I found their recent article
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Self: Social Media and Networked Subjectivity
to be rather interesting, as I am always intrigued by the issue of personal identity. I recommend people have a look at it. In particular, the lines:
"At the level of the subject, network culture moves beyond the fragmented postmodern self, which was still haunted by the loss of a unitary identity, and presents an entirely flexible self constituted perpetually and provisionally within the network"
and (I believe quoting Kazys Varnelis):
"Less an autonomous individual and more of a construct of the relations it has with others, the contemporary subject is constituted within the network…. In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things"
My first thoughts went to some of the work I've seen related to George Siemens and his ideas of Connectivism, the idea that we are moving into an era where knowledge is distributed across social groups with less emphasis placed on collecting knowledge within the singular individual. It's an interesting idea that people in Education circles are talking about. George is a nice guy, but I'm still thinking about this one.
At a deeper level though, the idea Generation Bubble put forth about the individual identity being (sub?)merged with the group, or network, identity. I'm interested to see where this goes. On the one hand, new technology makes this clearly a new phenomena, but I wonder if we still can't apply some good old-fashioned Hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis action/reaction type thinking to this process. It is often argued by supporters of Marshall McLuhan that the introduction of the printing press and the printed book helped liberate the individual from the group, ushering in the Modernist Era. Further, one of the hallmarks of modernism, aside from it's belief in "science" and "progress" was the exploration of the self as a unitary expression of difference from the group. The post-modern era, on the otherhand, dispensed with the notion of the self as unitary expression, insisting that individuals had multiple identities in different contexts and even going so far as to blur the boundaries between what constitutes separate identities and social groups. To describe it imperfectly, post-modernism saw identity as a mask that one was free to put on and take off, and that individuals possessed not one "true" mask as the modernists supposed, but rather a bag of masks to be used as the situation demanded, no one mask more or less true than any other.
The suggestion that I take away from Generation Bubble is that just as post-modernism undermined the idea that individual identities are fixed and concrete, the idea of "network identities" might actually be working backwards towards lessening or blurring the distinction between self and group brought about by the printing press.
