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Bruno
Latour, Column for Times Higher Education Supplement, 6th of
April 2007
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’Who would know how to love without having read novels?”
This saying seems to take on a new meaning with the multiplication
of virtual worlds, even though the adjective “virtual”
may be greatly misleading. It would be very odd to say, when thinking
of the young hero of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps
perdu, who spends whole days utterly absorbed in the fictional landscapes
painted by his favourite novelists, that he resided in a “real”
world, while a youngster of today who buys rather expensive equipment
to play with buddies on the other side of the planet through wireless
and satellite connections would be said to be living in a “virtual”
landscape.
It would be much more reasonable to argue that it was Proust’s
narrator who lived his adventures “virtually” while
his 21st-century counterparts have to embed their imagination in
so much hardware and software paraphernalia that they clearly end
up in a more real, more connected, more technical world. Or rather
we might agree to say that the capacity of young children to absorb
remains the same but that the technology of the printed book has
been partially replaced by a vastly more complicated and concentrated
entertainment industry.
Imagination no longer comes as cheaply as it did in the past. The
slightest move in the virtual landscape has to be paid for in lines
of code. If you want your avatar to wear a new golden helmet or
jump in the air, gangs of underpaid software engineers somewhere
in Bangalore have to get out of bed to work on your demands. The
fancies of our brains have shifted so little from the real to the
virtual that tens of thousands of children in China are earning
a living by causing avatars to graduate to higher levels in various
digital games before reselling them for a good prize to boys in
America who like to play those games but have not the time nor patience
to earn enough “points” for their aliases. When Segolène
Royal, the French presidential candidate, bought a piece of real
estate on Second Life to start a campaign headquarters there she
paid for it in hard cash.
If it is rather useless to try to decide whether we are ready to
upload our former selves into these virtual worlds or not, it is
more rewarding to notice another much more interesting difference
between the two industries and technologies of imagination. Apart
from the number of copies sold and the number and length of reviews
published, a book in the past left few traces. Once in the hands
of their owners, what happened to the characters remained a private
affair. If readers swapped impressions and stories about them, no
one else knew about it.
The situation is entirely different with the digitalisation of the
entertainment industry: characters leave behind a range of data.
In other words, the scale to draw is not one going from the virtual
to the real, but a scale of increasing traceability. The stunning
innovation is that every click of every move of every avatar in
every game may be gathered in a data bank and submitted to a second-degree
data-mining operation.
I am sure that this accumulation of traces has enormous effects
for the entertainment industry, for specialists in marketing, advertising,
intelligence, police and so on, but another consequence is worth
pointing out. The precise forces that mould our subjectivities and
the precise characters that furnish our imaginations are all open
to inquiries by the social sciences. It is as if the inner workings
of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and
outputs have become thoroughly traceable.
Before digitalisation, social psychologists used very vague words
such as “rumours”, “influences”, “fads”,
“fashions” or even “contexts” to describe
the complex ecology of our minds. But today it just happens that
a character from a game can be followed through the IP numbers of
the computers from which they are clicked or from the stream of
news in which they are commented upon, all the way from the designers
who draw them to the blogs where their adventures are exchanged.
The ancient divide between the social on the one hand and the psychological
on the other was largely an artefact of an asymmetry between the
traceability of various types of carriers: what Proust’s narrator
was doing with his heroes, no one could say, thus it was said to
be private and left to psychology; what Proust earned from his book
was calculable, and thus was made part of the social or the economic
sphere. But today the data bank of Amazon.com has simultaneous access
to my most subtle preferences as well as to my Visa card. As soon
as I purchase on the web, I erase the difference between the social,
the economic and the psychological, just because of the range of
traces I leave behind.
Dozens of tools and crawlers can now absorb this vast amount of
data and represent it again through maps of various shapes and colours
so that a “rumour” or a “fad” becomes almost
as precisely described as a “piece of news”, “information”,
or even a “scientific fact”. It’s not by accident
that the founders of Google have one reference in their original
patent, and it is to a chapter of Robert K. Merton, the American
sociologist, about citation patterns in science.
Owen Gingerich, the great historian of astronomy, spent a life-time
retrieving all the annotations of all the copies of Copernicus’s
first edition. He could thus give a precise meaning to the rather
empty notion of “Copernican revolution” and could show
which parts of the book everyone had read and misinterpreted. Nowadays,
any scientist can do the same for each portion of each article he
or she has published so long as the local library has bought a good
package of digital data banks. But what is more extraordinary is
that any journalist can do so as well for the latest Madonna video
or the dirtiest rumour about Prince Harry’s love affairs.
In other words, the former distinction between the circulation of
facts and the dissemination of opinions has been erased in such
a way that they are both graduating to the same type of visibility
— not a small advantage if we wish to disentangle the mixture
of facts and opinions that has become our usual diet of information.
Subjectivities used to be the inner sanctum where social sciences
had to stop and dismount in order to shift to other, less reliable
vehicles. It is now possible to follow how the characters of a “reality
show” or the finalists of Star Academy have so modified the
ways and means with which their viewers speak and think about the
world that the social has become, so to speak, continuous with the
psychological.
French kids arrested by the police and brought before a judge raise
their hands with an “Objection, your Honour!” that has
no meaning in the French legal system but is ubiquitous on American
TV series. The consequences for the social sciences will be enormous:
they can finally have access to masses of data that are of the same
order of magnitude as that of their older sisters, the natural sciences.
But my view is that “social” has probably become as
obsolete as “natural”: what is common to both is a sort
of new epidemiology that was anticipated, a century ago, by the
sociologist Gabriel Tarde and that has now, at last, the empirical
means of its scientific ambition.
Bruno Latour is professor of sociology at the Institut d’Etudes
Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris.
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