For those who believe 'Digital surveillance' is the end of world:

'Your world is not safe, your data is not private, you are prey to various spying machines. '

We have been hearing Mr.Snowden since mid last year. A contract employee for US security agencies has become the source of all top classified information! It has raised eyebrows of many of us to hear that USA is prying on even its closest of the allies. Now Mr.Snowden is saying that even Industries are not spared from the arms of internet surveillance.  Though all these seems quite shocking in public, this has been the practice of nations for many years, if not decades and centuries. What seems unique in this story is the role of technology and internet as the medium and tool for data leak and espionage.

Is Edward Snowden a real whistle blower for people, or just a cheer leader for imperial agencies?

If Snowden was a self willed crusader against the espionage regimes in USA and elsewhere, he would have shown an inclination towards any anti-imperial praxis. What we are seeing is a person broadcasting inside stories of an empire in regular intervals. When we look at the nature of events we are forced to think about the motives of these so called whistle blowers. Sometime before Snowden became a runaway hit, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were making waves around the world with their revelations.

Revelations are welcome! CIA also does declassification of their heroic deeds in Cuba and other Latin American nations years after overthrowing people's governments and heinous crimes. When we uphold the brave acts of Snowden and Assange, we are forgetting that imperialism is not only living on our data. Data theft and digital survilence are not the end of the imperial logic on the social relations. They robe our culture, social relations, political sovereignty, trade unions, progressive literature and every possible elements of human labor and its innate values. The whole world of exploitation still hinges on the brutal force in the political economy and markets.

Information is always key to market hegemony, as market is heavily volatile and dependent on the cues from the society in which it exists.  However, our world of life is not market alone. People, Governments, social relations, economic policies, dominant ideologies all exercise influence over our lives. These forces are not dependent on mere data exchange or any associated properties of information hierarchies. 

Our world is not lost even if imperialism cast their prying eyes on all the corners of earth with their powerful prisms and snooping servers and all sort of digital surveillance strategies. The world of resistance and consciousness is still very much in the political economy and the creative power of human labor. 

Let's hail 'Eadward Snowden' for what he really is! ....

The nature of digital consciousness and the role of market economy

Do we need to praise this digital consciousness of our times? Why do we feel that digital experiences are overwhelming and seamless? Digital images and devices seems so intimate that we started them wearing them in all possible fashion and fervor.Is it purely a technical marvel that we tend to get hooked on to the new generation social networks and communication systems? 

Of course not. Digital consciousness and the associated wealth of information is not something purely created by the technical advancement and sophistication in signal processing and encoding. The process of digitization enforces precision of information, condensation of messages and coherence of delivery channels, optimization of transmission frequency and so forth. These are qualitative changes in the technological dimension. When these qualitative changes gets associated with the social modes of production, technology absorbs the nature of market and capital accumulation. 

Digital communication and Capitalist Production

With digitization of information and experience, it became easy to monetize the related human labor and the social relationships. As digitization has increased the options to circulate capital more agile than the labor, labor and the laborer can be dynamically fixed to the production line where profit and circulation are the most. When the channels of exchange and transaction becomes more precise and efficiently condensed, it will benefit money and capital as well. As we know, money at the heart is the medium of exchange of value with respect to the circulation in time. 

In addition, digitization creates fragmentation of experiences into discrete emotions and natural responses. When human labor and exchange of labor gets associated with digital production and circulation systems, it is able to compress more labor in lesser time. When it reaches the threshold of recognition and perception, human beings begin to deviate from their normal behavior. 

Digitization and Human Mind

When the digital media bombards a normal consumer, their mind reaches the same cognitive and perceptive limits.The discrete sampling of the digital signals are fundamental to the cognitive dissonance in the consumer. Digitization increases the number of discrete samples while we measure an experience or store information. With the right choice of technology and data mining, this can become commodity faster and efficiently. 

Is digitization of experience hindering the possibility of unifying the experiences between different layers of experience? This is another challenge posited by digitization of experience and the emergence of digital consciousness. To arrive at a rational and meaningful decision on life situation, mind should be able to unify the sequence of emotions and experiences. 

What is required for mind to unify fragmented experiences? It should be able to infer assumptions, associate with the history, memory, knowledge and apply them on the experience set. This requires a balance of our relationships with society and the commodities. It becomes increasingly complex when society itself is prone to commodity relationships.

Digitization of experience: Have machines become more humane than humanity?

Digitization of experience: Origins in the power of media, information and data hiding 

As we know, mind tries to rationalize every experience and generate a united sense out of it. Everyman's mind exist in conjunction with its own past and a greater memory which may be called racial / collective. Hence we can say that our mind and body is conscious as long as they are able to unify experiences in a moment with its own vast set of memories. This act of unification of experiences happen in every piece of experience in every singular entity in space time. 

Digital devices and social interactions are worth investigation in relation with this. Digitization or digital technologies employ efficient and state of the art encoding of information. It can be information about a particular aspect of space, time, symbols, ideology and so on. Information from a continuous signal or experience is first quantized / discretized and then encoded as per our convenient processing rate as a preliminary state to digitization. This post does not aspire to go into the internals of the signal processing here.

Digital Ocra by Daniel Dionne on CreativeCommons

Instead, in this article we are interested to see how the digitized information influences the people who consume it.  When we engage with a digital data, we tend to think that data is the same as our continuous signal. It is the first and foremost significant difference. Digital data is not the same as the analogue / continuous signal. Hence it is highly customized / encoded and as a result highly ideological and influential. There is a relative limit to understanding condensed information. This cognitive capacity will be relative to each person and different cultures. When this limit is reached people tend to become subordinate to digital experiences and become just subservient consumers. From there onwards the discretion on taste / distaste, good/bad/ugly are lost. This can be termed as a decoding threshold. 

In addition to the data, the machine interfaces and interactions of digital world are highly customized for capturing human attention. This has a huge impact on the human cognition in the digital experience. Thus digital data and interfaces are highly customized and condensed to gain maximum attention span and focus from the consumers. And it will have repercussions on all the phases of digital experience. Thus data, velocity of data ( Like Twitter) , variety of data ( Like FaceBook ), value of data ( Like Newspaper) and veracity of data ( Government and popular media ) determines the decoding of digital experience.  If we visualize all these entities of data abstraction, data hiding and polymorphism on data it will render a complex information architecture. 

Digital Overload by Keoni Cabral on CreativeCommons

However, key factor is not in the differences between analogue and digital medium, rather the fact that people are not able to distinguish it while they experience them. People tend to spend hours in front of computers and video games confined in a single room. The same people may feel highly irritated on spending half an hour in the same room without a digital device or interaction even if there are some familiar people around. Has machines become more intimate to humans than their own genetic mates? Has machines acquired so much humanity than human beings themselves? This is a very unique situation where we are robbed of every sense and sensibility to distinguish real from illusionary. 

We term machines as dumb terminals. It is no more true. Nowadays, in communicative interactions, machines and digital devices are able to retain the human attention than a familiar human face. Thus human cognition and re-cognition is now highly controlled by the digital environment. But all is not lost for human sense and sensibility. The roots of the problem lies very much within us. We incite the addiction to digital devices and interaction in our social processes and education system itself. If we can devise a logical time slot for digital devices it is not going to take you away from your social life and social senses. Our human mind is still equipped with enough potential to rationalize digital experience as long as we prepare it upfront. Our brains no bounds when it comes to the complexity of neural nets and synaptic processing. We can still be humans!