> [accessed 2 December 2016]. 8 N Negroponte, Being digital, in , 1st ed., New York, Knopf, 1995, p. 153 to 154 9 H Jenkins, Convergence culture, in , 1st ed., New York, New York University Press, 2008, p. 41 10 C Shirky, Cognitive surplus, in , 1st ed., New York, Penguin Books, 2011, p. 63 11 J Lanier, You are not a gadget, in , 1st ed., New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, p. 9 12 A Galloway & E Thacker, The exploit, in , 1st ed., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p. 29 13 O Solon, S Levin & J Wong, “Bursting the Facebook bubble: we asked voters on the left and right to swap feeds”, in the Guardian, , 2016, <https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/16/facebook-biasbubble-us-election-conservative-liberal-news-feed> [accessed 15 November 2016].
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With the advent of the era of personalisation, online formats of search have shifted their purpose and agenda too. Indexing content has become secondary to indexing the people who seek and consume that content. The resulting indexes of people is content in and of itself, which can be sold for huge amounts to corporations, interested in You – not as a human being, but as a set of discrete values describing your likelihood to consume certain content types. The scientists who conceived of the Internet believed it would be the greatest library ever built; a searchable repository of information rivalling Borges’ near infinite library of Babel in size and complexity. Over the last seven years, since personalised data have become ubiquitous, corporations have realised that the Internet is merely the tool for creating the ultimate library; the Library of You. The overwhelming size of the Internet threatened to produce an ‘Attention Crash’; media and news made meaningless for their gargantuan incompatibility with the human brain in terms of size and speed.7 At the beginning of the century, advertisers seeking to take advantage of the instantaneous and wide-reaching power of digital networks were simultaneously concerned that their products would become invisible in the sheer mass of information out there. If the Internet (back then) was a supermarket, it would be one with no aisles or shelves – just piles of goods, loosely categorised by type with popular items somewhere near the tops. How could brands ensure that in this digital superstore, their products would appear consistently and conveniently at eye-height? The answer lay in the space’s ability to be instantaneously reconfigured. It could switch appearances depending on its contents, and on who was looking at it. It was a shift from a democratic model of the Internet to a consumer one.
Imagine a future, in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalised summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one…Call it the Daily Me. - Nicholas Negroponte, 1995, p. 153 to 154 We have all been living in Negroponte’s future for some time now.8 More and more, we are lockedin to our own universes of one. Whether Negroponte’s notion of the Daily Me represents an epistemological dilemma is in itself a polarising discourse. Optimists argue that media personalisation can empower previously disconnected communities, promoting heterogeneity. Henry Jenkins believes that “In a world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms”.9 Clay Shirky writes that media personalisation has (through increased contact with information and people worldwide), produced a cognitive surplus. “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes” he claims.10 ‘Have you not read online comments sections?!’ exclaim the pessimists. For them, the philosophy of the personalised Internet has brought with it a total degeneration of discourse into name calling, shaming, and ‘trolling’. The extreme and binary nature of the discourse generated by Brexit and the US presidential election this year only seems to support the claim that instead of encouraging collaboration and innovation, the Internet (on the whole) reflects a trend toward intolerance and narcissism in global society. At its worst, it can be argued that hyper-personalisation is a process of self-cannibalisation, where we consume ourselves in an endlessly narrowing loop. The Internet today probably sits somewhere between these dialectics, at times offering opportunities for the positive dissemination of culture, and in other contexts obfuscating progress and inviting unsubstantiated judgement. The paradoxical nature of the Internet (or indeed any technology) as both enabling and incapacitating society is a phenomenon observed by multiple technological theorists and philosophers. Jaron Lanier calls it ‘lock-in’, using the example of railway tracks to describe the condition where an innovative technology sets up a series of conventions that disable divergent development in the future.11 For Galloway and Thacker, they describe technology through the notion of ‘protocol. “Protocol is twofold” they write, “it is both an apparatus that facilitates networks and a logic that governs how things are done within that apparatus”.12 In an experiment run in the final days of the 2016 US election, the Guardian asked ten voters to swap news feeds for 48 hours. The team at the Guardian created two fictional Facebook profiles; Rusty Smith (a right-wing avatar who liked a range of conservative news sites and personalities) and Natasha Smith (a left-wing individual who linked to progressive news stories and organisations). The team then gave the liberal voters access to Rusty’s news feed and conservatives were given Natasha’s. Unsurprisingly, the experiment provoked strong emotional responses, as well as revealing how uncomfortable it was to be removed from one’s ‘filter bubble’. Moungo, one of the left wing participants reported after the election that “I learned that [people on the right] are far more vicious and lack a certain maturity that I would expect of adults…They are irredeemable monsters”. Pines, another participant said “It’s like reading a book by a fool. It’s hard to read something you know is a lie”.13 We tend to think of the Internet as a space for the revealing or uncovering of information. However, perhaps it is equally plausible to recognise it as (through its ever-increasing personalisation) an apparatus of unseeing.
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THE UNSEEN CITY Ul Qoman man and Besz maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. - China Mieville, 2009, p. 160 to 161 OPPOSITE ‘Facebook Algorithmic Factory’ by Sharelab <https:// labs.rs/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FacebookFactorysmall.gif> accessed 3 December 2016 14 C Miéville, The City & The City, in , 1st ed., 2009.
The citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma live in the same space, walking the same streets and breathing the same air and yet they live in different cities; places so separate that to travel between them requires a passport, a border crossing and the learning of a new language. China Mieville’s novel ‘The City and the City’ imagines a fictional metropolis, somewhere in eastern Europe where two societies co-exist and yet are trained from birth to unsee the other. Subtle differentiations in fashion, body-language and architecture allow residents in each of these strange twin cities to instantaneously recognise and then block out any signs of the parallel culture. To see the other city, to see the other, is in Mieville’s world a horrendous
crime. A mysterious alien presence known only as Breach enforces a law of separation, ensuring the two cities never come into contact – unless through the proper border crossing procedures. Anyone who breaches (acknowledges the spatial coexistence of these two realities) is mysteriously removed from society, never to be seen again.14 There is a real precedent for this city. The Belgium municipality of Baarle-Hertog consists of twenty enclaves contained within the town of Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands. The complicated borders that divide the Belgian town from the Dutch one are marked on the street, dividing restaurants, streets and in some cases, even houses. A walk to work in this town might entail crossing national borders multiple times, each time redefining ‘local’ currency, language and law. Houses on the same street are connected to different electrical grids and have different addresses. To phone your next-door neighbour may constitute an international call. However, while this city reflects the spatial characteristics of Mieville’s Beszel and Ul Qoma, the psychological and cultural phenomenon of unseeing is perhaps better reflected in online cultures. If we each now live in a filter bubble, an echochamber of our likes and desires, there will surely be overlap in world view between those of similar predisposition. Groups of people who identify with the same political ideologies, who have the same taste in music, or who share a common vocabulary of Internet abbreviations and emojis find that their filter bubbles intersect intensely and frequently. This coalescence of culture around clusters of individuals with shared values and desires, rather than around geographic or political borders has been described as the reincarnation of the tribe as the dominant format of social organisation. Online at least, this plethora of subcultures live (relatively) unaware of each other; or at least unaffected by each other. Whether on social networks like Facebook, to career sites like LinkedIn, to dating sites like Happn, the format of search that preferences similarity rather than difference produces within each a set of hermetic tribes. Just like Beszel and Ul Qoma, members of digital tribes live in the same space, aware of each NATHAN SU
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other’s existence but never really interacting, never seeing ‘the other’. This is Christopher Alexander’s City of Ghettos: “homogeneous internally, [they] do not allow a significant variety of life styles to emerge. People in the ghetto are usually forced to life there, isolated from the rest of society, unable to evolve their way of life, and often intolerant of ways of life different from their own”.15 BELOW ‘Map of Baarle Hertog/Baarle Nassau’ <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Baarle-Nassau_-_ Baarle-Hertog-en.svg/2000px-Baarle-Nassau_-_Baarle-Hertog-en.svg.png> accessed 7 December 2016 OPPOSITE ‘A restaurant sits on the Dutch/Belgium Border in Baarle Hertog’ <http://www.citymetric.com/sites/default/files/ article_2015/07/baarle-nassau_frontiere_cafe.jpg> accessed 7 December 2016 15 C Alexander, S Ishikawa & M Silverstein, A pattern language, in , 1st ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 43
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THE MIDDLE LAYER It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress. - John Stuart Mill, 1848 “Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book III, Chapter XVII | Library of Economics and Liberty”, in Econlib. org, , 2016, <http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP46. html> [accessed 7 December 2016]. OPPOSITE ‘City of Ghettos, The Heterogeneous City & Mosaic of Subcultures’ C Alexander, S Ishikawa & M Silverstein, A pattern language, in , 1st ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 43 to 44 16 Baudrillard, 1994, p.23
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In Latin, the word media referred to ‘the middle layer’; that which was between things. Our medias are the thin veils between our bodies and our reality, be they books, screens or holograms. And whilst we mostly imagine the Internet as an intangible site, the filters that effect our perception of culture online are starting to trickle into our interactions with physical space. Already, we are learning to navigate the city with head and eyes down, tracing our routes with blue dots on maps rather than through landmarks or street signs. The solidity and thinness of the Google maps navigation line assumes no deviation, no exploration, no serendipitous discovery. Google Maps’ younger brothers – Trip Advisor and Airbnb mean that we are ‘familiar’ with new places before we ever set foot in them. As if through a cosmic collective consciousness, a tourist knows which restaurants to visit and which to avoid without having even walked past them once. The geotag was the conduit which allowed the filter bubble to enter real space. We are on the cusp of an age where physical and digital, real and simulated become even more entwined. The nascent technology of augmented reality (or mixed reality as it is now being sold) promises to bring our virtual worlds into real space, overlaying our digital filters on the city in real time. As Pariser notes: There’s tremendous promise in this vision: Surgeons who never miss a suture, soldiers who never imperil civilians, and everywhere a more informed, information-dense world. But there’s also danger: Augmented reality represents the end of naïve empiricism, of the world as we see it, and the beginning of something far more mutable and weird: a real-world filter bubble that will be increasingly difficult to escape. - Eli Pariser, 2011, p. 184 Imagine this. You are a tourist in a new city. As you walk the streets, bars and restaurants serving your favourite cuisine glow with beautiful light. You are on the lookout for a new pair of shoes, so when you walk past shops selling styles you like, a flock of little boots jump out of the front window and enticingly array themselves in front of you.
The buildings that you pass have no doors, unless they are places you plan to visit. Your friends have told you to avoid the downtown district at night as apparently rates of crime are high. When you walk past the edge of the district it appears to you as an impassable lake – you couldn’t walk there if you tried! A beautiful carpet of grass and flowers directs you to your dinner date with a friend. Without hesitation you wend your way right and left through labyrinthine streets, following the green carpet. Friendly animals graze at the edges of the grass, some approach you but you cheerfully side step them and continue on your way. Without your filter on, you are actually walking through a dirty back alley, as several homeless beggars approach you for spare change. The technologies to bring this reality to life are already here. Earlier this year, Microsoft released ‘Hololens’ to developers – a visor with the capability to read the geometry of your environment in real time, and overlay animated graphics in real space. As we have already revealed, the Library of You growing in complexity and accuracy every day, and each time you interact with the networked world, you aid in the generation of an ever more detailed portrait of yourself, to be fed back to you. We hear Baudrillard’s voice echo again ‘Take your desires for reality!’.16 Now imagine a different scenario. You are a tourist in a new city. As you walk the streets, the bars most visited by local workers and the restaurants frequented by resident families, glow with beautiful light. As you pass by shop windows, you see an assortment of the latest fashions, as determined by the collective’s buying habits. Most of them you’d never wear but as you give a virtual thumbs-up to a pair of shoes you spy in the corner they shift ever so slightly forward in the display, gaining a little more prominence. As you walk along the streets at the edge of the downtown district, you see it is full of virtual creatures being chased by groups of children playing their epic fantasy games in the night. Wandering aimlessly through the streets you encounter a dark alley where groups of homeless gather. As they approach you, you notice the under-crofts of nearby building are adorned with signs, showing how safe they are as places to spend the night. The whole city has been full of these virtual signposts for the homeless network, but now you see them too.
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This is a city to get lost in, where the algorithm of virtual seeing feeds you the priorities of the collective rather than your own. Full of surprises (serendipitous or unnerving) it is a city that expands your view, rather than narrows it. Contrary to being a City of Ghettos, this socially generated view of the world models itself after Alexander’s Heterogeneous City, where people live in a cultural soup, mixed together, irrespective of their affiliations or preferences. This in itself is not without problems. As Alexander notes – such a place would likely encourage a reduction of all lifestyles to ‘a common denominator’. Total differentiation, precludes the formation of cultural groups, and instead is revealed to be ‘homogeneous and dull’. Whether we see it through the lens of social media walls and personalised search today, or through a future speculation on augmented realities, it would seem imperative that we at the very least, develop an awareness of the model of reality our formats of search provide. When what we see is increasingly defined by algorithmic apparatuses rather than spatial ones, Alexander’s final diagram for the city; the Mosaic of Subcultures; can be understood as not only a spatial strategy, but also one for the delivery of information. What if, like the cells in Alexander’s image, each of our personalised searches were surrounded by a context of diverse and foreign entries. At the cusp of a merging of virtual and physical realities, this model calls for the need to reformat our search methods; not in the aim of abandoning personalisation (and all its efficiencies and strengths), but rather to temper our realities with regular and much needed doses of context.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, C, S Ishikawa, & M Silverstein, A pattern language. in , 1st ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. Baudrillard, J, Simulacra and simulation. in , 1st ed., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994. Galloway, A & E Thacker, The exploit. in , 1st ed., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Jenkins, H, Convergence culture. in , 1st ed., New York, New York University Press, 2008. Lanier, J, You are not a gadget. in , 1st ed., New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Miéville, C, The City & The City. in , 1st ed., , 2009. “Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book III, Chapter XVII | Library of Economics and Liber ty”. in , , 2016, <http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP46.html> [accessed 7 December 2016]. Negroponte, N, Being digital. in , 1st ed., New York, Knopf, 1995. Pariser, E, The Filter Bubble. in , 1st ed., Penguin Books, 2012. Pariser, E, “When the Internet Thinks It Knows You”. in The New York Times, , 2011, <http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23pariser.html?_r=1&)> [accessed 7 December 2016]. Rubel, S, “The Attention Crash: A New Kind of Dot-Com Bust”. in Adage.com, , 2016, <http:// adage.com/article/steve-rubel/attention-crash-a-kind-dot-bust/117325/> [accessed 2 De cember 2016]. Ruoff, J, An American family. in , 1st ed., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. xv to xxv. Shirky, C, Cognitive surplus. in , 1st ed., New York, Penguin Books, 2011. Solon, O, S Levin, & J Wong, “Bursting the Facebook bubble: we asked voters on the left and right to swap feeds”. in the Guardian, , 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/nov/16/facebook-bias-bubble-us-election-conservative-liberal-news-feed> [accessed 15 November 2016].
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