Here we see a hint of what I mentioned in my earlier blog post; the influence of Internet communications on Fortun's story. The chapter is scattered with quotes from various online commentators on the Yahoo! finance message board. Fortun's main emphasis is, of course, on what these people are saying; they are used to illustrate the disconnect between the average investor and the actual investment mechanics -- i.e. those that require "DD". The quotes are intriguing because of their content. Indeed, in the medium of the Internet all one can produce is content; with no "stability" behind authorship, any and every act or statement on the Internet functions as a means of self-representation. And it is precisely because of this fact that Fortun's use of message board transcripts is a particular deft move; on the Internet, each and every contributor enacts (explicitlyXimplicitly) a series of promises -- this is who I am, this is what I have a stake in, etc. (Promises that can never be proved true or disingenuous!)
Thus Fortun's analysis of promising has heavy implications for the political structure of the Internet. Frequently, the Internet is lauded as a democratizing tool -- i.e. now anyone (with a computer and Internet access!) can connect with anyone and communicate on any topic. But if identity on the Internet is bound up in promises -- things that defy a true/false binary -- how can one consistently interpret and understand the identity of the Other? How does one establish (if even as a fiction) "same" and "different" -- which are undoubtedly the foundation of political cohesion?
To move the questioning back to genomics, what happens when an enterprise is built not only on the promises of companies to investors and of investors to companies, but also on the very promised existence of investors? (Isn't this sort of thing played out when Icelanders buy second and third-hand shares of deCode? Aren't they counting on the existence of other investors?)
Fortun's promises seem to be everywhere, even in places he leaves explicitlyXimplicitly unexplored.
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Indeed, promises are everywhere; promising is everywhere (and not just in the field of genomics or iPS cell biology). You explore briefly the political "promise" of the Web and quickly locate a problem of political cohesion (simply on the basis of unsure identity). It's surely the case that much else unsettles that cohesion, not the least being the growing number of contestable public things (genes and iPS cell lines of every sort, for example) that are constitute/caught up in the looped/network entanglements we spent considerable time examining.
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