Social Classification in the Control Society

Social Classification: In the P2P context, it refers to the trend that we are no longer classified by traditional institutions, but by many other individuals in online networks; and that we are no longer classified as an individual as a whole, but as different kinds of modules in different kinds of context.

Background Citation

"Except this process of individualization doesn't simply happen isolation, just as I delineate the boundaries of myself, others take a hand in it as well. This is where social-classification comes in. When someone comments on a post, tags my MySpace page, or places the feed from this blog among a group of other feeds, I have been classified by someone else. Thus the progression from mass to (multiple) individual takes place both internally, from the subject him/herself, as well as externally, from the individuals around him/her.

Deleuze noted this process back in 1990 in his Postscript on Societies of Contol. In describing the shift from a disciplinary to a control society, he noted that rather than being dealt with as masses by large institutions, we are becoming viewed as these "dividuals," broken into modular, multiple categories by ever smaller, ever more fluid entities he calls "corporations." Yet where we differ at this specific cultural moment in new media, is that we are our own modulating entity; we are defining ourselves, but, more importantly, each other." (http://www.swarmingmedia.com/2006/05/)