Michel de Certeau

Yesterday afternoon, I saw Fincher’s The Social Network with fingers-crossed that Sorkin’s bantery dialogue wouldn’t cause me to cringe like a bad number on Glee. I’ll blog about the film on rhizomicon this weekend, but the film reminded me of several aspects of the sociology of online spaces I’ve been mulling over. The film depicted Harvard in 2003 where a hierarchical social order existed in the face-to-face realm. Mark Zuckerberg ran with the idea of taking the collegiate de Certeauean everyday, in all of its mundane glory…online

Facebook is perhaps the perfect Web 2.0 app. User-driven content, interactive information sharing within social networks, etc. etc. Facebook allows users to create multidimensional fielded networks, using Bourdieu’s concept of field/champs. Here’s a summary from an Economist article from last year on the sociology of Facebook, based on how people use the site.

Not surprisingly, we tend to interact with a finite number of other people in our social networks. I’m thinking that as we move into Web 3.0, there will be pressure towards…a diversity of ties. We will be able to interact with others not on the basis of extant contacts and networks, but on other dimensions that may even be latent, e.g., a penchant for music in 3/4 time or a love of books with socialist themes.

Last.fm allows users to find others that have similar musical tastes, find similar bands to those with profiles, and friend others. Here’s an analysis {in French} of a Last.fm network [Google translation] with great interactive visualizations. Each artist on Last.fm has users who like and listen to them. The data is being ported to other sites, such as Songkick, that uses feeds to populate a database of live shows. I think it’s a powerful concept to be able to find like-minded others who might be right next door or around the globe.

Web 3.0 or the semantic web won’t destroy Web 2.0, but will shift focus from user-driven content to the utilization of users’ data. This will push social networking away from user-defined networks and I feel it will foster more tie diversity, not necessarily in terms of demographics, although this is a possibility, but in terms of geography and psychographics. Will Facebook be able to adapt to a scenario of users’ forging multiplex ties based on data or will it get bogged down with user expectations of what the site means to them and those clinginging to the notion of privacy?

The New York Times has an article on doing something about the Internet as the scourge of the workplace, being a timesuck of epic proportions.

“During the last few weeks, I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.”

The author goes on to talk about the various software solutions, but at the end he surmises that it’s human nature to goof off and waste time.

Why?

Michel deCerteau in The Practice of Everyday Life offers up the term, “la perruque,” where workers steal time for their own purposes as a form of resistance to the surveillance of control::

“It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job.  La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room.”

This probably rings true for many::

In my opinion, people engage in la perruque in resisting the logics of surveillance, but I feel this could be thwarted by developing organizational cultures where people feel motivated to do the work, rather than slack.  In this day and age, employees are often made to feel they are lucky to even have a job and this was before the recession.  Outsourcing and cost-cutting are terms used to “manage” the workforce through fear.  The problem with fear…is that it breeds more resistance.  A vicious cycle.

This is why I always allow students to use laptops in my classes and I don’t even care if they’re updating their Facebook or playing poker.  Why?  Because if I’m doing my job and engaging the students, they wind up using the Internet to complement class discussions, not as a distraction.

Now that I’m a consultant doing my own thing, I find that I still waste time on the Internet.  If it increases, I suppose it’s because I have a jerk for a boss.

Twitterversion:: NewSftware prevnts timesink w/Internet,but is wastng time just”la perruque”by deCerteau. Contrlvs.Motivate?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/2gx8 @Prof_K

Song:: Temptation – Heaven 17