My erstwhile-friend Roger from Content & Motion launched the first counter-offensive. ;-) His main point is about the decentralisation of power in the online world. There’s no central control tower any more in the online Panopticon.

O RLY? UK Government agencies want/have your email, your movements and your picture already. We have entered an age when central government in the UK has access to almost everything you do. So no, power and discipline is not decentralised. It is more centralised than at any point in history.

OK: that’s a little bit of a feint from me, I know. I do know what he means. He means we choose — a lot of the time — about what authorities and news sources we read. We each can vote for the stories/pictures/video etc. that bubble up on twitter, digg and delicious. If I want to get my news from the Doom-monger Daily and nowhere else, then I can.

But then… but then all of those choices are recorded; they are creating more information about me — they are fleshing out the picture of who I am and what I do and what I like. And what marketing tactics might work with me. And how much of a threat I might be, were I remotely threatening. Remember, that all knowledge, experience and information is also power given away. I went along to the always-splendid MeasurementCamp meeting this morning – and as I imagined, this is grist to the mill for the social networks (Facebook, Bebo are delighted to share demographic information). It’s the only part of their business model that makes sense:

What’s that? You want an ageing commie sympathiser who smells? Yeah, we’ve got a coupla hundred of them – check out this delaney guy – hahaha!

Yep: there’s no longer a central control tower. There are hundreds and thousands of them. You’re covered by twenty cameras every time you move online. They each exert their portion of control and they do, I believe, have a central ideology – what’s become to be called the groupthink and circle-jerk of the Internet. More on that below.

[As an aside, I remember a guy from Microsoft asking me a couple of years ago whether selling ads against user-volunteered information in their profile was ethical. He was genuinely concerned. I said go-for-it – there has to be a value exchange for there to be a business.]

Catherine (location unknown, sadly) makes a great point (she made three great points, actually, but I am only doing one tonight):

You may have no racists on your Twitter feed, but how is this different from the people you choose to associate with in real life? This isn’t socialmediaworld, this is the world most people create for themselves in real life. You may not like this process (and there is an argument to be made against it), but it’s certainly not down to social media.

You know what, she’s right. Social media has extended my political world to a far greater extent than it has constrained it.

The second-half of the post regarding transgression is severely unfinished – it was nearly 2am. I’d love to see some analysis on internet Groupthink. I know I see it on a daily basis. But the extent to which minority views and change are thus made impossible? That would be the theoretical outcome of Foucault and Social Media  and that’s why it’s there, but I don’t have any data whatsoever. mea culpa.

[NB: I’ll certainly back the original post up, insofar as I able, but be aware that I wrote it as an exercise in response to an invitation. It’s not a manifesto. It’s mucking around with ideas to create something potentially useful and thought-provoking. That’s not a cop-out; it’s the way it is].