SarahBefore I started writing this article I took some time to read Felix's article about his talk in the festival catalog. It actually made me change my mind about the content of this article. Before, this article would contain sentences such as, "Felix Stalder talked about 45 minutes, but I think he could have made his point in three". I wasn't very impressed about his thoughts on our worldwide new found individuality, mainly because it's been said so many times before, and I couldn't help but feeling slightly tired about it.
Felix Stalder
Reading the article however made my realise that he had made a few other points which deserve to be mentioned here, and that his story was actually well funded with facts and research of others. From my perspective he made his talk at the conference more about peoples individuality and the fact that they however still can seem to collaborate successfully on projects (nothing new here, yet the Wikipedia example was brought up again. Really can't people think of no other example when we talk about web 2.0 and collaboration?), while the really interesting thing about his talk was his description of the fragmentation of the public sphere. A bit to briefly discussed (in my opinion) in his talk, but when I read about it later, I saw the real point made here.
"If self-identity and the experience of the world is one of pragmatic fluidity and fragmentation / integration, then it seems safe to assume that, on a social level, one of the effects is also the fragmentation of the public sphere into sub-spheres. These are becoming increasingly differentiated by internal culture and sets of rules, pragmatically assembled by the people who make up these publics as they go. Since people inhabit more than one of these sub-spheres at the same time, and are moving between them, this does not mean the breakdown of social communication..."
Our new public life, 2.0 - Felix Stalder in the ARS Electronica 2007 catalog
On itself a world divided into sub spheres is not a stunning or new idea. But think about what sub spheres can mean for peoples feeling of privacy, because they can feel that material, data or information they share within a community or group stays within that community or group (bounded privacy). And therefore are more likely to share just those details about themselves. I think you may compare this with the talk of contextual integrity from Helen Nissenbaum yesterday, because the context in which people are willing to share things and the level in which they care has everything to do with context.
To conclude, as a speaker I did not found Stalder very inspiring, but I would surely recommend reading his article.
