Zombie labour: Send me your mailing address if you are into collectors editions

In response to the paper I wrote:

How have I come to learn, love, then reject, and now use ‘Free Labour’ (aka. You Tube) to tap into the media generation’s collective intelligence in my own practice?

I am shooting a new video piece that is inspired by our class and fearless leader . . .Prof. Chun.


This video takes place in Houston, TX and is tentatively titled Labour. It is about a woman who comes home from work every day and does the same thing. Her house is filled with red balloons floating on the ceiling and on the floor. In this house she paints images of post-apocalyptic scenes that are neon, vibrating, sparkling, and fantastic. She is in constant labour until she falls asleep. The work must be done, shown, and shared. The viewer senses the acceleration of time towards something. Maybe a deadline? The pace increases and this is her routine till one day she finds a zombie right before she goes to bed in her apartment. The zombie makes gestures with paint. She focuses the zombie’s gestures on her work and channels the activity. This then becomes her routine. She comes home from work, she works, she finds the zombie in the apartment, the zombie gestures, she channels, and she goes to sleep. In the morning the paintings are done. One day the balloons begin to pop and a man in a suit appears at the door he represents the zombie in legal action against her.

My intention is to dedicate the video to our class and share collector editions of the work with those that provide mailing addresses in January once I can finish postproductions. I will send links to all once the website is done.
rosalindagonzalez@gmail.com

Obama, Network Neutrality, Network Politics

For students, merchants, and companies with large stakes in the internet and its culture, the concept of network neutrality has proven to be a fundamentally divisive issue in recent American politics. Because of the nature of existing FCC-guidelines, which necessitated that all calls in the United States be connected with equal speed (so that no call could be privileged above any other), the speed at which one is connected to a website is theoretically equal to any other. This idea of "network neutrality" is very much an artifact of what Tiziana Terranova has called "network politics ... the existence of an active engagement with the dynamics of information flow" (3). The question of network neutrality, as then-Presidental candidate outlined to google in the video above, surely takes on this "network politics," as the network neutral individual fears a sort of manipulation of these "dynamics of information flow," to privilege certain sites over others.

I am perpetually interested by the network neutrality debate because of just this sort of embedded fear and distrust located at its core. On one hand, the idea of network neutrality works by characterizing the existing net as "open," and by virtue of this 'openness,' the internet is presented as ideal if not utopicly perfect. On the other hand, the non-neutral network is presented as an object of fear, a place where ruthless economic darwinism would quickly promote the already successful into the more successful. In short, a non-neutral network would further the schism between big business and small business.



Obama's own rhetoric, in a conversation with students at an MTV discussion, posits this opennes as a "level playing field," enabling "mom & op" operations to co-exist alongside "Fox News." Obama's depiction of the small website as familial clearly is meant to stand for both a manifestation of the American Dream, and the idea of something intimate and personal. This site is thus contrasted with (very pointedly) Fox News, which represents an overwhelming, media giant. The implication follows that the "mom & pop" entreprise is willing and able to co-exist with Fox News, but that the News Corporation will clearly crush the family company were the rules to be changed. Ironically, Obama also posits that his website barackobama.com as another example of the "small" web site that would be threatened by a non-neutral network. This seems highly unlikely, as Obama's site routinely attracted more hits than competitors, and Obama's operating budget was so ample (and his advertising so extensive) that it seems a non-neutral network would hardly present a major threat.

The essential concern of network neutrality is that the network remain 'unintelligent' and 'non-discriminatory.' This is built upon the assumption that when connections are made in the existence network technologies behind the internet, no political or economic inputs influence the speed of the connection. Which of course, is patently false. As Terranova writes "communication technologies do more than just link different localities ... They actively mould what they connect by creating new topological configurations and thus effectively contributing to the constitution of geopolitical entities such as cities and regions, or nations and empires" (40). Following this analysis, it is clear that politics are already at play in any connection. The way internet culture has shaken these existing politics off, however, is by virtue of their supposed consistency and pre-existence. Because they were the rules when people started playing the game, any change of the rules is dangerous for all existing business. It follows then, that maintaining the status quo is the only way to protect the "open" internet, which can only be "open" when it becomes opposed to a model of a "closed" network. It is in this way that the network neutrality debate works strangely like a conservative, fear-based administration, fearing change simply because it is change, and trying to justify its qualities by villifying alternative models. Terranova in fact, might argue that the real fear in reconfiguring a network's politics and dynamics, is that it would be "linked to the emergence of new geopolitical formations" (40).

This is not to say the Netwok Neutrality is an inappropriate consideration of existing economic and political interests surrounding the future of the internet. It is simply to problematicize the polarizaing simplification with which the issue is generally presented. On barackobama.com, Obama's official position on network neutrality reads:

• Barack Obama will protect the openness of the internet:

  Obama and Biden strongly support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet

How they will protect it is uncertain, except that Obama claims he will install an FCC minister who is likewise committed to network neutrality. The fascinating thing about these statements, and this position, is that in fact Barack Obama has put himself in a position to promise people what they already have, and that worked.

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This is an overdue post on the final reading

second life; first love. mmorpgs, subjectivity, and capital flows

“Bobby always wanted to own a little yellow cottage on the beach, where he could go out on the porch and feel the salty breeze while clasping a margarita in one hand and a beautiful woman in the other. Now he finally has it, and his life has become so much happier.”

“"I was looking for someone to do a customised animation for a guitar I had built and after a lot of research and talking with various animators I decided to choose Moopf Murray. His quote was a great price for the work I wanted done and he got it done quickly and exactly as I wanted it. I would recommend Moopf for any work as his quality and time that goes into is well worth what you get. I am extremely happy with the quality of the animation and the fast friendly service I received. Thank you so much!"

-Second Life Testimonials

Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of identity as well. [...] I know a respectable computer scientist who spends hours as an imaginary ensign aboard a virtual starship full of other real people around the world who pretend they are characters in a Star Trek adventure. I have three or four personae myself, in different virtual communities around the Net. I know a person who spends hours of his day as a fantasy character who resembles "a cross between Thorin Oakenshield and the Little Prince," and is an architect and educator and bit of a magician aboard an imaginary space colony: By day, David is an energy economist in Boulder, Colorado, father of three; at night, he's Spark of Cyberion City—a place where I'm known only as Pollenator.”

- Howard Rheingold, referring to a MUD in 19993

The emergence of mmorpgs and virtual communities has fundamentally shifted the ways in which “users” are inscribed within social systems, flows of capital, and information technologies. In the mmorpg “Second Life,” a full consumer economy has emerged involving real money with “Real-world” value and all the associated monetary issues such as inflation, bank-runs, recessions, gambling addictions, etc.

For my final project, I plan to explore the emergence of mmorpg’s (massively multiplayer online role playing games) and, more specifically, the ways in which the mmorpg “Second Life” is reorienting flows of capital and information and redefining notions of subjectivity, personhood, and presence. As people can increasingly lead what they consider to be whole, fulfilling, perhaps better-than-real lives through virtual communities on the internet, their patterns of social and economic interaction have changed drastically. My project will interrogate, through close readings of Hayles, Terranova, and Sherry Turkle’s work on MUDs, the ways in which this new frontier of human communication and socioeconomic activity is changing the ways in which identity, subjectivity, and personhood are configured. By exploring the burgeoning but highly regulated capitalist economy within second life, I will attempt to understand how and why this new system of economic exchange has captured the hearts and minds of millions willing to put hard-earned “earth money” into purchases of land, clothing, and accessories that exists only in the realm of the virtual. I will also be concerned with the rapid influx of “earth businesses” into the virtual world of second life. As second life has expanded, numerous earth-bound businesses such as Mcdonald’s, American apparel, Reuters, and Toyota have opened up outlets within the virtual world. Furthermore, non-profit organizations such as the anglican church and the embassy of the Maldives have decided to open outlets in the virtual world. Why, I wonder, have these businesses decided to expand in this virtual space, and what are the costs and benefits of their decision to do so?


As this project continues to take shape, I hope to embrace its "projectness" rather than writing a conventional research/criticism paper. Part of my project research will certainly involve creating an avatar and walking the streets within the second life world, entering businesses and talking to other users from around the world. Through this crude form of “cyberethnographic” research I will be able to get a better sense of the feel and form of the second life experience. Drawing from my experiences within the virtual world as well as my readings of Hayles, Terranova, and Turkle, I will attempt to understand and critique the emergence of second life as a viable social and economic alternative to “first life.”

Jamming Biotech

My paper will focus on Critical Art Ensemble's Biotechnology projects, in which they target specific strains of research, development, and capitalization within the life sciences. Their main focuses are on reproductive issues and food biodiversity. 

More specifically, I'd like to consider how their work--both theoretical statements and tactical deployments--does or does not align with Terranova's model of network politics; Lyotard's concept of an antagonistics of language games & open access to information; and Deleuze & Guattari's ideas of the de- & re-territorializations of capital. Of tantamount importance are the role of institutionalized science in providing new products for capital and the possibility of mobilizing targeted scientific and media interventions to forge a resistant, critical biology.

As it stands, I'm not sure exactly how I'll outline the study--any suggestions are more than welcome. I think that it might be useful to separate it into the following categories: institutional science, eugenics, genetic engineering & capital; the political strategies of critical biology in terms of organization, goals, and tactics; how information, both genetic and scientific, is conceptualized and (de-/re-)politicized differently by these two projects.

the gap between the symbolic and the real

I would like to address the question, what is at stake in the disembodiment of information, especially with reference to Godel's and Turing's incompleteness results? In particular, I'd like to talk about reflexivity and the decontextualized idea of communication introduced by Derrida, as it relates to the methodology and consequences of the incompleteness result. I'll address the idea of symbolic machines driving symbolic systems and physical machines operating in the physical world and the discrepancies introduced by imagining one as perfectly explained by the other.

Using the structures opened up by this question, I'd like to question the cultural archetype of the hacker, persons supposed to possess deep control over symbolic systems. I will show that hackers as mythologized (as sorcerers and gods, in particular) are impossible outside of a world determined by symbolic rather than physical systems. With reference to Sadie Plant I'd like to examine the hacker as a fundamentally feminine figure and demonstrate that the only hackers who might approach the godlike mythologized power are those who manipulate the physical machine of reality by creating in the real world and giving birth. I will then reframe Derrida's move to decontextualize discourse as a reembodiment rather disembodiment of discourse.

I want to show that the distance between the symbolic and the real is as great as the difference between the cardinality of the integers and the cardinality of the real numbers, and to show that the incompleteness of mathematics directly reflects the incompleteness all symbolic discourse.

I also would like to talk about the way communication networks amplify the approximations made by each of their nodes. In other words, if all nodes are embodied but imagining themselves as disembodied symbolic systems, the feedback created by the amplified slippage between real and symbolic works to remove the discourse proliferating through the network from the realm of embodiment.

I could point out efforts by situationists, dadaists, zen buddhism, and other movements to react to the slowly self-removing discourse of the network by anchoring themselves in the real through spontaneity and refusal to self-encode. I could trace the idea of the hacker/god as enlightened and removed from the physicality of the world as a fantasy about reconnecting the symbolic with the real, as a fantasy that explains the symbol-ward drift as a quest for control of the physical machine by humans. I could address the crises throughout fields of thought as they discovered unknowability and the inconsistencies that arise through symbolification.

Hold the pickes, hold the lettuce. Specials orders don't upset us! All we as is that you let us serve it your way.

I want to explore developments in television and internet advertising from the vantage of Terranova's theories of communication and production. I plan to call in Burroughs in order to address the more material and practical sides of the production of media, though both writers share many theoretical concerns (the production of subjectivity, genetics, representation and fragmentation, the move from molecular to molar, the play of images).

I will begin by looking at fast food TV/radio advertising. First, McDonald's: how does the change in its slogans and jingles reflect a greater move toward what Terranova would call network culture? In the 60's, the slogans referred to a more spatial realm, a realm in which producer, consumer, and consumed remain distinct: there are mentions of "place," "home," "eating out," landmark ("Look for the golden arches!"). At the same time, the slogans tend to center around McDonald's serving its customers. Eventually, the 1983 slogan "McDonald's and you" marks a hinging of perspective. Ad campaigns begin to suggest (and eventually produce) the audience's appetites and desires (1992: "What you want is what you get") as mention of McDonald's becomes detached from mention of place, becomes an abstract brand, a symbol (perhaps already suggested by the double reference of "golden arches"). The brilliant "Did somebody say McDonald's?" (1997) produces the actual actual saying of McDonald's, creates a discursive and subjective reality. " The whole host of "smile" campaigns after that had a similar effect of producing a satiated subject, while turning fully to the consumer and away from the restaurant/food itself. With "I'm loving it," McDonald's is finally putting words in the audience's mouth. The voice of the advertiser becomes one with the viewer/listener, effecting a feedback loop of desire, a production of production of reality, such as seen in Burroughs' playback experiments (emphasizing the erasure of context, the subject's vulnerability of placelessness) The latest "It's what I eat and what I do" as well as "What we're made of" reenforces the element of a virus, a collective, of bodies constituted by desire, acting through and as the brand.

Here is where I turn to Burger King's viral ad campaign. After years of flopped campaigns, BK hit gold with its reintroduction of the King character. First of all, the King is a frozen, flattened parody of an old BK character. In commercials, he appears in strange situations and places, seemingly already equipped for the removal of context and image replication that would come to constitute a viral campaign. Amused viewers have created their own photoshopped versions of the King in odd places, posting them to forums and blogs. The viral campaign relies on a sort of soft control, a reliance on viewers to produce their own content which becomes an integral part of the product branding. At the same time, BK (who had already innovated in product tie-in) has launched massive initiatives in which the King appears in video games, cartoons, even talk shows.

BK and its consumers, as in the music and fashion industries, have created a feedback loop in which the desires of the consumers leads to something productive in itself, then co-opted by the corporation (its adoption of the "Creepy King" appellation that became popularized on the Net; also, the taping and commercializing of viewer's affective reactions to being told that the Wopper no longer is made).

I still have to work out exactly how Terranova's idea of masses, molecules, moles, and networks relate to these ad campaigns, and how I will organize the presentation of these connections. I also have to read Terranova's final chapter more closely to absorb her ideas of image and affect. I'm also not completely clear on the "production of desire" concept, but it seems very relevant to this undertaking.

I may emphasis the production of subjectivity/collectivity more in the McDonald's case, and issues of capital, imagery, material flows, etc., with the BK example. I'm still unsure. I also don't know if I have room to talk about the decline of loud advertising, growth of libelous ads, and what that has to do with noise and communication.

That's that for now. I'm excited to explore this further.

Code Refactoring: Soft Control Necessarily Equates to Production?

I wanted to look at the coding practice of refactoring for my final project. The first two paragraphs from the refactoring wikipedia entry help define the term:

In software engineering, "refactoring" source code means improving it without changing its overall results, and is sometimes informally referred to as "cleaning it up". Refactoring neither fixes bugs nor adds new functionality, though it might precede either activity. Rather it improves the understandability of the code and changes its internal structure and design, and removes dead code, to make it easier to comprehend, more maintainable and amenable to change. Refactoring is usually motivated by the difficulty of adding new functionality to a program or fixing a bug in it.

When we looked at abstraction of a process or machine over the semester, I understood that if a machine takes X and produces Y, it should not matter how the machine produces Y... what is important is that the machine produces Y (hence the term blackboxing).

However, when we look at code refactoring, there is a strong desire against blackboxing in the previous sense, as HOW the machine takes in X and produces Y IS important. I see this process of cutting out dead code and keeping the code that makes the machine work as a process of Terranova's immanent control (122); i.e., the programmer generated a new code that was innovative but also destructive, and refactoring is the process of keeping only the innovate code. Thus, we can look at refactoring as a possible post-processing of the fluid space that produces turbulent phenomenon (108).

In this sense, I am not sure how refactoring relates to production. It seems to solidify the machine in its routines (anti-production), but oddly, it might also free up the machine to allow it to produce something outside of its original self once the refactoring is complete (production). While I do not have a complete grasp of D+G's use of production vs. anti-production, I think their text would be helpful in seeing if refactoring is a process of bureaucratizing code or opening it up to new forms of productionafter we look at refactoring through Terranova's eyes.

power/information

In view of this course’s themes of media, technology, theory and everyday experience, I want to explore the relationship between information, surveillance, and power. I posted previously about the concept of a smart grid, which would feed back information from households about their energy use to the grid, which would adjust its flow to distribute electricity more efficiently. I think this concept would be a good way into a discussion about the ways in which electrical power is a form of political and economic power.

I will read Langlois’ dissertation and Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, supplemented by J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” in relation to these questions. In particular, Langlois’ analysis of Amazon.com and its commercial relation to individuality will be useful to examine the implications of this kind of surveillance. In the case of the smart grid, people do not even have to activate an account or actively browse; aspects of their daily lives can be monitored simply by virtue of their connection to a power supply.

Through Wiener’s and Licklider’s texts, it will be possible to draw connections to earlier information technologies that could be labeled ‘smart.’ Licklider suggests the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between man and machine in order to increase man’s efficiency and productivity. Wiener also talks of machines “learning” when he discusses feedback: “If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning” (61). The adaptation through feedback produced by surveillance will be my point of departure in reading through these texts the relation between power and information.

Material Considerations

Readings : Hayles and Terranova

Many of our readings argue that the advent of information/network/cybernetic cultures represent a break with older forms of cultural/social formations and transmissions. I am skeptical to a simple rejection of prior ideological formations. I would like to interrogate how these formations and situations affect the emergence of a network culture.
Specifically, how does class undercut and determine identification with this new network/informational culture. I would argue that there are material changes in engagements with time space that are consequences of the emergence of a network culture. However, these changes are divided unevenly. This uneveness informs the cohesiveness of a global network culture.

Space and Subjectivity in the Information Milieu

Cybernetics fundamentally questions the boundaries of embodiment by privileging pattern over presence and information over material embodiment. In Terranova's informational milieu, and specifically in 'internet space,' subjectivity fundamentally changes with the devolution of the individual into dividuals, or 'clouds' of subjectivity. According to Terranova, these redrawn boundaries of subjectivity are connected to the seeming boundlessness of the Internet. The shape and space of the Internet that redraws subjectivity also redraws the production of knowledge and its connection to labor and control. I’d like to explore the relationship of space and subjectivity in the Internet, and how shifting/multiple subjectivities influence the relationship of ontology and activity; in other words, which is more important in an informational milieu?

Unfortunately, most of the theorists we’ve read engage these questions, making it difficult to pick only one to relate to Terranova, but perhaps Hayles focuses most directly on these issues by tracing the construction of the posthuman. She equates the shift from presence to pattern with a disembodiment of subjectivity, or a disembodied ontology, which Terranova complicates by arguing that the material world and the informational milieu are not at all distinct, and the reimbodiment of information changes the production of knowledge in important ways.

With shifting notions of subjectivity comes a reconfiguration of space and systems of control. Apart from WeFeelFine.org, Google Zeitgeist, Technocrati, and Google homogenize the Internet as they search through it, emphasizing pattern above presence. The open architecture of the Internet and the shifting of 1-way linkages to a more collective structure (google pages) create a kind of global brain that privileges consensus. What are the implications in this construction of space and the transformation of the subject?

Electric Sheep

1. Media text: electricsheep.org

"Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

You may take a tour of the sheep web site and related documents. Don't miss the archive and lineages of top sheep from the current generation. "

2. Texts

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Terranova, Network Cultures

3. Electric Sheep embodies and problematizes the question of the materiality of information as raised by both N. Katherine Hayles and Tiziana Terranova. While Hayles emphasizes narrative as a device to historicize the cybernetic privileging of pattern and randomness over materiality with regard to information, Terranova insists on the status of information as material as central to a conception of information flows.

Electric Sheep foregrounds several topical concerns present in both texts. In particular, it brings to light Terranova's interest in information as a milieu, since the screen saver's evolution happens in a space of informational flows between "sleeping" computers. Moreover, the programming of "a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over" into Electric Sheep is a reinscription of scientific conceptions of genetics into an informational realm. Terranova writes, "To the decoding of the mass into a network culture, to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of a multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code modelled on the biological notion of the gene" (NC 123). How does Terranova's conception of the "mass" work in dialogue with the free labor embodied by Electric Sheep (to which users can submit their own designs)? Moreover, the fact that these users can "vote" for particular sheep by touching designated keys on the keyboard while the computer sleeps raises questions of control.

Taking its name from a Philip K. Dick novel, Electric Sheep recalls Hayles' insistence that narrative and scientific realms interpenetrated one another to imagine and produce technological realities. In particular, her notion of the pov and interest in visibility is important for Electric Sheep. The notion of computers dreaming speaks to her interest in the cyborg: dreaming is an activity traditionally reserved for human beings, where sight becomes central to the experience. In contrast, a computer monitor functions as a display, and Electric Sheep ostensibly was created for human users who wanted to see a computer develop interesting and (one could say) beautiful visualizations.

I am interested in exploring the questions raised above specifically through the lens of space and embodiment in space. How does something like Electric Sheep provide a grounds for exploring informational milieus and questions of identity and embodiment?

Digital Scopic Regimes: Invention, Knowledge & Critical Visualities

"About 85 per cent of my 'thinking' time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so"
- J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis"

" Information networks need to be studied not only at the level of the front-end, that is, the human-understandable signs appearing on a screen, but also at the level of the back-end; the many layers of software that are needed, from transmission protocols to computer languages and programs, to transform data into signs"
- Ganaele Langlois, "The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning"

"In the wonderment of [...] taxonomy, the things we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of fabe, is demonstrated as the exotic chram of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that"
- Michel Foucault, "Preface" to The Order of Things

How does visual organization, depiction, and observation act as knowledge-production in the digital informational economy? This is a question that is tacitly asked by Ganaele Langlois' brief interrogation of alternative web browsers in her text The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning, and in is a thread that I would like to follow up on, engaging her impetus for a 'critical visuality studies' by employing Michel Foucault and J.C.R. Licklider. It is my belief that both of these early texts represents two theoretical trajectories, or what Delueze & Guattari might call
"lines of flight" which are hybridized by Langlois. On the one hand, Foucault is fascinated by the system of knowledge, and the production of informational systemicity. On the other hand, Licklider sees what might be termed a "cultural imperative" for the optimization of informational depiction and exploration. The site of unification of these two "lines of flight" is the space of the browser (which is central to Langlois' study) as it creates an interface for the optimization of informational analyses, and firmly articulates a distinct systemicity (with a distinct potential to be radicalized or made into "fable" as Foucault argues).

I would like to take up the idea of the browser as the site of a new critical visuality that I will examine through these three theories. I feel that each is in aa position to offer insights (pun intended) on how the visual interface of the web browser operates to construct specific knowledge systems, optimized towards certain consumption patterns and preventing others. Jonathan Crary's "Techniques of the Observer" may also be pulled in, as a way of examining how technologies of vision situate and construct their viewer, thus complimenting the study of system, by considering the subject.

Lyotard, Langlois: Approaching knowledge production, 'technocultural' language games

I want to attempt to read Langlois through Lyotard’s conception of the transformation of knowledge in a computerized society. I would like to explore Langlois’ case studies in terms of the possible directions for a computerized society imagined by Lyotard –the terrorizing “dream” of controlling and regulating the market system, or the emancipatory open access to, “memory and data banks” (67).

Lyotard believes, “It is possible to conceive the world of postmodern knowledge as governed by a game of perfect information, in the sense that the data is in principle assessable to any expert..” (52) There are ways in which I think the case studies explored by Langlois elucidate and complicate this conception of the nature of knowledge and its distribution within “technocultural” systems.

I still need to flush out these ideas to hone in on one particular question:

-How circulating knowledge (collaboratively produced) within Langlois’ “technoculture” is exteriorized in relation to its ‘knower.’

-How Lyotard’s conception of paralogy does or does not evade "terror" through Langlois’ case studies.

-I would like to integrate Langlos’ use of ANT –and the assignment of technological processes as non-human actors and therefore as active participants in the production of knowledge through the mediation of user-produced content. This appears to complicate Lyotard’s conception of the dynamic between producers and users of knowledge.

-How Lyotard gives power to language games, advocates a linguistic fundamentalism/privileging of language and what happens to the power of language in a technoculture where, “language as discourse does not simply transmit; it shapes our relationship to the world and positions us within a specific knowledge/power system"or when, "language is influenced by material, technological and cultural conditions.” (Langlois, 85)

-The legitimation of knowledge is analyzed through Langlois’ technocultural lens in which, “computer networks shape knowledge according to specific techno-cultural rules.” (39) She determines that it is , “changes in the material basis for representation that changes the relations of power and what we understand as knowledge.” (55) I want to unpack how discourse according to Langlois changes the rules of the game and plays a role in legitimating objects of knowledge and in mediating who participates in this legitimation.

Information and the Knowledge Economy

"Knowledge labour is inherently collective, it is always the results of a collective and social production of knowledge. Capital's problem is how to extract as much value as possible out of this abundant, and yet slightly untractable terrain." (Terranova 88)

Is the information economy pure capitalism, as Hayles cites Jameson as claiming, in which bodies "can be not only sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures" (42)? In the techniques that capitalists have adopted to combat the free distribution of information content we see medium-adaptive techniques like making for themselves a presence of the Internet; legal structuring of capitalism in the push for intellectual property rights protection and in the global TRIPS agreement; and perhaps the beginnings of a reconceptualization of capitalism or at least its workings in free labour, Gates's notion of "creative capitalism," and the kinds of (interdisciplinary-communication-facilitating! self-directed! fun!) work environments espoused by companies like Google. The first two of these are essentially reactive measures that do not fundamentally alter the landscape of capitalism; but is the third something different? And across all, what is the interplay between producer/consumer, information, control, and society?

To investigate this I would like to firstly examine, in light of the many different conceptions that have surfaced in cybernetics, the precise nature of information. Although this seems like an implicit assumption on the part of many thinkers, is it really even something for which we can provide a single cross-disciplinary definition? Specifically I will be looking also at the way information functions in a knowledge-based capitalistic economy. The emphasis that many thinkers in defining information have placed on layers and relational dynamics, but necessarily mediated through some kind of physical corporeality or (re?)embodiment will be investigated in its relation to where and how or whether it fits into conventional conceptions of goods and labour and in the structures of market economies. Soft control will be examined as it is relevant specifically to trends, ideas, and behaviour in the knowledge economy (and not in terms of any politics outright); likewise my analysis of subjectivity will be on the subject as consumer/producer, and whether this is the only kind of subject about which we can speak.

CLASS TEXTS USED:
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Terranova, Network Culture

Going cyberqueer

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the way our society functions, but I would go a step farther to say that we do not live in an "information age," any longer--such was a society dominated by the dial-up modem, the home PC, the amalgamation of knowledge from various locations and made consumable at specific, dominant (geographic) sites. The culture of information age, a digital culture, is dominated by what Hayles calls "information losing its body," a removal of the physical nature of commodities. Digital culture certainly began a trend of change in society--one not merely technological, but socioeconomic as well (as Terranova points out). However, in "network culture," a geographic locale, burdened by the heavy CPU tower, the weighty cathode ray tube monitors, and connected by LAN lines, no longer becomes the priveleged site of access. Now the "cloud" has become dominant--we have e-mail on our Blackberries, the internet accessable through WiFi-enabled mobile laptop computers, all manners of gadgetry that utilize the internet on our iPhones.

However, as much as a Western priveleged culture, with 'privelege' potentially being read as white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class, has been dominated by this shift to "cloud" access, there are certain subpopulations whose relation to the internet need to be coaxed out of such totalizing terms as "network culture." In particular, the use of various internet technologies of LGBTQ-identified people will be the subject of my final paper. It has been noted by several scholarz\s that such people took to the internet with great speed and ease. Yet, with this shift from a digitial to a network culture, LGBTQ people have been weighed down in their use of the internet, chained by their bodies to specific sites to use the internet--some call this "the closet." In a society still dominated by heterosexuality, the use of queer sites by queer people is something that cannot be done in the cloud, in the open, in the public. Chained by fear of judgment and reproach, perhaps out of fear of losing social status, LGBTQ users of the internet who want to network with similar individuals do so in the privacy of their own homes. Their bodies are still very much restricted in their use information technology.

I want to explore these connections in my final paper. In particular, because the term "LGBTQ" encompasses such a wide and diverse range of people, I will restrict my study to men who have sex with men, or MSM, perhaps an overly-clinical term but one I feel makes the most sense to use in this context. How do these men use the internet? What is at stake when they log on? Do they construct new identities, new bodies, for themselves on the internet? How do they use the internet to network socially with similar men, and why? Has this relation changed in response to a new network culture? And how is this different from how the "mass" use the internet?

I will use Terranova's Network Culture and Hayles' How We Became Posthuman to explore these questions.

Is Art a Form of Social Media?

“Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.” (Lyotard – 82)

Where lies art, artists, and viewers in our networked, technocultural society?

The question that I am addressing, is art a form of social media, asks if the use of social media to promote art has changed the conditions of production, value and status of art, and relations of viewership. Artists no longer sit in studios by themselves all day – they are out collaborating with other artists, interacting with the public, and doing it all while sitting behind a computer screen. I want to question the use of social media in the art world to explore how art practices, presentation techniques, viewership, and community have changed. I will be using Lyotard’s theory of postmodernity, Terranova’s book on “Network Culture,” and Kevin Kelly’s theory of “1,000 True Fans” (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php).

Some questions I want to explore: Are the technologies of art, from Photoshop to processing, tools that distance the artist from their production, to use Plant’s theory on tools? Or are these tools creating a new form of art making that could be argued lies in Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern? With the proliferation of artists on the web, what defines art and its value? How does the interaction between artists and viewers affect art (is this a form of free labor on the part of viewers)? Is art made for the masses or the individual or the dividual? 

Something like this

Information has come to exist in a generalized form that is fluid and moveable. Its body has been discovered or its body has been lost depending on how you look at it. In any case, the digital revolution has brought a lot of new problems into play concerning quality, originality, and storage. This is what I want to discuss. Specifically, the reconceptualization of storage and how it relates to the capitalist dream of efficiency and ubiquity. At the same time, these technologies are new, fragile, and singular.

Here is the paradigm shift that I want to investigate. The move from the multiplicity inherent in analog storage versus that singularity of digital storage in terms of materiality and the change in the object from a singular entity to a multiplicity of entities. The story of the former is thus:

a. Once upon a time, people stored their photos in photo albums and had large bookshelves full of books, records, and videotapes. The process of viewing always involved the choosing of a single object and having it engage with a playback device and the storage was divided into separate units. Now, all your music, movies, and pictures can be converted, created, or bought digitally and then stored digital in a hard drive. The entire contents of your music collection, film collection and so on can exist on one hard drive. In the past, a fire might destroy part of your collection, you might lose a tape, break a record but the rest would still be intact. Now, if you've digitized everything for the convenience of having your storage and playback contained in one device or the ease of movement, it can be lost by the simple clumsiness of a dropping. A single drop is the equivalent of a house burning down in terms of information loss and so we are told to have redundancies and redundancies of the same information as a safety measure. In any case, these technologies are relatively new and the whole point of storage is for something to last for an indeterminate length of time. A hard drive must be formatted in a specific file system so sometimes its not compatible with all types of computers and not for all time thus its legitimacy as a storage medium.

The story of the latter is thus:
b. Once upon a time, you had the prized singular possession that had to be taken care of. You just bought a record by Robert Johnson and want to make sure it lasts and doesn't get too much dirt on it so the sound quality remains high. Then your brother borrowed it to use as a frisbee, now you have to buy a new one. The possession was singular barring another monetary transaction for ownership. Now the materiality can be copied and digitized and made redundant over and over again. The piece of materiality becomes the master and the digital file never degrades or you can even circumvent that and buy the file digitally. This, however, brings up a few problems. In terms of accurate reproduction, you have a give and take between quality and space, an mp3 will be 4 mb, a wav will be 40 mb but also, mp3s have more compatibility. The same propriety problems rear their head in terms of if you rip your music into a format that later becomes obselete and cannot be converted. Thus you must decide how much of the original is to be in the copy and you now must have faith in your format. This is similar to the movement from records to tapes to cds except that you could always maintain that player whereas in the domain of information, if you updated your computer or program and now your file format is no longer supported, you're in trouble. Because the computer is mutlifunctional and remotely controlled by the company that creates its systems, you exist at their mercy though systems such as linux complicate this concern. In terms of degradation, a degraded record can still be listened to though there is noise while a file that has become corrupted cannot be used at all. The safety measure for the analog material is the fact that its degradation is slow and allows for use while the safety measure of the digital is its ability for infinite redundancy. The problem is that redundancy requires labor, re-ripping files, copying and copying and copying, uploading, etc.

Another thing to consider is the new domain of the internet as a storage medium. That is, no longer on my computer but on my website of gmail account in which case even more control is lost and given to the hosting or email company for the safety of your information though if its up for download, it can get diffused so that the redundancy of the file is now not just with you but spread through whomever has downloaded your files.

In terms of applicable texts to this discussion, much of it will deal with notions of what information is and has become and its tit for tat with materiality. This is discussed in several texts and I want to focus on its economic and social function and in this sense relates to Terranova as Terranova's discussion always relates back to capitalism and its evolution through the development of new media. Through this development of new storage, a new type of control is enacted where the company controls your things for you. It's not just the record but the record, record player, shelf, and house that a single hard drive in a computer represents. In addition to this, I would like to consider the implications of online storage for globalization and networking. I also want to investigate Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the organization of information versus material objects, that is, the shelf which is a single instantiation of all objects versus the file tree hierarchy of folders in a computer.

Body or no body? posthumans vs mass/identity

Starting from the point where I feel kind of seduced by Hayles as well as Terranova, who seem to contradict each other fundamentally. I would like to re-map how they constitute subjectivity and do a comparison, of where this gets us and if it makes any sense. Or which theoretical model holds which possibilities/has which flaws? 

The idea is at the moment to start out with hayles conceptualization of information loosing its body through cybernetics + us turning into being posthuman

versus

Terranova's reading of information gaining a body through cybernetics + and us being mass/individual 

and how different are they? terranovas mass/individual seems to work pretty similar to a flickering signifier. flickering bodies? no it is kind of tempting to use hayles concept of flickering signifiers in connection to terranovas construction of subjectivity: since through the mass perceiption and waves of intensities can pass - and then there is a feed back loop - matterializing embodiment - it flickers for a moment of zero degree - back into the system - leaving a trace in the space the movement has turbulented through.

but I am essentially not quite sure how to conceptualize this, exactly. the idea is at the moment to first, see how information is defined and then see what happens to subjectivity and see where it takes me. My interest is especially to understand how I can be seduced by both since they seem to contradict each other quite a bit.

I am also intrigued by actor network theory, and would maybe like to tie it in, if it makes sense. and of course the wolf men, they are fun, they might stop by, too.

also not sure how the assignment differs because of the whole graduate student credit thing? shall i just write more pages?

layers - [addition to previous post]

(this is also posted as a comment to my blog post from yesterday, in which I promised more on layers....)

In the Langlois, I was interested in her insistence that software's "role as yet another mediator needs to be taken into account" (49) in contrast to its reduction to electrical voltages. I thought through this quite a bit then, writing "as long as it functions then it is, but I just today mentally coined it to myself a bit clearer: software cannot merely be reduced to voltage differences, because historically it is based on and in the moment it embodies particular (human) decisions, by developers, based on user-friendliness, &c.

Where this is intriguing me in regard to Terranova's book is that she too focuses on layers-- which I think are important not just because they "build" on each other (59) but because of this same kind of mediation.

"Mediation" for Terranova is in some sense an inadequate process-at-work (the social decomposition into "closed enclaves coexisting but not interacting with each other outside the mediation of symbols" (61); mediation, that is, prohibits more direct contact. But elsewhere, it is attributed different characteristics. Mediation is (trivially) implicated in the social (87); and I think the mediation-not-reduction process at work in code functions in the same way that labour does vis-a-vis human work (waged labour vs human labour (88).

Where I'd like to go with this is a comparison of these underlying processes compared with those that underlie the image-as-not-representation (141). But as a result of classes, locked doors, and faulty Internet, it's later than I wanted it to be and our last class is starting!!

The financial system as a communication channel

On page 25, Terranova discusses the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a communication channel. At this point in her book she has been discussing "The Limits of Possibility," or the ways in which the probabilistic nature of information theory both relies on and leads directly to a constrained field of possibility. "How many points did the Dow Jones lose today and what are the chances that it will go up?" she asks. "Is it by chance that there is a whole sector of the financial markets, such as that of futures, that is based on a kind of legal gamble on the probable future?" (25) She cites Weaver's point that "the action of a code on a situation was also a kind of containment of the openness of the situation to a set of mutually excluding alternatives" (24). Her view of the situation reveals the reverse operation of the model feeding back to the modeled. As she says on page 18, "The tactics.. [begotten by a naive understanding of information theory] might backfire because it does not take sufficiently into account the powers of feedback or retro-action."

In the case of the financial markets, a naive view of the Dow as a communication channel over the set of messages {rise, fall} would not take into sufficient account that actions taken as a result of 'receiving' (really interpreting) messages from the numerical pattern of the price will feed back as 'noise' to the information channel. In fact, investors and economists alike model financial markets as nonlinear chaotic systems. Regardless of this somewhat sophisticated view, market movements are always projected onto a one-dimensional space of share price, the nature of which necessarily constructs {rise, fall}. This unidimensional projection of the multidimensional market, Terranova implies, becomes the space of a communication channel, subject to the same types of distortions and constructions present in one. Investors, interested only in profits and losses, take the multidimensional space of, say, the prices of each stock in the Dow, and reduce it through projection to one average movement. That radically degraded version of the system is then fed back into the system, largely through consumer action (the Dow has been a focus for this country for a while). And this feedback can create patterns.

The unregulated backwaters of the market, dependant on "poorly understood derivative securities" and derivatives of derivatives of bundles of those derivatives, had become an involuted communication channel whose success (rise) barely depended on the source of its value but rather on the feedback dynamics of the market itself. As soon as the source was shown to be worthless, those dynamics pulled the whole sector under. As Terranova says, the interpretation of a signal or system as a communication channel necessarily constructs a disconnected realm of possibility around it which is divorced somehow from its real substance. When that interpretation is fed back into the signal, the whole system starts to lose its anchor and float away.

Images as bioweapons in the informational milieu

Terranova’s book is one of the more engrossing and compelling I’ve come across in a long time, and I’m grateful for the circumstances that led me to read it. Beyond a useful (necessary) background for understanding the political and social issues raised in her book, the text makes me appreciate our semester’s work as a comprehensive body with strong political and social implications. For me, she more than everyone else we’ve read raises the question: What’s at stake?

The passage I found most personally interesting was that regarding communication, transparency, and democracy. Introducing both Stiglitz and Habermas (two of my favorites), she engages with Stiglitz’s assertion that transparency and freedom of information is a salve on the wounds of democracy and global governance through Habermas’ discussion of the ‘public sphere.’ While public space was once (in the 18th century) a place for the rationalization of authority, media and the inclusion of the masses distorts this space into a contested war zone of manipulation. “Communication has never only been about the sunshine of reason illuminating the dark secrets of governance, but it has always cast its own shadows”(133). Terranova points out Berlusconi, Osama bin Laden, Bush, etc, as ‘masters of the mediascape,’ arguing that control of the media ‘is restricted to those who can afford it.’ More than that, the increasingly ‘televisual nature of politics’ demonstrates the direct involvement of the state and private interests in ‘the public sphere,’ now a ‘site of permanent conflict,’(135) which could also here be called an informational milieu.

Moving onto Baudrillard’s theory of the mass, it becomes difficult, in other words, to parse the propaganda from the information or knowledge in these info milieus, be they the internet or other forms of media, particularly because ‘the image’ is “not so much decoded for meaning as consumed, that is absorbed and relayed.”(141) (My working definition of propaganda is something that tells you what to think rather than something that informs how to think.) Here I thought of the informationization (to hark back to chapter one) of the news event or insurgency act in the form of the videoed suicide bombing. Al Qaeda’s media department in Iraq has self consciously turned event into packaged visual information to be consumed by the masses by documenting the process and success of suicide attacks and dispersing them over the Internet. I’ve always found this interesting because of the duality or redundancy of the event, it’s two audiences, two different aims, and two different acts; one in the informational milieu and one in the war zone. While seemingly adding to ‘transparency’ in communication by providing the world with moving images of the situation in Iraq, many of which news agencies such as CNN have used in place of their own footage, the creation and distribution of these home-made news clips are also clearly acts of media warfare, and definitely propaganda. I think the fact that both CNN and Al Qaeda have shown the same footage to their different ends throws light on the relationship between the mass and the consumption of images, of fascination and yet distracted perception. (Side note: ‘Perception management’ consultancy firms sounds so sinister).

It is both sad and hopeful that Baudrillard’s singularly cynical view of the masses shifts as a ‘networked multitude’ into a discerning, fragmented, and (according to Terranova) intolerant world. Although equipped with an ‘active power’ of differentiation, Terranova argues (perhaps too pessimistically) that as a political milieu this network culture resembles a battlefield more than a utopia, and I’m inclined to agree, with a dose of optimism.

Taking a Look at the Abstract Machine of Soft Control

Terranova initially made some points about information and networks I read but did not entirely grasp until her chapter on biological computation.

One of her first moves was to posit Shannon's informational theory as a closed linguistic system of probabilities (20). We've studied this to some extend before, but then she introduces what she calls virtualization. "The virtualization of a process involves opening up a real understood as devoid of transformative potential to the action of forces that exceed it from all sides" (27). What exactly this process consists of eluded me. We've studied D+G's attempt to break out of the linguistic regimen, but what was hinted at here by Terranova did not necessarily shout out "rhizome" since we have "action from all sides" within this virtualization. Apparently, the roots are pushing, grinding, and morhping one another.

But then take a look at Conway's the Game of Life. We have these individual elements that shove up against one another, change one another. The grid of cells looks lifeless, cluttered, unpredictable, but yet each cell sucumbs to the pressures of those around it and emerges within a whole new environment. We don't know how things will look, we have to simulate them (be it by hand, computer, or chemical process). The very fact that we can't predict the game helped me to bettter understand how virtualization refutes Shannon's information theory.

We are then able to illustrate other terms Terranova uses here. Microstates can obviously be the cells on the grid while the macrostate can take the form of the grid as a whole. We see that the microstates of cellular automaton "cannot be known completely because they cannot be studied by dissection: once the connectionand mutual affection with other elemens is removed, the individual elements become passive and innert" (104). Who the hell cares about taking one cell out of the game of life and looking at it? It means nothing to us to look at that one cell- it is meaningless without the other cells surrounding it, it is lifeless. However, when we surround it by other microstates, we cannot even begin to predict the state of that cell without simulation- it's "impossible... to determine a priori the sequence of configuartions that running a CA experiment will produce" (112).

Informational space, where "space becomes informational... when it presents an excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our knowledge, and a nonlinear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables" (37) can become the limited sets of algorithms that run each cell. Information space requires the "mechanical and local rules" (110) that allow for such things as self-reproduction, unpredictability, and change of states. Informational space requires a large set of interacting algorithms.

In chapter 2, we also had a big new term when Terranova explains Xeno's paradox as not understanding space and time properly. "The virtuality of duration, the qualitative change that every movement brings not only to that which moves, but also to the space that it moves in and to the whole which that space necessarily opens up" (51). Time changes space when we think of her use of the term 'duration'. In the game Life, we see that every new tick/beat/turn changes the entire grid. Time always changes space- even if the board is clear, the algorithm is still running and open to new possiblities (it is waiting for you to place that next "live" cell down).

Major Question:

We then get to the notion of productivity: "the autonomy and creativity is produced by a process of recursive looping that generates divergent and transmittable variations at all points. Such systems, that is, are characterized by their tendency to escape themselves" (105).

Productivity hangs around in Terranova's liquid state: "at a certain value of information speed, the movement of cells turns liquid and it is this state that is identified as the most productive, engendering vortical structures that are both stable and propagating" (114). This .5 lambda value where "within CAs, then, the key area of computation is identified with a border zone fluctuating between highly ordered and highly random CAs" (113).

I can see how this can go outside of Shannon's theory of information, but it seems like this .5 lambda value harkens back to a linguistic system. A lingusitic system is predictable in the sense of syntax: a non-linguistic system escapes our grammar and thus does not fit into our system. However, lingusitics is productive in the sense that everytime one speaks, they can form a sentence never heard before. Redundancy and predictability allow for that. I am hesitant to connect the terms noise or randomness to that productive aspect of language; nevertheless, the liquid state produces new, unpreditable creative structures, yet they still remain within some sort of grammar or algorithm. For example, the CA of a game of Life won't build red or green squares if we've only programmed them to build black and white squares.

Terranova talks about these limits when she writes about the limits of genetic search algorithm. A CA is not artificial intellegence, but is dependent on the human limits set about it. These limits, be they rules in the CA, the predicitive element of Shannon's information theory, or the grammar of linguistics, set the stage for stable, productive forms produced through innovation. However, the term limit applies broadyly and diverly to the systems I outline above. How should we apply, define, and look at limits within Terranova's text? I think in my case it is easy to abuse or misread the term. We can always add limits (a new protocol, a new cell state in the game of life), but we can never take them all away.

Minor questions:

What is the difference between prediction and simulation? Does simulation require time? Is Shannon's information theory really predictable, or must it too require simulation like a CA?

I look back at Every Icon by John F. Simon and the first thing that comes to mind is "duration" art. I think using Terranova's use of the term duration applies fantastically well to this piece. This seems like a pretty different kind of CA though (almost linear in a way). Should we think of this merely as a subclass of a game of Life (with a simple pattern), or should we question how a state state within a system determines the system?

On arrival...

Terranova fittingly brings together a lot of key concepts and themes that we have grappled with throughout the semester in order to apply it to the circumstance of the modern moment. Often it seems that one reads media analyses only to realize that it has already become irrelevant but it is not so with this. It's moment is still our and its reading still contains accuracy.

The big questions that come to my mind after reading the book are in terms of goals in practice and the function of media. Her discussion of Baudrillard's description of the masses as a body that in a sense desires this sort of manipulative spin from their media opens the grand question of 'well, what is media good for?' that is besides the manipulation of large groups of people for the benefit of interest groups. In this question, there arises the dialogue between internet and television where television maintains a hierarchy of an information flows whereas the internet does not thanks to its open architecture and so appear at odds with one another. There is also the interesting question of media's role in globalization and the inability to control this such as in the discussion of how media depicting suffering in underdeveloped countries created anger in those countries more than sympathy in overdeveloped countries and the use of media for goals that are anti-western and anti-enlightenment. For example, I find it hard to imagine the sort of global decentralized terrorist infrastructure that exists today and coordinates itself in the shadows to be able to exist without the internet or cell phones or any number of other mediating technologies.

So I suppose these are sort of jumbled thoughts but really, there's a lot to say about this book and how it relates to what the status is on the ground today. We are connected, we mediated, we are played with, we are masses, we function as dynamical systems whether we know it or not, want to or not and so all of this must be taken into consideration in political goals and objectives. As was stated in the book, the ethics of journalism are not as efficacious as those of advertisement that consider the need to clear out a channel, create contact, and reduce noise as much as possible. Our news is never direct experience and comes to us as always already processed simulcra. This camera angle or that one, this is what's given, this is their choice; the television gives us and constructs our gaze just as a book we read tells us our thoughts and so media is redundant in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's descritpion of language.

So we live in a network culture typified by informational dynamics that become through networks such as the internet that are continually expanding and present a problem and a possibility. This is the internet's great interest, its organization in opposition to all the tenets previously valued as necessary for something to function with efficacy. This corresponds to the biological turn in computing of which the internet is born as an organism, a body without organs, where each intensity of its multiplicity is a player in the global network of networks hooking in and out and routing and rerouting as fluid intensity. This is not easy to manage, this is not easy to control thus the need for this new style of internet imperialism that allows for coexistence rather than domination and specificity of the target rather than broadcast.

All of these media really do have a lot of implications for the way we live life that are slowly materializing and becoming manifest and as this continues I wonder how much it is a benefit and how much a detriment. After all, much of technology requires a great expenditure of energy, as diffuse networks problems can spread quickly and have devastating effects while still being difficult to localize, and, as it is practiced today and described by Baudrillard, media is often more of a hindrance than an aid to understanding, and this is all in addition to the problems of global corporate imperialism. But it's been a long day and I have just returned from the vast highway networks of the east coast as a part of the masses of cars still and moving at different intensities. I have been becoming car all day and now I shall become sleep.

Masses of Masses

"We are always simultaneously both mass and class, mass and multitude, mass and race, mass and nation; and so on."

Terranova argues that the identification or sub-identification of mass is one of the active categories new communication politics. My reservation around this revolves around the use of the word and as a conjunctive. This conjunctive is of course situated within Deleuze and Gauttari's large discourse on becoming and molar conjunctives. The problem is that earlier in the book Terranova concedes that there is still a very material barrier to involvement in this kind of new media communactive framework. These material barriers rest on the level of access to hardware and a certain amount of media literacy. Now, it would be awfullly presumptive to say that such barriers are wholly determined by the functins of class, race, nation and so on. Yet, it would be dismissive to say that material barriers would not in some way be determined by identifications or sub identifications along classifications of class, race, nation and so on. Thus, I think that the conjunctive and is misleading in that deprivileges the second term in the formulation. I would say rather, that it is mass determined by race, nation, class, gender, and so on. It is still to early in my opinion to jettison those ideological formations in favor of molar becoming. Even if such a line of flight would become the ultimate goal of new politics, there are still many determinations that need to be analyzed before such a flight takes place.

I also found two things particularly interesting.

The first, is the idea of communication and networks as deforming and constructing durations/time/space. It made me think of Kristeva essay, which unfortunately I don't recall the name of, that I read during my undergrad years. The main arguement was that predetermined roles and expectations involved in gender construction also constructed durational feelings differently for men and women. One being linear goal oriented time and the other being circular role oriented time. This along with her mention of Virilio's concept of hypertime leads me to think that we need to also think of new media and communication within a specific function of time. I would say that this could be called maybe something along the lines of a possibility-function. New media and communications explodes the possibility function of time. My brain is a little too addled from turkey to flesh out this arguement in a blog post but I could maybe argue that the implication of this possibility function is that time moves faster. Not only hyper as in all pervasive but hyper as in hyper-duration in terms of speed. Those with access to technology are able to get more done in a shorter amount of time over a longer measure of distance. I think it would be interesting to think this function in its massively divisive engagement. In other words how different levels of material access and literacy create a divide in possibility-functions.

The reference to Massumi's television exeriments with different voiceovers made me recall Zizek's favorite example regarding Levi-Strauss. The example of the village with two subgroups who painted their village in differenet ways depending on their social position within the village. It's interesting to think the idea that even watching media across different platforms and different positions needs to traverse this gap in the real.

biological computation

Reading Terranova’s discussion of biological computation this week reminded me of an article a friend sent me a few weeks ago, “Testing Darwin,” published in Discover by Carl Zimmer in 2005. It describes ‘digital organisms’ that are clearly an example of von Neumann’s cellular automata, which the article agrees have the potential to be a serious alternative to Turing’s universal computing machine.

The article describes a lab at Michigan State that runs a program called Avida, which sets conditions under which fragments of code can self-replicate, mutate, and produce emergent phenomena.

“After more than a decade of development, Avida's digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life … One thing the digital organisms do particularly well is evolve. “Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it,” Pennock says”
“physicist Chris Adami of Caltech, set out to create the conditions in which a computer program could evolve the ability to do addition….Within six months, Adami's organisms were addition whizzes. “We were able to get them to evolve without fail,” he says. But when he stopped to look at exactly how the organisms were adding numbers, he was more surprised. “Some of the ways were obvious, but with others I'd say, 'What the hell is happening?”

This is only another example of what Terranova is talking about in her explanation of CAs, but the article does a good job describing the process the researchers use and it helped me understand the lessons of the “biological turn” that she insists upon in the fourth chapter.

What I don’t entirely understand are the implications of the concept of ‘the selfish gene.’ Terranova writes, “The selfish gene is a simple diagram of the apparatuses of subjectification that the abstract machine of soft control distributes and perpetuates not so much among molecules as among collectivities” (126). And, “The selfish gene, however, is not just a metaphor, or a moralization of natural life or an ideological justification of cut-throat competition in the ‘free’ market economy, but more insidiously a technique” (128). Is the selfish gene only a technique of “culture in as much as [it] is also an industry – and hence a mode of labour” (129), or is it also a potentiality of bottom-up organization, whose limits she stresses in the final chapter?

The article also touches on the question of free labour, in an interesting example that I won’t develop here. Creationists threatened by the practical defense of evolution that the Avida program furnishes download its code for free in order to attempt to expose theoretical problems with its initial conditions. The researcher merely says, “We literally have an army of thousands of unpaid bug testers. What more could you want?”

One last thought that Zimmer brings up is that Avida sort of demonstrates how computer viruses could potentially evolve very quickly. The decentralization of the Internet that Terranova harps on is designed to avoid widespread damage, but the example of the virus highlights the interplay between creation and destruction and the sharply anti-utopian nature of network culture that the book is right to emphasize.

Guattari waiting for? We have nothing Deleuze.

Reading Terranova is a great way to tie the semester together, reintroducing ideas of information and "digitation" to a very Deleuzonal/Guattaric reading of networks. To tell the truth, I was stunned at the relatively few mentions of D/G, whose vocabulary she uses unabashedly and whose "Anti-Oedipus" and Thousand Plateaus could be tied to the great majority of her arguments. I admit, I thought the fourth chapter was maddeningly repetitive, where usually Terranova's analysis is terse and dead-on. Also, I haven't read the last chapter yet, so apologies if certain connections I make are redundant/noisy.

The first chapter of Network Culture seems to support my week-old theory that one might read the field of information as a body without organs: "Information is no longer simply the first level of signification, but the milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning.(9)" Information is a flow, an "unfolding process of material constitution" through which certain signifying and a-signifying practices emerge. It is a backdrop against which any number of parties attempts to communicate, clarify, designate, sabotage, scramble. As a flow of material intensities, noise (whether through faulty hardware or crossed signals) can both derail a message or become the message.

Information, as a field of probabilities, is a field of virtualities. A power struggle is a struggle to reduce the flow to binary terms, to the duality of reality and possibility, "deal or no deal"; social struggle turns Langlois' a-semiotic genetic encoding into the selfish gene, an actor faced with the binary of co-operation or self-determinism. At the same time--and I'm not quite clear on this--these stiffly metaphysical moves simultaneously open up a "quantum jump onto another plane"; they somehow guarantee the deterritorializing play of the virtual. Perhaps this is because the social and the political infiltrate a network as material intensities, open it up to a certain volatility which needs to exist in the context of "soft control":

"The network, that is, is not a closed electronic space, but it is literally contracted by the intensity of the informational flows that reach it from the outside, an intensity which rises and declines, disperses and diversifies again to the rhythms of the geopolitical events, social debates and cultural trends that are the whole onto which a network duration opens.(71)"

"An open network should always be potentially extensible, and therefore should be structurally equipped to deal with irreconcilable tensions by leaping to a new level of generality that would thus allow such differences to connect within a common space.(57)"

Hence, the ability to change scale, as a the tree and the wind suddenly form a rhizome, as the hacker who breaks a protocol simply opens onto another broader one. And hence, the notion of imperialism as "inclusive" rather than "exclusive"--open, vulnerable, but enormously productive for its openness.
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I also thought chapter three tied in very well with "Anti-Oedipus," for reasons I will briefly outline. Basically, the idea of labor being separated from employment seems to allow for the extension of the idea of production. People who chat on AOL, just as much as free-lance coders, are implicated in a machine of social and capitalistic production--on websites like Amazon, it is a capitalistic intensity that designates the social position of the user as consumer. There is "an investment of desire into production,(84)" meaning that capitalism is not some greedy, flesh-rending cyborg-monster, but an open network in which socializers as well as entrepreneurs incorporate themselves.

And where we find talk of capitalism and networks, we encounter the idea of the production of production. Terranova observes, on the Internet, an increasing ephemerality and transparency of the actual commodity, a privileging of quick turnaround and updated content, in short, of the process of production. In this sense, the product is production. Where you find interrupting machines (data packets, discrete rather than continuous coding), where you find knowledge as both "[autonomous] from production" and yet the "principal productive force," you find the production of production.

a fitting conclusion

Reading Terranova’s Network Culture felt something like placing the final piece of a puzzle into that last perfect fitting hole. Throughout each reading we have completed, each concept we have discussed, the same question has continually emerged: what’s at stake? In her analysis of network culture and the politics of the information age, Terranova has taken a stab at this central question, connecting the science of information and its actualization through network culture to concrete geopolitical structures and events that inform and perhaps constitute the structure of networks themselves. Rooting her analysis in the information science of Weiner, Weaver, and Shannon in particular, Terranova attempts to reveal the ways in which emerging informational networks are fundamentally changing the realities of our individual and collective lives. Similarly to Langlois, Terranova’s work on the internet suggests new possibilities for ethnographic research on changing connections between global and local, conflict and peace, privilege and oppression.

 

I was drawn to two specific lines of flight within Terranova’s work:

 

1) Mapping/Visualizing/Describing Networks

 

I was interested in the ways in which network culture and different networks within the internet have been described, talked about, and understood. Terranova associates networks with both separateness  (“dust-like galaxies of minor and specialized nodes”… ) and interconnectedness (hence “vulnerability to informational dynamics, chain reactions, viral infections, &c”). Society has mapped certain shapes and forms onto the internet, visualizing the internet as a variation on interlocking spiderwebs, hub-and-spoke models, “sphere” shapes (“blogosphere”), and countless others.

 

Concurrent with these attempts to describe the shape of the internet have been new efforts to map and quantify the flow of information throughout the network. Algorithms from search engines no longer just track the pages and site that exist on the web but the flow patterns and movement between each page and server (48). As web access (and information traffic) increase, information scientists will create new metrics by which to quantify and document patterns of information flow and access.

 

Attempting to account for the emergence of the internet visually, Terranova sees the internet as an interconnected assemblage of microsegmented, highly differentiated pieces. Information is not, as hayles suggests, disembodied; rather, it’s body is dissected on the micro scale, segmented into infinitesimal fragments.

 

2) Politics of access/usership/information

 

            Attempting to understand the interplay between network culture and its broader social context, Terranova sees the network as ““literally contracted by the intensity of the informational flows that reach it from the outside” in response to “geopolitical events, social debates and cultural trends.” 71  As network culture follows and tracks the ebb and flow of geopolitics, new questions emerge regarding stratification, domination, and global connection. Is network culture creating a globally connected elite positioned to continually dominate those bound to the world of locality in what Manuel Castelles terms a “structural domination of the space of flows over the space of places?” 43 If so, can we identify sites of resistance to this hegemonic ordering, and where?

 

 

Lastly, similarly to last week I was interested in how all of this talk of mapping, domination, and global/local could be enhanced and better informed by new ways of measuring and visualizing the flows of information across the web. In analyzing how national, cultural, and geographic boundaries are being affected by global network culture; in exploring which people are being included and which people are being excluded in the ever-growing “global village;” and in fleshing out the new, electronically-mediated connections between global and local can we finally begin to answer ever-present questions of “what’s at stake” in our study of informational theory. 

Techniques of Communication Management

Terranova brings up the topic of communications management within network cultures throughout her book. I found this topic particularly interesting in relation to the realm of public relations because of the use of “free labor,” as well as the need to deal with how the “masses” receive and react to images, for example how public relations agencies establish brands through advertising campaigns online.

            Shannon brings up the topic of communication management in relation to the discussion between signal and noise. “The new techniques of communication management are crucially concerned with the relation between signal and noise with the explicit intent of generating a ‘media effect.’” (10) Media effect’s must be considered within the informational milieu, “a milieu composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such ‘massless flows’” (8), that Terranova posits information cultures are constituted by. The job of communication managers is then to determine the overall dynamics of the informational milieu are presenting a message that will be preserved across the noise a signal must battle.

            However, Terranova see that communication management theory leaves out certain aspects of the informational dimension of communication in that through enforcing short slogans or logos the “unfolding process of material constitution” (19) is ignored. Ignoring this aspect is due to the crisis of representation in network culture, how to cater to distracted perception that defines their audience. The solution within communications management is to sell to the individual or what Deleuze calls “dividuals” (34).

            This segmentation of mass audiences demands a desire of distraction or a perceived excess of images. In relation to this work, perception management focuses on this perception of images. The public is not seen to have a public opinion, but rather a simulation of truth, the manipulation of the informational milieu, convinces the public. The ability to produce such images makes images work in a new way, as Terranova terms, as bioweapons. Images as bioweapons creates an “artificial informational ecology of image flows” (141) where perception is always already within the images.

            In relation to Terranova’s discussion on free labor: where “cultural flows as originating within a field which is always and already capitalism” (80) – are images now lost within these cultural flows within capitalism? How has communication and perception management changed individual’s relation to images or have they only harp on the changes that occur due to network culture? Can images be bioweapons? Will these forms of management survive over time or are they only temporary fixes for the purpose of selling commodities? 

Politicizing Space

"The logic of representation presupposes a homogeneous space where different subjects can recognize each other when they are different and hence when they are identical" (35)

This space of representation is the three-dimensional space of subjectification, a space that allows for the illusion of stable subjects and objects that exist independently of this space and of temporal duration. In some sense, this concept of space constitutes the bounded liberal subject while disavowing any intrinsic connection to it. In some sense, space is "empty." 

(This gives rise to a question I often had before reading this chapter: how can we know the size or shape of the universe if it may expand and contract within what is seemingly more space, space that should be included in the original measurement?)

Yet for Terranova, subjectified homogeneous space cannot support a mapping of the internet. Citing the influence of geographers, she points out that "one of the most fundamental aspects of communication lies in the ways in which it forms and deforms the fabric of space and time" (40). Thus, space and time are not entities independent of communication technologies, but rather are constituted in relation to them. For example, the precision of the start and end times of our class depends upon the proliferation and (relative) standardization of timekeeping mechanisms. 

In order to aid her formulation of network space, Terranova turns to Henri Bergson:

"For Bergson, by thinking of movement as a linear translation of an object through space we miss a fundamental element: the virtuality of duration, the qualitative change that every movement brings not only to that which moves, but also to the space that it moves in and to the whole into which that space necessarily opens up" (51)

It is precisely the "virtuality of duration" that poses the principal difficulty in mapping the internet. For each packet of information seeks different routes to its destination based upon factors irreducible to three-dimensional concerns; it is not a question of finding the shortest path "as the crow flies" across the terrain of digital space, but of optimizing rates of data transfer between nodes in a network (excuse me if I play fast and loose with technical terms--what I mean to emphasize is the notion of optimizing speed and inter-nodal transfer of information). One cannot drive on the shoulder (or move through other such "empty" spaces) to avoid traffic; rather, it is the traffic itself that engenders networked space. Thus, for Terranova, "information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu" (51). 

Furthermore, duration "implies a qualitative transformation of space and space itself is nothing but an ongoing movement opening onto an unbounded whole" (52). I think that this concept of a space that opens onto an "unbounded whole" poses certain challenges to Terranova's theorization of the internet: what is the whole onto which internet space opens up? I can envision several possible answers: the smooth space of the internet's open architecture, which is founded upon the possibility of adding or removing a (theoretically) unlimited number of other networks or nodes; informational space, the space that is constituted by the transversal movement of information among media (Television, Radio, Internet, etc.); or real space itself, space as such. I don't think that these answers are mutually exclusive; indeed, it seems that all of these spaces are imbricated in but not contained by the internet. I'd like to pursue these interspatial relationships further in class discussion (her discussion on page 71 of Semptember 11th is of interest).

(Furthermore, this question of an unbounded whole brings me back to my speculative question: how do we know the "shape" of the universe? My confusion on this topic--a confusion that most likely persists on certain levels since I don't subscribe to Astrophysics Quarterly--arose because I posited a blank space against which the universe is measured, the background of perspectival representation. Yet, to provide an equally speculative answer, if the universe is just such an ongoing movement opening onto an unbounded whole, the 'shape' of the universe cannot be a transcendent Figure that would stand out against some non-universe background, but is a mobile property immanent to the universe's becoming).

Therefore, if "the linkages established by the tele-command of electronic space . . . do not lead to a single time or space, but to a multiple duration where linkages constitute a fluid dynamic of connection and differentiation," (52) then traditional concepts of politics based upon subjectified, three-dimensional space may become obsolete for a politics of network culture. The question of controlling territory, long a foundation of sovereignty (perhaps even in, e.g., counter-cultural attempts to occupy administrative buildings) seems radically outmoded or at least in need of reconfiguration. Identity politics also comes under fire as individuals are traversed by myriad information flows, becoming decomposable "dividuals." Rather, "the politics of network culture are not only about competing viewpoints, anarchic self-regulation and barriers to access, but also about the pragmatic production of viable topological formations able to persist within an open and fluid milieu" (68). Space is not the neutral "battleground" upon which politics plays out; rather, spaces must be produced so that they may persist within the unstable milieu of internetworks. That is, Terranova's politics are not only a struggle for space that already exists, but practices that produce spaces understood durationally, spaces that can make use of the internet's deterritorializing fluidity without botching the whole project by deterritorializing too wildly (I parse, rather poorly, Deleuze and Guattari's "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?"). In so doing, network politics may mobilize the virtuality inherent in durational space to challenge the probabilistic political calculus of the possible & the real in favor of heretofore unimagined possibilities.

A Question:

At times it seems that Terranova succumbs to more traditional spatial metaphors of network topology, as when she states that "in order to expand, an open network has to be able to extend both upwards and sideways" (59-60). Do these metaphors undermine her project of mapping a durational networked space? Do they merely aid the reader in understanding? Are the concepts of upwards and sideways incommensurable with her claim that the "problem of global geopolitics . . . [is] more importantly [at the level of] the speed of cultural and informational flows" (72) ?