The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

Have you checked your email today? Do you get online to find out the latest scores of your favorite sports teams? Do you use the Web to scan the latest news? Perhaps you make online purchases--a birthday present, new music, or a business flight? The Internet is such a remarkably multifaceted tool that it has experienced an exponential growth and embedded itself in the daily lives of a vast number of people.' As a new telecommunication technology, it allows the common individual to engage in a cybernetic system that is globally networked. Today, however, developments are seeking to establish the dynamics of the Internet as a delimited public arena, and the question is if the cyberspace imaginary will become a highly monitored and regionalized social space or if the Internet will retain its radical potential for independent endeavors and ideological exchange. With these opposing scenarios in mind, the political implications of the Internet as a social network present rich issues for creative and critical cultur al production.

The nature of the Internet as a network of connected computers used to exchange information engenders a sense of liberty and freedom in the individual. Early in its development, mainframe teams established host-to-host protocols such as Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that decentralized computer networking between independent users from the mainframe. (2) As the network grew it evolved into a new, public sphere of communication that traveled via a globally expansive routing system and a vast array of online applications, among them electronic mail and the World Wide Web. (3) The individual was able to interface with an enlarged public and an expanded dialogical space emerged.

Given the numerous forms of exchange possible via the Internet, online activity parallels Nancy Fraser's re-articulation of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere as put forth in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas presents the public sphere as a bourgeois arena for exchange where citizens may discuss common affairs, a model based on the old town hall. In her essay "Rethinking the Public Sphere." (4) Nancy Fraser updates and expands the Habermasian public sphere beyond institutionalized public forums to include the market place and the domestic space (specifically in relation to domestic violence). Whereas Habermas places market relations and domestic issues within the private sector, Fraser argues that, in doing so, these arenas of human interaction are restricted from "legitimate public contestation." Fraser's re-articulation expands the public sphere beyond the bourgeois domain to a space that is "open and accessible to all." As the Internet becomes increasingly commonplace and interweaves itself into the fabric of daily life through such collective forums as, to take only a few examples, list-serves, chat rooms and gaming communities, it assumes the role of a host for multi-user domains that, according to Fraser's definition, breeds a multiplicity of publics. Each public sphere is in turn part of a civil domain that is governed by a set of laws and policies. Therefore, just like any public space, the Internet must have its own set of policies that mirror those of society at large.

Among the online policies and regulations currently being established are decisions pertaining to the appropriate level of policing and monitoring of cyberspace, preferences that serve to determine the boundaries of privacy in a networked society. The very nature of the Internet presents, contrary to popular belief, a highly efficient means of surveying these borders, because it is structured through a networked electronic system that interfaces logical indexing machines--computers. The ability to digitize nearly all types of records in conjunction with the computer's indexing and networking efficiency has established the database as an advanced development of the nineteenth-century archive, which in turn borrowed heavily from eighteenth-century taxonomy. As an extension of this lineage, the database has developed into an exemplary model of our society: it draws the lines and terms of participation, it dictates inclusion and exclusion, it unites and sunders, all on the basis of networked data structures that effectively inscribe negotiated biases.

In his essay "The Body and the Archieve," (5) Allan Sekula traces early criminology's use of photography to document, categorize and archive the human body. As the body became a subject of the rapidly expanding police archive through the capabilities of photography, the fundamental problem of volume became apparent: "The early promise of photography had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archive of images." The electronic database's vast storage capabilities promise to resolve the problem of volume that initially threatened to overwhelm the premise of a centralized, controlling domain through what emerged as a lack of organizing principles. Hence, the photographs once used to document and index the body according to a structure dictated by sciences and normative measurements (which were linked to each photograph and are now a feature of every identity card) are phased out in favor of designated data streams, each in turn linked to networked avatars that take the form of usernames, passwords, numbers o r icons. And as various types of data such as our home address, our shopping patterns, our level of institutionalized education, our employment and income, for example, are monitored and stored, data becomes the very basis of identity, and the electronic network used to transfer data becomes a tool of investigation, much like the utility sought and implemented by the Paris police in the nineteenth century, due to its potential for surveillance. The question then arises, like it did with the role of photography in the service of the archive: How far will police, federal and even corporate monitoring of the electronic sphere extend? How will we ever know its parameters? Is it a matter of trust or open systems or regulatory institutions? Where and how will the lines of personal and civil rights be drawn in a networked society?