"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door... You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The Next Adventure

Hello, all. First, a comic to sum up my Honors class that I have been blogging about lately:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turtles.png

Thanks again to the ever wonderful xkcd.

I just wanted to post a quick update on what I'm doing now. Tomorrow morning I am heading out to Half Moon Bay, CA, to start a fellowship with the Not for Sale Campaign. It's a non-profit organization that works to fight slavery and human trafficking. This is a cause I have felt passionate about and been involved in for a few years, and I'm very excited to take the next step and becoming more involved.

Ideally, I would like to do some blogging this fall, although, as we all know, I'm not the most consistent blogger. But one can always hope. In the meantime, for any who are interested, you can read about Not for Sale at the following link:

www.notforsalecampaign.org

Also, this is an unpaid position, meaning I have to do some fundraising work. So if any you feel able to and called to support me, you can do so here:

https://nfs.webconnex.com/christy

Thanks, all, and I'll try to stay in touch.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Response: Barney and Andrejevic

This week I am responding to Prometheus Wired: The Hope ofr Deomcracy in the Age of Network Technology by David Barney and iSpy: Surveillance and Poer in the Interactive Era by Mark Andrejevic.

This week’s prompt:
[…]But what is the central reason for this disagreement: what, in other words, do the optimists “just not get” about digital media, according to Barney and Andrejevic? Do you think that the latter two writers might consider the work of the optimists to be a twenty-first century version of what the Marxists called “ideology”?

Barney’s disagreement with the digital optimists seems to be similar to my disagreement with Hayek. I was annoyed with Hayek because I felt that in his idealistic exaltation of “maximum freedom of individual choice,” he was completely ignoring the reality of the many powerless people exploited by the choices of those who have the power to exercise their freedom of choice. Barney makes a similar argument. Although it may be true that the implementation of network and computerized technologies in the workforce would result in a net increase of jobs, as the creation of new types of jobs would outbalance the elimination of manufacturing jobs, Barney points out that those who held the eliminated jobs are not necessarily hired immediately into the new jobs (often, he says, they are not). He seems to feel that the digital optimists try to reduce human lives and all the implications therein to numbers: “The point here is that, even if jobs eliminated by network technology are eventualy replaced by jobs ‘elsewhere’ in the economy, the fact of their elimination is more significant in the lives of the people who held them than is their replacement with a job for somebody somewhere else” (135).

I wonder how Norbert Weiner would respond to Barney’s argument. I interpreted Weiner’s argument in The Human Use of Human Beings to be that both machines and humans have their place in production, and that once machines become available to fill certain tasks, they should be implemented, thereby freeing humans up for more appropriate activities. Weiner feels that to place a human in a job that should be given to a machine is to degrade the human. The human mind should be stimulated, not demeaned to menial, mindless tasks. As such, I think he would approve the use of network technologies that eliminate jobs in the manufacturing industry and the creation of more human appropriate jobs, although there are some positions which have been replaced with machines that he would probably not approve. However, it is difficult to make such an idealistic argument in the face of Barney’s numbers and unemployment rates. Would Weiner maintain that machines should still be implemented, and that concurrently targeted efforts should be made to reintegrate those who lost their jobs into the workforce in new positions?

Andrejevic seems to disagree with the idea that the interactive nature of the internet will lead to a more egalitarian society. For him, this same interactivity praised by digital optimists is one of the key elements in the creation of digital enclosure. Despite claims towards egalitarianism, Andrejevic recognizes that someone still controls and has access to all the information that is exchanged through digital interaction. In an information economy, information is a kind of currency, and, according to Andrejevic, we willing turn over large amounts of this currency to the controllers of the information systems, creating an informational hierarchy: “A similar division of groups can be discerned in the emerging digital enclosure between those who control privatized interactive spaces (virtual or otherwise), and those who submit to particular forms of monitoring in order to gain access to goods, services, and conveniences” (3). Andrejevic does not buy Kelly’s idea that “the web runs on love, not greed.” The controllers of “privatized interactive spaces” only want to exploit the information of “those who submit” for profit.

I found reading the opening pages of iSpy and Andrejevic’s description of Google’s plan for contextual advertising. Today, contextual advertising is an everyday occurrence, and while it is sometimes annoying, we don’t generally view it as having the same sinister qualities as does Andrejevic. Is this because it is really not so sinister after all, or are we just desensitized? Are we so used to submitting to the information controllers so we can get the goods and services we want that we cease to resent such advertising as an uninvited invasion of our privacy?

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Response: Kelly, Lurie, and Trippi

This week I am responding to “The Web Runs on Love, not Greed,” “Making my own Music,” and “We Are the Web” by Kevin Kelly, “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left” by Peter Lurie, and The Revolution will not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything” by John Trippi.

This week’s prompt:
Like the writers for week twelve, those of week thirteen strike a strongly positive note about the future ... What do you make of their arguments? Are they too optimistic, or do you think that at least some of their predictions are likely to come true, if they haven't already?

While the writers we read this week were rather optimistic, and often had a flair for the dramatic (Kelly’s repeated attribution of the term “miracle” to the internet, Trippi’s title “The Overthrow of Everything”), they did not strike me as naïve as Barlow’s “Declaration …” did. While they have high hopes for the transformative potential of the internet, their expectations seem to be built to a greater extent on facts or history. Trippi’s assessment of the internet’s power to mobilize and connect comes from his experience in the Howard Dean campaign, where it did precisely that. He notes the way the internet empowered members of the campaign, and from that observation he extrapolates that we as consumers will demand this same empowerment from all our usage of the internet. I think this, for one thing, has definitely proved to be true. From personalization of blogs and web pages, to sites selling custom-designed, made-to-order products, to the plethora of iPhone apps available for download, consumers seek convenience, choice, portability, and ease of access.

Kelly’s argument is similar, in that he affirms that internet users will be driven to create content out of passion, not for profit. When internet users are empowered to create (blogs, vlogs, fan art, etc.), they will. Kelly portrays the relationship between the internet and its users as a symbiosis—the one offers a platform that empowers the other to keep the first going.

I had some problems with Lurie’s argument. His argument is fundamentally McLuhanesque, in that the structure and nature of the internet promotes a deconstructionist manner of thinking in its users. I think this is generally a valid point, and I have also observed that people are less willing to trust a single source. However, I think in his assessment of the implications of this trend takes some things for granted which are highly debatable. He conflates religion and politics in his argument, assuming that the “right” is entirely made up of subscribers to centralized, authoritarian religions. While it may be true that more such religious people identify with the political right than with the left, he seems to think (or, at least phrases his argument as such) that this is an absolute categorization. There are, in fact, conservatives who identify as such for economic reasons (they favor the free market) or reasons of governance (they want less governmental interference) than for traditional social values. Lurie’s argument does not address why the deconstructionist nature of the internet would undermine these economically or politically conservative modes of thought. He also makes the converse assumption that all members of the political left are agnostic. This, also, is untrue. There are many religious liberals, and for some of them their belief in the importance of social welfare programs is fueled by a religious (even if unorthodox) faith. Would a deconstructionist system that will destroy religious belief challenge the reasons why such people identify as liberal, causing them, perhaps, to opt instead for a free market where they can pursue their own ends? Lurie does not address this possibility in his article, and I feel like it weakens his argument.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Response: Negroponte, Barlow, and Gilder

This week I am responding to Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and “Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net” by John Perry Barlow, and Life After Television by George Gilder

While reading the Barlow essay “Selling Wine Without Bottles” and Barlow’s discussion of how our information-age, material-based mindset concerning intellectual property cannot be applied to the digital age, I was reminded of Melissa Anelli’s discussion of how copyright infringement and intellectual property was negotiated in the early days of the Harry Potter fandom and its presence on the internet. Anelli is the webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron, a popular Harry Potter fansite. Her book, Harry, A History, details the growth and development of the Harry Potter fandom. I unfortunately did not bring my copy of the book to school with me, so I can’t quote the direct passage. However, points out that the beginnings of the Harry Potter fandom were concurrent with the internet’s rapid development as a community forum (the Y2K era). In this time, fans began making fan websites, fan art, fan fiction, etc., using names and terms from the Harry Potter books. When Warner Brothers bought the rights for the Potter films, they began cracking down on what they felt to be copyright infringement, targeting these fansites. There was a highly publicized of a twelve-year-old girl, who had started a Harry Potter fansite, receiving a “cease-and-desist” letter from Warner Brothers. Being twelve, she, quite understandably, freaked out, thinking she was about to be sued or arrested or something. There was a great deal of backlash against Warner Brothers after this, and in the ensuing months they worked out exactly how to respond to these unauthorized usages of Harry Potter names and terms.

Again, I regret that I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t precisely say what the result was; I think it has something to do with making profit, but then again I know that wizard rock bands write music about Harry Potter and sell their music for profit. In any case, I think it’s an example of companies attempting to apply the industrial-age mindset described by Barlow to digital goods in the post-information age. While the use of the name “Harry Potter,” the term “Expelliarmus,” or the image of the Hogwarts crest in fan art may technically violate the sorts of copyrights we are accustomed to using, there just seems something wrong with penalizing a pre-teen for drawing a picture of Harry Potter and posting it online. J.K. Rowling herself, I think, has spoken a bit on the topic, and said that she is glad that people find her work and her world to be a source of creative inspiration, and she does not want to stifle that or to shut down conversations. I think this sort of negotiation that has occurred within the Harry Potter fandom is indicative of the negotiations that will need to happen in all sectors of “the economy of the mind” to achieve a system that allows free exchange of ideas but also does not violate a creator’s right to their creation.

I mentioned wizard rock above, and I think that’s an example of Negroponte’s new Sunday painter. In chapter 18 of Being Digital, he says, “The middle ground between work and play will be enlarged dramatically. The crisp line between love and duty will blur by virtue of a common denominator—being digital. The Sunday painter is a symbol of a new era of opportunity and respect for creative avocations—lifelong making, doing, and expressing” (Ch. 18). Internet forums like YouTube, DeviantArt, and Etsy allow people the opportunity to, perhaps, turn their recreational arts-and-crafting into a source of profit. The internet allows them to find and appeal to niche markets—like “wrock” (wizard rock) for Harry Potter fans or “trock” (timelord rock) for Dr. Who fans. These internet platforms allow amateur artists a low-cost way of distributing their art to a wide audience, until they gain enough attention or fans to profit. This is one example of digital media’s empancipatory power, in that it creates greater freedom of expression.

I think it’s interesting how both Negroponte and Gilder note an increasing emphasis on personalization and interactivity in our new technologies. In chapter 13, Negroponte describes the way new technologies can gather very specific demographic information about an individual, such that that individual’s devices may offer him or her extremely personalized information, recommendations, and advertisements. Similarly, Gilder discusses how the television, a one-way broadcast device, is giving way to the more interactive telecomputer: “Instead of a master-slave architecture in which every receiver can function as a processor and transmitter of video images and other information” (18). This capacity for user to interact with machine, and for user to interact with user via machine is what many of the Marxist writers (Ensenzberger, Baudrillard, etc.) we read earlier wanted in order to make new media truly democratic. The fact that more contemporary writers are noticing the existence of these trends is probably a source of their optimism. If the earlier, Marxist writers prescribed interactivity as the necessary change in media, and if interactivity is in fact encouraging, contemporary writers may feel that the democratization of the media is actually in their power.

And now, for your listening pleasure, "The Bravest Man I Ever Knew" by The Ministry of Magic.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Response: Haraway, Plant, and Turkle

This week I am responding to Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Chapter 8, “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Chapter 9, “Virtuality and its Discontents” by Sherry Turkle, and “Ada Lovelace and the Loom of Life” by Sadie Plant in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production.

This week’s prompt is:
What political potential might radical feminists (or radicals of any stripe for that matter) find in the new media forms that are absent in the mass media world of the decades immediately following the Second World War?

It seems that, for the writers we read this week, the primary political potential in new digital media lies in the ability to dissociate oneself from traditional labels and categories that have, historically, been used as justification for disenfranchisement or disempowerment: gender, race, class, etc. The anonymity of the internet would allow members of these groups to express their ideas and creativity apart from these restrictive classifications. Cyberspace represents for these writers a deconstruction of artificial, repressive social categories.

This is certainly so for Haraway. She rejoices in the fluid nature of the cyborg: “[Cyborgs] are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation” (153). The cyborg, according to Haraway, distills human interaction down to pure consciousness. This, she says, “changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century,” because it blurs all sorts of constructed boundaries—not only race, class, gender, and so on, but also human-animal, or material-immaterial (149). As a feminist, she sees this blurring of boundaries as a deconstruction of artificial conceptions of femininity: “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested scientific discourses and other social practices” (155). Modern electronic media will change women’s experience by allowing them modes of expression previously denied to them due to such socially-imposed constructions.

Plant gives a more historical view of the way the development of electronic media has influenced and involved women. She details the relation between computers and textiles, a craft generally associated with women, and discusses the history of women and computers, beginning with Ada Lovelace and continuing through twentieth-century women computer programmers. While her argument may be less theoretical than Haraway’s, she makes a case for computers and electronic media as an achievement of women as well as men. She marks an important place for them in a field which, today, is often associated with males, thus emphasizing their capacity to partake in a traditionally “masculine” discipline. She does not attempt to argue that women are somehow innately suited for computer work, as Freud tried to argue that women are innately suited for textiles. Rather, she indicates that women were allowed entry to the world of programming because it was considered menial, like weaving (p. 262). Once allowed entry, they excelled in ways that would be influential in the development of contemporary electronic media. Plant sets forth women’s historical involvement with the development of computers as a testament to their ability to excel in traditionally male industries, thereby undermining the assertions of Freud and others that women cannot think analytically.

While Turkle focuses less on women and more on middle-class young adults, she, like Haraway, discusses the empowerment offered by internet’s deconstruction of accepted social categories and norms. In the world of MUDs, people’s ability to recreate themselves as they desire offers them a sense of empowerment they may not feel in their real life. Although she seems wary of the conflation of simulation and reality, she does remark the greater level of participation exhibited by members of cyber-communities. Like Haraway, Turkle affirms that the disassociation of self from embodiment is empowering. She does offer a caveat: “The challenge is to integrate some meaningful personal responsibility in virtual environments. Virtual environments are valuable as places where we can acknowledge our inner diversity. But we still want an authentic experience of self” (p. 254). Haraway does not seem to share this concern for authenticity—she rejoices at the way cyberspace blurs all boundaries. Turkle, on the other hand, only values the empowerment of cyberspace to the extent that it does not replace simulation for reality. While she may also appreciate cyberspace’s capacity to deconstruct borders, it is useless to her if it results in an inability to discern or an apathy towards reality.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Response: Turner, Hayles, and Disneyland!!

This week I am responding to From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner, chapters 2 and 6, and How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hayles.

While reading the section about cybernetic art worlds in chapter 2, “Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture” or Turner’s book, his descriptions of the artistic environments created by the various avant-garde movements of the mid-20th century reminded me a lot of something that is generally not considered to be countercultural or subversive: Disneyland.

I am sure that several hippies are now rolling over in their graves. They must be scandalized that I would compare their art to something so corporate, so businessy, so, well, Disneyfied as the Disney parks. But hear me out. I have always perceived a great deal of artistry in the Disney parks, and I think the very reasons why those avant-garde movements found meaning in their particular mode of expression may be applied to the Disney parks and may explain in part why they have achieved such a devoted, enduring fan base. True, the Disney parks are constructed upon a business model, which the avant-garde artists would have shunned, but the parks reach a level and species of artistic and emotional engagement that I find similar to what the cybernetic artists tried to create.

The first passage in which I was reminded of the Disney parks was in the description of USCO’s cybernetic art productions:

Rather than work with a transmission model of communication, in which performers or others attempt to send a message to their audience, USCO events tried to take advantage of what Gerd Stern called “the environmental circumstance.” That is, USCO constructed all-encompassing technological environments, theatrical ecologies in which the audience was simply one species of being among many, and waited to observe their effects (51).

This is exactly what the Disney parks are. In my own private musings (because I am the sort of nerd who muses about the artistic classification of the Disney parks), I have called the parks “immersive, interactive, environmental theatre,” a description which sounds very similar to Stern’s idea of “the environmental circumstance.” Like USCO’s performances, The Disney parks use a variety of technologies, appealing to all five senses, to create intricately themed environments that engage with guests on artistic levels. To me, this is the biggest difference between the Disney parks and the average theme park—for example, a Six Flags. The latter is really just about thrills and fun. Honestly, most of the roller coasters in Six Flags parks are more intense and thrilling than those in the Disney parks. But that’s all, really. Adrenaline rush, yummy food, adrenaline rush, fun show—thrills removed from any sort of artistic engagement. In the Disney parks, on the other hand, the thrills are always part of a greater story, be it an epic adventure—chasing the Yeti on “Expedition Everest” or experiencing the paranormal on “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror”—or a short, poetic snapshot—the sights, sounds, and smells from a hang glider in “Soaring Over California” or the excitement of rushing to a rock concert in “Rock’N’Roller Coaster.”

Every detail in the parks and the attractions is minutely, carefully crafted to totally immerse guests in environment and story, from the subtly transitioning music moving between lands to the forced perspective used to make the castle and the buildings on Main Street look taller than they actually are. One of my favorite bits of trivia has to do with the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. The story of this attraction is that one day, at the Hollywood Tower Hotel, sometime in the 1920s, all the guests of the hotel suddenly disappeared in to … (in my best Rod Serling voice) the Twilight Zone. In order to thoroughly create the illusion that everyone had disappeared in a moment, there are several props strewn about in the lobby, including an in-progress Parcheesi game. Rather than just placing pieces on the board, the Imagineers hired two professional Parcheesi players to play for an hour. At the end of the hour, the players had to get up and leave the table, leaving the pieces where they were, to create the illusion that the fictional players had actually disappeared.

Turner mentions many times the techno-mysticism in the work of the USCO artists; they availed themselves of all sorts of technology to explore how they could be used artistically, to create an effect or to heighten the consciousness of the audience. This most definitely applies to the Disney parks. Disney has always been on the cutting edge of examining the artistic potential of new technologies. This tradition goes back to Walt himself, who, upon seeing an audio-animatronic bird, became enamored of the technology, and immediately began considering how to use and improve this technology. Disney continues this tradition today with such attractions as the World of Color water show in Disney’s California Adventure. This show uses fountains, laser projections on screens of water, pyrotechnics, music, and animation to create a spectacular and moving show. However, despite Disney’s use of new technologies to create new types of effects, it is the way it uses technologies that is truly telling. Today, we have ceased to be awed or surprised by audio-animatronic figures, but attractions like Pirate of the Caribbean continue to be beloved because of how they use older technologies to tell a story. They bend these technologies to a greater artistic effect, and so they continue to hold emotional significance even after the technology itself loses its novelty.

Finally, Turner describes a sense of “mystical together-ness” that the USCO artists strove to cultivate: “they aimed not only to help their audiences become more aware of their surroundings but also to help them imagine themselves as members of a mystical community” (52). In my experience, the Disney parks are one of the best environments for creating such a sense of “mystical together-ness.” From the oft-heard “Have a magical day!” to the excitement over seeing a favorite character, to the feeling of camaraderie with other guests, this sense of community is pervasive in the parks. When I was last at Disneyland, last November, I went with my friend Lisa, who had never been before. Upon first entering the park, we went to City Hall to get her “First Visit” button. Throughout our three days at the park, guests and cast members alike congratulated her on her first visit and asked if she was having a good time. That sort of conversation that would be strange anywhere else, but it feels natural within the communal air of the parks. While the avant-garde artists used psychedelic drugs to create this effect, the Imagineers use the much simpler drugs of endorphin highs and adrenaline rushes to create the same feeling.

As is probably clear by now, I could talk about Disney forever. So I will conclude with the thought that, although it is true that the Disney parks have a much larger business component than movements like USCO, they share many of the same artistic qualities and techniques. This all to argue that the Disney parks are not, as many critics would say, merely monuments to consumerism and mass media. They are truly immersive works of art.
One final observation on this front. Disneyland Park opened in 1955, concurrent with many of these avant-garde movements. I am not inclined to think this is coincidence.

A few words on Hayles, now that I have blabbered so long about Disney. I found what she said about the self being an information-processing entity (I can’t find her exact wording) interesting, and I think it might help explain the phenomenon observed by Foucault of or cultural obsession with the idea of an author. If the self is basically information, and the body is just a prosthesis, then one’s writing is, in a way, actually part of oneself. In fact, it may be considered more an expression of self than the body, because writing is made of information, not matter, so it is essentially more similar to an informational self. Hayles does not seem to think that this conception of self as pure information is the best (she seems to want to celebrate, rather than reject, the human material existence), but the existence of that conception may explain why we want to attach an author to a work so badly. We want to have some conception of the “self” behind that piece of writing. If the writing is an extension of the author’s self, it seems to make sense to use the same signifier for the work that we use for the writer—the writer’s name.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Response: Hayek

This week I am responding to The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek.

It seems to me that for Hayek, the most important value, which should be preserved at all costs, is individual freedom of choice. I may be not fully understanding or oversimplifying his position, but he seems to think that any restriction of individual choice will propel us rapidly down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. While reading this week’s selections, I couldn’t help but feeling that his viewpoint comes from a place of privilege (I’m using it a casual sense, not in his sense). He writes with contempt about restrictions which would turn individuals into means “to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the ‘social welfare’ or the ‘good of the community’” (96). Even restrictions intended to aid the common good are dangerous in Hayek’s eyes.

I am not very educated in politics or economics, but I do a lot of volunteer work with social justice, so I thought about his argument in terms of Fair Trade. For those who don’t know, Fair Trade is a certification process that ensures that growers in other countries are paid fair wages for their labor and use sustainable agricultural procedures. You can read more about it here. It’s especially important in industries like the chocolate industry, in which slave labor and the exploitation of children is a huge problem. So, in that light, it’s hard for me to take Hayek’s obsession with individual choice seriously. A certification like Fair Trade does, in fact, individual choice. When a chocolate brand agrees to supply only Fair Trade chocolate, it is agreeing to submit itself to certain restrictions. So yes, it does decrease the freedom of choice of the chocolate makers.

However, let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. What about a young African boy, living in forced labor on a chocolate plantation? Without a labor restriction like Fair Trade, what options would he have? Continue to live as a slave on the chocolate farm, run away to try to find other options in an area where chocolate plantations are nearly the only option, or to try to make his way in a world where he has no education or qualifications to recommend him. Hayek wrote about the power that a monopoly holds over consumers—in this case, the owner of the chocolate plantation holds a monopoly on food and shelter as far as the boy is concerned. So how likely is the boy to leave a life of forced labor, when it is his only known source of life and sustenance? In this case, a labor restriction like a Fair Trade certification would give that boy more individual freedom of choice. If he lived on a Fair Trade farm, his family might have enough money to give their children more options, even potentially an education. So, a restriction in the name of the “social welfare” or the “good of the community, “abstractions” of which Hayek writes with scorn, does in face increase individual freedom of choice, just for those at the bottom of the economic spectrum, not those at the top. It seems to me that Hayek is only really concerned for the maintenance of individual choice for himself and others in his class, as he disregards the idea that measures which benefit the “common good” benefit many individuals, allowing them greater freedom of choice in what they do with their lives.

Again, I may have misunderstood his argument and have just gone a Fair Trade rant for no reason. He may be referring to other types of restrictions (government imposed, rather than voluntary). But as a supporter of Fair Trade, I couldn’t help getting irritated at his dismissal of the individual freedoms of agricultural workers in developing countries as merely elements of some abstract “social welfare.”

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Response: Debord and Baudrillard

This week I am responding to The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and “Requiem for the Media” by Jean Baudrillard.

First, some informal reactions:

I could not help getting really annoyed with Debord. First of all, he started out saying all these things about “the spectacle” without defining what exactly he meant by the term. Although I was sort of able to piece it together and figure out what he meant, it would have been so much easier for me to read and internalize his thoughts if I knew what he was talking about in the first place. Perhaps this was intentional (using the textual form to reflect theme and all that jazz) but it was still irritating. Secondly, his prose was so purple, and he seemed to delight in reversals of language (“the science of domination becomes the domination of science” and so on) that really meant very little. He seemed to take an obnoxious, gleeful pleasure in his own wit and eloquence; I could just seem him, as he writes, muttering to himself, “God, I’m good.” Really, I found all his little language flourishes distracting and meaningless.

His form was kind of interesting though. Like Twitter, only longer.

I found Baudrillard much easier to read, although pessimistic. It was nice reading this piece at this point in the semester, because of how he tied in and analyzed other thinkers we have already read in this class. It was a good review, and a good insight into how these various thinkers dialogue with each other.

The prompt:
[…] The big difference between the Frenchmen and McLuhan is that the former appear to be quite critical of these changes, whereas McLuhan was considerably more sanguine. What is it about the modern electronic media that so disturbs Debord and Baudrillard?

Debord seems to be concerned with a society obsessed with appearances to the neglect of meaning or thought. The spectacle, he says, is comprised of “images detached from every aspect of life [merging] into a common stream” (12). These images lose “unity of life” and create a world where appearance is all: “te spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” (14). The pervasiveness, disconnectedness, and appearance-centeredness of the electronic media, especially the modern manifestation of the electronic media, render it the sort of entity that could quite conceivably promote this “society of the spectacle” that Debord so detests. Take for example the television: it transmits to the viewer a series of disconnected images (commercials which break up programs, programs of different sources following each other, or showing simultaneously on different channels), which the viewer often enters into without context. Those programs depicting some aspect of human life give a generally unrealistic portrayal of true social interaction, instilling in the viewer a conception of human life based more upon these images than upon actual observation of actual humans. Moreover, as Baudrillard also points out, the viewer substitutes the viewing of these images for actual social interaction. Finally, the system of advertising, especially the advertising of commodities, by which television is funded fuels the “pseudo-needs” people create to sustain the economy and the reign of the commodity.

Baudrillard seems less worried about the imagistic, spectacular society that may result from the electronic media, and more concerned with how these technologies may degrade true communication. It essential that communication be recriprocal. It is not enough, for instance, that all political parties have a news channel where they may air their respective opinions, because television is inherently a one-way medium, in which the viewer listens to what the broadcaster says, without being able to respond. No matter the content of the program, or how many different programs and different viewpoints the viewer chooses to view, the communication is still always one way. It is also not enough for Baudrillard that the transmitter and receiver reverse roles, because this only results in a one-way communication going the opposite direction. Any communication or media that is to be truly revolutionary must break down these barriers. He poses graffiti as one of these media, as it is inherently transgressive.

I wonder what he would think of internet forums or the comment sections on blogs. Although they are not inherently transgressive media, they do allow for greater reciprocal communication, and they allow readers to give feedback directly to the author of a thought, video, etc. However, I think even such communal internet media still pose some of the problems Baudrillard identified with the electronic media. He says in regard to television, “ TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself … it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other” (281). I think that same problem often proves true for the internet, even if many people mainly use the internet to “speak” to people. The problem with communications like e-mail, Facebook, and other social networks is that we are addressing ourselves to a cyber-persona of the person with whom we speak, in which such factors as body language, tone, and even oftentimes context are stripped away; we moreover present our own cyber-personas, consciously or not, to those with whom we speak. So by turning ourselves toward a screen and away from other flesh-and-blood humans, we engage in a type of social interaction that is built upon a great deal of illusion (hat tip to Debord). I think Baudrillard is quite prescient in his fear that the electronic media will stop people from actually talking to each other, whether it be because they are viewing various one-way media (TV, YouTube videos, internet articles, etc.) or they are only “speaking” with other people’s cyber-personas. It is not uncommon to hear statements like, “In an age where everything is so connected, why do we feel so isolated?” This degradation of human communication feared by Debord and Bauddrillard seems to have some foundation in reality.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Response: Barthes and Foucault

This week I will be responding to Mythologies by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author” and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault..

This week’s prompt is the following:
“[…]So, in some sense, both Barthes and Foucault argue (Barthes rather more directly), we get our sense of self through media consumption. In what sense do you think that who you are--your desires, your fears, your most fundamental beliefs about yourself and the world--could plausibly be attributed to the signs and meanings that you consume through our consumption of modern media messages?”

This semester I am taking a class about British Romanticism, so after a few weeks of studying the Romantics and their extreme emphasis on the individual, I was struck by the difference in this week’s readings concerning the individual. For Foucault and Barthes, the self seems to be the sum of the signifiers a person chooses to denote him-/herself, the signified, or, in Foucault’s case, the signifiers used to signify an author, whether the author chooses them or not. Barthes’s writing on semiotics may be applied to any medium we use to interact with the world and the people around us: the clothes we wear, the labels we give ourselves, that which we claim to like and to dislike. All these signifiers add up to create the mythology of self. This idea of self then becomes naturalized, and we perceive it as something that is (“That’s just how I function”) as opposed to something we construct. Foucault takes it a step further concerning authors, and how we retroactively construct their “selves.” In our conception of an author, it is the body of his or her published work to which we refer when we say his or her name. As Foucault points out, there are some pieces of information which learning will not alter our conception of that author, and some that vastly will—for instance, my conception of James Joyce was exceedingly altered when I learned of his erotic love letters to Nora Barnacle (the following comic quite appropriately expresses my reaction to said letters: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32). However, whatever my conception of James Joyce, it is a construction made from a variety of signifiers I have learned to associate with him. How many of t hose signifiers, though, would he actually have chosen? Probably, poor James would not have chosen to have his letters to Nora made public. For Foucault, then, the way one’s “self” is constructed is not even within one’s power to choose.

The prompt seems to be asking for our personal opinions, so I will give mine. I hesitate to call myself a structuralist, having only minimal exposure to the theory, but it makes a lot of sense to me that the way we conceptualize the world is formed by the structure of the language we speak. I find that whenever I really learn a new word, in the sense that I fully absorb and understand its meaning, I’m able to think about things with a liberating sense of greater clarity (one of my most recent lexical discoveries was “apotheosis”). Although I (and, therefore, I extrapolate many others, even if said extrapolation is somewhat hubristic) don’t necessarily think in words, but rather in abstract ideas or emotions, I find that I cannot fully process these ideas until I put them into words. That’s why talking something out with someone when I am upset is helpful, because it forces me to crystallize my random feelings into words. Further, as I explained in my blog last week, I think it makes a lot of sense that a culture’s language, or, on a smaller scale, a person’s language, could have a profoundly formative effect on that culture’s expression and development. Thus, a person’s or a culture’s contact with media messages, which are made up of signifiers such as words, must greatly influence that person or culture’s self-identity, because it provides a framework on which to build said identity. However, that said, I think there are some elements to human “selfness” that cannot be reduced to contact with media messages—primarily biological elements like hormones or basic necessities. Although how we confront these biological elements may be largely a construction built on the framework given to us by our culture and its mythologies (for instance, how one thinks about and responds to the drive for sex), I do think there is a sub-language or sub-semiological level to these biological elements which, though it may be expressed through the filer of semiology, exists outside of a semiological construction of self.

And now, for a bit of a tangent. This does not completely have to do with Foucault and Barthes, but I feel that it’s somewhat related. I took a class on the history of literary theory in the fall of 2009, and one of the first things we read about was the “The Intentional Fallacy,” by Wimsatt and Beardsley. This is an idea of New Criticism or Formalism that states that what the author intended to do with a text is irrelevant. We neither can know for sure what the author intended, nor does the author’s intent matter to the meaning of the text, even if the author has explicitly expressed his/her intent. Like Foucault’s idea of the author, the intentional fallacy divorces a text from any personal elements. I am unsure as to how much structuralism and formalism are related, but it seems to me that they at least share that impersonal element. What matters is the structure of the language or the structure of the text, not some sort of abstract idea of self and self-expression.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Response: McLuhan

This week I am responding to Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, chapters 1-4, 9, and 31

McLuhan starts out with the idea that media is an extension of self (7). Although he later elaborates on this idea with the Narcissus metaphor, he starts off without defending this idea, as though he felt it were a given. Although I found this to be somewhat annoying, the definition intuitively makes sense to me. McLuhan later goes onto define media as something that “eliminate[s] time and space factors in human association” (9). This makes sense in terms of what Wiener said about humans being the only animal “in whom this desire for communication, or rather this necessity for communication, is the guiding motive of their whole life” (Wiener 3). Communication may be understood as the process of making something known—some idea, concept, emotion, event, etc. Since no two humans have the exact same experience or perception of existence, any act of communication closes the gap, thereby “eliminat[ing] time and space” factors, between the experiences of sender and receiver. So by decreasing the gap between the experience, or self, of sender and receiver, the sender has extended his/herself such that it is closer to the self of the receiver. That got a little rambly, but to sum up what I was trying to say, an act of communication is an attempt to help another person—another self—better understand the self of the communicator, in terms of allowing the receiver to vicariously experience the thoughts, actions, or emotions of the sender. Therefore, the media through which a person him/herself known to another self is, necessarily, an extension of self.

However, McLuhan broadens his definition of media to include things we wouldn’t normally consider to be acts of communication, like tools or cars or clothing (although, in the case of the latter, fashion could be considered the imposing of meaning onto clothing). A tool like a hammer becomes an extension of self in a corporeal rather than metaphysical sense. It extends the hand and magnifies the strength to accomplish a specific task. So while this type of media is not a communicative medium in a person-to-person sense, it is still a medium in that it acts as a channel through which a person interacts with his/her environment. Further, if we think of a “message” in terms of a signal sent to effect a certain end, as Shannon and Weaver defined it, the hammer can be considered to communicate a message between person (sender) and nail (receiver).

Moving on …

Being the language person that I am, I was fascinated by McLuhan’s discussion of how the development of the technology of the phonetic alphabet created the individualist culture of cultures that use such an alphabet. Although I think he is being perhaps a little too categorical in his treatment of the issue—all cultures seem to fit in one box or another for him, without leaving room for grey areas or middle-of-the-road cultures—and he uses very charged terms like “civilized” in a somewhat too nonchalant manner, I think his discussion of how a technology like a phonetic alphabet can revolutionize cultural structure is really interesting. I have always been interested in how the brain uses language to conceptualize the world. Language is both a great tool for making ourselves known to others, and a crutch, in that we begin to rely on it to the extent that it is difficult for us to conceptualize the world outside of the set of grammatical structures and vocabulary presented to us. That’s why, when I read 1984, I found Orwell’s dystopia so terrifying; an effective deconstruction of language such as the Department of Truth was attempting would truly deconstruct people’s ability to even think revolutionary thoughts, because they would have no words for such thoughts.

That was a tangent. Anyway, if language can have such a formative effect on the mind, it makes sense that it should have a similar effect on a culture. The idea that a phonetic alphabet allows for a greater degree of individualization in a culture makes sense because it provides all speakers of the language with the ability to pronounce and look up any word they encounter, even a new one of which they do not know the meaning. Studying Chinese, if I come across a character I have never seen before, there is no way for me to look it up, unless I can input it into an electronic pinyin converter (pinyin being the transliteration alphabet developed for Chinese). I can’t even pronounce a new character without asking someone who knows what it is. So such a language would reinforce communal settings, in which a person must rely on others with superior knowledge to increase his/her own knowledge. With a phonetic alphabet, as long as one knows the phonetic rules of the language, one can easily pronounce a new word or look it up. As such, one can rely on other written media to increase one’s knowledge, and as long as one has access to said media, one does not need other people for this pursuit.

A phonetic alphabet also a more individualist nature than a character-based language in the sense that each letter is itself, and only itself. It corresponds to a sound (or maybe two or three, depending on the phonetic rules of the language), and that is all. In Chinese, there are several basic characters, and then characters made by combining basic characters into more complex characters. So if one recognizes a component in a complex character, one can guess the meaning. This sharing of character components creates linguistic webs of association that mimic the tribal relations McLuhan writes about.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Response: Shannon, Weaver, and Wiener

This week I am responding to “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” by Claude E Shannon and Warren Weaver and The Human Use of Human Beings, chapters 1 and 11, by Norbert Wiener.

Again, beginning with a couple informal responses.

I hate math. One of math’s favorite hobbies is to tear my brain in pieces and then stomp on them while laughing maliciously at the spurting brain juice. So I was a bit apprehensive about the Shannon and Weaver reading. But I actually found it quite interesting, and not as painful as I was afraid it would be. I was especially intrigued by the idea of “noise” as it applies to the transmission of information, and, more specifically, translation between languages. I am double majoring in English and Spanish, studying Mandarin Chinese, and planning to go onto grad school in translation studies. Languages fascinate me, as does the act of translating something said in one language into another. Noise, in this case, would be whatever discrepancies arise from structural, vocabulary, stylistic, or idiomatic differences between languages. As I believe Wiener pointed out, a translator has, broadly speaking, two options: a more direct, literal translation that maintains denotative ideas from the original language, but perhaps loses something of idiomatic meaning or style, or a broader, more liberal translation that may maintain the original tone, but that also, intentionally or unintentionally, inserts meanings and nuances that were not originally present. I would say that the job of the translator, looking at these two options (and the spectrum of choices in between), is to pick the option producing the least amount of noise.

And now, the prompt:

The Marxists we have previously read seemed concerned with the manipulation of information from a socio-political standpoint—how is information being manipulated for the political ends of the ruling class, and how can the revolutionary class counter it? Shannon, Weaver, and Wiener, seem more concerned with manipulation of information (manipulation as in “technical treatment of a given material with a particular goal in mind,” as Enzensberger defines it) from a pragmatic stance—how can we, whoever we may be, manipulate information most effectively, such that it may arrive at the receiver, be that human or machine, with the least amount of distortion occurring during the transmission process. Both articles seem concerned with the idea of information free from any sort of partisan bias. Their concern is the act of communication, especially the changes it will, should, or should not undergo in the face of the development of communicative technologies.

Shannon and Weaver focus on establishing a framework for thinking about information in quantifiable terms. I think it’s significant that they emphasize “information must not be confused with meaning” (161). This idea shifts the focus from the semantic implications of that which is communicated to the data that is transmitted.

With this framework in mind, Wiener’s writing may be understood to discuss how machines can be designed to transmit, receive, and respond to information, and therefore the role they should play in social communication. His idea of a “message” is similar to Shannon’s idea of a “signal”—a stimulus, be it verbal, visual, etc., transmitted from a transmitter to a receiver, with the end of communicating a meaning. Wiener’s concern is control, “the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient” (8). If we put in in Shannon’s terms, control is the process of removing noise from a transmitted message: “a message can lose order spontaneously in the act of transmission, but cannot gain it” (7). In terms of machines, control becomes difficult because machines can only respond to a message in one of a predetermined set of responses. Thus, while Wiener seems enthusiastic about the potential usages of communication machines in society, he warns that it is important to determine their place. Placing machines in roles that belong to humans can be dangerous, because they cannot be appropriately controlled, but placing humans in a role that should belong to a machine, now that such machines exist, is degrading to the human.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Response: Enzensberger and Habermas

Again, I will begin with a few informal reactions.

Habermas used several words which were rather similar, he was using them for distinct entities, and I was not quite sure of the specific definitions. What does he mean by realm, sphere, domain, and world. He seemed to used these terms to convey something different, but I couldn’t quite figure out the distinctions between them.

I am also curious about the meaning and implications of the term “avant-garde,” which has now come up in Adorno and Horkeimer, Benjamin, and Habermas. I know the basic definition of the term, and I have a series of ideas and attitudes associated with it, but I am interested in the historical context of the term in relation to how they use it—what specific artists do they consider to be avant-garde, and why.

I was intrigued by Enzensberger’s definition of “heritage” as “class-specific handing-on of nonmaterial capital” (106). Again, I basically understood the idea of heritage, but if I had been asked to define it, I would have had some trouble. This definition seems to fit the idea I had in my head, but it also offers more to ponder, like what exactly is entailed by “nonmaterial capital.” I haven’t drawn any conclusions concerning this definition, but it caught my attention, and I want to think on it more.

This week’s prompt is the following: “Despite their Marxist orientation, both Enzensberger and Habermas are generally considered more optimistic about the emancipatory potential of modern culture. What is the reason for this optimism?”

Habermas’s optimism seems to be largely historically based. He details the changes that have occurred in the platforms through which culture has been developed and the cultural trends that resulted. From the coffee houses and salons opened up opportunities for the layperson to discuss and opine about art, such that it was no longer only the elite who could do so. The institution of paid concerts, although it made music more of a commodity, allowed composers to compose what they wanted, not just whatever a patron demanded for an occasion. While Arendt would have feared the destructive consequences to the commoditization of music, Habermas identifies the ways in which this sort of commoditization actually may create space for greater creative expression on the part of the composer. By identifying the positive effects of changing cultural platforms throughout history, Habermas seems to fear future change less and seems more open for recognizing its artistic and cultural potential.

Enzensberger’s optimism seems to stem from a pragmatic recognition of the steps necessary to achieve a more egalitarian mass electronic media. He presents a quite realistic, pragmatic attitude towards the question of new media and how it should be treated. Although he is a Marxist, he clearly recognizes some of the problematic attitudes of some of his fellow left-wing thinkers towards new media. According to Enzensberger, many left-wing activists and thinkers have a tendency to write off new media as one of “the Man’s” devices, and therefore of dubious social good. For Enzensberger, this sort of attitude is counterproductive and problematic in that it doesn’t consider the potential of new media, only previous usages of it by the bourgeois; to use a cliché, this attitude “throws the baby out with the bathwater.” These left-wing activists are so repulsed by the thought of “manipulation” by the new media that they fail to realize, as Enzensberger points out, “every us of the media presupposes manipulation … The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them” (104).

It is this pragmatic understanding of electronic media that forms the basis for Enzensberger’s optimism. With this level-headed attitude that refuses to sensationalize electronic media as a device of “the Man,” Enzensberger is able to identify what changes need to occur to the mass media to render it truly egalitarian: primarily, that it somehow to achieve a greater level of interaction and dialogue between author and audience and to deconstruct the barrier between them. I think this idea anticipates many of the developments that have occurred with internet media. Enzensberger presents radio as an example of a form of media with the potential to achieve more egalitarian communication: “Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked system—that is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact” (98). This idea anticipates such developments as the live podcast, in which the hosts use a platform like UStream or BlogTV to record a radio show live, during which listeners may call in to contribute or converse about what is being said in a live chat box. Similar developments like YouTube, web forums, and blogs also allow for a greater level of interaction between author and audience.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Response: Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

First, I will start off with a few informal reactions.

I found Benjamin easier to read than Adorno and Horkeimer, as far as the language goes. However, as Kerry McAuliffe remarked to me, and I agree with her, he seems to use some words in a very specific, defined sense, and I was not entirely sure I understood all the implications of his usages of these words. These terms include “progressive” as it refers to literary technique, “phantasmagoria,” and “fetish.” I hope we might be able to go over these terms some in class so I can get a better grasp on precisely what he meant.

I was also unclear on his position towards fascism. Perhaps my understanding of fascism is somewhat faulty, but I had thought of fascism and communism as opposites, and Benjamin seems to support some of the ideas of Marx. But at other times, he refers to “the privilege of fascism,” as though he were praising it.

Now, on to the prompt.

For Arendt, there seem to be two types of intellectuals in society. The function of the first is to take objects of culture and figure out how to adapt them to prevailing societal trends such that they are more universally palatable and consumable. She refers in one instance to this first group as a “special kind of intellectual” (284). The second , which she categorizes as being in a state of malaise, is the type that wishes to preserve objects of culture. This type exists in conflict with those “professionals” who “fabricate” books rather than write them (284). This double and apparently self-contradictory usage of the word “intellectual” may reflect some degree of the prevailing confusion between culture and entertainment about which Arendt writes.

Benjamin uses the term “intellectual” in a rather more specific sense. He references Hiller’s definition of the intellectual as “representatives of a certain characterological type”, a type which transcends class, in that belonging to a specific class is not necessary for consideration as an intellectual (although, he does provide the caveat that members of the bourgeoisie have greater access to the means of production that help to facilitate becoming an intellectual” (84). The intellectual is defined by a shared set of “opinions, attitudes, or dispositions” (85). Benjamin states that, as an intellectual does not necessarily belong to one class or another, the position of the intellectual in society is determined “on the basis of is position in the process of production” (85). I understand “production” to refer to the act, craft, or process through which a work of art—in this case, literature—is created or written; in other words, it refers to the literary techniques used to convey an idea. Thus, it is not enough that a work merely promote revolutionary ideas; it must do so in a way that actively engages the process of production, using various techniques not merely from habit or tradition but because the author “has reflected deeply on the conditions of present-day production” (89). An intellectual only becomes part of the revolutionary class if he is also a producer in the sense that he engages these means of production, not merely regurgitates revolutionary rhetoric.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Honors 3013: The social construction of new media

Hello, all. [Insert requisite comment about how I am terrible at blogging]. I promise, I didn't drop off the face of the earth. I am just negligent when it comes to blogging/journalling/whatever. However, I will be putting this blog in use again. I am taking an Honors class this semester about, as the title implies, new media, the internet, the role it plays in our culture, how we interact with new media, etc. One of the requirements for this class is that we post weekly blog responses to our readings. I decided to use this blog for that purpose rather than creating a new one because 1.) I'd rather have just one blog account and 2.) these issues are topics I like to think about, so I may want to save these responses for future reference. For those of you who have been following me to hear about my travels, these posts might be of little interest, so I will certainly not be offended if you don't read them.

I am excited about this class, because, like I said, I like to think about these topics, but I don't always feel that I am intellectually equipped to think well about them. I hope this class will give me said intellectual equipment to contemplate these ideas more thoroughly.