Historicizing Hypertext and Web 2.0: Access,Governmentality and Cyborgs

Introduction: Cyborg and Governmentality

Cyborg, from its very first theoretical conception as an entity, was conceived as an ‘illegitimate offspring’, a bastard child, a mutating transformative agency which was intended to make a place for the different social subject. (Haraway, 1991). This transformative agency attributed to cyborg, to replace the worker of the socialist politics and woman of feminist politics, also ironically underwent a thorough transmutation in the wake of the networked and programmable media of the post-90s and cyborg was soon relocated from the metaphorical socio-political realm to that of techno-materiality (Hayles, 2006). Haraway herself had acknowledged this transition when she observed with foresight that ‘Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field’ (1991, p.150) and had later resituated cyborgs as ‘breached boundaries’ between the evolutionary narratives of nature and technology (1995, p. xvi) and as a minor member in the ‘companion species’ which is conceived as a figure to demystify the conventional myths about human and non-human (2003, p.4). In the turn of the millennium, when the earlier ideas about the ‘immaterial’ and ‘disembodied’ cyberspace were intensely challenged and replaced from the ‘cybertariat’ and cyberfeministic quarters (DeVoss, 2004; Gillis, 2007; Huws, 2003), cyborg as a concept was also reviewed. Ironically, re-inventing its original formulation as a psycho-physiological symbiosis of man and machine (Clynes & Kline, 1995), cyborgology proliferated as the study of human–machine couplings in cybernetic organisms (Grey, Mentor, & Figueroa-Sarriera, 1995). Cyborg is now widely used in the realm of cognitive technologies, to go beyond the superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, in the profound human–technology symbionts, strictly differentiated from the esoteric questions about whether machines can think, and reconceived in terms of how ubiquitous computing processes has become in everyday life, in the thinning differentiating line between mind and machine (Clark, 2003; Ekman, 2016). Clark traces the ‘cognitive fossil trail’ of the cyborg trait in the cognitive technologies beginning from speech and counting, in written texts and numerals, into early printing of moveable typeface, to printing press and now to the digital encodings that bring text, image and sound into a uniform and transmissible format. The assumed polarities between William Gibson’s ‘meat space’ and ‘cyber space’ having already withered; the cyborg is perhaps the only concept that could swim through the polarity discourses and make itself relevant in contemporary realities when capital has sullied the cybernetic dream (Sreekumar, 2015). While the techno-scientific reconfiguration of human and the machine is taken as the harbinger of the post-modern by Haraway, there has been many significant studies that reject ‘modernity’ as a Eurocentric grand narrative about the ‘human’ with technological progress as the main denominator (Bauman, 1989; Dussel, 1993; Eisenstadt, 2000,). In a world where the universality of the theoretical framework called ‘modernity’ itself is contestable, cyborg subjectivity cannot thus imply a technological trans-humanism that do not take into account ‘the regional and material inequalities that the history of modernity also embodied’ (Sreekumar, 2016, p. 187).

When we speak about the material inequalities that are embedded in technology, mostly questions pertaining to digital divides (Dijck & Hacker, 2003; Warschauer, 2003) that pertain to both socio-demographic divides, (Mossberger, Tolbert, & Gilbert, 2006) and the second-level of divide that involves Internet usage skills (Min, 2010), cultural and social disparities and several such come under our immediate purview. Getting access to the global infostructure’s material infrastructure (Luke, 1998) is certainly a large social issue and there is no doubt that these material inequalities challenge a universal idea of cyborg. This article attempts to see if the materiality of cyborg can be critically approached by demystifying the idea of access in human–machine systems. ‘Access’ is not just a question of possessing technology alone, but one that involves how technology also possesses us. The demographic, cultural and economic divides not only deepens the injustices in the question of access, but complicates it when access, in the digital realm, becomes a double-edged process in the ‘surveillance assemblage’ that could be viewed as a sort of post-modern mutation of earlier practices of surveillance (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000) and the interests of the global corporate conglomerates who also access people indiscriminately. The procedures of access are determined by a combination of the human cultural denominators (that are mostly majoritarian) as well as the machinic components of data processing. This implies that our autonomy is constantly getting linked to the automation of machinic systems. The result of this linking is not a neat pyramid like structure of control, such as the classic bureaucracy, but ‘something much more like a creeping plant that sends out shoots here and there, growing rhizomatically’ (Lyon, 2003, p.162). In the period following the development of world wide web, the surveillance assemblage expanded rhizomatically partaking the technologies of convergence and their hierarchies, (Hier, 2003) and further into reciprocal systems of control (synopticon) expending the Web 2.0 technologies (Doyle, 2011). The surveillance assemblage also definitely involves the self-gaze of the watched, the internalization of the panopticon (Caluya, 2010), an internalization that takes ahead the idea of ‘database subjectivity’ (Poster, 1990) which points to the social regulation phenomenon where the subjectivity is construed through the database especially for the control and regulation of individuals. The response toward Big Data and its human and automated practices from the field of social sciences and humanities has been overwhelmingly numerous (Niederer & Chabot, 2015). Over and above the empowering and disempowering rhetoric and the general debates about systems of self-inscription and the status of legal personhood conferred on people in the wake of new biometric technologies, we may see that the history and the contemporary realities of this double-edged-accessing process is rooted in the mechanisms of surveillance states with respect to the technologies in question. (Breckenridge & Szreter, 2013) As Haraway observes ‘myth and tool constitute each other’ and communication technologies and biotechnologies are the most crucial tools re-crafting our bodies (Haraway, 1991, pp.205–206).

The relation between the individual, the machinic systems and capitalist ideology that originated with print (Anderson, 1991) is getting more consolidated with the system of self-inscription in the digital. The attempt here is to find how a simple format for establishing our self-relation with the web came in to being through the ‘stabilization’ of the technology called hypertext. Stabilization or ‘closure’ in the social constructivist approaches to technology, is understood as a stage in which a technology ‘settles into a comfortable frame of understanding’ (Gillespie, Boczkowski, & Foot, 2014, p.13), a process by which an artefact becomes a dominant form of a technology (Siles, 2012; Kline & Pinch, 1996). The surveillance and regulatory strategies initiated through the systems of print in the past three to four centuries had already become crucial and decisive to the life of surveilled subjects and is getting more consolidated and gaining more visibility and proximity with the digital (Ball, Domenico, & Nunan, 2016; Epstein, 2016). There are some evident continuities of the print-informed relation of individual and text in the contemporary ramifications of textuality and our understanding of it in the usage of hypertext in web today. By recalling the crucial stages during the establishment of World Wide Web at the turn of the century when a prototypical web application called weblog burgeoned and stabilized certain practices of associating with the web, I offer a conclusion that it is the reconsolidation of the subject’s relation with hypertext in the web that made possible the surveillance mechanism through user-generated data.

In Michel Foucault’s schema (1981), a particular inscription is raised to the level of discourse, through many principles, and any discourse—like the discourse of ‘madness’—is what it is, mainly because of the events, sites, tools and meanings that the mere physical ingredients get in their making. The methods of identification and the culture of bureaucratic authenticity that encircled the identifying and generalizing apparatuses of states continued to perfect itself with the culture of print (Groebner, 2007). The ideals of transparency about self in the domain of Internet are more often translated into more situated practices and become associated with specific organizational and regulatory concerns and governmentality becomes an effort of ‘managing visibilities’ (Flyverbom, 2015). Viewed from the theoretical lens of governmentality, even the question of free speech as a right and a legal problematic makes both the expressive subject and the guarantor endowed with certain mutual juridical capacities (Nasir, 2016). Imitating the corporate adoption strategies of the poor in neoliberal premises (Bonsu & Polsa, 2011), free speech also is getting adopted by the platform providers who intermediate between the two agents of speech. The political subjectification through user content is thus shaped and brought into being through a complex web of legal governance that serve as vital units of surveillance assemblage like the CCTV, (Lippert, 2009), in biometric inclusions (Jacobsen, 2012), in biopedagogies in schools and health departments (Petherick, 2015), in the discourses of biomedical neoliberalism (Pitts-Taylor, 2010), in monitoring and shaping the criminal imagination (Lippert & Wilkinson, 2010), in reducing the moral proximity in military action (Coeckelbergh, 2015) and in every socio-technical assemblages involving big data (Aradau & Blanke, 2015).

For Foucault, the speaking subject is one who enters a power relation with the discourse, by being a principle of it (Faubion, 1994, p. xvi). In his seminal essay on the ‘The Order of Discourse’, he observes how when language manifests materially as written or spoken object, it becomes discourse, perilous with unimaginable powers. (Foucault, 1981, p.52) Its ‘ponderous materiality’ threatens even the institutions from which it emerges. Institutions ironically reply through certain procedures to control, select, organize and redistribute this dangerous threat. Biopower, thus involves the numerous and scattered strategies of locating individual bodies through discourses, consolidating knowledge around the bodies, generating ‘truths’ about them and archiving the data for all future reference. In this schema, there is a privilege assigned to ‘writing’—from the invention of print on—that is primarily associated with material objects and individual bodies, which Foucault (2002, p. 43) identifies by calling writing, ‘the male principle’ of language. With printing, the written archive became the fundamental and mainstream nature of language, its ‘male principle’. The intensification of contemporary surveillance has been seen as an elaboration of late nineteenth-century media and the proliferation of evidence-producing communication technologies like photography, phonograph and the telephone (Lauer, 2012). Today’s data archives extend the male principality of the written form through HTML in the web. The ‘procedures of exclusion’ in the production of discourse that Foucault locates are not only about an exercise of control over what is being said. There is no doubt that the ‘ponderous materiality’ of language that is implied here has become manifold with the coming of the digital. Materiality in the context of the digital is ‘an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies’ (Hayles, 1999, p.3).

Materiality of Hypertext and Its Cultural Encounters in HTML

To locate the materiality of hypertext (Voithofer, 2005; Weight, 2006)is also to see its significations and demythify certain uses found for it in the World Wide Web, which is hitherto its most extensive and important usage. The archaeologists of media look at the evolution of electronic language, the digital form and objects in terms of particular materialities that it involves (Barnet, 2013, pp. xxi; Evens, 2012; Kallinikos, Aaltonen, & Marton, 2010; Leonardi, 2010; Parikka, 2012; Yoo, 2012).From its very genesis in Vannevar Bush’s classic article, ‘As We May Think’ (Bush, 1945/1991), to its most practical implementation as of now—the HTML in the World Wide Web—the two important attributes of the material text that hypertext extended were the capacity to branch and to respond (Nelson, 1980/1993), that is, to proliferate and to generate (Manovich, 2003).The way we look at the early scholarship about hypertext has now changed considerably (Baehr & Lang, 2012) and the same relation between computer and textuality that first was read by theorists as a vindication of the poststructuralist theories of the text as a decentred labyrinth, one that ‘denies the fixity of the text’ and ‘questions the authority of the author’ (Bolter, 2001, p. 153; Landow, 2006, p. 2), later came to be understood as one that identifies and marks-up every individual use. This was achieved because Tim Berners-Lee combined the capacities of Nelson’s hypertext with that of SGML or the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language, a meta-language for marking documents that was developed by Charles Goldfrab for IBM in 1986 (Beesley, 2001; O’Regan, 2008, p.107; Ragget, 1998; Reid, 2015, pp. 6–7). The earlier assessments of the potentially “revolutionary” impact of hypertext with respect to print were mostly overly simplistic and was informed by the deterministic interpretations of technology and prove redundant in terms of the HTML and the web tools in use today (Baehr & Lang, 2012; Barnet, 2013; Douglas, 1993). Now that it coupled with the meta-language of marking up, the ephemerality and fluidity of hypertext was found to be too dynamic and difficult to capture. Parikka (2012, p.128) offers two solutions for the problem of historicizing software and computing. One is to engage with all the related archives and metadata, like manifestos, design processes, blueprints, patents, marketing material reviews as well as the protocols and program languages. The other option is to tap into the processuality of digital culture itself. Following this method, I try to read into the processes that stabilized our present way of associating with hypertext by looking into the ecology from which weblogs evolved.

The earliest manifestos of ‘cyberspace’ held that information technology is generating a ‘space’ (and not a product) that could be occupied, imagined, seized and regulated (Cohen, 2007). The ‘Cyberspace’ that they imagined as a new possibility was technically nothing but the extension of the abstract, virtual space ‘between two phones’, famously located after the invention of telephone (Sterling, 1992, p.9). The occupation and colonization and the ‘end’ of this space (Hall, 1999; Thomas, 2006) can be traced to have happened at two levels. On the actual textual level beginning from the invention of hypertext to its application as HTML in the 1990 and in the ideological level during the last few decades of the previous millennium through the notion of the personal computer to the personalized web. (Bardini & Horvath, 1995; Katz, 2003; Pariser, 2011; Pfaffenberger, 1988; Turkle, 2005)

The earliest popular uses of hypertextual form of language were in literary experiments like ‘Storyspace, created by the Eastgate systems and sometimes referred to derogatorily as the ‘church of hypertext’ (Ciccoricco, 2003) and in MOOs and Multi User Dungeons (Joyce, 2001). However, the culture and usage to which hypertext was put to use after the conception of Web 2.0, is well beyond the prescribed design of even the inventors (Modir, Ling, & Abdul Aziz, 2014). Ted Nelson found the current state of computational media as ugly and benighted and toward his death, had blamed it on his own conceptual design (Barnet, 2013, pp. x–xi). Barnet absolves Nelson from this guilt by observing how it is not a failure of vision, but because the business and academic interests imagined that intellect can be property and that hypertext can be converted into cryptomoney. The benighted textual market that got Nelson disillusioned, observes Barnet, is the one in which crusades against ‘online piracy’ mimic and model upon the wars on terror. The conceptualization of questions about copy and piracy became possible when the theoretical focus shifted from the early notions about textual transgression in the web to that of the ‘codedness’ of web itself and a sense of computer textuality that revolved around a trilogical relationship of “I, apparatus and You”, which acknowledged the apparatus as an entity with agency and text as property (Weight, 2006).

It is in its application in the web, through forums like Usenet, chat rooms, Bullettin Boards (BBS), Multi User Dungeons(MUD) and finally through blogs and Social Media, that hypertext seeped into our dailies and attained a kind of ‘stabilization’ as technology as a textual form that let identification of the user possible. While the early hypertextual uses were scattered across platforms like MUDs and BBS with no unifying standards and procedures to assimilate them, blogs and Social Media—the locomotive via which the web evolved (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), became a unifying surface for various specifications of hypertext. This is because as an application of hypertext, the World Wide Web introduced a single form of ‘marked-up text’ to represent any hypertext document that can be transmitted across the network. The web, officially defined as the ‘wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents’ (Berners-Lee, 1992), follows a standard client-server model in which the user relies on a program called ‘the client’ to connect to a remote machine called ‘the server’ where the data is stored. The operation of the web entirely relies on the hypertext/hypermedia format of its documents. Berners-Lee writes that, in proposing this model of web in 1989, the greatest challenge before him and his most driving force was to make it a shared ‘universal space across which all hypertext links could travel’ (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 163). In effect, this was achieved by integrating everything available in the Internet prior to it as the Web. Thus, every content in the hypertext form that existed before and during the formation of World Wide Web was blended into the Web. Every forum, every discussion board, every gaming platform now got an identifying URL under a common protocol of a language that could be shared. Berners-Lee notes how this integration of various protocols was achieved through continuous and instant archiving of every data, every text that came across in every search act, into the web. The contribution of early bloggers in the building of this massive textual Babel is substantial as they used their homepages as filtering spaces (Blood, 2000; Dibbel, 2000; Siles, 2011). It is this enormous archiving act that actually made the hypertext format what it was meant to be; not only branching and incessantly generating, but identifying too.

In this conversion and integration, the standard procedure available before any user was the act of locating and sharing data. For this, the user, the transmediated self, had to first identify oneself as a node, a functioning and archivable, browsable node among the data load (Elwell, 2014; Gochenour, 2006). The pre-web format of information sharing presupposed the user as the sender of the message, whereas Berners-Lee’s web redefined user as the ‘generator of content’. From this moment of critical cultural difference on, we can find that there is an internal controlling principle within the functioning of web discourse that becomes obligatory to every user. Every single use of the web was made possible through a logging—one that also recognizes the logger as a URL, integrates his log activity as collective data and then distributes it across the web’s ever widening platforms. URL, (Originally Universal Document Identifier or UDI and rechristened by Internet Engineering Task Force as URL which was again a semiotic rather than technical change. (Berners-Lee, Masinter, & McCahill, 1994) is a common representation system for all networked objects that works as a web address. This user identification marks the first stage of the control of hypertext, an actual delimitation of the electronic language. After location, follows the ‘descriptive mark up’ (the system of tags that encapsulate the texts, represented by a less-than-sign and a greater-than-sign) which was identified as a procedural convenience originally in scholarly text processing to aid scholars in formatting text and citations, in sharing their files across computers. (Berners-Lee, 1985; Coombs, Renear, & DeRose, 1987) With the ‘mark-up’ system, the nature of hypertext as ‘meta-language’, integrating the written, oral and audio-visual modalities of human communication (Castells, 1996/2010, p. 356) takes a step forward, as the text is recognized as also capable to process itself in its own capacity. The idea and terminology of ‘mark up’ is said to have evolved from the practice of ‘marking up’, in which editors wrote the revision instructions in the manuscripts of authors. With hypertext markup, the ‘branching and responding’ hypertext becomes a ‘self-identifying’ text as well. These design specificities that were the most innovative uses of hypertext also led to the first steps toward the ‘colonization’ of it.

HTML or the Hypertext mark-up language was designed by combining the uses of language that were generated by the various Internet applications that had come up by the 1990s. This included not only the sending and connecting capacities between sites, but the flexibility, sharing, filtering and interface value of the popular forms of CMC. Firstly HTML required formatting on top of the IP, (Internet Protocol) and transmitting through HTTP (Hypertext Transfer protocol), thereby necessitating an address for every single use as in a URL (Berners-Lee et al., 2004). The very first requirement in such an application would definitely be an ‘interface’ or a mediating application that connects every website with every identified use of it. Technically, these are called ‘browsers’ and the first browsers Mosaic (1993) and Netscape Navigator (1994) and what was termed as ‘browser wars’ immediately followed the finding of World Wide Web (Reid, 2015). With browsers came the first commercial interpretations of the web and the second half of the last decade of the millennium saw the emergence of a network that was in actuality an information-processing system with programming and identification tools. This stage also marks a crucial turn from the postmodernist narratives about ‘decentredness’ that had permeated early computing to that of ‘pervasive’ and ‘ubiquitous computing’ (Coleman, 2012; Galloway, 2004; Hansmann, Merk, Nicklous, & Stober, 2003; Nieuwdrop, 2007) and the ‘Internet of things’ (Evans, 2011; Niederer & Chabot, 2015).

With the dissemination of Hypertext through Web using the HTML protocol, a fixed threefold pattern of control emerged. This was effected through the URL, the integration of log activity through shared protocol and the dissemination of content across widening platforms. This threefold regulation repeats in the successive stages of the development of the web and has effected a ‘stabilization’ of hypertext. In the following sections we would look into the cultural meanings that this threefold regulation of hypertext acquired when a concept called Web 2.0 was introduced. This ordering of the chaotic web content plays a seminal role in the actual control of electronic language and paved the way for the personalizing technologies and its censoring, surveillance and regulatory capacities.

Web 2.0 and the Ideological Interpretation of HTML

With the new foundations laid down by Web 2.0, a notion of ‘user-generated content’ was getting attached to hypertext. The notion of ‘user generated content’ that was widely interpreted as ‘psychological empowerment’ (Leung, 2009) and as endowed with wide emancipatory potential when compared to the traditional media content (Kim, 2012), was initially a prospective model for commerce that in their first Web 2.0 conference, Tim O’Reilly and his team projected as what characterizes the change from what they called Web 1.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 was a call to understand HTML in terms of public collectivism and amateur participation that both functions entirely within commodity culture, and was unfree from the values of old media. (Beer, 2009; Dijck, 2009/2013; Stevenson, 2014). The version of web 2.0 that O’Reilly projected even made up a discourse about the nature and purpose of Internet and made ‘versioning’ a dominant mode of Internet’s history. (Allen, 2012a, 2012b) The conceptual changes involving Web 2.0 was explained by O’Reilly by recalling the difference between Netscape and Google. While the former focused on producing software to be distributed, the latter focused on amassing and filtering data, to provide a service based on links. As O’Reilly notes, Google actually occupied the space between the browser and the search engine much like the space between the two phones that are at the either end of a call that was identified as a possibility of a ‘cyberspace’. O’Reilly’s conception was not any technical invention but an ideological interpretation of the web that was available for colonization (Trebor, 2008). Web 2.0 conference was presented by him as ‘the second generation Internet-business conference’ that introduce ‘web as a platform’ (O’Reilly, 2005). O’Reilly had a series of web applications to list the changes that marked the transition from early web that he retrospectively termed as ‘Web 1.0’. This includes changes from Netscape to Google, from Britannica Online to Wikipedia, from personal homepages to blogging and many such, none of which actually implied any structural or technical differences. What differentiates Wikipedia from Britannica Online or DoubleClick from Google Adsense is a sense of understanding the spaces as ‘platforms’ (Gillespie, 2010) and data as content and involved a change in the way users began to look at the applications. The crux of the rhetoric of change lies in the fact that the users were interpellated into a new mode of self. This new user self-looked at oneself as the owner of a bit of space in the web, responsible for the content, willing to share and acknowledge ownership of others, mostly also willing to forego a part of his own right to the content, to contribute to the collective intelligence. (Chia, 2012; John, 2013). Much like modern authors whose self-constitution, as Samuel Beckett revealed in his question—What does it matter who is speaking—for the new users of the web, the textual relation was mostly ‘ethical’, in the sense that it was a relation that let them understand and constitute their self. With the new foundations laid down by Web 2.0, the notion of user-generated content was getting attached to the same kind of text that earlier remained part of the web in dungeons and bulletin boards. The change in approach needed ‘identifiable’, ‘authenticate’ and ‘fluid’ content in the web. It is this recognition of content as a product with market value that happened with the amalgamation of different types of speech platforms for identity and self-presentation in the pre-web that was spread across MUDs (Gochenour, 2006, Vrooman, 2002), Bulletin Boards and personal homepages (Chandler, 1998; Doring, 2002) into a convenient format through the massive popular appeal and the usage of the weblog format. By concentrating on the weblog format—the material design of identity constitution—and not the individual desires attached to it, the discussion on the materiality of the online identity formation, in weblogs that follow, takes a diagonally opposite route to the general phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches of the same, (see for instance, Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013 who view online identities as an expansion of Goffman’s framework of self-presentation or Jodi Dean’s (2010) study of blog as a product of the capitalist ‘communicative drive’, a typical tool for gaze).

Weblog Format and the Interpellation into ‘Personal’ Space

The relationship we have with the web—that we understand as a freedom—also involves a certain reality, the bare physical act of logging in, recording data and migrating through the network. This facility to ‘log in’ to a private/public space to write and share, was constituted as an act, a form of subjection, a capacity for some action that had to be therein mobilized and regulated. In effect, the users had to be ‘interpellated’ (Althusser, 2001) to the hidden ideologies of the web. The technological utility of computing began to be interpreted with the word ‘personal’ ever since Douglas Englebert’s ‘Mother of all Demos’(Engelbart, 1968)., made a proposition for a personal desktop using hypertext. After this, the researches on computing which was till then primarily concerned with the esoteric problem of automating human intelligence, took a significant turn toward the realization of another potential that it offered, that of ‘personalizing’ the technology. ‘Personalizing’ is that cultural meaning that henceforth got attached to the tools and designs, differentiating this particular invention from everything else that came before. The transition, from the possibility of human-machine intervention from the perspective of the machine, to that of the user/individual, has both a history and far reaching cultural implications. It includes the deep tropes of individual self-worth, self-expression and rebellion rooted in the processes of our knowledge-building exercises. It also implies that this technology would continually be implemented by harnessing individual capacities and market ideologies in unique and unexpected ways.

The feeling of ‘personal’ that was culturally established and coded with respect to computing (Turkle, 2005; Ceruzzi 2003) is also important because it built up an active workable framework of human-machine interaction in a very basic, simple and hassle-free manner in the typical DIY fashion (Turner, 2006). Technically what was required was a simple framework of establishing a contact point with the machine that can be then duplicated by successive applications. Logging in with an authentication to personal computers provided the first step toward the realization of this association with the machine. Logging involved the capacities of both the human and the machine entities, as well as the potential possibilities of connecting the two. Through a simple application of the logic of access in both directions a ‘personal’ technology could take the culture of the print that was centred on the ‘possession’ of product to the next higher level. Here the product also possessed the user, not just virtually, but materially through the maze of networks. We may also note here that the cultural insistence of the act of logging-in also produced the culture of breaking in and constituted the parallel ‘hacking cultures’. In fact, Bernes-Lee’s invention of web, though funded by the military sponsored ARPANET tradition, was also deeply informed by the computer hackers’ cultures of the 70s (Abbet, 1999; Berners-Lee, 2000; Levy, 1984).

Most of the Web.2.0 applications that we use today allow individuals to use its facility by providing an ‘authentic’ identity, by letting the platform collect all the activities of this particular identity as related data tagged to it and by using the text to feed the networks through sharing and distribution of data. This means that unless one has a stable web-handle, a web archive across diverse platforms and fall into an insulated network, one cannot use the facilities that these platforms offer. The procedures thus insist that every Internet user should have a web-identity, an archive of data and a networked presence to be able to have the cyberspace experience. The culture of this technological standard of a profile that is integrated to a canon, relates back to the experience of writing in print. It is with the dissemination of the industry of print that writing came to be accepted as ‘normal’ as long as there is a stable identity to which the text may be attributed. The culture of print insists that this textual self has an oeuvre of related data that could be brought under scrutiny if and when required. Moreover print-textuality validates every text in terms of how much it is repeatedly used, referred to, discussed, and how it is related to a canonical framework of texts. (Foucault, 1981) This cultural schema of validation of text has served as the fundamental model to link individuals to Internet-specific framework of logging in, archiving of data and perpetuating the network. In the following section of this article we try to see how this threefold format got stabilized through one application of web namely the blog format.

Weblog is a particular web format that evolved in the late 90s to replace personal websites and became immensely popular among a wide range of users across the world. The utility of the format for debates and dialogue, for anonymous writing and personal empowerment and democratic speech was celebrated. Mostly bloggers rather than the tool called blog became the subject of interest or whenever it was otherwise, blogs were studied as ‘information upchucking’ (Merholz, 2000; Meed, 2000) ‘fragmented narratives’ (Walker, 2008, p. 112), as a product of globalization, as a popular technological practice of content production, as a product satisfying the communicatory capitalistic drives (Dean, 2010), as a form of ‘language of new media’, a part of database culture (Manovich, 1999), as an ‘antidote to the crippling effects of media-saturated culture’ (Blood, 2000), or as a ‘nihilistic impulse’ that served as a model for creating communities of like-minded people (Lovink, 2008, pp. 1–38).

The weblog format lets the individual make a claim for a bit of the space as his ‘own’ in cyberspace where the user could set out to build it up as a community with its norms and practices. As Boyd (2006) notes, in the blog format, the two dominant models of the architecture of CMC, one in which individuals are directed to a location of communication (a URL, an IRC channel, a newsgroup server) and the other in which individuals are given a personal reference to communicate (an email-address, an IM handle) were being combined into one surface, into a single format that could be used both synchronously and asynchronously). This format could be used both to refer to the self and to access the space as it evolved from the early use of online ‘filters’, combining the utilities of online diaries and personal publishing journals (Siles, 2011) and became much larger than a ‘closure’ of an online tool. Many of the earlier Newsgroups and communication sites became redundant when these sites were re-launched as Social Networks Sites after incorporating the features that blogs popularized (Boyd & Ellison, 2008). Even the ‘death of blogging’ (Dean, 2010) that was a trending tagline with the coming of Social Media denoted that the structure of blogs, with the profile, daily update and interaction had become ubiquitous as a social networking format.

Unlike in a message, in publishing, the presence of “I” is a culturally appropriated position and is as much a product as the work produced. This ‘I’, unlike the ‘I’ of messages, links directly to the space by inscribing into it. The most popular question that such an entry inaugurated was about ‘private’ and ‘public’ space. It became possible to look at Internet as a virtual reincarnation of the Habermasian public sphere. (Papacharissi, 2009). Simultaneously, Internet was also recognized as a space that corrodes and problematizes the distinctions between private and public spaces, a notion that is ever expanding with the data mining usages and commodification of data in privatized technologies which has created a climate of exposure and risk in which identity becomes not only something we are constantly compelled to construct but also something we are constantly compelled to safeguard against threats to its integrity and security (McNeill & Zeurn, 2015; Papacharissi, 2010 p. 43). Western idea of privacy, over which our contemporary understanding of it is rooted, is largely that of a right, a citizen right, especially over media interference (Warren & Brandies, 1890). Increasing concerns over privacy entitlement also generate a productivity for the watching of privacy, the labour of which is further re-purposed as media content into a continuous loop of ‘digital enclosure’ that is ‘omnioptic’ (Andrejevic, 2004; Jurgenson, 2010). In this very ironic ouroboros like construct of privacy, individuals should generate privacy through their acts, lend it to the agencies of political or commercial power whenever demanded and are also expected to protect their privacy as a right. The privatization, identification and labelling of the space through the use of a ‘private space’ as in the blog format, brought the textual content under juridical purview of society, institutions and state.

The first step of galvanizing content into a format happened when bloggers positioned their acts collectively. They voiced a need to locate themselves, ‘know themselves’ and distinguish their act from the chaotic content integration in the web. The frantically mushrooming calls ‘to unite’ and name their activity, the need to generate pages and pages of links to other matters they encountered in the web, and most importantly to see them as ‘authors’ of pages marked off these users of the web as distinct. The earliest blogs identified till date are ‘Robot Wisdom’ by John Barger, Daive Winer’s ‘Scripting News and Justin Hall’s ‘Links from Underground’. What Barger and other early users of web did by encountering what they referred to as the blog format, was not only to find a private little place where one could hoard information, thoughts and innumerable links, but also to find oneself in the web, as a node, an identity (Barger, 1998; Dibbel, 2000). A list of design suggestions that were provided by Barger in praise of Winer’s Scripting News, distinctly reflects the future that the format was going to take up. Barger insists on a single URL for an individual that stays and a provision to scroll back in time, continual updates so that people come back every time they are on-line, a main page that adds new links to the top, link with summary, sorting archives to categories (meta-tags), summary of the link-test and not just a teaser and the crediting the borrowed links. These design suggestions embrace almost all aspects of the print textuality sustained by the functional author like oeuvre, ‘work’, critical-interpretation and attribution. The early users of the format thus literally laid down the rules, their practices galvanized the form and design of blogging software subsequently developed by platform providers.

These design suggestions are a crucial point in all the reconceptualization of web that followed, especially those that came up with Web.2.0. Locating self as a speaking subject has been a discontinuous strategy in the subjectivization of people from very old times which a single URL for a profile catered to. Design descriptions of weblog platforms reflected this self-relation of bloggers by relating to the platform as a venue for self-publishing. When they launched in October 1999, Blogger, the first popular blogging platform described its product as ‘an automated web-publishing tool’ and their tag-line ‘push button publishing’ was synonymous for blogging. The tag-line of Livejournalwas ‘an up-to-the-minute log of whatever you are doing, when you are doing it’. By the time Typepad was launched in 2003, the tag line becomes ‘a powerful hosted weblogging service’ stressing the completion of the structural evolution of the tool as ‘weblog’. When Xanga, the 1999 site for sharing book and music was re-launched in 2004, it called itself ‘The blogging community’, establishing the fact that by then there was a ‘community’ called bloggers whose approach to their practice was thoroughly distinct. The Weblog companies thus recognized the content in terms of publication of genres like journal and diary and stressed on features like immediacy and community aspects in blogging (Boyd, ‘A Blogger’s Blog’). By 2003, formal definitions came up in Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster and Routledge Encyclopedia that defined blogs both in terms of the structure and format.

When the bloggers intensified the moments of writing, chose textual subjectivity and anonymity as political tools, swapped social categories like gender—advocating freedom from the category itself—and vociferously claimed freedom of speech as a right by writing manifestos and proposing codes of conducts and developed ethical models of self-censorship, attribution and collaboration, in effect blogger was also interiorizing the strategies for remaining as an author in a network that thrives through text. It is pertinent to ask ‘What is a blogger’, in the same vein that the question ‘What is an author’ was asked. An author’s name classifies the discourse as something other than ordinary speech, a speech act that ‘must be received in a certain mode’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 211). The category called ‘blogger’, in the same way, integrated a kind of expression in the Internet that distinguished itself from the ‘noise’ generated in the cyberspace, from messages in bulletin boards or chat rooms. With blogging, logging into cyberspace could be reduced to the simplest of terms of knowledge of space with a user-profile with password and every logger could then proceed to make this space public and generate the privacy that could be then monetized.

In computer terminology, logging is an act of keeping a log—single file that records all the events of a system. The technical possibility of creating a log file with all the activities of a particular individual was given a massive cultural acceptance in blogging and then later through Social Media. In this format, the question of identity verification is not limited to a user-name and password, but a persona that includes one’s inclinations, attitudes and beliefs. It is a form of authentication that demands cultural categories to identify an individual. This also set apart another kind of online activity which is based on a hierarchy of password, authentication and self-mythification as against others like hacking and malware programming, that reverses these procedures with technological expertise. In the act of logging-in with a password the idea of ‘authenticity’ is reduced to ‘self-authentication’, thereby narrowing the set of possibilities of speech that is open to us (Crampton, 2003, pp. 73–82). With a password authenticated profile the ‘contact point’ between technologies of self and that of power has been set and the governmentality of the subject (Foucault, 2000) becomes a possibility. It is very discernible that the popular Internet, the Internet that reshapes the lives of millions through Social Media and daily networking activities, now demands for the same kind of freedom of access through privatized spaces that act as accessible archive.

Conclusion

The article attempted to present a scrutiny of that point in the fleeting history of HTML when its cultural use enforced ‘access’ as a double edged process that is now being ‘stabilized’ in the web technologies of surveillance within the larger schema of ‘governmentality’ of the populace. The idea of access as a liberal strategy of individual self-worth not only appropriates more people to the dominant capitalist world-view but creates a myth of change around it. Like the myth of Web 2.0 that was put forth only as a potential for access from one side, the liberal idea of ‘personalized technology’ is also very ironic. It puts forth ‘access’ as a means to revolutionize systems of knowledge and do not confront the theoretical and practical lacuna in the idea of access as double edged, especially in the evolving context of the digital technologies. Access depends on the processes that delimit individuals as identities, as profiles that serve the functional and ideological role of contact-points. By looking into the history of HTML in the web and briefing the evolution of blogging as a standard prototypical web format of individual association with hypertext, the article scrutinizes the historical juncture when surveillance mechanisms started to constitute the technical practices in web. When access is being established as a sociopolitical tool and a right for life, it becomes pertinent to historicize the material technology and the practices that standardized and stabilized access in the digital realm. The weblog format and practices are one such that happened during the crucial ideological overlaying of web, as a domain of the speech economy. Cyborg subjectivity that entails being at the ‘interface between automaton and autonomy’ can be used as a theoretical critique of self-formations that also includes the procedures of ‘access’ that constitutes subjects within material domains.