Local vs. Global Connectivity

Definition

A local node can have gravitational pull within a local community, but that pull is like a small planet's compared to the sun-sized pull of a global node.

The distinction is not about audience size alone. It concerns whether the relationship runs in both directions. A local node is reachable: the people who attend to it can also reach it, and the connection is symmetrical. A global node is attended to by orders of magnitude more people than it can attend to, so the relationship becomes one-way by arithmetic rather than by choice.

Teleoperation

On Twitter, celebrities can teleoperate. They connect with followers and fans without having to see them in person. The celebrity's actual body is protected from access by fans through the digital technosocial interface of the social network architecture.

Alice Marwick and danah boyd examined this directly in "To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter" (Convergence, 2011). Their argument is that celebrity on Twitter is a practice rather than a status, performed through the appearance of backstage access. Celebrity practitioners disclose what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cultural references to build affiliation. Interactions with other celebrity practitioners give the impression of a candid, uncensored look at the person behind the persona. The authenticity of these performances is indeterminate, and part of the appeal for some audiences is the game-playing intrinsic to consuming gossip.

The teleoperation framing captures what the interface does physically. The performance of proximity is delivered while the body remains inaccessible, and the architecture is what holds those two facts together.

Status and Attention

Envy in the face of celebrity. At the highest levels of the society of the spectacle, people become deferential toward those with high Whuffie, the reputation currency Cory Doctorow invented in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), where standing is continuously visible to everyone and functions as money.

Marwick's Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale, 2013) is the substantial treatment. It draws on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco tech scene between the dot-com boom and the App Store, when the city was the center of social media development. Her argument is that Web 2.0's participatory promise did not materialize, and that the technologies instead encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention, turning users into marketers and self-promoters. She also traces the consequences for gender and social status.

Marwick's related work with boyd on context collapse, "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately" (New Media & Society, 2010), addresses the other half of the problem: a global node addresses many audiences at once through a single channel, and no single register fits all of them.

Sealed off

Richard Dawkins closes chapter two of The Selfish Gene (1976) with a passage describing genes as replicators that now travel inside large lumbering machines, sealed off from the outside world and communicating with it indirectly, with those machines being us.

Donna Haraway quotes the passage in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991) in order to argue against the picture it presents, and Jonathan Crewe quotes Haraway quoting Dawkins in "Transcoding the World: Haraway's Postmodernism" (Signs 22, no. 4, Summer 1997, 891-905).

The earlier version of this page attributed the passage to Haraway. Since she cites it to disagree with it, the attribution reverses her argument and should not be restored.

The analogy the passage suggests is nonetheless usable. Humans are likewise sealed off from cyberspace and communicate with it by remote control, through the safety of a suit: the interface, the computer. What the analogy adds to the local and global distinction is the asymmetry of the seal. A local node's suit is thin, and contact still happens through it. A global node's suit is thick enough that nothing gets in.

Additional Reading

• Society of the Spectacle
• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
• Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings
• Interaction Ritual : Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
• Alone Together: Technology and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude
• Designing Social Interfaces
• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
• Conspicuous Consumption
• Place: The Networking of Public Space

Key texts

• Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd. "To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter." Convergence 17, no. 2 (2011): 139-158.
• Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd. "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience." New Media & Society 13, no. 1 (2011): 114-133.
• Marwick, Alice E. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press, 2013.
• Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Tor, 2003.
• Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976.