“DEPRECATE” THIS ONE:
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
/DEPRECATE THIS ONE

REPLACE WITH THIS ONE
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them, which are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), leaving unanalyzed aspects of data effectively compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
/REPLACE WITH THIS ONE

I’d probably change the last sentence and half the rest of it, but there it is.

Phil

It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.

It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them, which are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), leaving unanalyzed aspects of data effectively compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.

I’d probably change the last sentence and half the rest of it, but there it is.

Phil

There’s too much legwork required to do proper follow-up for the moment, but the pattern of monsters becoming allies is kind of a working staple in movies, isn’t it? Not only with Godzilla, but with the _Terminator_ movies as well (e.g.). I’m reminded of changing alliances in childhood, endlessly metastable, and the semantic phenomenon of _ad hoc_ categorization. **

The practical and affective import of invisible, network-hidden, remote-acting vampires (however metaphorical) is pretty unmistakeable, as well. That’s a part of your post that has a lot of resonance. It seems to me to have a genealogical relation to science fiction preoccupations with “shape shifters” and their perfidy, possibly resonance as well with mythological trickster figures (but I’ll vouch for the “shape shifter” angle).

Social networks (not the electronic kind, the relations of everyday life portrayed as netting) have their own analogues to this kind of vampire action, as well: What is now identified as bullying, practiced as hermetic social exclusion combined with varieties of unfriendly misrepresentations, from which the intended victim is excluded and denied recourse. The rough pattern is similar: depredations practiced beyond the reach of their target, cloaked by segregation of information.

You concentrate for part of your post on identity theft, and make an illuminating comparison to the vampire’s activities in the Sherlock Holmes story. (Now I want to get down my Holmes compendium and pick it out. Time! I need more time!) It’s a depredation that has to form a perpetual anxiety in anyone who is paying any attention to current events. It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible. It raises a kind of bete noir: What if bullies from elementary school had permanent, constant, essentially uninterrupted access to their prey, throughout life? This puts one kind of pressure on society. Many other force vectors push through these networks. After the work cited by Moretti in _Graphs, Maps, Trees_ by D’Arcy Thompson, _On Growth and Form_: the shape of our society, however high-dimensional or abstracted, _has_ to be changing with the changing lines of force that networked, computer-mediated communication introduce within it. For purposes of measurement, these changes may be rapid, broad, there and gone, ephemeral, lost to measure just as surely as non-computer-mediated social changes have been in the past, only their grossest outlines available to us for inquiry.

So, aspects of the individual are abstracted and personified: At one point it was the personified corporation, with its rights to free speech (though “freedom of the press” does not prescribe individual ownership, and seems to presuppose a business entity…); at another point, we find “information wants to be free”: post-Enlightenment cant grafted off onto a non-human and non-corporate structure, the language of rights and freedoms given to spirit itself, in one way of imagining it. Your information wants to be free? Your biometric data have rights that are not reposed in your person? It gives quite a bit of license to a sysadmin with higher permission status than you in a Unix environment — but what sorts of rights to anyone else? The compartmentation of the computer-mediated communication infrastructure imposes severe asymmetries of power, licensed by information’s imputed desire to be free, on the people who were once subjects of liberation. These asymmetries are reversible only by craft (hacking), and so we have Neo’s situation: freedom for the adept. Freedom if you can hack it.

It has its ecosystem, though. A strange ecosystem indeed develops: the erasure of borders invited by some conceptions of Romanticism, leveraged by global capitalism against inconvenient legal frameworks, and a severe pressure on now-local systems of law. The hackers in cyberpunk come up in an ecosystem of computer crime — and the hackers of today are not just the Western “console cowboys” and their cognates, but stables of crime-workers holed up in cities in Eastern Europe and out of reach in (presumably military-administered) sites in China. Etc., etc. (there’s that postmodern list again!). So, at the same time consensually legitimized businesses like Facebook rise to world prominence, a shadow economy — a kind of abjected, monstrous side of the global economic consciousness — thrives largely beyond reach of our law.

So we live in a society of neophilia (not to mention partiality to _The Matrix_ as a movie) and retrophobia. I say this as a more or less careful “late adopter” of the new.

Phil

** I’ve guessed this could have some relation to neurodynamic itinerancy, a wandering among states, possibly described, at least loosely, by work on heteroclinic cycles in neurodynamics, in a previous post response. So, I think it’s not only an interesting issue but one that may have cross-disciplinary connections.