It ’ s perhaps easier to conceptualize this than to draw it. For example, Bruno Latour ’ s recent interest in network visualization in relation to actor-network theory passes through a reenactment of the 1903 Gabriel Tarde – Emile Durkheim debate, social monadology versus macrological abstractions (with Latour playing Tarde and speaking on his behalf). <sup>24</sup> He concludes that because we can now identify and track social interactions at the immediate scale that Tarde sought, and have the computational means to model boundless instances according to as many different scalar prisms as we choose, therefore the vocabulary of individual (as element) and society (as aggregated structure) is an unnecessarily reductive schema. For its part, working to speak as/for Virilio ’ s theories, Exit does and does not succeed in reslicing the data sets so as to demonstrate this recursion, relying in many cases on the optics of individuals caught up in global flows within the bounded array of the Mercatur projection. We appreciate this multitude of intersecting systemic perspectives, as escaped from the single structural plane, but want to extend beyond secondary analytical images of social interactions. As discussed in the Interfaces chapter, the images of systemic interrelationality found in GUI and in dynamic visualizations not only diagram how platforms operate; they are the very instruments with which a User interacts with those platforms and with other Users in the first place. At stake for the redesign of the User is not only the subjective (QS) and objective ( Exit) reflections of her inputs, states, and performance metrics within local/ global and intrinsic/extrinsic variations, but also that the profiles of these traces are the medium through which those interactions are realized. The recursion is not only between scales of action; it is also between event and its mediation. Put differently, the composition with which (and into which) the tangled positions of Users draw their own maps (the sum of the parts that busily sum themselves) is always both more and less whole than the whole that sums their sums! This interfacial recursion — the identification and measurement of Users that already organize themselves with the very mechanisms that are used to do the measuring — underscores that planetary data infrastructure, now general-purpose equipment, are means not only to scan a world but to compose one as well. Data visualization is, for good or ill, more than world-mapping; it is also world-making.
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User Layer