The archive and the processor: The internal logic of Web 2.0

tags

Attention Economy

Notes

Moments of inputting data into Facebook thus resulted in the elimination of years of lost time

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I define ‘Web 2.0’ as the new media capitalist technique of relying upon users to supply and rank online media content, then using the attention this content generates to present advertisements to audiences. It is currently the hege- monic business practice on the Web

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expected to process digital objects by sharing content, making connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing digital content, a mode of computing I call ‘affective processing.’ In essence, this business model imagines users to be a potential superprocessor.

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archival possibilities of computers are typically commanded by Web 2.0 site owners

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users cannot control these archives

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archives of affect, sites of decontextualized data that can be rearranged by the site owners to construct particular forms of knowledge about Web 2.0 users.

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control of the archive leads to social power

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devices designed to capture the affective labor of users

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how new media sites encourage users to value the new and to engage in the affective processing

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The dual logic of the processor and the archive animates and in part determines the current business practice and social structures of the Web.

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enabled this constant production of content by ceding control over the immediate to users

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users now have unprecedented power over popular trends on the Web. However, the catch here is that Web 2.0 site owners have not ceded the other half of the computational equation: the archive

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While users are defining trends and shaping the now, Web 2.0 site owners are carefully shifting user-generated content out of time; thus, site owners com- mand the past

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emphasize the new even at the cost of other modes of organization such as relevance or importance.

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The virtual … can be positioned at the interactive threshold between the processes of real-time and the processes of the archive

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the ‘net- worked information economy,’ involves ‘decentralized individual action – specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically dis- tributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies.’ While this is presented as ‘nonmarket,’ it is clear that Benkler and Howe see this development as, in fact, a new, cheap labor market.

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The legendary marketplace, where labor meets capital in a personified negotiation, is replaced by a screen interface, where labor finally becomes completely mechanical and rationalized.

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emphasizing the processing of digital artifacts and de- emphasizing knowledge of what these tasks are for

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development of Web 2.0 is a trajectory of increasing capitalization of the processing power of the masses of computer users

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Thus even a user who ‘free rides’ on a site, only browsing but not contributing content, generates such data

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store as much user-generated content and data as possible, serve it to users who process it further, and then store the results, creating an ever more precise and extensive archive

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In sum, Facebook – and other Web 2.0 sites – seek to grow the archive through the process A-P-A’. The larger the archive, and the more granular the data about the desires, habits, and needs of users, the more valuable the archive. And if the archive is reliably linked to users who can sort data and process digital artifacts, the archive can be grown and made more precise.

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how could one start constructing an archive without knowing the principle of its construction, without knowing in advance, among other things, what to select?

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Bowker’s name for our computer-driven memory episteme is ‘potential memory,’ a mode of power where those with access to the archive create narratives post hoc from a priori taxonomically organized objects

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so-called ‘big data’ have built the Web 2.0 archives in order to construct exchangeable images of user/consumers. The ‘facts’ that will become produced in Web 2.0 are largely concerned with consumer preferences

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‘the lords of cloud computing’ who command data flows and storage. Although editors and gatekeepers have seen their roles eroded, data-miners have emerged as the new personi- fication of media power

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