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!

Terrains of Identity Politics: Some Thoughts

Identity in the times of latent capitalism...

Identity politics spells out various meanings. This convenience is used by different movements. It communicates something surreal yet ubiquitous in a society. It is used as a wrapper for many movements from its inception. Some treat it as a counter current for class politics; where as some others use it against nationalist politics. There are some others who consider it as a prelude to the class politics. Beneath this polymorphic composition and ambiguity there lay vexed questions on the terrains of identity politics.

In the works of Michael Keith and Steven Pile [Politics and Spaces of identity], modernist identity politics have created a sort of essential-ism that rests on the exclusivity of certain norms. They allege that this sort of exclusivity and selectivity of modernist identity politics have made it very divisive. This was not congenial for working toward a multiple, pluralized yet still radical conceptualization of agency and identity.

We can see an array of works on the national identity discourses. It may tempt us to think that identity politics have superseded the national polity. Simon Bekker defines Identity politics as the search of reconciliation between nation building and demands by different citizens for recognition of communal identity. He goes on to say that identity politics has emerged as a primary challenge in many nation states. He accuses the national tendencies to achieve homogeneity as the primary reason for the unrest and ethnic conflicts. This conveniently ignores the external interventions that stir ethnic unrest.

Moreover, homogeneity is an apparent ideology resting on the ethos of cultural nationalism. In that sense, the attempt for a cultural homogeneity itself is an identity politics. Rashtriya Swyayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which preaches a ‘Hindutva India’ is one instant example for this. They are the ones who raise voice for uniform civil code and hegemony of Hindutva ideology.

Thus any attempt to unify the nation based on culture or religion or language devoid of considerations of productive forces and the social relations will become identity politics in reality. Stanford Encyclopedia highlights that identity politics strive to achieve a political freedom for a specific constituency of marginalized people. But this fails to explain the causes of marginalization. The awareness that only a particular constituency of people is marginalized is because of identity politics. It confines the perspective to specific identity ignoring the totality in exploitation.

In a market economy, if someone says that only tribes are marginalized, it is a cruelty to slum dwellers and the millions in the unorganized sector. The process of marginalization acts as a time warp for all those who labor Only those outside the dominant mode of production will be in a perpetual state of marginalization. Detaching tribes from the dominant mode of production by way of identity politics will only worsen their plight.

The case of Narmada Bacho Andolan (NBA) is a grim example of identity politics. The apolitical struggle of environmental politics detached the struggling people from the political process and its dynamics. Their voices became unheard in the political ecosystem. What the identity politics has achieved in NBA is creating a perpetual apolitical site. This generates a question: who creates marginalization, NBA or National government?

Capitalism has evolved to become sustainable in ecology of unequal modes of production. It no longer standardizes the economy. As capitalism now thrives on the expanding market economy rather than nation states, it stimulates multiplicity of choices. It is in this focal point where the pluralism of identity politics and the market’s desire for multiple choices converge.

The question of identity rests on the epidemiological currents initiated by modernism. The essence of modernism lies in the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize itself, not in order to subvert it, but to enrich it more firmly in its area of competence [Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg]. Thus it inherits a tendency to criticize itself. As self-criticism is the organic element of Marxism, it is easy to draw parallel lines between Modernism and Marxism. The awareness of identity is a dialectical process between objective knowledge and subjective experience. Identity is a subjective knowledge of objective experience as well. It is rooted in both of them. Thus identity is the dialectical product of objectivity and subjectivity. Identity of identity is nothing but the labor process and life process. Hence identity is both reflexive and self critical in nature. With the progress of either objective knowledge or subjective experience identity undergoes transformation in form and content. This means that identity of a child born to a religious family undergoes change if he studies in a national institution and it changes further if goes on to work in a multi-national corporate organization.

Thus if class is the dynamic product of self in labour, identity is the transient process by which self changes. It is this volatility of identity that becomes the instrument of imperialism. It captures one by its fractured identity and tempts to organize based on it. Fractured identity and identity crisis can be rooted in both crisis in knowledge and crisis in experience. It implies a crisis in the criticism itself. It is this fractured identity or identity crisis that is being targeted by the architects of identity politics. These formations of identity groups are not self made always. Imperialism purchases the identity formations through various funding agencies. And using the power of money, imperialism exercises hegemony over the identity groups. And using this funded economy, identity groups will be integrated to the imperial market economy. Collectively, these preys can be named as social capital. -- Gokul Alex