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This guest-post and #TtW13 review is cross-posted with permission from\u00a0<\/em>Technophilosophy<\/a>, a French digital theory blog<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n On Saturday, March 2nd, 2013, I made a presentation in New York as part of the International Conference Theorizing the Web<\/a>. Organized by Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson)\u00a0and PJ Rey (@pjrey)\u00a0[Yes, I also wonder what his real name is]<\/em>, both doctoral students in sociology at the University of Maryland (Washington, DC), the event was held in the Graduate Center<\/a>\u00a0of the City University of New York (CUNY<\/a>), on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A prestigious and perfectly equipped venue (no Wi-Fi issues), which promoted the sharing of high quality insights.<\/p>\n The organization was very professional and quite remarkable, worthy of a great international conference, despite the fact it was mainly organized by PhD students. On this point, I would like to emphasize the extraordinary dedication of the planning committee<\/a>, which seemed to perfectly master the principles of division of labour. Besides the superb communication material, both printed and online, I particularly enjoyed the total integration of Twitter in the event, which I had never seen used so comprehensively in a conference before.<\/p>\n Not only has the hashtag of the event (#TtW13<\/a>) been announced on the website for weeks, but each room in which a thematic panel was organized had its own sub-hashtag (for example: #TtW13 #d2); hashtags moderators<\/em> were in charge of both moderating parallel discussions on Twitter and collecting questions, to ask a question to a speaker via a moderator, you only had to start your tweet with \u2018Q\u2019 (and use the right hashtags); each speaker and each participant had a personal badge with his\/her Twitter username, and some have even created online interactive graphs<\/a>\u00a0summarizing all the discussions!<\/p>\n All this has obviously helped to create an excellent synergy between the participants. Everyone was also fully engaged in the project as everyone had a Twitter account! (The list of the speakers\u2019 Twitter accounts was included in the programme). A fine example of the intelligent use of social networks for research: Digital Humanities <\/em>in action!<\/p>\n During the 44 presentations<\/a>\u00a0over the two days, many topics were discussed. Among those I attended, I notably remember the lecture given by Sophia Drakopoulou on the dimension of the \u2018lived now\u2019 aspect of social networks, that of Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (@pgde)\u00a0on \u2018online after death services\u2019 or that of\u00a0Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) on MOOCs. Unfortunately, I wasn\u2019t able to understand much of the round table entitled \u2018Free Speech For Whom?<\/em>\u2019, during which\u00a0Danah Boyd<\/a>\u00a0notably spoke (and whom I congratulate for her very elegant New York style hat that would, I think, be quite awkward to wear in an academic conference in France), as understanding spoken English without the support of slides is (sometimes still) difficult for me. Sorry about that!<\/p>\n However, during these two days, I received an incredible number of extremely rich intellectual stimuli that have left a deep impression on me. Some of these will no doubt bear fruit in future projects. It is obviously not possible to summarize them here. I nevertheless wish to focus on two points: surveillance<\/em> and digital dualism<\/em>.<\/p>\n Everyone will agree with the fact that one topic has dominated these two days, and I must say that it was a great surprise to me: that is the issue of surveillance. It was indeed rather ubiquitous as it was the subject of both the opening lecture by\u00a0Alice Marwick<\/a>\u00a0(@alicetiara) and the closing one by\u00a0David Lyon<\/a>\u00a0(shouldn\u2019t the theme of the opening and closing lectures have been different?), albeit both very interesting. According to Alice Marwick, whose point of view was supported by user surveys, we use social networks to keep under surveillance \/ track \/ observe each other through a horizontal surveillance between users, which she calls \u2018social surveillance\u2019 (you can read her\u00a0research paper<\/a>\u00a0in the review Surveillance & Society<\/em>). I\u2019m not sure that we should so hastily consider as \u2018surveillance\u2019 the natural curiosity that drives us to observe others. We have always observed each other, as this is part of the basic way to connect with others. Is a teenager who is interested in a pretty girl, what she\u2019s wearing, what she\u2019s doing, the places she goes to or the friends she meets, undertaking a form of surveillance or simply expressing his desire? Is showing interest in others, in the information they give us access to, in the digital traces they leave, keeping them under surveillance<\/em>? I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n I am of course aware that, since Foucault, the topic of surveillance is a political issue that has never ceased to be topical. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at the University of N\u00eemes, in the south of France, and I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that there were already \u201876 CCTV cameras scattered throughout the city,\u2019<\/em> that there will be \u2018200 within three years\u2019<\/em> and that, according to the city\u2019s official website, all these CCTV cameras were meant \u2018to ensure the tranquillity of its inhabitants\u2019<\/em>\u00a0(source<\/a>). There’s a thin line between monitoring and surveillance and I find it unacceptable that public spaces devoid of any \u2018watching eyes\u2019 no longer exist. In other words, it is clear to everyone that we live in a society of surveillance, which is implemented by various technical means, be they digital. As evidenced by the very strong concerns already raised by the possible disciplinary use of the\u00a0future Google Glass<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, using surveillance as the major subject of a conference whose aim is to \u2018theorize the Web\u2019<\/em> seems to be a questionable choice which I personally disagree with. Although it is perfectly legitimate to ask oneself what role is digital technology playing, as a technical device, in the society of surveillance. But insofar as surveillance goes beyond (and precedes) the issue of digital technology, I don\u2019t understand why it should be the main subject of the \u2018Theory of the Web.\u2019 And, as such, even if he has been widely quoted by several speakers, Foucault does not seem to be the best suited author to understand the digital changes that we are experiencing. Because Foucault had no experience of digital technology and because the digital mutations that we are experiencing are not primarily<\/em> issues related to surveillance. In France, moreover, the country of Foucault, it is not at all the issue of surveillance that concerns the thinkers who take an interest in digital technology.<\/p>\n One example is collective intelligence<\/a>\u00a0according to philosopher\u00a0Pierre L\u00e9vy (@plevy), whose ideas have, early on, orientated the French approach towards the logic of digital cooperation;\u00a0the economy of contribution<\/a>\u00a0according to philosopher Bernard Stiegler, which is integrated into a global vision of the current hyper-industrial political economy and develops (in its way) this logic of cooperation; the\u00a0psychological experience of new technologies<\/a>\u00a0according to psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, who develops an empathic psychology of the relationship with machines but based on the extremely problematic concept of the \u2018virtual\u2019; the new opportunities of Internet democracy<\/a> according to sociologist Dominique Cardon, in opposition to the demonization of the internet of which the media are so fond; or, in the younger generation, the new hybrid forms of sociability introduced by the\u00a0digital liaisons<\/a>\u00a0according to the sociologist Antonio A. Casilli (@bodyspacesoc), the new ontology that emerges from the architecture of the Web<\/a>\u00a0according to Alexandre Monnin (@aamonnz) or the new structures of perception introduced by digital ontophany<\/a>\u00a0into the phenomeno-technological approach that I suggest (1).<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying that French thinkers are not interested in the issue of surveillance as it may be raised again or in a new way due to Internet technologies. What I\u2019m saying is that it\u2019s not what concerns them the most with regard to the internet, even if young philosophers such as\u00a0Cl\u00e9o Collomb<\/a>\u00a0(@CleoCollomb) are currently working on the \u2018digital traces\u2019 we leave behind us in the era of Big Data<\/em>. Moreover, when discussing this with\u00a0Lev Manovich<\/a>\u00a0(@manovich) during the After Party at Slattery\u2019s Pub<\/em>, I had the feeling that I was right to consider the theme of surveillance as excessive. Manovich was telling me that, according to him, this could be explained by the importance given to the individual and to \u2018privacy\u2019 in the culture of English speaking countries. For my part, I was thinking that a country that dominates the world like the United States does, and is so focused on performance, can only be extremely concerned about all forms of power that exist between individuals. But these reflections may be too simplistic in addressing this issue.<\/p>\n By the way, thanks to Theorizing the Web 2013<\/em>, I am now more aware of surveillance issues in digital media and I even agree on the assholishness of Google Glass<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two years ago, in February 2011, Nathan Jurgenson published a post on Cyborgology<\/a>\u00a0entitled\u00a0Digital dualism versus augmented reality<\/a>. In this text, he used the term \u2018digital dualism<\/em>\u2019 for the first time. Here is an extract:<\/p>\n The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line. And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism<\/strong>. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is \u201cvirtual\u201d and the physical world \u201creal.\u201d This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy<\/strong>. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I must say that this concept of digital dualism <\/em>has been for me a source of genuine intellectual excitement throughout the conference, as well as the main reason why I wanted to attend. Not that I have indeed discovered something but, stylistically speaking, I saw in this term a simple and clear manner to describe the way of thinking that I have long considered as a regrettable aberration. For several years now, I haven\u2019t been able to satisfy myself with what I personally call the \u2018vulgate of the real and the virtual<\/em>\u2019 (2), whose persistent rhetoric tires me greatly, as I have heard it for so long and as I think it paralyzes the mind by blocking any progress in the study and understanding of the digital phenomenon (in my\u00a0PhD dissertation<\/a>, I suggest we consider this vulgate as an \u2018epistemological obstacle\u2019 as Bachelard<\/a> called it).<\/p>\n The worst thing is that this miserable doxa has become so popular that it has introduced itself not only into everyday language, into the language of the media or into Wikipedia articles (3), but also in the approach of some researchers too… That takes the biscuit! However, if people had read, as I did ten years ago, the life-changing and pioneering book by\u00a0Pierre L\u00e9vy<\/a>\u00a0entitled Qu\u2019est-ce que le virtuel ?<\/em> (4), we would not be where we are today. This book has been published in French for the first time in 1995 and was translated into English in 1998 (under the title\u00a0Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age<\/a>)! Pierre L\u00e9vy has understood before anyone else the false and absurd use that was made of the concept of \u2018virtual\u2019 at the beginnings of so-called \u2018cyberspace\u2019 (5). Quoting Deleuze and Aristotle, he brilliantly demonstrated how the distinction between the real and the virtual, in opposition with the entire Western philosophical tradition, was meaningless. I couldn\u2019t agree more!<\/p>\n Unfortunately, France has rejected Pierre L\u00e9vy, a visionary who emerged too early and eventually emigrated to Canada in 1998, where\u00a0he is now teaching<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Ottawa. Then have developed the French theories of the virtual, a term which, under an unconscious dualist<\/em> agreement, everyone began to use to describe \u2018digital reality\u2019 in opposition to \u2018physical reality\u2019 (despite the fact that digital reality is an attested form of physical reality: Bits are also Atoms). The numerous research studies made on\u00a0video games<\/a>\u00a0(which can be defined as a virtual world<\/em> in the IT sense of the term) have then indirectly (and unintentionally?) contributed to this trend, and the psychoanalytic theories of Serge Tisseron (who is somehow the French Sherry Turkle), although nuanced and more subtle than they may seem, have sanctified the term, which is now even used by the Academy of Sciences (6). It shows how necessary it is to now deconstruct<\/em>, in the sense of Derrida, the theories about the virtual (7). I hope that we will soon be numerous enough to work in this direction in France because so much work is needed to \u2018undo\u2019 all of this properly.<\/p>\n Because, contrary to what I thought, belief in the existence of two separate worlds is still very much alive today. On 6th December 2012, Serge Tisseron himself declared in\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0published on a website called \u00c9crans<\/em> (whih means ‘Screens’ and is affiliated to the national daily newspaper\u00a0Lib\u00e9ration<\/a>), that we \u2018must raise children with the idea that the world of life and that of the Internet are two totally different spaces.\u2019<\/em> I was so disappointed to read such a statement, almost twenty years after Pierre L\u00e9vy, that I immediately responded on my personal blog with a post entitled There is no difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’<\/a>, which also became the title of\u00a0my presentation<\/a>\u00a0at the #TtW13 conference. For if there is one thing I am absolutely certain of is that the world of the Internet is an integral part of the world of life, or to quote Husserl, of \u2018lifeworld.\u2019 And, in ten or twenty years, digital natives<\/em> will prove me right. This is why what Tisseron called the \u2018psychological virtual\u2019 is, I believe, the most inappropriately named concept in the world, as it adds confusion to confusion. I’ll return to this in my book L’\u00catre et l’\u00c9cran<\/em> (Being and Screens), to be published in French in September 2013, as well as in other publications.<\/p>\n For now, I would like to say that I am very happy to have discovered and met, on the other side of the Atlantic, a whole community of researchers, the members of Cyborgology<\/a>,\u00a0who are opposed to \u2018digital dualism\u2019 and are working to condemn\u00a0the IRL Fetish<\/a>\u00a0(N. Jurgenson) as well as the Myth of Cyberspace<\/a>\u00a0(PJ Rey), without limiting themselves to being white boys with toys<\/a>. Those who still believe in the difference between the real and the virtual had better watch out because they have been identified! In France, in the United States or elsewhere, they now have a name: digital dualists<\/em>. Do they know it? Do they accept it? They would better stick to it or give it up as we are now numerous, on each side of the Atlantic, to fight their well-entrenched rhetoric that doesn\u2019t impress us anymore and, if they want to survive, they will have to find some strong arguments. Because this is not a joke. To be or not be a digital dualist <\/em>has many implications in how to engage and act in today\u2019s world (I will go back to this in a future post).<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been using the internet since 2000, and so I probably believed in digital dualism<\/em> at the beginning (because I think it is a natural and inevitable attitude for those who are not digital natives<\/em> or digital designers<\/em>), but I completely abandoned it as soon as I have been able to experience, in my everyday life, the new opportunities of the Web Squared<\/a>\u00a0in which we all live today and from which it is clear that\u00a0digital and material realities constantly co-construct each other<\/a>.\u00a0That is why, since I finished my PhD dissertation, the obvious has imposed itself on me: the separation between the real and the virtual doesn\u2019t exist and never has<\/strong>. The dualism of the substance,\u00a0based on Neo-Platonism<\/a>\u00a0(slides 16-17), is an illusion. Better still, it is an epistemological fantasy, that is to say, an illusion of knowledge that aims at healing a phenomenological trauma: the trauma caused by digital ontophany in our daily lives (I cannot develop this idea further here as this post is already too long, please refer to\u00a0my presentation<\/a>). But fundamentally, it doesn\u2019t make any difference. There is and there has always been only one substance, which feeds on the permanent co-construction of the digital and the material. Those who have been using Facebook on a daily basis long enough know this: it is no longer possible for them to separate the online and offline dimension of their social relationships. They have become completely<\/em> interdependent and co-constructed. Facebook is not a social world separate from our social world. Not only is it fully part of our social world but it is also a great accelerator for this world (just think of the Arab Spring for example, but I could also quote many more mundane examples from my personal life). As Nathan says, now people are not friends until they are friends on Facebook.\u00a0Facebook is real life<\/a>.<\/p>\n Also, to make my contribution to the building of our common vocabulary, I suggested\u00a0in my presentation at #TtW13<\/a>\u00a0to use the term \u2018digital monism<\/strong>\u2019 to describe the point of view of those who defend the model of Augmented Reality, which I belong to. As I wrote in my PhD dissertation last year, \u2018we have always lived in an augmented reality\u2019 <\/em>(8), a position also held<\/a>, I\u2019m glad to say, by the Cyborgologists<\/a> (perhaps am I also a Cyborgologist without knowing it, although I don\u2019t like this term much, as, in my opinion, it refers too much to science fiction).<\/p>\n What characterizes our contemporary world is that augmented reality (which has always been so) is now digitally centred<\/em>, a phenomenon that I suggest we call \u2018digital tropism of reality\u2019.<\/strong> This does not mean that the modalities for the augmentation of reality are now only<\/em> digital (all technologies are involved, and not only digital technology). It simply means that they all tend to aggregate around a digital core<\/em>, what I called in my PhD dissertation, following the work of Bertrand Gille<\/a>, a \u2018technical digital system<\/em>\u2019 (9). Our reality is based on a digital tropism, that is to say, it orbits around digital technology in the way electrons orbit around the nucleus, due to an irresistible attraction.<\/p>\n But it is not only technical. It is phenomenological. This is why digital technology is \u2018a form which our perception slips into\u2019<\/em> (10) or, as I explained in my PhD dissertation (again!), an \u2018ontophanic matrix\u2019<\/em> (11). We live in what I call the \u2018digital ontophany\u2019, i.e. a perceptive environment (or\u00a0Umwelt<\/a>)\u00a0with a digitally centred phenomenality<\/strong>, which, because it is technically augmented, is fundamentally hybrid, both digital and material, online and offline, so that it forms a single continuous substance<\/em>.<\/p>\n Designers have perfectly understood this, as they always keep looking towards the future and are not afraid of technology. The hybrid experiments they offer us more and more, reflect the fundamentally monistic direction that the digital technical system<\/em> is taking. The work of French designer \u00c9tienne Mineur with\u00a0\u00c9ditions Volumiques<\/a>\u00a0is a perfect example of this, as he designs and produces new types of games and toys based on linking the tangible and the digital (see video below)<\/em>. Because it is with these types of objects that our children are growing up and learning how to perceive reality<\/strong>, and it would never occur to them to imagine that their existence is split into two separate worlds.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nOrganization of the conference<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nContent of the conference<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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\nDanah Boyd. Photo credit :\u00a0Aaron Thompson<\/a><\/em><\/small><\/p>\nSurveillance<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nDigital dualism<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nQuestion by @machinestarts\u00a0about digital dualism at #TtW13. Photo credit : Aaron Thompson<\/a><\/em><\/small><\/p>\n