*

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 1

The Uses and Meanings of ‘Technological Objects’, a guest lecture by Prof. David Morley. If the two ‘pure’ approaches to digital media are (1) technological determinism and (2) cultural constructivism, Morley was all about the constructivism.

Unfortunately, this equating to a two-hour session of him tilting at illusory windmills, for – however determinist we may appear – ‘pure’ technological determinism died with McLuhan. Equally, ‘pure’ constructivism can no longer be held as a tenable position, as it tends to radically underemphasise the novelty of new media’s technical affordances.

Technological objects as symbolic, as well as functional (Silverstone). Barthes’ notion of ‘the superlative object of [its] time” – car, washing machine, mobile phone, USB memory stick. A specific artefact which becomes metonymic of technology as a whole (see: Anth & Representation, Wk 3: marked vs. unmarked terms). The technocultural transubstantiation of consumer appliances, fuelled by ubiquity. It’s why this works:

Audience studies? Morley’s accusation is that much of new technology studies operates with old models of media effects. It’s important to recognise that people use media in different ways; audiences bring their own cultural baggage to the … home entertainment centre.

No television? “So what does your furniture point at?” (Friends)

Take the mobile phone. The single most frequently lost item on the London Underground. And that’s a place with no mobile connectivity. What are people doing, without connectivity, that means they can leave their phone on the tube? Seriously. Mobile as security blanket, as social barrier, as portable private space, as identity vector, as St. Christopher Medallion …

So, the important question: how much determinacy do you want to give the object? How much agency can you cede? Think of our discussion of virtuality and cybernetics in the Cold War, and the abstraction of human responsibility (see Digital Media #5). What is technology, even? Language, sanitation, cartography? I’m thinking Civilization II (1996), and the tech-tree:

Technology – neither good nor bad, but intensely political in its affordances and capabilities. Important discourse-clusters (memeplexes?) relating to novelty, upgrade, innovation, and hacking.

“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” as symbolic warfare (see Anth & Rep #8). A semiotic tennis of campaigns and counter-campaigns:

Morley >> “It’s about the non-material meanings we attach to technology, as much as its capabilities and affordances.”

Us >> “Well, yes. We thought that was the point.”

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21st Century American Fiction

Two weeks worth of seminars, amalgamated into a four-hour LitFest. The novels: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. Finding the former a work of baffling scale, and far too diffuse to absorb properly, my surrender followed with relative speed. On the Meyer, however, I was doing my presentation …

Presentation notes, as a .pdf:

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Anthropology & Representation

A time-shifted seminar, with footage of a lecture from the reading week shown in the room where it was initially filmed – a phenomenon both recursive and faintly unsettling.

Economic anthropology. Gifts. Colonialism as an economic exercise. Debt as a moral excuse. The infinite desire of the conquistador. Economics as justice, as “common sense”. Communism – not as totality, but economic mode within capitalism (open source software vs. Apple / Microsoft). The breakdown of market economics in times of natural disaster, or when the cost is sufficiently low (asking for a light, for directions, for the time). Societies in which you cannot eat your own pigs, but must eat the pigs of your neighbour – permanent artificial dependencies. Contrast with: commercial exchange as a relationship that cancels itself.

The man in action. Well, not “the man”, but this man. We are all already communists (reconsidered). Yes:

The reciprocal act of taking-out-for-dinner only works when the two parties are assumed to be equal. Questions of hierarchical debt, or precedent. A continuum between theft and charity, with neither extreme implying an ongoing relationship.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 2

Technoscience, and how to do it!

Watch as new media slides peculiarly into science & technology studies, with a convergence/remediation of information, communication, and … biotechnology. Wait, what?

Evolutionary psychology, artificial life, genomics >> hegemonic discourses, based on information, and much more conservative than they initially appear.

Media about science, questions of content & form. We’re talking embodiment, affective computing, intelligent media. It’s all made of the same stuff – the same technobabble, the same framings. The so-called ‘science wars‘ have broken down, giving way to wetware, synthetic biology (see: ‘At home with the DNA hackers‘), and the rapid proliferation of biologic metaphors pretty much everywhere.

Hmm.

photo credit: shareski

We’re left with McLuhan as revenant. Scrapping the determinism in his work, Kember reckons we may yet need his physicalism and notions of embodiment. In 2010, let us talk of media not as agent, but prosthesis.

END OF [AUTUMN TERM]

please reboot

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)

Gobbledegook or genius? There are some minor spelling and referencing issues, sure, and – in her comments – my course tutor suggested that the writings of biologist/cyborg feminist Donna Haraway might have filled the gaps in my argument. Since submitting, I’ve devoured a book-length interview with the woman, and got my hands of a copy of When Species Meet as part of the Christmas loot, which is high on my dead-tree reading list for 2010.

In the meantime, any comments or questions?

“What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?”

- Sam Anderson, ‘When Lit Blew into Bits’, New York Magazine

In the Ninth Week (23/11 – 27/11), I ventured out into London, with events at the RSA and Hackney’s SPACE. As the week drew to a close, attempts to pull myself back into some kind of life structure & emotion balance were destabilised by a (as it turned out, relatively minor) health issue … which I dramatically overanalysed, sending my mind spiralling inwards … leading to my abandonment of Friday’s classes in favour of a flight back to rural Sussex & the solace of family.

From before then, though, a photo of the most enjoyable part of the week – the epic quest to Hackney for Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield (on which, more below), and the surreal return via Canary Wharf. It’s always good to get out of New Cross, and check out different bits of London – keeps me sane!

photo credit: jfpickard

This week’s notes follow, under the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Lev Manovich argues that the cinema has profoundly influenced the development of the computer (the notion of the frame, the narrative as loop, editing and montage).

- Goldsmiths Course Syllabus

But, according to pretty much everyone else in the field, he’s wrong. Poor chap.

photo credit: Anne Helmond

Steering away from the relatively clear and concise definitions of new media in Lister et. al., Manovich argues that there are five characteristics that constitute new media –> [numerical representation / automation / transcoding / variability / modularity].

As a heuristic, we might be able to retrieve something of value … but as a definition, Manovich somehow manages to be obtuse, vague and unnecessarily technicist. This is echoed in his piece on ‘The New Language of Cinema’, in which he reduces the new digital cinema (?) to six areas, which distinguish it from its analogue predecessors –> [simulation / the loop / montage / information space / cinema as a code / narrative].

But this move of ‘rendering innocent’ (Haraway) the analogue is more a rhetorical tactic than anything substantive. It overemphasises the purely indexical, representative qualities of old media – diverting attention from historical manifestations of the experimental and avant-garde. Take Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which pursues indexicality within the form of the montage (database?):

Seduced by the logic of the computer, Manovich heralds novelty wherever he sees it – reducing media to its technical properties, he suggests that technological convergence (c.f. Week 4) is not only real, but a fait accompli.

For us, the reality is a question of hybridity, remediation and exchange. Convergence is never a finished product, and its not enough to say that because computer and cinema now exist in a relationship of remediation, they are now necessarily the same thing. Rooted in apophenia, Manovich’s arguments are seductive but (for our purposes) far too simplistic.

Slavoj Žižek @ the RSA

In a time of ever-increasing economic inequality, Žižek pointed to Venture Philanthropy and the Guaranteed Minimum Income as two reletavely novel approaches to the issue of charity, which – pitted against each other in some kind of … dialogue? contest? – he uses to illustrate many of the assumptions and biases which underlie our current moral/political/economic landscape.

21st Century American Fiction

Two novels, both supposed to shed light on the ways in which fiction of 2000s has dealt (is dealing?) with the darker moments of American history. The books: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Sherman Alexie’s Flight. The former is a sober, relatively grim look at the earliest days of American colonialism, telling the story of a Dutch man (Jason Vaark) who accidentally drifts into the slave trade, primarily from the perspective of the women of his household (wife, slaves, etc.). The latter is the Native American equivalent of something somewhere between Audrey Niffinger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and Quantum Leap.

Both were well written and had their (powerful, affective) moments. That said, the Alexie did – at times – slide toward the facile and the  emotionally manipulative, while much of the Morrison relied on the reader’s willingness to immerse themselves in the world and cosmology of a specific place and time far removed from contemporary experience.

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((There’s a separate piece to come on the Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield event, as my notes were sufficiently sprawling & meandering to deserve some serious post-Christmas analysis. Plus, I’ve just laid my hands on an Arduino starter kit & an RFID reader. Watch this space))

“The 1946 Macy Conference is kind an aleph moment. In attendance were people intrinsically involved in computers and prosthesis (the collaboration of man and machine), modern anthropology and modern neuroscience (what it means to be human), game theory (the Cold War and the conversion of people into cogs). We can trace direct paths through counterculture and social organisation, decentralisation and the Web, and to a socialist Chilean internet. There are connections to cults, advertising, social software and games, rocketry, suburbia, complexity theory and ecology. Historical roots lie in golems and pneumatic tubes, science fiction and weaving, pataphysics and the telegraph. The language of our information society was created, often knowingly, by these people. Cybernetics is the beautiful and ugly and ambiguous heart of our information society.”

- Matt Webb, ‘Cybernetics: Researcher Wanted‘ (BERG)

This week, one of my friends from undergrad was down in London. She’s studying for a PhD on the mating behaviour of massive scary ants, and was learning how to radio-tag insects as a guest of ZSL. Having been woken by the fire alarm test an hour after the start of my Wednesday morning American Lit seminar, I needed exciting animals and zoological facts to cheer me up – so legged it across town to meet her at London Zoo. Hence the photo, which is sufficiently odd to stand as an illustration of Week 8:

photo credit: jfpickard

Course notes follow, below the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Photography, digital and otherwise. Working from the introductory essay in Lister’s The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995), we zoomed in on the celebratory discourses of digital photography … in which the change from analogue to digital is posited as ’startling’, ‘powerful’ and ‘epochal’ … a paradigm shift.

Here, it’s all too easy to read the digital image as an unprecedented fusion of the imagined and the real, but really there’s nothing particularly new about all this. Yes, we’ve shifted our attention from the camera-as-prosthetic eye to ‘the small grey, plastic box of the personal computer’ (p. 3) and we might be living under Sontag’s image-based economy. But this is all linguistic/discursive!

Digital photography is still photography; part of an 150-year old photographic culture. Lister comments on the way in which digital photography has become entangled with ‘a heady mixture of millenarian futurology, the visionary excesses of postmodern thought, and of utopian premise and cultural pessimism.’ (p. 5) Supposedly ‘traditional’ (analogue) photographic images are cast as indexical; slavish (subordinate) mirrors/copies of the Real. With analogue edits, there’ll always be a trace or stain – some evidence of tampering with the indexicality of the image.

Semiotics: links between signifier and signified are arbitrary … culturally constructed! Notions of indexicality serve to naturalise the cultural connotations (meaning) of the photo; the illusion of immediacy can be used to conceal the tacit assumptions and ideology of the image. Historically, photography has held a powerful position as an evidential practice. Think of photographs in the legal, medical, and photojournalistic realms. John Tagg’s Burden of Representation (1993).

Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980) talks about photography as an affective (emotional-physiological) medium. What does my body know of photography? Punctum (detail) – the emotive immediacy of a photographical detail. The power of something that resonates, or ‘leaps out at you’. Think of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List (1993).

Digital photography parcelled with postmodernism – a collapsed sense of temporality; an emergent schizophrenia. The spatio-temporal manipulations of the digital, of images that no longer function in relation to science … abstracted from light, film, chemistry – are we looking at the death of optics? Remediation! It’s not as if analogue photography has disappeared. Plus, digital photography is still informed by the legacies of the analogue – there continues to be a language, a grammar of (effective/good) photography.

Mechanical/optical media were a historical phase in visual media. Perhaps the analogue photograph was an anomaly; a ‘raw’ indexicality sandwiched between the oil painting and the photo-manipulation? Yet the metadata of digital photography stands as an extended (and more powerful) form of indexicality. From a Flickr photo, you can deduce the camera make, date taken, and (sometimes) even the geographical location: it’s all embedded in the image-as-data.

Peripheral to, but illustrative of, the shift from analogue –> digital, we have Foucauldian interpretations of  Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon. Photography & the lens, the gaze … as an instrument of power, of science, in criminology, medicine, psychiatry … a way of making truth claims (Gunning). Relationships between the observer and the object of scrutiny?

((ASIDE: In one of the Anth & Representation seminars, Graeber raised an interesting and … surprisingly local line of enquiry – springing from the fact that the earliest manifestation (inspiration?) of the panopticon concept was in the schemes of the philosopher’s brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, who’d commissioned the construction of a prototypical ‘Inspection House’ on Prince Potemkin’s estate in Russia. Later, Sir Samuel was also in charge of improvements made to the docks at Deptford in 1799 – a short walk from the current location of Goldsmiths College. There’s probably some kind of alternate history here, where a better-funded Bentham turns Deptford & Greenwich into a pre-steampunk, pseudo-totalitarian naval/mercantile super-panopticon … Say, that’d be pretty good fun to write about. Hold that thought!

Oh, and for another alternate history of panopticism, check out Tony Jones’ exemplary exercise in world-building; Cliveless World))

Following the shift to digital, Cascio’s notion of the participatory panopticon. When photos can be faked, the best measure of veracity is through plurality – if an Event (with-a-capital-E) occurs, there will be multiple photos, from the camera phones of participants and observers (participant observation?). Think Eyeborg …

… that photo from the London bombings, and – perhaps most strikingly – the human wall of camera screens at Obama’s inaugural Youth Ball …

image provenance hard to find, due to the crazy Sontagian circulation & reproduction of images – but I’m inclined to credit Reuters staff photographer Kevin Lamarque

21st Century American Fiction

Security, by Stephen Amidon. Not great literature, nor particularly original – but interesting, likeable and skillfuly written. From the Washington Post review -

“What a freak show,” a character in Stephen Amidon’s Security remarks of another’s unstable father after a humiliating scene. Although the speaker herself is detestable, an irredeemable villain, her comment lays bare the deepest fears of Amidon’s people: that their messy private lives will burst into public view. But because the author is a nimble satirist, we can count on such disruptions, as readers of his fine Human Capital already know.

On the surface, these characters aren’t remarkable or odd, and neither is the setting, the quiet Berkshire town of Stoneleigh, but the major players are in crisis: Edward Inman, proprietor of a home security firm, hasn’t slept in weeks and roams the night rather than share a bed with his wife, Meg. Kathryn, his old flame, is trying to reconnect with her college dropout son, Conor. And Walt Steckl, formerly a master electrician, takes painkillers and drinks to quiet his nerves, which were fried in a workplace accident.

(…)

Despite the improbable endgame and an over-reliance on types among his supporting cast — the preoccupied wife, the creepy snob, the sullen teen — the novel succeeds as an entertainment. It’s well-paced and always engaging, if occasionally broad. Thematically, like any good satire, it presents a cautionary tale and dares us to find ourselves in it, and because Amidon is such a fine writer, we do. As in Human Capital, he once again displays his unerring facility for sniffing out the shaky foundations of our lives, showing us what we will selfishly renounce — trust, intimacy, integrity, reality — to achieve what we believe is an impregnable security.

Taken alongside Ellis’ Lunar Park (see previous week), Amidon’s novel sheds light on a very specific current within 21st century American fiction – something related to the spatialities of suburbia, focusing in on the unstable and arbitrary foundations of our domesticity, and containing some (limited?) form of social critique. It’s probably too early to see quite how this’ll develop, but I think we can also see something similar in American TV dramas like Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and architectural competitions such as Reburbia. There’s an anxiety here; a precariousness which seems worthy of further investigation.

Anthropology & Representation

As far as I can make out, something to do with the phenomenology of giant puppets? Violence, myth, and narrative in the (alter-)globalisation movement. We’re talking Battle of Seattle, protests against the Iraq War, and – slightly more jovially – the Burning Man Festival and the Paperhand Puppet Intervention. The puppets really annoy the police, but why?

We need to think about the relationship between puppets and monuments. Questions of memory, identity and permanence/transience. Perhaps they stand as a pastiche or parody of the monumental; something to do with totems, fetishes and the carnivalesque; boundaries between the sacred and the profane; or the uncanny valley? How about conspiracy theories – puppets mirror the relations of power; it’s an appropriate deployment because we (they?) are the puppets? The processes of puppet-construction as an act of community-formation. A literal embodiment of the man-made-of-many-men of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan … the body politic.

Urban protests as a manifestation of symbolic (asymmetric) warfare. The media as a platform for a conflict of symbolic systems. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967). The violence of representation? Denigration of enemies (of the state?) as ‘trust fund kids’. A Black Bloc ethics, rooted in concepts of value – where it’s verboten to attack family-owned stores, but the symbols of transnational capitalism (McDonalds, Starbucks) are fair game. Rules of engagement, different for the cops (do anything necessary to contain the chaos, but don’t kill people) and the protesters (violence against capital, against property … harm everything but people). Carl Schmitt & post-Westphalian, urban warfare.

Narrative frames lifted from Hollywood, mass media, fiction – protest as an orgy of destruction. Replicated in music festivals, public holidays, Guy Fawkes’ Night … as a sublimation of the carnivalesque into popular culture(s) of destruction.

photo credit: BellaBim

“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”

An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.

See: Trafigura & Carter-Ruck, Stephen Fry.

And then there’s this from Chairman Bruce, in conversation with Dunne & Raby (and courtesy of of Icon 078) :

“If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they’d be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.”

At this point, some appropriate footage from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes, from (the newly en-PhDed) Aleks Krotoski’s ‘virtual communities’ interview with Howard Rheingold:

I’m (always) on Twitter, and – as a medium – it’s made my experience of the world a lot ‘thinner’, for want of a better word. It’s given me partial access to lots of people and areas of interest that would have otherwise remained strictly off-limits. This might be because I got in early, at the point where a relatively small, tech-literate user base were more willing to engage with strangers, and the ‘thinness’ phenomena is something I’ve also experienced (though to a far lesser extent) with other media and social networks – bulletin boards, newsgroups, email, Facebook.

But is Twitter a Rheingoldian (?) ‘virtual community‘ in the same way as something like the WELL or a World of Warcraft guild? I’m not really sure – the affordances of the technology seem to favour the individual at the expense of any kind of inchoate collective. It’s lots of relationships happening simultaneously in the same space, but there’s no real distinct group identity. Here, a logic of radical individualism combines with a sense of transience to encourage behaviours that – as with the boyd case – simply wouldn’t wash elsewhere. There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a major challenge to science fiction authors attempting to evoke a sense of wonder from an audience of readers who will have read the same things, and may even be able to reverse-engineer the initial ingredients from the final published work. And that’s after the writing (authoring?) process is complete!

See: Node Magazine, a hypertext annotation of William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country.

As a Twitter user, it’s easy to feel abstracted from your words: words which either fade to dust or take on a life of their own, re-tweeted by others. A slip of the tongue, an impulsive comment, and – like Fry – you find yourself as the prisoner of your own (digitised) tongue.

“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”

- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’

A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.