Flashing forward to Mosaic

10Dec09

I have been watching with some interest the sci-fi series Flash Forward. I have not read the book – as they say, it’s on  my list; I had not even heard about it before the show premiere. However, one thing caught my attention: the Mosaic Collective idea. It is certainly an interesting spin in community sharing and social network services, driving right to the heart of the Zeitgeist. Of course, viral marketing has taken the idea and implemented it in a webpage of its own (link, same as above), with rather limited results at this point.

Experiences

The idea of a community based on experiences, instead of information or ideas, is very appealing, particularly in proximity contexts. Sharing ideas and web links is one thing, but taking that to the next level would be the equivalent of reality TV for the social web. In a way, Twitter allows this, but within the small brackets of its 140 characters it is not possible to go very far. Google Wave, on the other hand, might make it possible to stream lives as they take place, albeit maybe not in its present beta form. Anything is possible with enough bandwidth and speedy smartphone skills. Everyone is an eye-witness, even if they do not have much to talk about.

The consequences of the actual sharing of what they saw in the blackout are quite diverse. As are the motives for the sharing: exhibitionism? curiosity? hope? loneliness (i.e. the urge to connect to a better future)? In Flash Forward, everyone has different reasons to log onto Mosaic but they are all related to blackout. It became the spiritual experience for which lots of people seem to yearn nowadays.

Big Brother | Panopticon

Mosaic is anything but grass-roots. It can hardly be described as a grassroots Internet start-up venture. Mosaic is set up by law-enforcement specifically to start gathering information that might help in the investigation. That does not mean it isn’t a killer app, but in the context of a planet-wide phenomenon, it clearly addresses what is in everyone’s mind. Of course, it is clear that the public does not know who is behind Mosaic. Nevertheless, it is not that hard to believe something like that might happen. Just imagine a disaster in which everyone had a website to exchange experiences and perceptions – generalized or universal eye-witnessing.

The process does not merit the name of surveillance – which demands an interception of an independent flow of information instead of taking the initiative to create the flow of information. It is more of a creative process of participatory open source intelligence.

In Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance, published in First Monday, Anders Albrechtslund explains:

(…) the role of sharing should not be underestimated, as the personal information people share – profiles, activities, beliefs, whereabouts, status, preferences, etc. – represent a level of communication that neither has to be told, nor has to be asked for. It is just “out there”, untold and unasked, but something that is part of the socializing in mediated publics.

In the Mosaic Collective, the information is not merely “out there”, available for the social ransacking of “friends” and contacts (and the occasional social scientist). Its context is actively created and, therefore, is a hybrid requiring both participation, sharing and the willingness to establish connections based on a vision of the future. Maybe because of that, at least initially, Mosaic is not presented as a law-enforcement tool.

Translations

I do not really think Flash Forward is a great television achievement. It is, however, though-provoking, which usually means it provides something for me to mull during idle or insomnia hours.

Mosaic is a direct link between minds. It does not address real experiences, but the future. It posits the endless fitting of pieces of futures into a giant scroll which constitutes the history of the brief blackout moments. As a history of the future, it links presences and phantoms of a time that should be unknown, but also evokes the darkness – or blankness – of the absence. I. e., it creates in the present a community of seemingly certain existence in a moment some months after the fact. On the other hand, Mosaic presents those who did not see their future with the anguish of the excluded – simultaneously deprived of a future and of the experience of participating in the collective sharing of futures.

Like an irrevocable contract, the penalties of forsaking it are terrible. A blood pact with the future can only be broken through death. The pattern of Mosaic is perfect in that regard because, as a mnemotechnic of the future, creates a margin of exclusion for those who wish for a free future – that is, for the characters that wish for a peaceful status quo existence. It is not by accident that the flash-forward makes some at least one of the characters commit suicide, while another is stopped in the exact moment he tries to blow his brains out. For those who have conflicts with their future, the sudden registry of a forbidden and feared reality projects them to the darkest places of the taboo of their present struggles. That is, their present and their memory is all they wanted. Much like anyone who has ever been wrongly caught in the jaws of law – which brings us back to the point: as most social network services pursue commercial viability by selling clients’ data, trying to keep both groups interested by juggling privacy and exposure, so does Mosaic show a radically different face of what it was made for. It is not that users have internalized or merely shrugged off the panopticon – maybe they just need the connections, the links in the present and with the past, in order to face some sort of future.

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Tags: flash forward, media, mosaic, science fiction, social networks, surveillance, television