This is the second panel spotlight for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference on April 9th. I am presiding over an open paper session whose full title is “Poets and Scribes – Constructing Fact and Fiction on Social Media.” The title alludes to Susan Sontag’s On Photography in which she describes the evolution of thought surrounding our relationship to that earlier medium:
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer—as scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but and evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.
The parallel between photography and social media is that both produce documents that are mediated through the situated perspective of the actor. Media production is never passive and it is never asocial (though, of course, such actors fall on a continuum between the ideal-typical poet and scribe). However, when we accept that media products are embedded within a system of social relations (particularly, relations of power), we implicitly accept the idea that these products inextricably contain poetic or fictitious elements—angles or interpretations that reflect the historical moment in which they were articulated. All media, including social media, are expressions of what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge.”
The salient difference between the poet and the scribe is that the poet is self-aware the her work is always a half-fiction. She embraces the fact that expression is always a process of fictioning and uses it to her advantage. On the contrary, the scribe is faced with the paradoxical task of trying to legitimate her existence by saying her work is necessary but adds nothing. Her unwillingness to acknowledge what she brings to the product leaves her vulnerable to both marginalization and exploitation because she is blind to the unique interests of her social position and to the value that is created in offering a concrete expression of these interests. No doubt, the average Facebook user is more like a scribe than a poet, faithfully documenting the “truths” of their existence without realizing any claim to the value of the information generated.
The four papers on this panel are joined by a theme of inquiry into the active, poetic practice of mediating our online interaction and documentation. Abstracts are presented below: more...