{"id":11165,"date":"2012-07-26T11:24:33","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T15:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=11165"},"modified":"2012-07-26T11:41:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-26T15:41:18","slug":"possibility-vs-potentiality-a-case-study-in-documentary-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/07\/26\/possibility-vs-potentiality-a-case-study-in-documentary-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"Possibility vs. Potentiality: A Case Study in Documentary Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
It doesn’t matter if anyone actually sees your status update; it’s indeterminacy that drives our anxieties about the unknown and unknowable futures of our digital artifacts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the last part<\/a> of my recent essay \u201cA New Privacy,\u201d I described documentary consciousness<\/em> as the perpetual (and frequently anxiety-provoking) awareness that, at each moment, we are potentially the documented objects of others. In this post, I use a friend\u2019s recent \u2018Facebook debacle\u2019 as a starting point to elaborate on what documentary consciousness is, how it works, and whether it can be diminished or assuaged by the fact that \u201cnobody\u2026 wants to see your status update from 2007<\/a>.\u201d I draw on Brian Massumi\u2019s distinction between the possible<\/em> and the potential<\/em> to help explain why documentary consciousness entails \u201cthe ever-present sense of a looming future failure<\/a>,\u201d<\/strong> <\/strong>whether anyone reads that old status update or not.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>My friend Dani (not her real name) recently moved 2000 miles away to be closer to her partner. The weekend before the movers came, Dani had a going-away party at her house that featured a cookout, friends\u2019 bands playing live, and another friend DJing after the bands\u2019 sets. The event started at 2pm and, somewhat amazingly, managed to make it to midnight before a uniformed gentleman arrived to announce that the hour for outdoor merriment had passed. Dani chose to look on the bright side of things, and saw getting shut down by local law enforcement as just one more sign that the night had been a success. As she posted to Facebook as the officer walked away, \u201cHey! At least the cops shut down my party! Yeah!!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Much later that night, Dani suddenly remembered that certain members of her extended family (with whom she has contentious relationships) were \u201cfriends\u201d with her on Facebook; these relatives would be scandalized if they saw her status update. Dani jumped out of bed, went to her computer, and deleted the digital residue of her earlier exuberance. In reloading her Facebook profile, however, Dani saw just how many of her friends had also<\/em> excitedly posted either about how the party ended or about her consequent jubilation. She started to panic at the sheer volume of documentation: well-meaning friends had not only posted on her wall, but also tagged her in a flurry of their own status updates and posted photographs.<\/strong> Due to a difference in time zones, it would be impossible for Dani to remove all the tags before her relatives began to arrive at work and sit down at their computers.<\/p>\n

Then Dani had an idea: she\u2019d simply block<\/em> her relatives on Facebook instead. That way her relatives wouldn\u2019t be able to view any of the information on her wall; she could go back to bed, and decide which posts to \u201cun-tag\u201d herself from next day.<\/p>\n

The problem, as Dani explained a few nights later, was that she hadn\u2019t realized \u201cblocking\u201d someone on Facebook also entails \u201cunfriending\u201d that person\u2014and that \u201cunblocking\u201d that person does not<\/em> entail quietly \u201crefriending\u201d them. A small group of us spent an hour or more debating the question Dani now faced: should she refriend her extended relatives or not? If she left them unfriended, they would eventually discover the unfriendings (perhaps through Facebook\u2019s \u201cfriend suggestions\u201d); this would make them upset, and put Dani\u2019s closer family members in awkward positions. If Dani did refriend her extended relatives, Facebook\u2019s \u201cfriend request\u201d notifications themselves would implicitly serve as notifications of the unfriendings; not only would the relatives be upset, but Dani would also have to manage the family fall-out now<\/em>. She asked us to come up with a plausible story\u2014maybe about her account getting hacked\u2014to feed the relatives about why they had been unfriended, but no one story passed muster with all of us. Dani admitted that she didn\u2019t want to be \u201cFacebook friends\u201d with those relatives anyway, but felt an obligation to her closer family members to maintain digital connections with the others.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Sometimes being on Facebook can be problematic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dani\u2019s story illustrates a number of concepts and ideas that I\u2019ve been thinking about recently, most of which will be familiar to regular Cyborgology readers. First and foremost is the fact that \u201conline\u201d and \u201coffline\u201d are not separate worlds: online and offline relationships impact and shape each other, and frequently blur to the point of being simply \u201crelationships\u201d that include both online and offline interaction. Digital dualists<\/a> (those who believe online and offline are<\/em> separate worlds or realities<\/a>) would do well to observe the very real effects that Dani\u2019s offline activities had on her \u201conline relationships,\u201d as well as the effects her online activities were poised to have on her \u201coffline relationships.\u201d They might note as well that five people spent an hour discussing\u2014offline and in real, live, Turklesque \u201cface-to-face conversation<\/a>\u201d\u2014what one of them should do to manage her online connections.<\/strong> Dani\u2019s story also highlights the way family expectations can shape our use of digital social technologies (see Jessica Roberts\u2019s [@jessyrob<\/a>] presentation as part of TtW2012\u2019s \u201cLogging off and Disconnection<\/a>\u201d panel<\/a>), and the \u201claborious practices of protection, maintenance, and care<\/a>\u201d that social media users put into presenting themselves online. It highlights, too, how Facebook can transform one\u2019s friends into a form of digital paparazzi<\/a>, especially for the majority of Facebook users who haven\u2019t memorized all the ins and outs of Facebook\u2019s constantly shifting privacy settings.<\/p>\n

What I want to focus on, however, is the moment of panic Dani felt when she confronted the plethora of posts her friends had made about the party.<\/strong> Though her anxiety was sparked by being not a potentially documented object, but a clearly documented one (perhaps we would call her experience \u201cdocumentary awareness\u201d), at the heart of her disquietude was the same \u201clooming sense of future failure\u201d that characterizes documentary consciousness. Though each variable had a smaller range of values, she was attempting to calculate the same unwieldy and incalculable matrix of who might see which documentary artifacts, at which times, in which contexts, with what kinds of reactions, and with what kinds of consequences.<\/p>\n

One might argue\u2014as have Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson<\/a>) and PJ Rey (@pjrey<\/a>), among others\u2014that for most of us, the likelihood of anyone reading any particular status update we post is very small, particularly if that status update is in the past<\/a>; even in the present, \u201cthe web\u2026 still sometimes forgets<\/a>.\u201d This is because the so-called \u2018data deluge<\/a>\u2019 is not limited to corporations<\/a> and researchers<\/a>; it is also alive and well in ordinary people\u2019s experiences with social media.<\/strong> How many Facebook users have all<\/em> of their Facebook \u2018friends\u2019 in their newsfeeds, and how many Facebook users actually read every newsfeed item that appears? For an ordinary Facebook user, who\u2019s going to comb through each and every status update to find the incriminating one, whether it was posted three days ago or three years ago?<\/p>\n

Like jokes about \u201cat least it was on G+<\/a> where no one will see it<\/a>,\u201d these arguments rest on the assumption that though it may be possible<\/em> for someone to view incriminating content, the probability that anyone will do so is really very low for most social media users. Fallout from something as mundane as a single status update is therefore only a very small possibility, and not one worth getting worked up about. We may like to think that we are all special, unique snowflakes, and that \u201ceverything we do is being recorded for all time<\/a>,\u201d but no: snowflakes melt, and so do their status updates, usually without incident (or accolade).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
You can’t know what could have happened until you know what did happen.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What fuels the anxiety of documentary consciousness, however, is not possibility<\/em>, but potentiality<\/em>.<\/strong> In his book Parables for the Virtual<\/a><\/em>, Brian Massumi draws on philosopher Henri Bergson to explain the difference between \u201cthe possible\u201d and \u201cthe potential\u201d through the image of an archer\u2019s arrow shot into the air. While the arrow is in flight, there exists an infinite array of positions that it could occupy in any next moment; the continuity of movement that we see in the arrow\u2019s flight path can only be measured and confirmed once the arrow comes to rest (whether in a target, in the ground, or off in the bushes somewhere). While the arrow is in flight, all points in space are its potential<\/em> endpoints; when the arrow comes to rest, and its \u201creal trajectory\u201d is known, the range of its possible<\/em> endpoints can be plotted retrospectively by tracing backward from where the arrow\u2019s flight ended. Possibility is therefore \u201cback-formed from potential\u2019s unfolding.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

If we consider any given digital artifact on Dani\u2019s Facebook profile to be the arrow, and its ultimate impact (or lack thereof) the place where the arrow lands, we start to see why potentiality is the key to documentary consciousness. When has a tag, a photograph, or a status update \u201ccome to rest\u201d?<\/strong> Even if it registers a bullseye in the target of an angry relative, there are still more relatives; a status update\u2019s flight path can switch seamlessly from digital to analogue (and back again) through word of mouth, through family gossip, through online and offline confrontations. Even if a photograph is deleted, it may have been saved or copied by someone else; though one version\u2019s flight path may end at uneventful deletion, countless others may still be in flight\u2014and we can know neither their possible numbers, nor their possible impacts, until they land.<\/p>\n

Massumi states that once possibility is formed, it feeds back in to prescript a normative range of outcomes. In Dani\u2019s case, this range probably includes a large number of outcomes in which nothing in particular comes of her status update, and only a few outcomes in which she experiences fallout (after all, the risk\u2014though real\u2014is small). But the problem is that the flight path of a digital artifact never fully stops unfolding, so the range of possibility is never fully formed.<\/strong> Potential, Massumi writes, \u201cis the immanence<\/em> of a thing to its still indeterminate variation, under way.\u201d Digital artifacts cannot escape the unprescripted realm of potentiality, and the potential \u201conly feeds forward, unfolding toward the registering of an event.\u201d It is these unknowable, unregistered events that \u2018loom\u2019 when we experience documentary consciousness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, the magnitude of possibility is not the issue here. It is not possibility, but possibility\u2019s indeterminacy, that drives our anxieties about the unknown and unknowable futures of our digital artifacts. <\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Social media flowchart from https:\/\/plus.google.com\/115389785798978799745\/posts\/F3SadyEuQS1<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook eats man image from http:\/\/www.funfused.com\/signs-facebook-stalkers\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Archery targets image from http:\/\/bullseyearchery.info\/tag\/archery-information\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In the last part of my recent essay \u201cA New Privacy,\u201d I described documentary consciousness as the perpetual (and frequently anxiety-provoking) awareness that, at each moment, we are potentially the documented objects of others. In this post, I use a friend\u2019s recent \u2018Facebook debacle\u2019 as a starting point to elaborate on what documentary consciousness is, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":11166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[10447,18300,942,18338,18336,18337,732],"class_list":["post-11165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-digital-dualism","tag-documentary-consciousness","tag-facebook","tag-massumi","tag-possibility","tag-potentiality","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2012\/07\/social-media-flow-chart_edited.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11165"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11180,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165\/revisions\/11180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}