ABSTRACT
One way to understand the motivation of what follows then is a desire to measure the distance between subjectivation and subjectification when it comes to the major relational approaches to structured data and global graphs deployed in social computing. To anticipate the book's conclusion, in the final chapter, I come to rely on work by the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, as offering a way to think through how the sides might start to be reconceived, in terms of an ideal for what Guattari would call a transversal 'subjectivation'. Developing an account of knowledge graphs at length in the next chapter, in subsequent ones I will be navigating two other approaches to directed graphs-social and predictive-analytic, both of which work in concert with knowledge graphs to form the conceptual basis for social computing in general. To suggest a final broad influence upon my choice of the term formatted subject, unpacking the representational strategies deployed in social computing platforms can give us a sense of how they promote or fail to promote what the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg calls operational autonomy. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to introducing some basic critiques of this vision, with some help from Deleuze and Guattari's mixed semiotic perspective. Using their work, I return to the basic practices of each graph style and gather them together under the concept of an allagmatically formatted subject, as a way to stage an altered understanding of what it means to be social in the final chapter.
