New Media

this object, rather than another, in support of this worldview rather than another. What we have, instead, is a worldview that embraces being indiscriminately, the way Nietzsche's neutered historian embraces not a desired object, but only the eternally feminine.

Woman with a capital W, so to speak: Ontology with its capital O's.

VII Unlike the imagined audience for a work of print literature, which is abstract and broadcast, our electronic correspondence is absolutely particular and receptive. Each recipient is an individual, with her own culture and interests, even "passionate interests" (Latour) that can be formulated in conversation, aggregated mathematically, and valued according to the expressed or recognized interests of others.

Esteem, as much as anything, can now be calculated in new media.

But this individuality, unlike the individualism associated with print literacy, is wholly objective (or, rather, "object oriented" in the terms of Latour's followers in new media). The conventional privacy of an extended encounter with a printed text has not much traction in new media; neither does the reserve that one brings to cosmopolitan discourse. In new media, we have instead of privacy, security: protective passwords, protocols that allow or disallow contacts, profiles that reveal parts of ourselves in transaction with others - particularly, those who share our orientation toward particular objects, and objectives, in life.

Interiority is not lost in new media transactions; to the contrary, a subject's personal aspects are minutely defined and capable of extended refinement through online conversation. The passions, including the passions of crowds, are wholly capable of being treated mathematically, thus transforming economic calculations of a group's productive capacity. But only that which is namable,