Questions and thoughts on Heverly and Lessig

A few questions and thoughts in preparation for our Second Life discussion of Heverly ("Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life") and Lessig (Code v.2):

- Heverly, Lessig, and Chun are all preoccupied with "control."  In what ways do their notions of "control" converge and in what ways do they diverge?  (Sheesh.  Is that a 101 question, or what?!)

- How might Nakamura's discussions of subjectivity/objectivity be used to complicate Heverly's "active creation"/"passive object"?  Heverly talks about some of the unintended ramifications of young people who "embed themselves in digital media...by choice" and who are embedded by others against their will or without their knowledge (204), but he doesn't theorize this dichotomy too deeply.

- For me, this was Heverly's most interesting point:  "[W]e risk a future where the bullied remain bullied throughout their whole lives, where the space that children need to grow is wiped out by the permanence of the digital artifacts that are created when they err..." (216). We tend to emphasize the ephemerality of digitality (Wikipedia entries constantly changing, for example) and the ability to construct our own identities on the internet, but Heverly reminds us of both the potential permanence and uncontrollable nature of identity on the web. What does this mean for "digitizing race"?

- Lessig suggests that surveillance might be, in my words, a self-fulfilling prophecy:  "[P]rofiles will begin to normalize the population from which the norm is drawn.  The observing will affect the observed.  The system watches what you do; it fits you into a pattern; the pattern is then fed back to you in the form of options set by the pattern; the options reinforce the pattern; the cycle begins again" (220).  This reminded me of a point made by Robert McChesney in Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (from Dennis' class): In response to the notion that entertainment media "give the people what they want," he writes, "When people consume from options provided, the media giants then state that they are satisfying audience demand.  If some find the offerings imbecilic, the argument goes, that is because the people are morons who demand such tripe.  But this is a circular argument, since there is no proof that this range of choices conforms to something innate to the audience" (51).  We could perhaps say this about any digital medium: We are so accustomed to working within the constraints of Word, or Blogger, or Web 2.0 — in other words, any code — that we assume it's "what we want" ... the constraints become invisible as constraints ... they seem "innate" (to us and to the medium). The ability to produce code on the web does trouble this, although the vast majority of us don't produce actual code (certainly not binary machine code, at least), so we have to work through translating programs that, again, provide us with a particular set of options.

- I was very interested in Lessig's suggestion that social hierarchies, which were diminished due to increased mobility, are being reinstated through digital profiling: "An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank. Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past" (221).  Can/should we do anything about this, or is it a necessary evil?