"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.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
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.
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.
-----
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.
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.
-----
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) ?
Terranove states in regard to the question of composition and decomposition in the formation of competing beliefs:
"What this ultimately boils down to is a capacity to synthesize not so much a common position (from which to win the masses over), but a common passion giving rise to a distributed movement able to displace the limits and terms within which the political constitution of the future is played out."
Turning away from a modernist avantgarde - masses dichotomy she rejects the idea of the masses which need to be informed, flirting for a moment with Baudrillard feedback-loop idea of how the masses actually demand the information they are shown, while the information passes through them and leaves them unharmed, until they demand something else in a moment of "zero degro", she resumes that we are as much mass, as we are not, since information contextualizes itself for us in a particular meaning at a particular space and time.
I feel that her practical approach towards new media and the question of how it constitutes its agents/subjects/users/networkers is quite appealing. Understanding new media as tools which can and are being put to a political use brightens up my relationship to new information technology again. Furthermore the way in which she emphasizes figuring politics through affects and intensities seems to open up a lot of possibilities for coalition politics in the name of a common cause while refraining from the need for a common identity. Attributing this as a structural feature to new media, was very interesting to me.
Topology and informational societies
"A cultural politics of information thus also implies a renewed and intense struggle around the definition of the limits and alternatives that identify the potential for change and transformation" (25).
"An informational space is inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic: one cannot simply observe it, but becomes almost unwittingly overpowered by it. It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements, mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it, recompose it and carry it along" (37).
A conception of information that links it to probability, specifically to probable outcomes, requires that the field in which this information is calculated or transmitted be stable-- homogeneous. I'm reminded here (as always) of Derrida's engagement with the supposedly homogeneous field of communication and of our Foucault reading. I'm not confident I can fully engage with Deleuze and Guattari's heterogeneous assemblages, but am thinking about de- and reterritorialization as well as lines of flight in the rhizome with regard to the internet. I was interested in Terranova's interest in the space and materiality of information (topos, milieu?)-- how information societies and globalization are connected, Swatch internet time, IP addresses, the grid. Limits and possibilities would seem to imply space-- how is control constituted as a scramble for space?
Invoking Manuel Castells, she writes, "the network makes explicit the dynamics by which a globally connected elite is coming to dominate and control the lives of those who remain bound to the world of locality, thus reinforcing a 'structural domination of the space of flows over the space of places" (43).
"If a structural domination of the space of flows (the global) over that of places (the local) exists, together with attendant forms of cultural imperialism, it is one that does not deny the fluidity of places as such, their constitution as local reservoirs endowed with a productive capacity for difference" (49).
On the same page: homogenizing (global) and heterogenizing (local).
"A piece of information spreading throughout the open space of the network is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the space crossed that alays leaves something behind - a new idea, a new affect (even an annoyance), a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu" (51).
On space also, pp. 63-71. Sadie Plant resonates here.
Ultimately I would like to discuss what is or isn't material about information and what is or isn't material about real or virtual space. How is something like the internet deterritorialized? What constitutes a moment of reterritorialization? How does the internet constitute itself in time, and how does adapting to this technology transform the way human beings think about identity and their duration in time? Finally, how does technology determine what thoughts about space and time are possible? How does it determine the scale of the global and the local? If there is no homogeneous space, just an openness through which packets find their way, what is the not-homogeneity of that space if not nothing?
Terranova's use of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology interested me in that it made their concepts seem legible and clear, partly by establishing referents for these concepts. Her assertion that "[it] is not about signs, but about signals" recalls Langlois' explication of Deleuze and Guattari's "regimes of signs" (Terranova 16, Langlois 60). For Langlois, the signs are not primarily linguistic, but there is still an interest in meaning-making and circulations of meaning-production through networks.
In contrast, Terranova's text enacts its content. Terranova writes that, in the contemporary moment, and working from a definition of information where one seeks to establish a contact by transmitting information as a differentiation of signal from noise, redundancy is integral to ensuring that information can survive the potential interferences it may undergo. My repeated remark to myself while reading this text was that it was "so clear." Terranova's stylistic moves made it possible to get that this signaled neither that an especially persuasive rhetoric was at play nor that Terranova had written a text expressing a particular truth that was legible and graspable because it was a good representation of what was out there (see page 24). Rather, the content was graspable because similar phrases expressing the same thesis showed up repeatedly in the text, an enactment of the very redundancy to which she refers.
"An informational space is inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic: one cannot simply observe it, but becomes almost unwittingly overpowered by it. It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements, mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it, recompose it and carry it along" (37).
A conception of information that links it to probability, specifically to probable outcomes, requires that the field in which this information is calculated or transmitted be stable-- homogeneous. I'm reminded here (as always) of Derrida's engagement with the supposedly homogeneous field of communication and of our Foucault reading. I'm not confident I can fully engage with Deleuze and Guattari's heterogeneous assemblages, but am thinking about de- and reterritorialization as well as lines of flight in the rhizome with regard to the internet. I was interested in Terranova's interest in the space and materiality of information (topos, milieu?)-- how information societies and globalization are connected, Swatch internet time, IP addresses, the grid. Limits and possibilities would seem to imply space-- how is control constituted as a scramble for space?
Invoking Manuel Castells, she writes, "the network makes explicit the dynamics by which a globally connected elite is coming to dominate and control the lives of those who remain bound to the world of locality, thus reinforcing a 'structural domination of the space of flows over the space of places" (43).
"If a structural domination of the space of flows (the global) over that of places (the local) exists, together with attendant forms of cultural imperialism, it is one that does not deny the fluidity of places as such, their constitution as local reservoirs endowed with a productive capacity for difference" (49).
On the same page: homogenizing (global) and heterogenizing (local).
"A piece of information spreading throughout the open space of the network is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the space crossed that alays leaves something behind - a new idea, a new affect (even an annoyance), a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu" (51).
On space also, pp. 63-71. Sadie Plant resonates here.
Ultimately I would like to discuss what is or isn't material about information and what is or isn't material about real or virtual space. How is something like the internet deterritorialized? What constitutes a moment of reterritorialization? How does the internet constitute itself in time, and how does adapting to this technology transform the way human beings think about identity and their duration in time? Finally, how does technology determine what thoughts about space and time are possible? How does it determine the scale of the global and the local? If there is no homogeneous space, just an openness through which packets find their way, what is the not-homogeneity of that space if not nothing?
Terranova's use of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology interested me in that it made their concepts seem legible and clear, partly by establishing referents for these concepts. Her assertion that "[it] is not about signs, but about signals" recalls Langlois' explication of Deleuze and Guattari's "regimes of signs" (Terranova 16, Langlois 60). For Langlois, the signs are not primarily linguistic, but there is still an interest in meaning-making and circulations of meaning-production through networks.
In contrast, Terranova's text enacts its content. Terranova writes that, in the contemporary moment, and working from a definition of information where one seeks to establish a contact by transmitting information as a differentiation of signal from noise, redundancy is integral to ensuring that information can survive the potential interferences it may undergo. My repeated remark to myself while reading this text was that it was "so clear." Terranova's stylistic moves made it possible to get that this signaled neither that an especially persuasive rhetoric was at play nor that Terranova had written a text expressing a particular truth that was legible and graspable because it was a good representation of what was out there (see page 24). Rather, the content was graspable because similar phrases expressing the same thesis showed up repeatedly in the text, an enactment of the very redundancy to which she refers.
TBC, in the face of virtual bus tickets.
PREFACE
Because my 9:30a bus home was overbooked, i am rather than IN Providence for my evening meeting now headed to Port Authority in the hopes that by arriving an hour and a half early, i will actually be able to return to Rhode Island sometime tonight. Unfortunately internet access wasn't quite at the ready in the interim, and now I have about 15 minutes to try to form something coherent out of my diasporic thoughts of recent, in regards to this book. The addition will come whenever I get home, in terms of LAYERS (see below).
------------------------------------------------
One of the most seductive passages of Terranova's work for me came on page 142: "If this world could appear to some as a world where appearances or spectacles have triumphed over reality, this is only because of a metaphysical prejudice that needs images to uphold the value of a truth that must always be uncovered." This by itself of course is nothing new in the face of postmodernism, so I was trying to see how the bio/informational -political structure in which it has come to light makes a significant difference. I see the overabundance of information argument as productive in terms of causality, but from an ahistorical viewpoint I am still planning to examine tonight (and hopefully we will discuss tomorrow) precisely what is included in the kind of fundamental framework of her ideas, and what about it is so different or important. (Yes, I am trying to avoid the phrase "at stake," but yes, that is more or less what I am talking about)
My overall fascination in this text was her emphasis from chapter to chapter, with no overarching thesis to unite it, on layers and the interim. This has come up the last two weeks (or at least, did two weeks ago and did in what I remember in the midst of illness last week). Reference p. 59, 122, others. This is the part on which I'd like to elaborate once I get home.
Questions / Issues
I apparently decided when I came to Brown as a freshman computational bio student that it was a good idea to take with me to Providence every Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, and old genetics text book I owned, so I couldn't skim through _Selfish_Gene_ to double-check precisely Dawkins's argument, but I was a little confused by Terranova's attempted argument that "selfishness closes the open space of a multitude down to a hole of subjectification." On the one hand, I kind of get it, at least if Dawkins was trying to explicitly anthropomorphize or generalize anything (which I don't particularly feel if I remember properly he was), but on the other hand genes in some sense operate quite similarly to CA's, especially since some genes effectively act as on/off switches of others, so in theory one could construct a CA out of a genome.
I was disappointed by the "Free Labour" chapter. This is neither Terranova's nor her text's fault-- 2004 was sort of before the golden age of Wikipedia and Youtube ("'YOU' weren't person of the year until two years later!) but I hope we will have more discussion in class about where the world has taken us in this regard since then.
Because my 9:30a bus home was overbooked, i am rather than IN Providence for my evening meeting now headed to Port Authority in the hopes that by arriving an hour and a half early, i will actually be able to return to Rhode Island sometime tonight. Unfortunately internet access wasn't quite at the ready in the interim, and now I have about 15 minutes to try to form something coherent out of my diasporic thoughts of recent, in regards to this book. The addition will come whenever I get home, in terms of LAYERS (see below).
------------------------------------------------
One of the most seductive passages of Terranova's work for me came on page 142: "If this world could appear to some as a world where appearances or spectacles have triumphed over reality, this is only because of a metaphysical prejudice that needs images to uphold the value of a truth that must always be uncovered." This by itself of course is nothing new in the face of postmodernism, so I was trying to see how the bio/informational -political structure in which it has come to light makes a significant difference. I see the overabundance of information argument as productive in terms of causality, but from an ahistorical viewpoint I am still planning to examine tonight (and hopefully we will discuss tomorrow) precisely what is included in the kind of fundamental framework of her ideas, and what about it is so different or important. (Yes, I am trying to avoid the phrase "at stake," but yes, that is more or less what I am talking about)
My overall fascination in this text was her emphasis from chapter to chapter, with no overarching thesis to unite it, on layers and the interim. This has come up the last two weeks (or at least, did two weeks ago and did in what I remember in the midst of illness last week). Reference p. 59, 122, others. This is the part on which I'd like to elaborate once I get home.
Questions / Issues
I apparently decided when I came to Brown as a freshman computational bio student that it was a good idea to take with me to Providence every Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, and old genetics text book I owned, so I couldn't skim through _Selfish_Gene_ to double-check precisely Dawkins's argument, but I was a little confused by Terranova's attempted argument that "selfishness closes the open space of a multitude down to a hole of subjectification." On the one hand, I kind of get it, at least if Dawkins was trying to explicitly anthropomorphize or generalize anything (which I don't particularly feel if I remember properly he was), but on the other hand genes in some sense operate quite similarly to CA's, especially since some genes effectively act as on/off switches of others, so in theory one could construct a CA out of a genome.
I was disappointed by the "Free Labour" chapter. This is neither Terranova's nor her text's fault-- 2004 was sort of before the golden age of Wikipedia and Youtube ("'YOU' weren't person of the year until two years later!) but I hope we will have more discussion in class about where the world has taken us in this regard since then.
CURRENT LINE/WORK OF FLIGHT and TERRANOVA'S MOVE TOWARD 'PUBIC' OR Do you Prefer the seductive power of the spectacle?
{{{{ CURRENT LINE/work OF FLIGHT FOR THIS WEEK: This week I am making a piece called, ‘Sex’ Display (in part inspired by Deleuze and Guattari as well as sections of this weeks reading). The work fits into a larger on going body of work that is called Video/Arcade (Imaging entering into a strange video installation. You first hit a concession stand that has work made out of chocolate credit cards, or what I call ‘Free Credit’ . The concession stand also has a magazine rack with, Issues of Art, which are collages made out of issues of art forum. After Issues of Art the viewer is hit with the, ‘Sex’ Display. After the ‘Sex’ Display the viewer enters in to the main space. What I would like to call a body without organs. In the end there will be 4 video booths one on each wall, about 600 balloons on the floor and hopefully some passing intensities).
‘Sex’ Display is an installation consisting of about 30 painted white boxes. These boxes are 7” by 9” (somewhere in between the size of a cereal box and a dishwashing soap box). They are arranged like a supermarket pyramid display that is over 5 feet tall. Then there is the word Sex spray painted on with black and gold (its aesthetic of an 80s DIY/Punk). The work has a great sense of humor as you can already tell yet there is a certain approach that reveals a mixed painful/liberating part of our ‘reality’. }}}}
TERRANOVA's MOVE TOWARD 'PUBLIC'
In the work as well as in the readings I began to gravitate to some of the aims that Terranova sets up in the introduction and the elements at work in chapter five.
In the introduction Terranova touches on thinking about ‘network culture’ as simultaneously thinking about the singular and the multiple (Question I raise: How do we see ‘Sex’ at once yet at the same time see all the multiplicities of ‘sex’? What happens to the viewer? What happens when ‘Sex’ is given a common form we recognize yet different than what is expected . . . the super market display. Yet the aesthetics are a cross-pollinations of modernism/minimalism and early 80s stencil/punk. What about the economy of sex or the tangled role of economics and sex )
Terranova makes this shift from singular and multiple to the common and the unique. Terranova describes our lens as a Kaleidoscope and that what is appearing before us is a ‘meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid reinventions, cross-pollinations and singular variations. From this point Terranova speaks to our awareness of increasing interconnectedness but in the same breath we start to see this idea of “tendencies” start to emerge in the discourse of information. Tendencies is also brought up when the discourse turns to the internet and biophysical “tendencies” or open systems. As an off shoot to my original interests in Terranova’s work, the presence and acknowledgment of tendencies might be of importance in understanding the dynamics of information flows.
Terranova continues by stating, “Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyper connected planet.”
I think that in unpacking this last thought one can look to chapter five. Terranova taps into the following main points from my perspective: concerning ‘media as public sphere’, the division of the educated facebookers vs the TV babies turned adult TV junkies. Terranova points us toward ‘reappropriation of the properties of the ‘mass’ can help untangle the semantic properties of communication (meaningful) from its intensive, affective ones.' (***Passing line of fight: My interpretation of this is like watching the Dave Chappelle Show where every moment of that show is devoted to media spoofs and parodies, inversions of stereotypes and Chappelle's approach to reflexively in his humor point to his spectacular ability to reappropriate and own and recognize the masses 'envelop the media')
In Communication Biopower, Terranova gets into a tangle of paramount importance: the relationship between communication and democracy with the ‘public domain’. The discourse starts with the communication we have rebelled against at some point---communication as manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin. The mechanics of the “public’ and that Terranova calls “ the impossible task of the public sphere thus becomes that of returning communication to an older purer function by combating the corrupting influences of manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin.” What could the counter be from a ‘new media’ stand point? Terranova points to the possibilities of the internet but raises the issue of the masses and “seductive power of spectacle” and the masses that ‘envelop the media’. One possibility is the role of media art in 'public' and performance on line. Maybe the key is reappropriation in calculated excess.
(FYI the last issue of Wire had a great article on Egyptian Facebookers that were using it as communication medium for organizing progressive social movements.)
‘Sex’ Display is an installation consisting of about 30 painted white boxes. These boxes are 7” by 9” (somewhere in between the size of a cereal box and a dishwashing soap box). They are arranged like a supermarket pyramid display that is over 5 feet tall. Then there is the word Sex spray painted on with black and gold (its aesthetic of an 80s DIY/Punk). The work has a great sense of humor as you can already tell yet there is a certain approach that reveals a mixed painful/liberating part of our ‘reality’. }}}}
TERRANOVA's MOVE TOWARD 'PUBLIC'
In the work as well as in the readings I began to gravitate to some of the aims that Terranova sets up in the introduction and the elements at work in chapter five.
In the introduction Terranova touches on thinking about ‘network culture’ as simultaneously thinking about the singular and the multiple (Question I raise: How do we see ‘Sex’ at once yet at the same time see all the multiplicities of ‘sex’? What happens to the viewer? What happens when ‘Sex’ is given a common form we recognize yet different than what is expected . . . the super market display. Yet the aesthetics are a cross-pollinations of modernism/minimalism and early 80s stencil/punk. What about the economy of sex or the tangled role of economics and sex )
Terranova makes this shift from singular and multiple to the common and the unique. Terranova describes our lens as a Kaleidoscope and that what is appearing before us is a ‘meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid reinventions, cross-pollinations and singular variations. From this point Terranova speaks to our awareness of increasing interconnectedness but in the same breath we start to see this idea of “tendencies” start to emerge in the discourse of information. Tendencies is also brought up when the discourse turns to the internet and biophysical “tendencies” or open systems. As an off shoot to my original interests in Terranova’s work, the presence and acknowledgment of tendencies might be of importance in understanding the dynamics of information flows.
Terranova continues by stating, “Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyper connected planet.”
I think that in unpacking this last thought one can look to chapter five. Terranova taps into the following main points from my perspective: concerning ‘media as public sphere’, the division of the educated facebookers vs the TV babies turned adult TV junkies. Terranova points us toward ‘reappropriation of the properties of the ‘mass’ can help untangle the semantic properties of communication (meaningful) from its intensive, affective ones.' (***Passing line of fight: My interpretation of this is like watching the Dave Chappelle Show where every moment of that show is devoted to media spoofs and parodies, inversions of stereotypes and Chappelle's approach to reflexively in his humor point to his spectacular ability to reappropriate and own and recognize the masses 'envelop the media')
In Communication Biopower, Terranova gets into a tangle of paramount importance: the relationship between communication and democracy with the ‘public domain’. The discourse starts with the communication we have rebelled against at some point---communication as manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin. The mechanics of the “public’ and that Terranova calls “ the impossible task of the public sphere thus becomes that of returning communication to an older purer function by combating the corrupting influences of manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin.” What could the counter be from a ‘new media’ stand point? Terranova points to the possibilities of the internet but raises the issue of the masses and “seductive power of spectacle” and the masses that ‘envelop the media’. One possibility is the role of media art in 'public' and performance on line. Maybe the key is reappropriation in calculated excess.
(FYI the last issue of Wire had a great article on Egyptian Facebookers that were using it as communication medium for organizing progressive social movements.)
Thursday, November 27, 2008
...better late than never...
In The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning, Langlois explores the links between a wide network of theorists and theories of communication with the goal of establishing a “mixed semiotics of the world wide web.” Drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory, D + G’s mixed semiotics, and Chun et. al’s software studies, Langlois attempts to elucidate the complex relationships between code, software, and the production of cultural meaning. In so doing, Langlois calls into question the notions of usership, access, interface, and hyperspace that have dominated cultural conceptions and understandings of new media, specifically the world wide web.
Briefly delving into medium theory, Langlois asserts that:
“medium is not simply a technology, but the social relations within which a technology develops and which are re-arranged around it” (1998). A medium, then, is the space where technology, social relations and cultural processes are articulated.” (27)
Applying this conception of medium to the internet, Langlois argues that:
“examination of linking patterns among websites gives strong clues as to the new relationships between the local and the global and as to how social movements can be both focused on a single cause and exists in a decentralized manner. (24)
The notion that mapping the internet as a wide network of hyperlinks can elucidate “relationships between the local and the global” is of great interest to me because it suggests new ways of thinking about anthropology and the study of human relations. If we can, in fact, map each and every hyperlinked connection on the internet, we could see the relative strengths of connections between different areas (measured by web traffic) as well as the ways in which the developing world and the developed world are interacting virtually. Hyperlinks could provide a useful tool for anthropologists, revealing the manifold global connections that link local populations and permit the transfer of cultural norms, language, and ideas across national and geographic boundaries.
Approaching the internet as a site of ethnographic research raises new questions about issues of access, usership, and representation. Is a “user” in Canada the same as a “user” in Nigeria if they are accessing the same website? If not, what (besides IP address) differentiates the two users? How do local political, economic, and social contingencies determine access to the world wide web, and can we better understand certain cultures or countries by looking at their patterns of internet access? Furthermore, do local cultural differences correspond to differing approaches to and understandings of the internet, or is the internet inherently multinational and cross-cultural? Does the internet reify, erode, or have no effect on cultural differences?
In examining the internet as an entity situated within dominant sociotechnological regimes, Langlois has opened the door for a new type of “ethnotechnological” analysis that could be extremely useful for better understanding the world, both the virtual and the “real.”
Monday, November 24, 2008
Power, Discourse, and Representation online
I was most interested by Langlois’ discussion of power in technocultural dimensions of discourse. Taking the stance that technology and ‘the message being transmitted’ via that technology are not distinctly separable, or rather, that “both technology and language have material effects in that they manipulate and establish relations between social actors,”(62) she extends Foucault’s theory of discourse as the space where “’power and knowledge are joined together’”(63) to the Internet and technoculture. Discourse both reflects and creates its social subjects and relations of power (63).
In this respect, “the reason why computer communication is important for media studies is that the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation” (47). Thus we should consider the ways in which “technical elements participate in the construction of representations.” Issues of representation extend even to the practical levels of language and access; power and culture structures dictate the representation of subjects of discourse before one joins the democratic ranks of facebook profiles. Wikipedia is a good example of this, as its size and content vary enormously depending on the language. In 2006 the New York Times published an interesting article on the Wiki presence of African languages, citing Swahili as the first to cross the 1,000 article mark (English had well over 1,000,000 at the time).
A contributor to Swahili Wikipedia was the only African or African-American to attend that year’s Wiki conference, and on noting that everyone at the conference was white, he said, “We have allies, people who are willing to help us, but we need to be in charge of our own identity. When it comes to producing information, we don’t want to be dependent.” All the same, a young grad student began paying people in Mali to write Wikipedia articles in Bambara, which had only around 100 articles, as part of a general attempt to represent and preserve culture in the form of a substantial Wiki encyclopedia. Another interesting example in Wikipedia is the surprisingly small size of the Arabic encyclopedia, Arabic being the 6th most spoken language in the World. Wikipedia decided to have its annual conference in Egypt this summer, to call attention to this problem and think of ways to increase the Arabic encyclopedia, acknowledging and studying more practical issues of information distribution and representation in techno-discourse.
I also feel grateful to Langlois for her enlightening engagement with Deleuze and Guattari; she gave me a much better grasp on their works. I find their argument that meaning is immanent rather than pre-existing a particularly useful way to look at the fast-paced process of web-based discourse, although I also had trouble understanding glossematics and would like to look at it more closely in class.
A Brief Quotation Guide to Mixed Semiotics
We understand the relationship between the human, hardware, software, user interface is complex from our understanding of media. Langlois does a fantastic job of highlighting previous insights into theories of how we understand meaning within technology in the first chapter of the dissertation (from McLuhan toKittler to Saussure to Foucault) and pointing out the faults each one holds for understanding this new, complex environment. It is poignant to emphasis the non-neutrality and the faithlessness of these layers when it comes to meaning making: the user clicking the "browse related books" link on the Amazon.com website is not just "browsing related books."
Langlois finally settles on using D+G's schizonalysis and pragmatics (on page 74) to understand what is refered to as technoculture within an Internet framework. Suassure's sign system does not take into account non-linguistic signs and separates the medium and the message, two areas that become problematic when looking at meaning within the web and a user's interaction with the web. "Finding the machine" more accurately maps out the tool we must use to understandLanglois' case studies. I thought table 2 (84) and table 3 (87) were of prime interest, as were the textual descriptions of these charts on pages 88 through 93. They are a major KEY to the text in my opinion.
Thus, we have an actor-theory network where any actor (human or non-human) can effect one another along with the D+G framework to help us look at the case studies. While most of this information was presented very clearly and detailed at first, I felt the case studies were very helpful in further parsing out the theory framework of mixed semiotics.
For the Amazon.com book recommendation system, we have these levels (106-)
"At the a-semiotic level, the information gathered about books and users constitutes the basis for a-semiotic encodings.
Definition: "A-semiotic encodings concern the processes for gathering, storing and formalizing data." functions independently of the constitution of a semiotic substance” (1996b, p. 149).Guattari's example is that of genetic encoding, which is the formalization of material intensities into a code that is not an “écriture” (1996, p. 149), or a signifying system."
(88)
Example: "In that sense, tools used to gather data, such as cookies (Figure 3) are sites of analysis, along with other processes for transforming data intouseable information as they are defined through the amazon.com architecture."
(106-107)
"At the signifying level, the amazon.com interface can be analyzed as resulting from a
process of capturing a-semiotic encodings within signifying semiologies, and of
articulating signifying rules and discourses with broader a-signifying power formations."
(107)
Definition: "concerns “sign systems with semiotically formed substances on the expression and content planes” (Genosko,2002, p. 167). They are divided into two kinds. Symbolic semiologies involve.... substance of expression is not linguistic but gestural. Semiologies of signification, on the contrary, rely on... a linguistic one... “dictatorship of the signifier” (1996b, p. 150)"
(88)
Example: "In that sense, the processes that shape the amazon.com interface are a central site of analysis (Figure 4)."
(107)
"The central site of analysis at the a-signifying level concerns the existentialization of
users. At that level, the “Hello, Ganaele” (Figure 5) appearing each time I log onto the
website does not simply acknowledge successful connection, but also recognizes me as a
user within a specific framework.
(108)
Definition: "The work of the software, then, is not only to offer meanings, but also to interpret which meanings are the most appropriate for my profile."
(108)
" a-signifying machines circulate the planes of expression and content and create relationships between matter, substance and form that are not primarily signifying"
(80)
Example: "In that sense, the recommendation software, along with other features present on the website, is in charge of shaping the cultural perception of users. That is, in the process of
articulation between software and human actors, the software shapes the identities and
subjectivities of users. It becomes indispensable, then, to analyze how the software,
through the existentialization of the category of the user, serves to translate economic
goals as cultural subjectivities and practices within the commercial environment."
(108)
I wish to go over some basic concepts in class that will further our understanding of the text:
1. I'd also like to look at meaning/semantics/message vs. function/syntax/medium. We see a separation of these two items (Saussure) or the supremacy of the medium over the message (McLuhan,Kittler), but Langlois , along with G+D, wish for these two elements not to be separated. This allows us to look at non-signs, which I believe are related to a-semiotics. Is this the correct interpretation, as well as allowing us to renew our look at complex meaning makingsystems such as MediaWiki/Amazon. I'd like to outline this line of thought and see where the cracks in my reasoning are.
2. I had some difficulty comprehending Glossematics (especially understanding the difference between matter and substance). On page 114 and 115, I can see specifics of each category, and I think that might help in giving concrete examples. I know "matter" alters the dynamics of the message vs. the medium (87, the top paragraph).
3. Although Langlois did a great job in picking out the specificity of the technologies to illustrate the mixed semiotics framework, as I was hesitant to accept some technical descriptions. E.g., the use of Google as a discourse of the Web when it comes to looking at the "plagiarism" ofWikipedia pages in commercial websites (186), or looking at WSDL as a functional, and not semantic, markup language (120).
Langlois finally settles on using D+G's schizonalysis and pragmatics (on page 74) to understand what is refered to as technoculture within an Internet framework. Suassure's sign system does not take into account non-linguistic signs and separates the medium and the message, two areas that become problematic when looking at meaning within the web and a user's interaction with the web. "Finding the machine" more accurately maps out the tool we must use to understandLanglois' case studies. I thought table 2 (84) and table 3 (87) were of prime interest, as were the textual descriptions of these charts on pages 88 through 93. They are a major KEY to the text in my opinion.
Thus, we have an actor-theory network where any actor (human or non-human) can effect one another along with the D+G framework to help us look at the case studies. While most of this information was presented very clearly and detailed at first, I felt the case studies were very helpful in further parsing out the theory framework of mixed semiotics.
For the Amazon.com book recommendation system, we have these levels (106-)
"At the a-semiotic level, the information gathered about books and users constitutes the basis for a-semiotic encodings.
Definition: "A-semiotic encodings concern the processes for gathering, storing and formalizing data." functions independently of the constitution of a semiotic substance” (1996b, p. 149).Guattari's example is that of genetic encoding, which is the formalization of material intensities into a code that is not an “écriture” (1996, p. 149), or a signifying system."
(88)
Example: "In that sense, tools used to gather data, such as cookies (Figure 3) are sites of analysis, along with other processes for transforming data intouseable information as they are defined through the amazon.com architecture."
(106-107)
"At the signifying level, the amazon.com interface can be analyzed as resulting from a
process of capturing a-semiotic encodings within signifying semiologies, and of
articulating signifying rules and discourses with broader a-signifying power formations."
(107)
Definition: "concerns “sign systems with semiotically formed substances on the expression and content planes” (Genosko,2002, p. 167). They are divided into two kinds. Symbolic semiologies involve.... substance of expression is not linguistic but gestural. Semiologies of signification, on the contrary, rely on... a linguistic one... “dictatorship of the signifier” (1996b, p. 150)"
(88)
Example: "In that sense, the processes that shape the amazon.com interface are a central site of analysis (Figure 4)."
(107)
"The central site of analysis at the a-signifying level concerns the existentialization of
users. At that level, the “Hello, Ganaele” (Figure 5) appearing each time I log onto the
website does not simply acknowledge successful connection, but also recognizes me as a
user within a specific framework.
(108)
Definition: "The work of the software, then, is not only to offer meanings, but also to interpret which meanings are the most appropriate for my profile."
(108)
" a-signifying machines circulate the planes of expression and content and create relationships between matter, substance and form that are not primarily signifying"
(80)
Example: "In that sense, the recommendation software, along with other features present on the website, is in charge of shaping the cultural perception of users. That is, in the process of
articulation between software and human actors, the software shapes the identities and
subjectivities of users. It becomes indispensable, then, to analyze how the software,
through the existentialization of the category of the user, serves to translate economic
goals as cultural subjectivities and practices within the commercial environment."
(108)
I wish to go over some basic concepts in class that will further our understanding of the text:
1. I'd also like to look at meaning/semantics/message vs. function/syntax/medium. We see a separation of these two items (Saussure) or the supremacy of the medium over the message (McLuhan,Kittler), but Langlois , along with G+D, wish for these two elements not to be separated. This allows us to look at non-signs, which I believe are related to a-semiotics. Is this the correct interpretation, as well as allowing us to renew our look at complex meaning makingsystems such as MediaWiki/Amazon. I'd like to outline this line of thought and see where the cracks in my reasoning are.
2. I had some difficulty comprehending Glossematics (especially understanding the difference between matter and substance). On page 114 and 115, I can see specifics of each category, and I think that might help in giving concrete examples. I know "matter" alters the dynamics of the message vs. the medium (87, the top paragraph).
3. Although Langlois did a great job in picking out the specificity of the technologies to illustrate the mixed semiotics framework, as I was hesitant to accept some technical descriptions. E.g., the use of Google as a discourse of the Web when it comes to looking at the "plagiarism" ofWikipedia pages in commercial websites (186), or looking at WSDL as a functional, and not semantic, markup language (120).
representations
I, like many of you, appreciated the relief from Deleuze and Guattari this week with Langlois’ somewhat clearer dissertation. The text helped me understand the implications of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory, especially in terms of the layers of transmission and representation that Langlois discusses in a section some of you have pointed to. She writes, “The question of layers,
then, concerns not only the protocols that are used for ensuring communication between computers, but also requires a consideration of the ways in which technical elements participate in the construction of representations, that is, the ways in which they enable specific practices of meaning-making” (47). I try to bear this project in mind when going through her engagement with D&G.
Langlois echoes many of the difficult distinctions between terms that D&G offer throughout A Thousand Plateaus and I find her overview of Glossematics almost as tough as their text to parse, but this quote from ATP is an avenue into her content/expression discussion: “Precisely because content, like expression, has form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity” (86). Overly simply, it seems to me that this distinction forms the crux of Langlois’ argument for the irreducibility of the layer of representation, which combats the supposed transparency of the layer of transmission.
I also read Langlois through N. Katherine Hayles’ emphasis on embodiment in understandings of information technologies. I think that Langlois stakes out a wary position between the excessive application of that principle of embodiment and a disregard for the materiality of transmission. She avoids, for instance, Kittler’s reduction of software to “signifiers of voltage differences” (43) as well as cybernetics’ black box conception of information transmission. She takes a self-conscious position against both “technological determinism [and] social constructionism” (20). These ideas are somewhat general and I appreciate Langlois’ application of her theory to specific examples.
then, concerns not only the protocols that are used for ensuring communication between computers, but also requires a consideration of the ways in which technical elements participate in the construction of representations, that is, the ways in which they enable specific practices of meaning-making” (47). I try to bear this project in mind when going through her engagement with D&G.
Langlois echoes many of the difficult distinctions between terms that D&G offer throughout A Thousand Plateaus and I find her overview of Glossematics almost as tough as their text to parse, but this quote from ATP is an avenue into her content/expression discussion: “Precisely because content, like expression, has form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity” (86). Overly simply, it seems to me that this distinction forms the crux of Langlois’ argument for the irreducibility of the layer of representation, which combats the supposed transparency of the layer of transmission.
I also read Langlois through N. Katherine Hayles’ emphasis on embodiment in understandings of information technologies. I think that Langlois stakes out a wary position between the excessive application of that principle of embodiment and a disregard for the materiality of transmission. She avoids, for instance, Kittler’s reduction of software to “signifiers of voltage differences” (43) as well as cybernetics’ black box conception of information transmission. She takes a self-conscious position against both “technological determinism [and] social constructionism” (20). These ideas are somewhat general and I appreciate Langlois’ application of her theory to specific examples.
Games and reality
In the tradition of Plato, Wark uses the inverse of the truth to set up his parable. Plato used the metaphor of the cave as a thought experiment: if we were in a cave and we saw shadows on the wall, this somehow wouldn’t be so different from reality. Wark, on the other hand, points out that if we were gamers in a cave this would also be similar to reality. He discusses the many ways the world can be point-based and otherwise gamelike. But there is slippage in the form of the extrapolation. Plato suggested one could see the imperfect forms of the real as shadows cast by ideals in another plane. Wark says games are “colonizing reality.” Really, as in the original Platonic construction, viewing the real as structured along game-like lines remains a different way of looking at reality. Wark claims reality is different than it was at some before-time, stating that “stories no longer opiate us…” But stories haven’t changed… just culture and understanding.
Wark seems to be trying to demonstrate that reality has changed… but I believe he is more effectively showing that the perception of reality has changed. In the same way the introduction of the computer changed the perception of information, the introduction of the game as an externalized, self-contained entity (in contrast to games orchestrated by human players, computer games are mediated by machines and are thus physical inevitabilities once put into operation) has changed the perception of causality and power. Games are programs designed with two layers, as I wrote earlier when talking about Pokemon. They consist of a narrative layer rooted in human psychology and perception as well as an operational layer rooted in symbolic logic, physical law, and mathematical ‘truth.’
Games form an aperture between ourselves and worlds we make for ourselves. Games are necessarily fabricated, and while they contain the narrative flows and themes that draw human interest, they are really just carefully constructed frameworks for the manipulation of algorithms. All possibility within the narrative layer of the game is underwritten by the algorithmic possibility of a symbolic manipulation. In contrast to this, there is no algorithm underlying reality: quantum mechanics’ probabilistic foundation precludes it (or at least, I believe it does—Stephen Wolfram, for one, does not). Nonetheless, the very fact that humans have always created narratives to explain chains of events—and, for that matter, that we perceive distinctions between events, between nouns and verbs, between times and places—exposes the disjuncture which has motivated the pervasion of the concept of the game. Where reality offers only randomness and chance, games are always algorithmically founded and more or less predictable (note the difference between the horror of actually dying of dysentery and the feeling of irritation at Oregon Trail’s pronouncement “You have died of dysentery”). Just as the concept of the computer allowed us to conceive of information as infinitely iterable and ourselves as machines—both fallacies driven by a neglect of the consequences of embodied reality—the concept of the game allows us to rationalize the chaos of the world. They thus embody the essential disjuncture between the human mind and the operation of reality.
To bring this back to Plato, the impulse to scaffold reality—which seems shaky, dirty, and impossible upon close consideration—with a system of rationality which exists solely in the human mind is an ancient one. Computers have allowed us to perpetrate another iteration of the tradition, and the externalized game (a microcosm of an idealized reality) allows to perpetrate another. But, of course, the game can only ever be a model. After all, mathematical systems are demonstrably incomplete. I believe computers and their programs should be seen as another part of a holistically regarded reality, rather than external or idealized models projected, as shadows, onto the rock of our cave.
Wark seems to be trying to demonstrate that reality has changed… but I believe he is more effectively showing that the perception of reality has changed. In the same way the introduction of the computer changed the perception of information, the introduction of the game as an externalized, self-contained entity (in contrast to games orchestrated by human players, computer games are mediated by machines and are thus physical inevitabilities once put into operation) has changed the perception of causality and power. Games are programs designed with two layers, as I wrote earlier when talking about Pokemon. They consist of a narrative layer rooted in human psychology and perception as well as an operational layer rooted in symbolic logic, physical law, and mathematical ‘truth.’
Games form an aperture between ourselves and worlds we make for ourselves. Games are necessarily fabricated, and while they contain the narrative flows and themes that draw human interest, they are really just carefully constructed frameworks for the manipulation of algorithms. All possibility within the narrative layer of the game is underwritten by the algorithmic possibility of a symbolic manipulation. In contrast to this, there is no algorithm underlying reality: quantum mechanics’ probabilistic foundation precludes it (or at least, I believe it does—Stephen Wolfram, for one, does not). Nonetheless, the very fact that humans have always created narratives to explain chains of events—and, for that matter, that we perceive distinctions between events, between nouns and verbs, between times and places—exposes the disjuncture which has motivated the pervasion of the concept of the game. Where reality offers only randomness and chance, games are always algorithmically founded and more or less predictable (note the difference between the horror of actually dying of dysentery and the feeling of irritation at Oregon Trail’s pronouncement “You have died of dysentery”). Just as the concept of the computer allowed us to conceive of information as infinitely iterable and ourselves as machines—both fallacies driven by a neglect of the consequences of embodied reality—the concept of the game allows us to rationalize the chaos of the world. They thus embody the essential disjuncture between the human mind and the operation of reality.
To bring this back to Plato, the impulse to scaffold reality—which seems shaky, dirty, and impossible upon close consideration—with a system of rationality which exists solely in the human mind is an ancient one. Computers have allowed us to perpetrate another iteration of the tradition, and the externalized game (a microcosm of an idealized reality) allows to perpetrate another. But, of course, the game can only ever be a model. After all, mathematical systems are demonstrably incomplete. I believe computers and their programs should be seen as another part of a holistically regarded reality, rather than external or idealized models projected, as shadows, onto the rock of our cave.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
ANTS!
I thought that this weeks reading was very interesting in that it linked elements of the theory that we have been reading with some concrete case studies. I know that it was a welcome breather for me to be able to apply some of the concepts to a few objects, for lack of a better word.
The formulation that I was most intrigued with was the idea of Actor-Network Theory. I feel that the tensions outlined in this theory are things that we have been dealing with and working through in class. On one hand there is the theoretical insistence on form above content, the purely technical apparatus underpinnings of new media and information technologies. On the other hand there is the unavoidable reservation that what is actually being produced and represented should have meaning somehow. But of course, the same thing can be said and represented across a variety of different and sometimes conflicting mediums. ANT mediates this tension in an interesting way by postulating the interplay of form and content. I think that it is pretty much right that the form of presentation changes the perception and articulation of content.
The way that ANT argues that form itself is a kind of agent is also interesting. Of course, this is a kind of non-subjective agent. Yet, the actor remains an agent none the less in an assemblage of agent-relations, where all agents act upon the final system.
As such, I think there needs to be rethinking of the world virtual-space. As Langlois makes clear the point of a space such as Amazon.com is not to replicate the feel of a traditional bookstore. Rather, the similarities on the surface in procedural processes are belied by a series of differences on the software level. The form of the space itself is different. Thus, even if virtual spaces resembled real spaces entirely the differences in their agent-relations produces another completely different form of reality.
The formulation that I was most intrigued with was the idea of Actor-Network Theory. I feel that the tensions outlined in this theory are things that we have been dealing with and working through in class. On one hand there is the theoretical insistence on form above content, the purely technical apparatus underpinnings of new media and information technologies. On the other hand there is the unavoidable reservation that what is actually being produced and represented should have meaning somehow. But of course, the same thing can be said and represented across a variety of different and sometimes conflicting mediums. ANT mediates this tension in an interesting way by postulating the interplay of form and content. I think that it is pretty much right that the form of presentation changes the perception and articulation of content.
The way that ANT argues that form itself is a kind of agent is also interesting. Of course, this is a kind of non-subjective agent. Yet, the actor remains an agent none the less in an assemblage of agent-relations, where all agents act upon the final system.
As such, I think there needs to be rethinking of the world virtual-space. As Langlois makes clear the point of a space such as Amazon.com is not to replicate the feel of a traditional bookstore. Rather, the similarities on the surface in procedural processes are belied by a series of differences on the software level. The form of the space itself is different. Thus, even if virtual spaces resembled real spaces entirely the differences in their agent-relations produces another completely different form of reality.
software as fetish
"As Chun (2005) argues, software is ideology in that the interface produces
specific modes of representations that shape modes of activity, and thus users"
pg.17
"Following Chun’s (2005) exploration of software as ideology, the starting point of this research lies in the examination of the types of cultural and communicational practices that are enabled by the software used by these formats and, in turn, of how these software layers shape the role of users as agents and actors within commercial and non-commercial representational spaces."
pg.19-20
While this isn't a point too much commented on in Langlois' paper, I wanted to investigate more on her foundation on Chun's claim that software is ideology. While I do agree that software indeed has some traits of ideology, I believe that these traits are created via software being commodity fetish. While the distinction may not be clearly seen as very impactful, I think viewing software as fetish instead of ideology produces different relationships between software and user and the modes of production they create.
I believe that the ultimate connection between software and fetish is the effect software has on its users. One of the most important effects of commodity fetishism is that as the laborer is estranged from his product so too is he estranged from his own labor (a commodity itself). The production process, then, is made independent from the laborer; the commodity is fetishized completely. Software, too, alienates its users from both the product and the production process. As software becomes more and more “standardized”, the work that we put into using software becomes more and more independent of us. For example, if I am working on retouching a photograph on Adobe Photoshop and want to learn how to create a certain effect, all I have to do is go online and find a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so. As a result, I, the user, become exchangeable; anybody and anyone can do what I did. I feel no connection or ownership of my own agency, and even if I did figure out how to create such an effect by myself, it is nullified by the fact that, anybody, after enough trial and error, could have achieved the same exact product as mine. The product then too is estranged from me, and not just because it could be the same as anybody else’s product. By making a product in Adobe Photoshop, it is not I who owns the product, but the software itself: this is made evident by the fact that if I did not have the correct software, in this case Photoshop, I would not be able to open the photoshop-only file (a reflexive discourse harking back to commodity fetishism). Thus, software renders the user exchangeable and consequently causes a “cognitive failing of the workers to grasp what really happens, while at the same time being part of the machinery.” And what is the ultimate result of this? Just as commodity fetishism creates a separation between exchange-value and use-value, software then creates a separation between the visible and the invisible. As many code/software theorists have written, software has privileged the arbitrary image, the imaginary graphical depiction of what is “going on” in our computers. Our fetishized software does not simply hide the hardware: it becomes independent of it and as a result, user’s see software’s value as not stemming from what it does with the hardware, but from what it seems to do on its own, on our screens, “visible” to us.
Viewing then software as fetishistic instead of ideological, there is a shift in what it means to "produce content or facilitate content production." Instead of looking at the customizeable aspects of amazon.com as a tool to create a false consciousness around the user, I wonder then if it these "personalized" affectations are actually creating even more of a (hidden) distance between user and "user-produced" content- after all, I didn't create those banners; they were created for me using technologies and programming hidden behind a veneer of visible image.
specific modes of representations that shape modes of activity, and thus users"
pg.17
"Following Chun’s (2005) exploration of software as ideology, the starting point of this research lies in the examination of the types of cultural and communicational practices that are enabled by the software used by these formats and, in turn, of how these software layers shape the role of users as agents and actors within commercial and non-commercial representational spaces."
pg.19-20
While this isn't a point too much commented on in Langlois' paper, I wanted to investigate more on her foundation on Chun's claim that software is ideology. While I do agree that software indeed has some traits of ideology, I believe that these traits are created via software being commodity fetish. While the distinction may not be clearly seen as very impactful, I think viewing software as fetish instead of ideology produces different relationships between software and user and the modes of production they create.
I believe that the ultimate connection between software and fetish is the effect software has on its users. One of the most important effects of commodity fetishism is that as the laborer is estranged from his product so too is he estranged from his own labor (a commodity itself). The production process, then, is made independent from the laborer; the commodity is fetishized completely. Software, too, alienates its users from both the product and the production process. As software becomes more and more “standardized”, the work that we put into using software becomes more and more independent of us. For example, if I am working on retouching a photograph on Adobe Photoshop and want to learn how to create a certain effect, all I have to do is go online and find a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so. As a result, I, the user, become exchangeable; anybody and anyone can do what I did. I feel no connection or ownership of my own agency, and even if I did figure out how to create such an effect by myself, it is nullified by the fact that, anybody, after enough trial and error, could have achieved the same exact product as mine. The product then too is estranged from me, and not just because it could be the same as anybody else’s product. By making a product in Adobe Photoshop, it is not I who owns the product, but the software itself: this is made evident by the fact that if I did not have the correct software, in this case Photoshop, I would not be able to open the photoshop-only file (a reflexive discourse harking back to commodity fetishism). Thus, software renders the user exchangeable and consequently causes a “cognitive failing of the workers to grasp what really happens, while at the same time being part of the machinery.” And what is the ultimate result of this? Just as commodity fetishism creates a separation between exchange-value and use-value, software then creates a separation between the visible and the invisible. As many code/software theorists have written, software has privileged the arbitrary image, the imaginary graphical depiction of what is “going on” in our computers. Our fetishized software does not simply hide the hardware: it becomes independent of it and as a result, user’s see software’s value as not stemming from what it does with the hardware, but from what it seems to do on its own, on our screens, “visible” to us.
Viewing then software as fetishistic instead of ideological, there is a shift in what it means to "produce content or facilitate content production." Instead of looking at the customizeable aspects of amazon.com as a tool to create a false consciousness around the user, I wonder then if it these "personalized" affectations are actually creating even more of a (hidden) distance between user and "user-produced" content- after all, I didn't create those banners; they were created for me using technologies and programming hidden behind a veneer of visible image.
Musings
In the spirit of broadening D/G's theories to the realm of computers and cybernetics, I wonder if I might propose a couple of interpretations:
I've been noticing some connections between a disembodied theory of information and the notion of a body without organs. In "Anti-Oedipus," D/G write of capital as a sort of BwO, an abstraction or residue of a production process that retroactively asserts its primordiality. In this way, information becomes disembodied from the production of knowledge and re-produces man as a series of genetic codes, fax-able, reduced to information. As Davis was mentioning a couple weeks ago in class with regard to intensities and the BwO, the feedback loop appears to fly off of its production complex and become self-sustaining, reducing everything to varying degrees of intensity. This is essentially a state of entropy, of pure, unadulterated information (white noise).
Thus, Hayles' attempt to reterritorialize, to re-embody information. Thus Fanon's paralyzing fear of the trapped and dissected body. Thus, Burroughs' and D/G's and Langlois' attempt to even the playing field by establishing a-signifying semiotics. This, I think, is the plane of consistency, of the virus which is never just material, never just expressive. Fanon will not necessarily be overdetermined by, say, genetics, because for D/G and Langlois, genetic code is an a-semiotic encoding. There is a materiality that "can be captured by different interests that can impose genetic interpretation,(88-90)" meaning that a language of control and power can emerge from any quarter at any time; DNA is a latent virus, activated by the media of external milieus (screens, recordings). Perhaps what Fanon fears, to put it sloppily in Burroughsian terms, is that the virus is the pure signifier, overdetermined like the signifier of Freud's dream (if I remember correctly), overdetermined by the discursive/signifying powers that be--whereas the virus, the sign-particle, really possesses a kind of metaphysical freedom, a laughter or jouissance in the face of the notion of "subject" or signification in general.
Briefly, I've also been thinking about the word-processor as a BwO. The "interface," a site of cultural inscription, appears to "miraculate" the words and meanings which appear on screen. That is, the long process of production, the series of codes and operations that interrupt or branch off from each other, is concealed while the words appearing seem to appear as if by magic. Over time, the interface, like capital, begins to appear totally natural and foundational--we forget that the typing is an illusion, a clever re-production of more original processes of production.
Just some scattered thoughts. Goodnight.
I've been noticing some connections between a disembodied theory of information and the notion of a body without organs. In "Anti-Oedipus," D/G write of capital as a sort of BwO, an abstraction or residue of a production process that retroactively asserts its primordiality. In this way, information becomes disembodied from the production of knowledge and re-produces man as a series of genetic codes, fax-able, reduced to information. As Davis was mentioning a couple weeks ago in class with regard to intensities and the BwO, the feedback loop appears to fly off of its production complex and become self-sustaining, reducing everything to varying degrees of intensity. This is essentially a state of entropy, of pure, unadulterated information (white noise).
Thus, Hayles' attempt to reterritorialize, to re-embody information. Thus Fanon's paralyzing fear of the trapped and dissected body. Thus, Burroughs' and D/G's and Langlois' attempt to even the playing field by establishing a-signifying semiotics. This, I think, is the plane of consistency, of the virus which is never just material, never just expressive. Fanon will not necessarily be overdetermined by, say, genetics, because for D/G and Langlois, genetic code is an a-semiotic encoding. There is a materiality that "can be captured by different interests that can impose genetic interpretation,(88-90)" meaning that a language of control and power can emerge from any quarter at any time; DNA is a latent virus, activated by the media of external milieus (screens, recordings). Perhaps what Fanon fears, to put it sloppily in Burroughsian terms, is that the virus is the pure signifier, overdetermined like the signifier of Freud's dream (if I remember correctly), overdetermined by the discursive/signifying powers that be--whereas the virus, the sign-particle, really possesses a kind of metaphysical freedom, a laughter or jouissance in the face of the notion of "subject" or signification in general.
Briefly, I've also been thinking about the word-processor as a BwO. The "interface," a site of cultural inscription, appears to "miraculate" the words and meanings which appear on screen. That is, the long process of production, the series of codes and operations that interrupt or branch off from each other, is concealed while the words appearing seem to appear as if by magic. Over time, the interface, like capital, begins to appear totally natural and foundational--we forget that the typing is an illusion, a clever re-production of more original processes of production.
Just some scattered thoughts. Goodnight.
Exposing the mathematical underpinnings of the internet
I think Langlois’s observation that “the mathematical layer becomes a new mediator” (42) is a very rich one with the potential to illuminate inconsistencies and discontinuities present in new media. Her overarching agenda is to analyze the web as “as an assemblage of technocultural layers” (52), rather than sticking with the medium-theoretical approach of “identify[ing] one essential feature of a medium” (21). This layered view results in an understanding of new media as shaped by an ecology of technologies whose impact on transmitted messages, as well as effects on culture, are determined by each of the parts and the arrangement of the whole. Effects of each technological layer propagate upward, even from the quantum level of the underlying mathematical concepts behind computation.
If you have played one of the original Pokemon games, or even read Lewis Carroll’s logic puzzles, you may have noticed that there is a certain pleasurable blurring of boundaries when logical, computer driven processes are attached to cognitive objects which do not follow such strict rules as numbers. One puzzle, for example, reads:
(a) All babies are illogical.
(b) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
(c) Illogical persons are dispised.
…from which we are meant to conclude, of course, both that all babies are despised and that no baby can manage a crocodile. As explained at http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~hile/math100/logice.htm, the three declarations can be understood as statements about sets: if it belongs to the set of babies, it also belongs to the set of illogical things. From the three set-theoretical statements we can extrapolate further set-theoretical conclusions. And while, in this case, the conclusions one might reach are in fact logical, hanging somewhat messy everyday concepts on mathematical scaffolding still feels silly and strange.
And in the original Pokemon, the whole world followed rules laid out by the programmers of the game. Like the designers of any game, they tried to make a two-level structure: an outer one of characters, storylines, and images, and an inner one of the underlying computational logic that ties the story together, provides verbs to the user (like “to battle,” “to capture,” and “to explore”). But a glitch, often referred to as the Missingno glitch, allows you to obtain infinite copies of items in your inventory. This rupture in the logical fabric of the game makes everything tied together by it flimsy and strange.
To bring the discussion back to Langlois, the mathematical and logical foundations of the internet often break through in the same way as they do in logical puzzles and Pokemon. The technology which tries to be transparent is necessarily flawed or inconsistent: try as we might, 404 pages are commonplace and hyperlinks often do not link properly, and search engines yield irrelevant results. The mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings of the internet often poke through the smooth surface, exposing the processes which always participate in the mediation of information through it.
If you have played one of the original Pokemon games, or even read Lewis Carroll’s logic puzzles, you may have noticed that there is a certain pleasurable blurring of boundaries when logical, computer driven processes are attached to cognitive objects which do not follow such strict rules as numbers. One puzzle, for example, reads:
(a) All babies are illogical.
(b) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
(c) Illogical persons are dispised.
…from which we are meant to conclude, of course, both that all babies are despised and that no baby can manage a crocodile. As explained at http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~hile/math100/logice.htm, the three declarations can be understood as statements about sets: if it belongs to the set of babies, it also belongs to the set of illogical things. From the three set-theoretical statements we can extrapolate further set-theoretical conclusions. And while, in this case, the conclusions one might reach are in fact logical, hanging somewhat messy everyday concepts on mathematical scaffolding still feels silly and strange.
And in the original Pokemon, the whole world followed rules laid out by the programmers of the game. Like the designers of any game, they tried to make a two-level structure: an outer one of characters, storylines, and images, and an inner one of the underlying computational logic that ties the story together, provides verbs to the user (like “to battle,” “to capture,” and “to explore”). But a glitch, often referred to as the Missingno glitch, allows you to obtain infinite copies of items in your inventory. This rupture in the logical fabric of the game makes everything tied together by it flimsy and strange.
To bring the discussion back to Langlois, the mathematical and logical foundations of the internet often break through in the same way as they do in logical puzzles and Pokemon. The technology which tries to be transparent is necessarily flawed or inconsistent: try as we might, 404 pages are commonplace and hyperlinks often do not link properly, and search engines yield irrelevant results. The mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings of the internet often poke through the smooth surface, exposing the processes which always participate in the mediation of information through it.
Allegorithm Nation
I wondered, first, why Wark ordered his Table of Contents in alphabetical order. (1a. And why, in a book so concerned with the digital, is the ToC so obstinately qualitative, not quantitative?) Second, why are the paragraphs numbered? Third, why are there twenty-five paragraphs per chapter? Then: In making very clear his belief that everyday life has come to resemble a video-gamespace, what kind of game is Wark playing with his readers? For me, the game--struggle, agon--was to rethink my progress through the book in terms of number of paragraphs read rather than in number of pages.
This paragraph-counting mindset isn't a trap Wark set for me; rather, I think it's a habit of I've developed over many years of reading and just as many years of playing video games. It's a habit of tracking how far I've read in a book, sure, but it's an analogue to saving my game, to tracking my score.
Wark sees gamers as constructing or expecting a gamespace as their environment: "Everyday life in gamespace seems an imperfect version of the game. The gamespace of everyday life may be more complex and variegated, but it seems much less consistent, coherent, and fair," (paragraph 32). The examples he gives of gamespaces that seem embedded in Americans' attitudes--The Sims and a bland, unquestioning pursuit for material objects; Civilization and world conquest; and Katamari Damacy, where space and time are collapsed and always automatically rescaled so that no amount of collection-of-stuff is ever big or good enough--are pessimistic, to say the least.
Maybe he's playing a game, but it's not a lighthearted one. Wark asks us to interrogate the foundations and implications of the games we play, from the military-industrial/entertainment complex to wide-eyed, blister-fingered propagation of ideology.
"When playing Civilization III, it doesn't matter if the civilization you choose to play is Babylon or China, Russia or Zululand, France or India. Whoever wins is America, in that the logic of the game itself is America. America unbound," (74).
This paragraph-counting mindset isn't a trap Wark set for me; rather, I think it's a habit of I've developed over many years of reading and just as many years of playing video games. It's a habit of tracking how far I've read in a book, sure, but it's an analogue to saving my game, to tracking my score.
Wark sees gamers as constructing or expecting a gamespace as their environment: "Everyday life in gamespace seems an imperfect version of the game. The gamespace of everyday life may be more complex and variegated, but it seems much less consistent, coherent, and fair," (paragraph 32). The examples he gives of gamespaces that seem embedded in Americans' attitudes--The Sims and a bland, unquestioning pursuit for material objects; Civilization and world conquest; and Katamari Damacy, where space and time are collapsed and always automatically rescaled so that no amount of collection-of-stuff is ever big or good enough--are pessimistic, to say the least.
Maybe he's playing a game, but it's not a lighthearted one. Wark asks us to interrogate the foundations and implications of the games we play, from the military-industrial/entertainment complex to wide-eyed, blister-fingered propagation of ideology.
"When playing Civilization III, it doesn't matter if the civilization you choose to play is Babylon or China, Russia or Zululand, France or India. Whoever wins is America, in that the logic of the game itself is America. America unbound," (74).
ANT, mediators, etc..
I'm really interested in Langlois' application of ANT to the technological relationships on the Web. I like how ANT avoids a straight ahead social analysis which designates the social processes that form technology. In this sense, there is not one, specified social domain which can be called upon to demonstrate the, "social factors" or "social forces" that explain the "non- social" entity of technology. Instead, ANT prevents the predetermined split of what is social and non-social, and allows for an analysis of the ever-shifting associations among assemblages of elements in order to end with an understanding of the "movement" not the "domain" of what is being made "social."
Langlois demonstrates this technique by attending directly to the actors themselves about where these associations and assemblages exist. He allows the technological processes to unfold as non-human actors and, therefore, as active participants in the configuration of assemblages of meaning--as participating in the modification of a given state of affairs. I don't think that in doing so he is creating a relationship of symmetry between human users and non-human software processes. However, I am not sure exactly how these two actors exist in relation to each other--if they are on the same plane of agency, or if one is considered more active than the other. Langlois determines that, "one has to acknowledge the omnipresence of software as a technical mediator of user-produced and commercial produced content and as an active participant in the production of meanings" (123). This could be interpreted as an emphasis on the agency of software over that of the human user in terms of software's capacity to be a "technical mediator."
I do think that the ANT idea of "mediator" fits perfectly with the two software processes that Langlois discusses in his case studies. Mediators have the capacity to transform the meaning of the elements they carry, as opposed to just acting as vessels of material transmission. In this sense, the input is never indicative of the output and there is a constant, "technocultural shaping of user's perception of the meanings that are offered to them" (124). Because books are mediated on amazon.com into digitally based texts, their information is inevitably modified, as the software does not act as a direct translator of information from one mode to another, but as a mediator of underlying processes of expression and content. I think that this analysis successfully portrays the software systems in these case studies as simultaneously producing and being produced by cultural practices and, therefore, redefines the process of meaning production as a "technocultural" movement (2).
The keys
First of all, you just lost the game.
It is of course a primitive viewpoint, but that just means it surpasses us in some way: the idea of understanding existing in a box, or behind a door, which can be opened through the correct application of a key--a key, then, represents the singular revealing the multiple. The key to the labyrinth was Ariadne's thread, it had nothing to do with Theseus or the Minotaur, those two were interchangeable, like Beowulf and Grendel (as Gardner has noted). The key to the Langlois reading is like a thread, which I am entirely incapable of rolling into a ball, but I think it can be indicated in certain spots. On page 3: "These changes cannot be captured by conventional theories focused on the study of meaning, as they result from the introduction of new software systems whose processes are always hidden behind a cultural interface." What is the cultural interface? The analyst. The processes of the system are hidden by their revelation. Langlois wants us to take into account the necessary influence a priori of the system upon the articulation of the system. Of course the system only exists as a series of points of articulation (if viewed in series), so like the Deleuze and Guattari method of always placing the trace back on the map, this seems to be a problem mainly of precedence. The system precedes its own articulation, which must then consist in a continuous tracing back of its own source. "The economies of meaning production" (p 4) is a good way of putting it, it has to do with where we locate (therefore allocate) value. It is an awareness that the obvious order--hardware precedes software--must be reversed in order to advance. It's all software. But I don't know if I agree when she says that "The first challenge lies in finding a theoretical framework to take into account..." (p 20), doesn't that constitute an unnecessary return to structuralism? Of course, a theoretical framework will have to exist, but it should be produced by its own articulation (I realize this goes nowhere). Maybe what I'm saying is that we need to feed Wikipedia until it becomes bigger than everything else. The problem of the representations (Empire of Fashion vs. Harry Potter) seems to be to find a representation which includes both of them as terms which could be equivalent (that might be Wikipedia). If we're playing a game, fiction is supposed to constitute cheating, as opposed to the technical writing (in its various forms) which is how you're supposed to play the game. It seems the rules have to be rewritten to acknowledge that you were always supposed to cheat. Of course, it's not cheating if you don't get caught, but that's fascism. So even if Wikipedia is God, it is as necessary as it always has been to allow the devil to roam freely through it. Maybe the best way to prevent cheating is to make everyone try to cheat at the same time. But then what about the people who aren't willing or able to cheat? Ah, there's the framework, I suppose.
I like the Wark reading better. Talking about Actor-Network Theory seems to sidestep the issue Wark is attempting to grapple with directly: we're not movie stars (not yet), we're players. Who says "I'm a player"? We tend not to like those people. But that's because they're the ones winning the game. And it's not really a game like chess, it's more like an online shooter, you can die as many times as you want, but if you keep dying you get frustrated and take off your headphones, leave the computer behind and go do something more "productive" like going to hell. Of course the immediate problem with this phrasing is that we are supposed to be killers. But isn't that the way it always has been? The goal seems to be to recontextualize our ideas about living and dying in the arena so that we no longer fear the opponent we see coming towards us. It appears inevitable that in order to overcome death (avoid death) we must become death. But that very inevitability is our real opponent, and he (she it) doesn't follow the rules. Shooting another player is always a misfire, we were always aiming at the programmer, and of course you can't use the design to fight the designer. So we must all learn to cheat, not by finding the loopholes in the program from the inside, but by learning to program ourselves. The Wikipedia model seems relevant here too--that's the only game in town. The three levels are interesting, too--one is you're watching a movie and then it's over, two is the movies are always playing there, in the ether; three is the game, which nevertheless becomes boring. I think perhaps the solution is in the myth of Sisyphus: why did the gods subject him to such cruel and unusual punishment? Not because he deserved it, the gods don't care about things like that. They did it because they wanted something of him. What did they want? Not for him to balance a stone on a hill. They just wanted something to laugh at forever. It's the funniest joke in the world, if you're a god.
It is of course a primitive viewpoint, but that just means it surpasses us in some way: the idea of understanding existing in a box, or behind a door, which can be opened through the correct application of a key--a key, then, represents the singular revealing the multiple. The key to the labyrinth was Ariadne's thread, it had nothing to do with Theseus or the Minotaur, those two were interchangeable, like Beowulf and Grendel (as Gardner has noted). The key to the Langlois reading is like a thread, which I am entirely incapable of rolling into a ball, but I think it can be indicated in certain spots. On page 3: "These changes cannot be captured by conventional theories focused on the study of meaning, as they result from the introduction of new software systems whose processes are always hidden behind a cultural interface." What is the cultural interface? The analyst. The processes of the system are hidden by their revelation. Langlois wants us to take into account the necessary influence a priori of the system upon the articulation of the system. Of course the system only exists as a series of points of articulation (if viewed in series), so like the Deleuze and Guattari method of always placing the trace back on the map, this seems to be a problem mainly of precedence. The system precedes its own articulation, which must then consist in a continuous tracing back of its own source. "The economies of meaning production" (p 4) is a good way of putting it, it has to do with where we locate (therefore allocate) value. It is an awareness that the obvious order--hardware precedes software--must be reversed in order to advance. It's all software. But I don't know if I agree when she says that "The first challenge lies in finding a theoretical framework to take into account..." (p 20), doesn't that constitute an unnecessary return to structuralism? Of course, a theoretical framework will have to exist, but it should be produced by its own articulation (I realize this goes nowhere). Maybe what I'm saying is that we need to feed Wikipedia until it becomes bigger than everything else. The problem of the representations (Empire of Fashion vs. Harry Potter) seems to be to find a representation which includes both of them as terms which could be equivalent (that might be Wikipedia). If we're playing a game, fiction is supposed to constitute cheating, as opposed to the technical writing (in its various forms) which is how you're supposed to play the game. It seems the rules have to be rewritten to acknowledge that you were always supposed to cheat. Of course, it's not cheating if you don't get caught, but that's fascism. So even if Wikipedia is God, it is as necessary as it always has been to allow the devil to roam freely through it. Maybe the best way to prevent cheating is to make everyone try to cheat at the same time. But then what about the people who aren't willing or able to cheat? Ah, there's the framework, I suppose.
I like the Wark reading better. Talking about Actor-Network Theory seems to sidestep the issue Wark is attempting to grapple with directly: we're not movie stars (not yet), we're players. Who says "I'm a player"? We tend not to like those people. But that's because they're the ones winning the game. And it's not really a game like chess, it's more like an online shooter, you can die as many times as you want, but if you keep dying you get frustrated and take off your headphones, leave the computer behind and go do something more "productive" like going to hell. Of course the immediate problem with this phrasing is that we are supposed to be killers. But isn't that the way it always has been? The goal seems to be to recontextualize our ideas about living and dying in the arena so that we no longer fear the opponent we see coming towards us. It appears inevitable that in order to overcome death (avoid death) we must become death. But that very inevitability is our real opponent, and he (she it) doesn't follow the rules. Shooting another player is always a misfire, we were always aiming at the programmer, and of course you can't use the design to fight the designer. So we must all learn to cheat, not by finding the loopholes in the program from the inside, but by learning to program ourselves. The Wikipedia model seems relevant here too--that's the only game in town. The three levels are interesting, too--one is you're watching a movie and then it's over, two is the movies are always playing there, in the ether; three is the game, which nevertheless becomes boring. I think perhaps the solution is in the myth of Sisyphus: why did the gods subject him to such cruel and unusual punishment? Not because he deserved it, the gods don't care about things like that. They did it because they wanted something of him. What did they want? Not for him to balance a stone on a hill. They just wanted something to laugh at forever. It's the funniest joke in the world, if you're a god.
towards critical visualities of the web/software
This week's reading hit a nerve, or more appropriately, tapped into a rhizome of thoughts that I've been following since I first confronted the question of "software studies" in Braxton Soderman's wonderful seminar on code, software, and serious games last year. In that seminar, we engaged a lot of the same questions that Langlois is struggling with here, namely, how does the idea of meaning change when it is constructed in digital environments. In particular, I can remember quite a long discussion of Kittler's contention that "there is no software" only "signifiers in voltage differences."
Like Langlois, a lot of people felt this was an oversimplification, and in any case, Kittler's abstracting ignores the visual 'packaging' of the web, a concept that Langlois rightly stresses as essential for engaging the question of meaning-making in digital media. Towards that point, we might take Langlois statement that "the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation" (47) as a charge for a further exploration into the aesthetics of digital informatics, and the ways in which the visual ("representational" layer) of the web cannot be black boxed or ignored, simply because it represents the most superficial layer of the user's experience. Instead, we must stress "The agency of software" as "not only the actor with which users have to interact but also the mediator that defines the conditions and cultural richness of these interactions" (48).
Langlois' Critical Visuality
I think it makes sense to start within Langlois' text and engage the ways in which she stresses certain visual schemas and angles to approaching visual signification witinh "technoculture." Two areas to start looking at, would be her section on "Technologies of the Web and the Question of Representation" (pp. 47 -51) and her discussion of "visual regimes" of the web, traced out in her introduction (pp. 8-13) alongside her analysis of webstalker and IssueCrawler.
In that first (introductory) section, where the arguement for critical engagements of the web visualities is first made, Langlois stresses the necessity of "alternative ways of exploring the potential of the Web through the creation of alternative modes of surfing" (9). The examples given, WebStalker and IssueCrawler, "represent(s) a first attempt to overcome the page metaphor and to represent Web browsing in spatial terms, where URLs are represented as circles and hyperlinks as lines, with text and images collected in a separate window" (9).
Why is this important? It must be because it is a change only in the top layer (to use Langlois' three tiered model of the web p. 52) of the web's construction. The schematic views of WebStalker for instance do not require new code or hardware, they simply reinterpret existing codes, using existing hardwares. So the opportunity for this experimental, critical visuality, demonstrates the fact that changes in one strata of web development do not necessarily impact other strata. That said, even this seemingly simple visual reintrepretation of the "lower" layers of web code and computer hardware, posit a powerful conclusion, that there is no one way to percieve this information, and the existing styles cannot be naturalized or essentialized. Like experimental film techniques then, the avant-garde visualities of WebStalker and IssueCrawler show us something new about already existing information, and make the web user think about how s/he views information in addition to what information is shown.
There is also the question of the persistence of the "page metaphor." Like Langlois, I have argued against the continued persistence of the page as visual schema in web culture, and like Matthew Fuller, I've worked with digital media designers to create new schemes for connecting/viewing and therefore understanding certain collections of data. Anecdotally, I worked at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society this summer, and was charged with the task of taking a vast set of multimeida information for a tenth anniversary conference, and putting it all together in a meaningful way. The Center being oriented towards new media, I had a lot of freedom, and immediately I knew that the page metaphor simply could not work. The media was far too overlapping (or "imbricated" as Langlois likes to say) to be broken apart into different cells of discrete data. I needed a way to bring things together, not pull them apart (which is inherent in the idea of the page, alongside it's insistence of linear, right to left, progression). So I became involved with a group that produced single-browser windows with multiplicitious networks, and we worked all summer to produce what the designer's would call a "knowledge space" where videos, blog posts, tweets, and audio recordings could be played without leaving the browser window. I think this worked to overcome the limits of traditional "code politics" because it literally had to be re-coded, not simply re-intrepreted (12). It also hacked "the technodiscursive and technocultural rules that create specific flows of content" to produce new flows, whose directionalities are much harder to determine, creating a new sense of perusing freedom on the part of the user (10).
It looks a lot like IssueCrawler, you can check it out here.
From Fuller's art/web-browser, to his theory of "sensorium" Langlois follows the lead of visual culture to engage with the idea of meaning being deeply embedded in how one sees (50). Langlois follows Manovich, to engage the soviet constructivist traditions possibly embedded in contemporary web browsing scopic regimes, but also engage with Shields' "bricolage
of digital images, text, and other elements linked together by hypertext references” (51). In both cases, the heterogeneity of the web browser is key. The elements of the web cannot be broken down beyond certain multimedia objects. They cannot, for instance, be all reduced to language (text) though ironically, they are of course reduced substantially on the side of code, and hardware. The essential differentiation here, is that the computer can think of the images as binary code, and the browser can think of it as html, but the user must see it as a jpeg image, or it's rendering correctly.
further critical visualities
It would be healthy, I imagine, to read Crary and his techniques of the observer in light of the questions raised by langlois' critical visualities of the web browser. It could be healthy to read perspective as symbolic form, and other theories of visuality that have been produced for art history, theories on painting, and questions of photography (especially the concepts of post-biology and digital photography). All of these texts, would not doubt, be wonderful to hybridize like Langlois does so capably with her many sources, towards some transcendent critical visuality.
But I can already see how these will not be adequate to assess what kind of things are going on in web browsers, and flash interfaces. No, considering perspective will surely be helpful, but it will also be a misdirection, for as sure as the web browser does invite a certain sense of depth, it also requires a literacy that painting could never posses, nor art historical theory could ever approach. Namely, the concept of the click, and what is clickable (a sort of cyber-tactility) and what is simply cyber-surface.
That's where I would wander towards in another 1000 words. In this page that is a blog that is an irony I cannot shake.
I wonder how you can compose a text in non-page space?
Like Langlois, a lot of people felt this was an oversimplification, and in any case, Kittler's abstracting ignores the visual 'packaging' of the web, a concept that Langlois rightly stresses as essential for engaging the question of meaning-making in digital media. Towards that point, we might take Langlois statement that "the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation" (47) as a charge for a further exploration into the aesthetics of digital informatics, and the ways in which the visual ("representational" layer) of the web cannot be black boxed or ignored, simply because it represents the most superficial layer of the user's experience. Instead, we must stress "The agency of software" as "not only the actor with which users have to interact but also the mediator that defines the conditions and cultural richness of these interactions" (48).
Langlois' Critical Visuality
I think it makes sense to start within Langlois' text and engage the ways in which she stresses certain visual schemas and angles to approaching visual signification witinh "technoculture." Two areas to start looking at, would be her section on "Technologies of the Web and the Question of Representation" (pp. 47 -51) and her discussion of "visual regimes" of the web, traced out in her introduction (pp. 8-13) alongside her analysis of webstalker and IssueCrawler.
In that first (introductory) section, where the arguement for critical engagements of the web visualities is first made, Langlois stresses the necessity of "alternative ways of exploring the potential of the Web through the creation of alternative modes of surfing" (9). The examples given, WebStalker and IssueCrawler, "represent(s) a first attempt to overcome the page metaphor and to represent Web browsing in spatial terms, where URLs are represented as circles and hyperlinks as lines, with text and images collected in a separate window" (9).
Why is this important? It must be because it is a change only in the top layer (to use Langlois' three tiered model of the web p. 52) of the web's construction. The schematic views of WebStalker for instance do not require new code or hardware, they simply reinterpret existing codes, using existing hardwares. So the opportunity for this experimental, critical visuality, demonstrates the fact that changes in one strata of web development do not necessarily impact other strata. That said, even this seemingly simple visual reintrepretation of the "lower" layers of web code and computer hardware, posit a powerful conclusion, that there is no one way to percieve this information, and the existing styles cannot be naturalized or essentialized. Like experimental film techniques then, the avant-garde visualities of WebStalker and IssueCrawler show us something new about already existing information, and make the web user think about how s/he views information in addition to what information is shown.
There is also the question of the persistence of the "page metaphor." Like Langlois, I have argued against the continued persistence of the page as visual schema in web culture, and like Matthew Fuller, I've worked with digital media designers to create new schemes for connecting/viewing and therefore understanding certain collections of data. Anecdotally, I worked at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society this summer, and was charged with the task of taking a vast set of multimeida information for a tenth anniversary conference, and putting it all together in a meaningful way. The Center being oriented towards new media, I had a lot of freedom, and immediately I knew that the page metaphor simply could not work. The media was far too overlapping (or "imbricated" as Langlois likes to say) to be broken apart into different cells of discrete data. I needed a way to bring things together, not pull them apart (which is inherent in the idea of the page, alongside it's insistence of linear, right to left, progression). So I became involved with a group that produced single-browser windows with multiplicitious networks, and we worked all summer to produce what the designer's would call a "knowledge space" where videos, blog posts, tweets, and audio recordings could be played without leaving the browser window. I think this worked to overcome the limits of traditional "code politics" because it literally had to be re-coded, not simply re-intrepreted (12). It also hacked "the technodiscursive and technocultural rules that create specific flows of content" to produce new flows, whose directionalities are much harder to determine, creating a new sense of perusing freedom on the part of the user (10).
It looks a lot like IssueCrawler, you can check it out here.
From Fuller's art/web-browser, to his theory of "sensorium" Langlois follows the lead of visual culture to engage with the idea of meaning being deeply embedded in how one sees (50). Langlois follows Manovich, to engage the soviet constructivist traditions possibly embedded in contemporary web browsing scopic regimes, but also engage with Shields' "bricolage
of digital images, text, and other elements linked together by hypertext references” (51). In both cases, the heterogeneity of the web browser is key. The elements of the web cannot be broken down beyond certain multimedia objects. They cannot, for instance, be all reduced to language (text) though ironically, they are of course reduced substantially on the side of code, and hardware. The essential differentiation here, is that the computer can think of the images as binary code, and the browser can think of it as html, but the user must see it as a jpeg image, or it's rendering correctly.
further critical visualities
It would be healthy, I imagine, to read Crary and his techniques of the observer in light of the questions raised by langlois' critical visualities of the web browser. It could be healthy to read perspective as symbolic form, and other theories of visuality that have been produced for art history, theories on painting, and questions of photography (especially the concepts of post-biology and digital photography). All of these texts, would not doubt, be wonderful to hybridize like Langlois does so capably with her many sources, towards some transcendent critical visuality.
But I can already see how these will not be adequate to assess what kind of things are going on in web browsers, and flash interfaces. No, considering perspective will surely be helpful, but it will also be a misdirection, for as sure as the web browser does invite a certain sense of depth, it also requires a literacy that painting could never posses, nor art historical theory could ever approach. Namely, the concept of the click, and what is clickable (a sort of cyber-tactility) and what is simply cyber-surface.
That's where I would wander towards in another 1000 words. In this page that is a blog that is an irony I cannot shake.
I wonder how you can compose a text in non-page space?
Computer as a Representational Tool
“The reason why computer communication is important for media studies is that the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation” (47)
I wish Langlois had gone into the status of art in a technocultural world more. The abstract opens with “this dissertation project argues that the study of meaning-making practices on the Web…needs to involve acknowledgement of the importance of communication technologies” (iv). New media art or digital art uses communication technologies of the Web to explore “meaning-making practices” and expresses itself through software.
Software is essential to the Web because it is how a viewer experiences that space. It is related to self-expression in an abstract world. It both constrains and sets free users. As artists using and creating software to produce art, I am wondering how the conditions of art have changed. Langlois brings up Kittler’s theory that “there is no software” and how lack of acknowledging the layers at work within technology makes it that “we simply do not know what our writing does” (43). If this is true and the aesthetics of software hide the layers at work for user’s pleasure – what does that mean for artists who break down and create software? Are they too implicated in that system or can they be in the realm of programmers? How does a viewer’s viewing of new media or internet art change compared to traditional art viewing practices?
Mixed Semiotics 2.0
Langlois outlines a compelling argument by showing "the many layers of software that are needed, from transmission protocols to computer languages and programs, to transform data into signs" and integrating these layers into actor-network theory (9). In particular, I found her evidence of Amazon's (many, many!) "software actors" demonstrating their "space of agency" powerful and interesting (46). Her application of ANT seemed especially strong in showing the superiority of using a combination of human and computer choices to construct Amazon's recommendations. I was glad to see the point made--though in a pretty dilute form--that Web 2.0 software, structures, and websites, tend to follow a simple tenet: "You (the user[s]) make the content. We get the money."
Also, though she doesn't depend too much on medium theory, she does define a medium as "a communication system...that...creates new social environments and is thus active in bringing social change," (27). I can see the connection between the implementation of the MediaWiki format and changes in the way encyclopedic knowledge is conceptualized, but elaboration on the transformation of consumerism with regard to Amazon's interpellation of customers and their desires was missing, I think.
In her discussion of the MediaWiki suite, I thought the "credentials" was underdeveloped--who has the expertise among Wikipedia users to be an administrator? Why? And does this structure reproduce problematic hierarchies from non-open-source bodies of knowledge that Wikipedia attempts to supersede? In a chapter that relies so much on Latour and STS scholars, a mention of partial perspectives might have shored up Wikipedia's credibility a bit.
(A very small side note: I found it funny when, at certain points in the text, levels of signification and resignification, and structures of control and power, made themselves apparent where Langlois made typos.)
(Another small side note: Langlois claims that "dynamic content production makes it possible for technical actors to be included at both the levels of content and expression in ways that were not possible before [MediaWiki systems]" (208). Are blogs not considered "dynamic" enough to have preceded wikis in this form of editability?)
Also, though she doesn't depend too much on medium theory, she does define a medium as "a communication system...that...creates new social environments and is thus active in bringing social change," (27). I can see the connection between the implementation of the MediaWiki format and changes in the way encyclopedic knowledge is conceptualized, but elaboration on the transformation of consumerism with regard to Amazon's interpellation of customers and their desires was missing, I think.
In her discussion of the MediaWiki suite, I thought the "credentials" was underdeveloped--who has the expertise among Wikipedia users to be an administrator? Why? And does this structure reproduce problematic hierarchies from non-open-source bodies of knowledge that Wikipedia attempts to supersede? In a chapter that relies so much on Latour and STS scholars, a mention of partial perspectives might have shored up Wikipedia's credibility a bit.
(A very small side note: I found it funny when, at certain points in the text, levels of signification and resignification, and structures of control and power, made themselves apparent where Langlois made typos.)
(Another small side note: Langlois claims that "dynamic content production makes it possible for technical actors to be included at both the levels of content and expression in ways that were not possible before [MediaWiki systems]" (208). Are blogs not considered "dynamic" enough to have preceded wikis in this form of editability?)
a world after my x-files-indundated conspiracy-theorist heart
[--this is more observational than critical, and i'm hoping to add more, but my meeting tonight just got moved up from six to five pm, and it's definitely not going to be over by ten. thus:--]
Although they were not particularly central to the topic of the paper, I found Langlois's points on surveillance to be rich sites of further interrogation of an ever larger picture of contemporary society.
Langlois writes that "amazon.com cannot simply be seen as a repressive system, but also as a creative and productive system" (171); surveillance techniques such as cookies and solicitation of personal data are willingly or not accepted by users in exchange for a more tailored consuming experience.
This seems to be the matter of debate for a number of similar issues. A number of people lobby actively against the loyalty cards you get at CVS or supermarkets. Some of this is pretty justifiable, based on examples within the past few years of that kind of information being sold to third-party companies or released on websites; after September 11th, several companies shared their databases with the FBI. People also fear it eventually being sold to insurance companies or shared with government organizations or otherwise being used for other kinds of surveillance purposes. But they get you a few cents discount! Maybe you'll get some tailored coupons! The price of convenience. This is a new kind of social contract, one that puts the individual on both sides.
Something that Langlois doesn't write specifically but that I started thinking about in September when I was buying textbooks on-- of course!-- amazon.com, is that the recommendations that the site makes for you are based obviously on only those books that you have bought from them. As it happens, I tend to only use amazon.com for big and potentially ridiculously expensive purchases like textbooks. But I was thinking this year that what I'd really like in the way of recommendations would be suggestions on authors whom other fans of Rilke, Jabes, and Calvino have been reading. I can check the "Other Readers who Looked at..." section of any one of these books, but if I'd like my instant, cumulative recommendations, I better start buying everything from Amazon.
So it's a marketing strategy. And a kind of surveillance. And kind of subjectivization, and I thought interesting Langlois's note about the "'ideal--from the point of view of the software--version of the user" (241) because anyone who has written programs requiring a GUI knows that a lot of time and research goes into making it "user-friendly," both responding to, shaping, but also anticipating user behaviour. Using old paradigms but maybe adding something else. Today, everyone recognizes a sideways triangle as PLAY, and a couple parallel vertical lines as PAUSE. I wasn't around for when that started, but I bet although it might have started with the words and the symbol, today designers are pretty safe in just putting in the pictures. The modern logic is predicated pre-facto on what the user brings to the table to the extent that one can act within this kind of space. That is maybe the only requisite precondition. The invisible other, effecting structuring works so powerfully as a result.
This is very interesting coincident with what came up a number of times last week-- that Deleuze and Guattari's semiotics play with a kind of strange always-already there. The performative order-word has subjectivizing effects on bodies, which it presupposes. But also creates? This seems to be at work in Langlois's specific mixed semiotics of the web.
Although they were not particularly central to the topic of the paper, I found Langlois's points on surveillance to be rich sites of further interrogation of an ever larger picture of contemporary society.
Langlois writes that "amazon.com cannot simply be seen as a repressive system, but also as a creative and productive system" (171); surveillance techniques such as cookies and solicitation of personal data are willingly or not accepted by users in exchange for a more tailored consuming experience.
This seems to be the matter of debate for a number of similar issues. A number of people lobby actively against the loyalty cards you get at CVS or supermarkets. Some of this is pretty justifiable, based on examples within the past few years of that kind of information being sold to third-party companies or released on websites; after September 11th, several companies shared their databases with the FBI. People also fear it eventually being sold to insurance companies or shared with government organizations or otherwise being used for other kinds of surveillance purposes. But they get you a few cents discount! Maybe you'll get some tailored coupons! The price of convenience. This is a new kind of social contract, one that puts the individual on both sides.
Something that Langlois doesn't write specifically but that I started thinking about in September when I was buying textbooks on-- of course!-- amazon.com, is that the recommendations that the site makes for you are based obviously on only those books that you have bought from them. As it happens, I tend to only use amazon.com for big and potentially ridiculously expensive purchases like textbooks. But I was thinking this year that what I'd really like in the way of recommendations would be suggestions on authors whom other fans of Rilke, Jabes, and Calvino have been reading. I can check the "Other Readers who Looked at..." section of any one of these books, but if I'd like my instant, cumulative recommendations, I better start buying everything from Amazon.
So it's a marketing strategy. And a kind of surveillance. And kind of subjectivization, and I thought interesting Langlois's note about the "'ideal--from the point of view of the software--version of the user" (241) because anyone who has written programs requiring a GUI knows that a lot of time and research goes into making it "user-friendly," both responding to, shaping, but also anticipating user behaviour. Using old paradigms but maybe adding something else. Today, everyone recognizes a sideways triangle as PLAY, and a couple parallel vertical lines as PAUSE. I wasn't around for when that started, but I bet although it might have started with the words and the symbol, today designers are pretty safe in just putting in the pictures. The modern logic is predicated pre-facto on what the user brings to the table to the extent that one can act within this kind of space. That is maybe the only requisite precondition. The invisible other, effecting structuring works so powerfully as a result.
This is very interesting coincident with what came up a number of times last week-- that Deleuze and Guattari's semiotics play with a kind of strange always-already there. The performative order-word has subjectivizing effects on bodies, which it presupposes. But also creates? This seems to be at work in Langlois's specific mixed semiotics of the web.
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