About to defend my dissertation, I am a PhD candidate whose work is centered in critical informatics and critical internet studies. My interests lie primarily in how web software services represent a new kind of social rationalization. Through the structures of their code, Web 2.0, 3.0 and social media technologies are bringing theoretical strategies from logic and formal semantics to highly personal dimensions of discursive life. I am interested in how these are being deployed to produce conditions of rational validity in the social order. Following Foucault, scientific-technical approaches to language bring a governmental rationality to everyday experience in new ways, producing principles of conduct and ‘ways of saying’, as well as altered sensibilities towards the relation of self-to-self, and self-to-other.
My current research takes up three different social web technologies in light of these interests—XML/RDF, Google PageRank, and collaborative filtering services—by examining how they instrumentalize language to different governmental effect. On their face, social information systems help us to collectively cope with information overload, organizing the web so that individuals can ‘bank attention’ by relying on the collective labour of others. At a deeper level, however, these systems also represent a medium for what Bernard Stiegler calls orthographic relations. By this term he means that technologies like social computing project exactitude and validity onto everyday life; they form a pre-conditional base of objectivity upon which individuals project their existential and discursive selves. Relying on scholarship from social epistemology, continental philosophy and computer-mediated communication, the work interrogates each case-technology with this concept to hand. It draws out latent relations between social computing as a technical practice, the ideological commitments of post-Fordist capital, and philosophical theories of meaning. These relations are examined at the level of their technicity, for the ways in which they may potentially bias or frustrate emancipatory political discourse.