[--this is more observational than critical, and i'm hoping to add more, but my meeting tonight just got moved up from six to five pm, and it's definitely not going to be over by ten. thus:--]
Although they were not particularly central to the topic of the paper, I found Langlois's points on surveillance to be rich sites of further interrogation of an ever larger picture of contemporary society.
Langlois writes that "amazon.com cannot simply be seen as a repressive system, but also as a creative and productive system" (171); surveillance techniques such as cookies and solicitation of personal data are willingly or not accepted by users in exchange for a more tailored consuming experience.
This seems to be the matter of debate for a number of similar issues. A number of people lobby actively against the loyalty cards you get at CVS or supermarkets. Some of this is pretty justifiable, based on examples within the past few years of that kind of information being sold to third-party companies or released on websites; after September 11th, several companies shared their databases with the FBI. People also fear it eventually being sold to insurance companies or shared with government organizations or otherwise being used for other kinds of surveillance purposes. But they get you a few cents discount! Maybe you'll get some tailored coupons! The price of convenience. This is a new kind of social contract, one that puts the individual on both sides.
Something that Langlois doesn't write specifically but that I started thinking about in September when I was buying textbooks on-- of course!-- amazon.com, is that the recommendations that the site makes for you are based obviously on only those books that you have bought from them. As it happens, I tend to only use amazon.com for big and potentially ridiculously expensive purchases like textbooks. But I was thinking this year that what I'd really like in the way of recommendations would be suggestions on authors whom other fans of Rilke, Jabes, and Calvino have been reading. I can check the "Other Readers who Looked at..." section of any one of these books, but if I'd like my instant, cumulative recommendations, I better start buying everything from Amazon.
So it's a marketing strategy. And a kind of surveillance. And kind of subjectivization, and I thought interesting Langlois's note about the "'ideal--from the point of view of the software--version of the user" (241) because anyone who has written programs requiring a GUI knows that a lot of time and research goes into making it "user-friendly," both responding to, shaping, but also anticipating user behaviour. Using old paradigms but maybe adding something else. Today, everyone recognizes a sideways triangle as PLAY, and a couple parallel vertical lines as PAUSE. I wasn't around for when that started, but I bet although it might have started with the words and the symbol, today designers are pretty safe in just putting in the pictures. The modern logic is predicated pre-facto on what the user brings to the table to the extent that one can act within this kind of space. That is maybe the only requisite precondition. The invisible other, effecting structuring works so powerfully as a result.
This is very interesting coincident with what came up a number of times last week-- that Deleuze and Guattari's semiotics play with a kind of strange always-already there. The performative order-word has subjectivizing effects on bodies, which it presupposes. But also creates? This seems to be at work in Langlois's specific mixed semiotics of the web.
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