I n t e r n e t o f A f f e c t

Sumandro Chattapadhyay
ajantriks.net

The Centre for Internet and Society
cis-india.org

The Social Web

The social web is a set of social relations that link people
through the World Wide Web. The Social web
encompasses how websites and software are designed
and developed in order to support and foster social
interaction... The social aspect of Web 2.0
communication has been to facilitate interaction
between people with similar tastes.
Wikipedia, 2016

“The central principle behind the success of the giants
born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the
Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced
the power of the web to harness collective intelligence”
Tim O'Reilly, 2005

“Many people now understand this idea in the sense of
“crowdsourcing,” meaning that a large group of people
can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that
provided by any of the individual participants. The Web
as a whole is a marvel of crowdsourcing, as are
marketplaces such as those on eBay and craigslist, mixed
media collections such as YouTube and Flickr, and the
vast personal lifestream collections on Twitter, MySpace,
and Facebook.”
Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, 2009

“But is this really what we mean by collective
intelligence? Isn’t one definition of intelligence, after all,
that characteristic that allows an organism to learn from
and respond to its environment?”
Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, 2009

“In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a break-
through, realizing that links were not merely a way of
finding new content, but of ranking it and connecting it
to a more sophisticated natural language grammar. In
essence, every link became a vote, and votes from
knowledgeable people (as measured by the number and
quality of people who in turn vote for them) count more
than others.”
Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, 2009

Google AdSense

The 'social' web

Ubiquitous social web

“In its broadest sense, ubiquitous computing is currently
seen to comprise any number of mobile, wearable,
distributed and context-aware computing applications.
In this way, Ubicomp may consist of research into ‘how
information technology can be diffused into everyday
objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new
ways of supporting and enhancing people’s lives’”
Anne Galloway, 2004

“Central to ubiquitous or pervasive technologies is the
ability of computers to be perceptive, interpretive and
reactive. In other words, information infrastructures
must be able to shift from periphery to centre, and to
recognize and respond to actual contexts of use. Context-
aware computing therefore relies primarily on two types
of information: physical location and user identity”
Anne Galloway, 2004

Internet of things

“The Internet of Things is a vision to build a world where
every object can be approached both through analog and
digital methods... Over the next few years, we will see a
logistic ecology of barcodes: 2- and 3-D barcodes that are
readable with mobile phones, IPv6, 6Lowpan, and radio
frequency identification (RFID)... [W]henever a number
appears, a certain value can be attached to that number,
a specific action or note can be associated with that
number.”
Rob van Kranenburg, 2011

“[M]ost of the fantasies for these technologies revolve
around making the whole of the human and natural
environment legible for computer systems... Most of my
work aims to provide alternative visions and tools to
counter this desire for total legibility. Machines and
humans have distinctly different competencies that
complement but do not substitute each other. ”
Christian Nold, 2011

“[M]ost of the fantasies for these technologies revolve
around making the whole of the human and natural
environment legible for computer systems... Most of my
work aims to provide alternative visions and tools to
counter this desire for total legibility. Machines and
humans have distinctly different competencies that
complement but do not substitute each other. ”
Christian Nold, 2011

Internet of things people

The Internet of People enables a vision of globally
interconnected workshops that change the type of
things we produce, as well as our social and cultural
relations in which we do so... Small open source
workshops already exist in most towns. The social and
technical networking of these workshops will form the
global backbone for open collaboration in the future”
Christian Nold, 2011

AirBnB + Workspace sharing

AirBnB + Workspace sharing

AirBnB + Workspace sharing

GoPro/livestream of polital event <- PIB

Waning of affect

“The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially
approached by way of the human figure, and it is
obvious that what we have said about the
commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol's
human subjects: stars -- like Marilyn Monroe -- who are
themselves commodified and transformed into their
own images...”
Fredric Jameson, 1991

“The waning of affect, however, might also have been
characterized, in the narrower context of literary
criticism, as the waning of the great high modernist
thematics of time and temporality...”
Fredric Jameson, 1991

Autonomy of affect

“[T]he primacy of the affective is marked by a gap
between content and effect: it would appear that the
strength or duration of an image's effect is not logically
connected to the content in any straightforward way...
What is meant here by the content of the image is its
indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective
context, its socio-linguistic qualification. This indexing
fixes the quality of the image; the strength or duration of
the image's effect could be called its intensity.”
Brian Massumi, 1995

“[T]he primacy of the affective is marked by a gap
between content and effect: it would appear that the
strength or duration of an image's effect is not logically
connected to the content in any straightforward way...
What is meant here by the content of the image is its
indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective
context, its socio-linguistic qualification. This indexing
fixes the quality of the image; the strength or duration of
the image's effect could be called its intensity.”
Brian Massumi, 1995

Affect as medium

“The digital artwork you have just encountered is
Kirsten Geisler's Dream of Beauty 2.0 (1999), an
interactive, voice-activated installation with a digitally
generated female persona. And the experience it has
catalyzed for you is an affective interfacing with what I
shall call the ‘digital-facial-image’ (DFI).”
Mark Hansen, 2003

“In this experience, the infelicitous encounter with the
digitally generated close-up image of a face – and
specifically the affective correlate it generates in you, the
viewer-participant – comes to function as the very
medium for the interface between the embodied human
and the domain of digital information.”
Mark Hansen, 2003

“I propose the encounter with the DFI as a new paradigm
for the human interface with digital data. Via the
affective response it triggers, the DFI offers a promising
alternative to the profoundly impoverished, yet
currently predominant model of the human-computer-
interface (HCI).”
Mark Hansen, 2003

“Whereas the HCI functions precisely by reducing the
wide-bandwidth of embodied human expressivity to a
fixed repertoire of functions and icons, the DFI transfers
the site of this interface from computer-embodied
functions to the open-ended, positive feedback loop
connecting the digital-facial-image and the entire
affective register operative in the embodied viewer-
participant.”
Mark Hansen, 2003

Internet of things people affect

“Unfortunately affect has often been manipulated and
managed towards fascism... We require an educational
model for the future Internet of People that positions the
personal emotion as the connection point to a wider
systemic network of relationships with the environment
and others.”
Christian Nold, 2011

“Affect cannot work in the isolation... Right now this
recognition happens through anthropomorphism,
which requires a human-like face... This is where
technologically enhanced perception is crucial to
hearing the sap rise. I think we will see a critical
blending of sense (perception) and sensor (data)
networks, which are currently very separate.”
Christian Nold, 2011

Sources
The Social Web image - Mirna Bard
Social Network image – Shutterstock
Web 2.0 Meme Map – O'Reilly Media
How Google Search Works – Google
Facebook buttons – Facebook
Live-streaming iPad image - Diung Libiu / Chang Liyou
Your Memories on Facebook image – Jillian D'Onfro
Kirsten Geisler's Dream of Beauty 2.0 – Kirsten Geisler

References
Wikipedia, Social Web
Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On
Anne Galloway, Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City
Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of People for a Post-Oil
World
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect
Mark B.N. Hansen, Affect as Medium, or the 'Digital-Facial-Image'