My own paper “Imagining the Blogosphere” extends Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” to the blogosphere and tries to explain how diary bloggers can be considered linked into the wider community. It’s not that these teens are bloggers because they are writing for the faceless public or superpublic, but just because they imagine themselves to be one of millions of young people like themselves using the same medium, writing the same kind of experiences, with the same kind of small personal audiences (or none at all).

Like the consumption of modern print media on which Anderson argues the imagined community of the nation is built, the imagined community of the blogosphere is built on the amateurized and widespread production of digital print media.

Julika Rakemas (very brillant filming of millionairs from denmark with the video person unobstrusively documenting the millionaire’s phone conversation, getting the person to be very candid about their opinion about the poor without realizing they are being videoed) , Jill Magid, and Tina Laporta: Julia Scher and Jenny Marketou seem to fit into this group as well.

they all deal with the idea of truth, and distorted truths on the internet, and touch upon the concept of “super publics” and the self.

Just finished with Tina’s current dilema of how her friend evicted her from his apartment, and a law suite that is evolving around her art work, and how it is to be stored. In the past, Tina had her art work displayed over at the Whitney, and it was one of the first exhibits dedicated to the concept of surveillance: she had installed surveillance web cams in several different homes, and made it seem that all the webcams where of the same home.

Then one day, on one of the webcams, someone attempted a suicide attempt for the museum public to see. This quickly exposed the exhibit, and created some publicity in the nyc papers (sometime around 1999).

It sort of seems like a flashback to Ben Morea’s work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfuckers

It is intersting that Ben supported Valerie and the theatrics around the attempted murder of Andy Warhol as a form of art, and perhaps an intersection of what a “super public” means. Are we more interested in the 15 minutes of fame, or the continous lack of privacy we find when we are in danger? such as the permenate loss of privacy when one pulls an amber alert?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol

Dan Georgakas is still around, editing Cineast magazine, and had a great article on “La Dolce Vita” and also met with Aldo Tambellini to discuss the idea of expanded cinema, and where the audience lives in a surveillanced world. The idea of situationalism is also present in clayton pattersons work on sousveillance of the NYC police from 1982 till 2001. It seems that the situationalism of the Tompkin square riots deconstructed the police corruption around drug trafficing, and was also reviewed by federal agencies, looking at images establishing links to organized crime. so what was very unpublic, suddenly became a public forum for increasing security and making public corruption.

so the idea of a super public, also intersects with an willing, or unwilling informant culture

http://www.nwtekno.org/vb/showthread.php?s=f54893b0d0fa65ba449ca6babd651db6&threadid=98954

what is generally a space for just those interested, has been recently “discovered” by all types of folks looking for more information about the shootings. not only is the press there actively seeking more information, friends, acquaintences, mourners and all are mixed in there together with a disctict awareness that others are there too.

i must say though, i am a bit reluctant to post this as many are still left in shock, and are mourning the loss of friends and loved ones; in many ways, i believe that people should be given the space to still grieve. at the same time, to me this is a prime example of which you speak, and if we can all learn from this and move forward (and i think the press has been better about the reporting since reading all of the posts), all the better for us as a community.

According to the discourse of the Toronto School of Communication (Havelock, Innis, McLuhan), the notion of the public, and concommitantly individual privacy, were created as artefacts of the availability of mass literacy post-Gutenberg. Now, as this age has been obsolesced (i.e., rendered non-dominant in terms of shaping society) by multi-way, instantaneous electic communication, privacy reverses into publicy. Your notion of super-public captures this effect in a way that transcends the specificity and fragmentation of “constituency” (suggested by a prior commenter).

It’s more than texts (and, besides, I tend to find the way the Phrench Postmodern Philosophers use “text” distracting to what’s really going on), and more than information: the effects deal with relationships that transcend traditional conveyences, in my estimation (sort of a quantum physics, influence-at-a-distance analogy happening here, I think).

Reminds me of a conversation I was having at a party at the weekend – talking about people on public transport having music so loud you could hear it from their headphones, and I pointed out the really popular thing on London buses – especially near where I live (around Brixton/the south): kids play music on their music-phones/phone-radios, but instead of playing it through headphones, they crank it up as loud as possible.

So you’ve got kids on the back row of the bus playing The Game really loud out of a tinny walkman phone. It’s the new boom-box.

But this isn’t entirely about public display. They’re demonstrating their taste in music to their mates who they’re sitting with. To a lesser extent, they’re demonstrating it to the outside world (and also establishing a boundary) – but they don’t think they’re being invasive. Display is different to invasion; a peacock flashes its feathers, but it doesn’t think it’s disrupting my view. It’s the same with the kids blaring hip-hop out of their phones.

So when one of the people I was talking with said “it’s all about respect”, and suggested that kids these days didn’t respect people around them, and that this was due to the death of community… I countered; it’s all about people around them: they’re living a hyper-public life. Everything is about outwards traffic, display – they just care less about your response to that display. The “community-based” society of forty years ago has faded away, to become reaplced by a society of individuals agressively representing their individuality. At the same time, in those communities, people kept their lives very private; now, they’re living every second in pubilc – at the global level, through myspace; at the local level, through playing music loud. They’re living this kind-of hyper-public life; they’re living in super-publics.

So yeah; having this conversation reminded me of a lot of what we discussed late on that Thursday night at Etech (I was the bearded redhead), and a lot of what you’d been writing. Then you wrote that essay and explained super-publics, and a few more things fell into place.

(Thanks for an awesome night, great chat with great people – Thursday was one of my favourite days at the conference).

you always substitute appeals to authority for logic or facts. you always make ridiculous, unfounded assumptions that are based on your communist-sympathizing opinions. “post-9/11 opinion” that if you hide something you’re a terrorist? says who?

what the fuck are you talking about?

But what is perhaps new is how these groups find affinity, voice and can take action, which requires treatment closer to a constituency. And how easy group forming allows constituencies to form that previously could not.