Archive for category Culture of Technology
Receding Beauty and a Phone Made of Glass
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on January 20, 2012
Despite agreeing with the general consensus that the iPhone 4/S is a beautiful bit of industrial design, I still maintain making a phone out of glass was a strange decision. If it wasn’t, as I tend to describe it, “a monumentally stupid idea”, then it was at least a little impractical. Glass, after all, breaks.
Yet I wonder if Apple didn’t stumble onto a serendipitous bit of Lacanian luck with their glass phone. Think about these two things. The glass is what gives the phone its sleek, polished aesthetic. It’s the reflectiveness, the unmatched smoothness of glass that makes the iPhone 4 seem like a bit of the future that has somehow found its way into the present. On the other hand, glass is comparatively fragile and if you drop the phone, that same lustworthy aesthetic is ruined.
So what do you do? You buy a case for it. You cover it. The qualities that provoked your desire must be hidden out of a need to protect it, or there will be no reason to desire the object. But covered up so, the object’s beauty always recedes into an impossible future: the time when its sheer aesthetic pleasure can be enjoyed without fear of it being ruined. It is a ghost of beauty, a promise of the things that cannot be – an impression and nothing more of an experience that cannot be had.
Put another way, the iPhone is Aishwarya Rai or Ryan Gosling.
Or, rather, what I mean is that the desire elicited by the iPhone’s fragile, receding beauty is at least in the same vein as that we experience of the beauty of celebrity. Impossible in its perfection, overdetermined with desire, a canvas for both the id and superego, celebrity beauty is a virtualized palace of Platonic forms, forever slipping behind a horizon soaked with our individual and collective want.
And taken together, both the iPhone and photoshopped simulacra of people who may or may not exist articulate the capitalist fetish for aspirational objects that can never be touched and can never be real. Instead, they are libidinal magnets, pulling us further in, temporal and ideological vacuums, vessels into which we pour our unending emptiness.
Or something like that, anyway.
In Which Information Masters You
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading on April 22, 2011
So, over at Toronto Standard (when the swanky HTML5-tastic design gets sorted, I’ll introduce y’all for real) I wrote a piece called ‘Masters of Data‘ about our changing relationship to information. For regular SiW readers, I don’t think it’ll be radically new, but it was a fun thing to do. I was also fortunate enough to speak to some cool people for the article, including friend of Scrawled in Wax Joanne McNeil, who most of you are probably familiar with.
I’m okay with how the piece turned out, but as with any article, there were some things that I wanted to talk about that didn’t make it in. Foremost among them was that, talking to all these smart people about how they keep themselves well-informed, they all circled around to a similar idea: those who are really good sifting through tonnes of information are the people who do stuff with it. They don’t just read; they write. They’re journalists, bloggers, um… tumblr-ers – well, you get the idea. It’s these people who seem to have ‘mastered the flood’. And I was intrigued.
For some reason, I’ve always tended to express how I thought of this glut of stuff online in aquatic terms – the ocean, the flood, the torrent. Maybe because of this, I started to think of it like fishing. I know, bear with me. But it seems our prior model of information was a lone person, standing at the shore of a sea of knowledge. Since the advent of print, the paperback, libraries etc. we’ve had access to massive amounts of knowledge, but only a comparatively small amount of it at once. You could get fish, but you’d either have to make do with what you could reach from the shore, or rely on those with large fishing vessels of their own to bring you their catch. In this incredibly smart, nimble metaphor, those fishing vessels are editors or authors or interlocutors. I think.
But in this awful analogy, the web gives you your own boat. You still have the same limitations, though. Being human, you can only deal with so much at once. But you can also scoot around (yeah, I just typed ‘scoot’) from one spot to another much faster than you could before. If you want, you can strap on your diving gear and go deep down into something. But you can also ricochet from one spot to the next, only staying on the surface.
The sea of knowledge has always pre-existed and overwhelmed us. But before, our only choice was to accumulate knowledge standing at the shore, slowly adding to a storehouse as it got larger and larger. The idea was that gaining all this knowledge would provide you with the perspective you needed to understand the world and life. This is why being well-read was so key; it was only through plowing through many books that you could acquire the kind of scope and comparative basis needed to understand something like a modern political trend or social phenomenon.
I don’t think that part of things has changed. The people who I think are doing smart thinking are still those who have a background in ‘deep thought’. But it seems interesting that Joanne, Mathew and Noah – and lots more – all said that there’s something about being forced to reconfigure and re-present all that information we get online that really helps. What’s more, they all said those who write are not only good at filtering all that stuff, they’re also at a cultural advantage. These ‘masters’, as I’ve called them, have a skill that lets them get ahead.
There’s something here about what the web as a persistently accessible storehouse of information does to the idea of staying well-informed or being smart. We know that the need to memorize facts and figures is less important because they’re simply there in the persistent ether of human knowledge that, quite literally, floats by our head. But the very existence of that ‘always there network’ means that it’s almost as if being well-read has to become something like ‘being well-written’. Given an almost limitless amount of information and data, it’s those who reconfigure that information into new, unexpected assemblages that get ahead. You are no longer on the shore, producing linear narratives. No, our new relationship to epistemology can be summed up by saying that you, my friend, are on a boat.
Given the omnipresent accessibility of knowledge, data, facts, one’s task is still to make sense of it. But the change isn’t just the now cliched division between narrative and database – between linear chains of meaning and non-linear networks of information. It’s that knowledge has always been a non-linear network, shaped into recognizable forms by ideology and experientially presented to us in a generally linear narrative form. What the web changes is not how humans produce meaning – which will always inevitably on some level be narratival and textual – it’s that one’s position in relation to that network has changed, as has the capacity to witness ‘units’ of knowledge outside of familiar narratives of meaning. No longer on the shore, you sit both in and atop the ocean the knowledge, dipping in and out almost against your will.
In many ways, this inversion of position is analogous to many trends in 20th century ideas. Identity isn’t something inside you; it’s something outside that you step into (if ambivalently). You don’t choose ideology; ideology chooses you. And so it goes.
* * *
A couple of years ago, my friends Majero Bouman and Dunja Baus created a holographic poetry project for a symposium honouring professor Barbara Godard. Here’s the description:
“3 Words” is a 2×2.5 foot laser lit pulse hologram. It acts as a window frame onto a 4x4x4 foot scene of suspended letters in suggestive relation. As the “reader” moves his or her body across the frame to view different angles and elements of the scene, the letters move in parallax, at times obscuring one another, at times revealing phonetic and associative elements of their arrangement in space-time.
You would step up to a window through which you view the installation. And true enough, as you moved your head, you’d see different words and arrangements of letters that, put into a new context and new relation to each other, would evoke new ideas. By putting words and letters into a virtual three-dimensional space, you could, instead of putting letters together in linear chains, assemble then in ‘unintended’ ways.
I guess all I’m saying is this: what if, rather than just one window in a temporary art installation in a dance studio in Toronto, that holographic poem was all around us all the time?
Reading has always been an act of writing. But we’ve often experienced those moments as temporally singular and fleeting. Sitting in bed with a book, we produce our relation to a narrative in that strangely rhythmic emotional pulsation that occurs as each word we read slips into the past.
But presented with a never-ending overlapped network of narratives, an array of tabs, windows, flashing notifications from Tweetdeck, and chimes on one’s phone, the inherently inscriptive act of interpretation finds its manifestation in writings that are ever slightly less evanescent. Far from the profoundly odd temporal strangeness of reading alone, our relationship is not subject-to-book, productive and creative, but a reconfiguration. We gather things in Storify. We write blog posts full of links. We take apart the lego spaceship we just built and put it back together again, knowing quite well we mean for it not to be the same.
What do I think the web has done to our relationship to knowledge? I guess I think it’s made it three dimensional and rhizomatic in a way that is both immediate and materially ‘experiencable’. Knowledge has always potentially been that – it’s always been this set of relations you could reconfigure. But you had to literally or figuratively tear pages out of books and throw them into the air. The web just makes that process easier.
Considering the Concatenation of Concentration in Capitalism
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on March 25, 2011
As the place of the things we love – books, magazines, slow, quiet films – starts to change, there is an anxiety that stalks us. We are worried that forces, both within us and beyond us, are moving to rob us of these subtle pleasures. These sentiments constantly simmer, or hang like loose threads, waiting to be tugged by news that at least seems to confirm our fears.
But it isn’t that the forms of these media that are disappearing. It isn’t that video or text or images or games are going away. It’s that their delivery is changing, specifically in that it’s being concentrated, reduced into ever smaller units.
I’m thinking this because it’s been both surprising and interesting to witness people within the world of video games – like, say, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata – start to offer very similar arguments to those we hear about long-form journalism. The ease and pace with which the web works as a delivery mechanism means you can offer atomised content, so that the time one might have spent playing a 20 hour roleplaying game is as easily taken up by a 99 cent game on a smartphone. The singular thing that offers depth, immersion, sophistication and specialization is being supplanted by a collection of more shallow, quick, disposable products. ‘Just like’ journalism or literature etc. Or something.
Whether or how one thing is supplanting another is, I think, a conversation for another time. But it seems impossible to think about these things without also thinking about how this increased pace of gratification is related to psychology and the market.
I still am a pretty firm believer that Zizek’s assertion that capitalism works by beckoning us to enjoy is a sound one, particularly in its most contemporary forms. Because people in the wealthier parts of the world have their needs met, most of our financial choices are about how we wish to, if you’ll excuse the phrase, pleasure ourselves.
Because of digital’s capacity to deliver atomised content, this process of getting what we want can undergo a form of concentration. If what we want is to enjoy ourselves – to gratify our ids, as it were – then the way digital can provide bite-size content, and lots of it, allows for a never-ending stream of bite-size enjoyment. We are awash in attention-economy hickeys.
As the size, length, breadth or depth of what we desire shrinks (psychoanalyze that statement!), our attention can, rather than becoming fragmented, instead become focused upon a successive concatenation of pleasure in which we chain together small units of things to occupy the same amount of time. The album becomes the series of songs. We watch TV series on Netflix for hours on end, episode after episode. The structure of games starts to change so that they are meant to be enjoyed in short bursts. They might last 12 hours overall, but it’s all ten minute chunks. I’m generalizing, of course, but not entirely exaggerating. A concentration of forms is happening.
It seems wrong to avoid what this has to do with desire. If our desire for the new is a psychological urge, then it seems that the potential of digital capitalism to serve that urge, and serve it quickly, may be an issue. It seems our options for dealing with it are few. We could adopt an ‘asceticism of attention’, forcing ourselves to sit down with a book or movie or game because ‘it is good for us’, of course. This is what a certain class of people – and I use the term deliberately – have done for most of the 20th century. I don’t mean that people read against their will; simply that they structured their lives against certain technological and social trends so that they wouldn’t have to.
But that is at odds with the functioning of capitalism. The market always works to reduce the resistance of the superego. Pleasure and capitalism are inherently linked. Completion, too, is pleasure. So we seek to ‘finish’ over and over again, and quickly too, rather than just once. An atomised collection of hundreds of petits morts.
* * *
I could end here. I could, with the above, imply that capitalism works to constantly chip away at the kinds of aesthetic experiences that produce reflective interiority and also suggest that the web accelerates this process. And though web cheerleader I certainly am, I do think this is a real worry – not least because of my own experiences with not only an obliterated attention span, but a strange new lack of desire to push myself through the hard art I genuinely enjoy – or enjoyed.
But I am also left thinking if this concentration of form is one half of an equation that is yet to be finished. If the units of delivery are shrinking because of their function and place within an attention economy, then what if the ‘stuff’ in that units was, to use the old metaphor, deeply nutritious rather than junk food: small packages of calorie-rich, vitamin filled, high-protein astronaut food. The food equivalent of ten pages of Joyce.
* * *
Among the many reasons reading Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake is so hard is just how concentrated they are. A few pages might require intense attention because there is so damn much in there.
This concentration is doubled – it is intense and thus requires intensity. Neither is it isolated. Far from it, it is simply a node of a network of intertextuality – a network one familiarizes oneself with after years of study (which is why I’ve never read them).
But if our forms are becoming concentrated, do we respond with concentrated content? Do we intensify the atomized as the pressure on our attention itself intensifies? Or does the network of attention required to support such concentration – that you need to ‘get all the references’ – already make this an impossibility?
* * *
Let’s take an example of the other side of concentration. One of the most common complaints about critical theory is how impenetrable the writing is – that it is nearly impossible to read. What many miss is that the jargon used makes the writing more precise and shorter. Take a look at this sentence by Spivak:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism and development.
If the significance of the terms ‘subject-constitution’ or ‘culturalism’ are lost on the reader, then this is an impenetrable mess. But when one is familiar with the terms and ideas they refer to – and not just the ideas, but the debates around them – the density of the passage is, more than anything, efficient. By compressing large concepts into the shorthand of jargon, it says a great deal, and weaves numerous complex strands together very neatly to sum up a very subtle argument about the cultural currency of the subaltern woman.
But, weirdly, it also reminds me of Arrested Development. This piece from the AV Club goes to great lengths to explain just how concentrated one lone scene from the show was:
Which brings us back to that scene at the wake, which I still haven’t fully unwound. For instance, I could point out George Sr.’s shirt, which bears the logo of the Bluth family banana stand, a running bit of self-reference dating back to Arrested Development’s earliest episodes. I could note the presence of Henry Winkler, playing the Bluths’ hapless attorney, Barry Zuckerkorn. (When he thinks George Sr.’s dead, he starts making up reasons why he can’t get his hands on the will; at the end of the episode, when the family learns that George Sr. is actually alive, he can be heard offscreen saying, “And I just found the will!”) I could talk about Jeffrey Tambor’s secondary role as Oscar, who’s been enjoying running around Lucille’s house in the buff now that George isn’t around. (Lucille: “Oscar, close it. You look like the window of a butcher shop.”)
There are just so many jokes in “Good Grief,” some of which are funny in and of themselves, but most of which require so much setup that a newcomer would likely be completely at sea. There’s a reason Arrested Development’s opening-credits sequence features arrows and extra text, all circling and connecting and explaining. Even the four fairly simple comic moments in the clip below could take a wall-sized chart to adequately explain.
All of which makes me think: do we need to think about changing our emphasis on the length of focus to the depth of focus, so that, within an attention economy where small chunks of focus work best, the content designed for those small chunks is super concentrated? That it contains layers upon layers of sophistication to make up in intensity what it lacks in scope?
There are obvious assumptions I’m making here: that depth and length are extricable; that ‘sophisticated’ is good; and that the barriers of entry to ‘good art’ should remain. All of these should, of course, be questioned.
But in the meantime, a nerdy reference: do our attentions, instead of a long, lazy, sumptuous meal, need elven lembas bread?
That Thing You Really Like is Dead
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on February 12, 2011
“X is dead” has become a common trope in the tech world. Whether it’s print, the blog or the album, to say something is dead has become shorthand for expressing some of the significant transitions of form or infrastructure engendered by all this fancy new tech.
Certain writers – like the intellectuo-sphere triumvirate of Madrigal, Carmody and Battles – deliberately stay clear of the term, and for good reason. Old forms and practices rarely die out completely – they just lessen in importance. Even if the newspaper or the printed book is ‘dead’, it’s not like those with an affinity for making them or reading them will, with absurd Simpsons-esque rashness, suddenly set fire to their printing presses. It’s just that their centrality to our day-to-day life will diminish.
More to the point, saying ‘x is dead’ also seems to support those who argue that our culture is being dumbed down. It grabs attention at the expense of nuance, turning an entire conversation amongst professionals into little more than supermarket-tabloid style journalism.
Still – in my limited time and scope as a ‘tech blogger’, I’ve noticed that my more successful posts are the ones with the inflammatory headlines. But though my choice of headline is, of course, partly motivated by a narcissistic desire to have ‘people read my stuff’, I’m starting to wonder if the incendiary nature of blog rhetoric and headlines isn’t about the cultural functioning of the web.
I’m wondering this because, as I’ve argued before, I’m starting to see a great deal of overlap between Walter Ong’s analysis of oral cultures and the web.
Part of this has to do with the superficial similarity between networks and oral culture. Twitter, for example, is remarkably ‘oral-like’: when you tweet, you frequently enter into an ongoing conversation rather than generate one with an assumed reader; it is highly communal, and resistant to domination by one individual or even idea, much like the homeostatic nature of oral cultures.
But another aspect of orality Ong highlights is agonism: the deliberately confrontational nature of oral expression rooted in conflict.
Ong’s reasoning for this is, at times, not very good, as he talks about how oral-only cultures are more connected to the human lifeworld than written ones. To which I say: “bleh” – and I think Derrida agrees with me. Once your relationship to the world is bound up in language, it’s… well, bound up in language. The spoken word is, at least in the abstract, no closer to thing it refers to than the written one.
But if one accepts that there are some similarities between the way an oral-only culture and Twitter or blog conversations culture, maybe there is still some use to the idea.
Ong argues:
…[O]rality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs, and riddles are not sued simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or contradictory one. Bragging about one’s own prowess and/or verbal tongue-lashings of an opponent figure regularly in encounters between between characters in narrative: in the Iliad, in Beowulf, throughout Medieval European romance…
[...]
Violence in oral art forms is also connected to the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high-both attractions and, even more, antagonisms
If we assume that relationships of ideas on blogs are ongoing conversations that, in some way, have an oral character, then maybe histrionic, hyperbolic headlines – “WHY THE PRINTED BOOK IS DEAD FOREVER!” – make a bit more sense. After all, the attempt to grab attention may not just be crass commercialism, but a kind of repeated trope expressed in order to initiate discussion.
In a sense, this is what makes someone ‘good at Twitter’. No-one can really express brilliant, complex ideas in under 140 characters. But what Twitter can do well (and blogs do in an expanded sense) is to encourage an agonistic conversation in which hyperbole forms both the peaks and anchors of a dynamic, ongoing, many-voiced conversation. It is not so much titles like “x is dead” destroy nuance as much as they form firm, centralized nodes in an otherwise messy, unstable mass of ideas. What theorists and theories are to modern thought – “I guess the post-structuralist response to this would be…” – pithy, over-the-top headlines are to the modern blogosphere: a kind of shorthand for those who are already in the know.
Much of this has to do with the difference between what you might call a ‘logocentrism of print’ vs. the rhizomatic nature of the web. To crassly express an idea like “Print is dead” on paper seems simplistic because the printed article or book should stand alone as an independent argument. As much as you are able to express about an idea should be contained in the space of the page, or article or book, and it should, like all good written works, function in the absence of its author.
The web page or social media conversation as they currently exist resist such ‘independence’. Because they, in terms of their material experience, lend themselves more immediately to being one part of the always-already multiple, the hyperbolic headline isn’t meant to stand alone as much as it is meant to stand out. Drawing you in, you then read the rest of a post or engage with those ideas in the comments/Twitter window etc. Agonism is an anchor on a medium that refuses to sit still.
Of course, newer developments like Readability or Instapaper suggest that the capacity for a kind of experience of text as singular, independent etc. are not alien to the screen; they are, instead, more likely a function of the relationship between screens and networks on the web.
Whether or not this tendency toward agonism helps or hinders ‘a dumbing down’ remains to be seen. But, as an example, the recent flurry of activity around the revolution in Egypt provided more than a few over-the-top headlines. The aggregate content of the discussion, however, doesn’t have seemed to suffer for it; quite to the contrary, merely witnessing the heated argument online provided one with far more perspective and insight than most print readers could have ever dreamed of.
The Unintentional Database of Ladies in Red Dresses
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on January 15, 2011
Most of the time, when people talk about the law of unintended consequences, they’re usually referring to negative consequences.
But the creation of electronic databases – the constituents of which are malleable, reconfigurable etc. – can often do neat, rather positive things which nobody really meant to enable.
Case in point: over the winter break, I interviewed the head of a newly formed Canadian accessibility coalition. Their aim is to have the Canadian broadcast system be fully accessible by 2020, in terms of both closed captioning and described video (DV is an audio description of the action in a television program for the visually impaired).
The primary aim is of course to make things better for people with visual or auditory challenges. But the unintended result of a 100% accessible system – which is of course a worthy goal unto itself – is that you have a database of both the text of dialogue in television programs, but also a database of text describing the action.
So, the malleability of that data leaves you with a searchable, non-video archive of an entire broadcast system’s content.
Beverly, the charming head of this coalition, gave the following example. If you want to all the instances of a lady in a red dress, she said, this database will give you that. So you can see why my mind jumped to The Matrix.
But among other things, the possibilities for academics would be great. Imagine searching for all examples of someone writing on paper, or winding a clock or cleaning a gun.
And all this stems from an unintended offshoot of something that, simply by itself, should come to exist anyway.
Which I think is pretty damn neat.
A Glimpse of a Limit. A Crack in the Horizon.
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on December 30, 2010
So, um, #wikileaks.
I invoke the hashtag because it has all become a blur of unending news, analysis and analysis of analysis. This is not media as event, but event as media.
The quiet hum of geopolitics – which to me has always hovered in the background, too big and too depressing to pay it my full attention – suddenly pushed its way into my window on life. And after spending years saying “this internet thing man, y’all don’t know how deeply it will change things” – well, here was some small little glimmer that ‘I was right all along’. Or something.
But rather than some misguided feeling of vindication, I – and I think many others – felt something altogether more sinister.
For the past year I have made it my business to give the optimistic take on technology and the web. It is decidedly and deliberately a polemical move, one meant to counteract the entirely understandable malaise that surrounds me when the subject of technology arises; when you’re a writer and a grad student in English, it’s just to be expected. But part of my Twitter bio reads “I look for the hope in iPads and musty books” – in part to assert that those two things are not as opposed as people say they are, but also because I like to remind myself that it takes work to look for that hope. As I tell myself, someone has to right?
But with #wikileaks, the sorta’ playful nature of my optimism no longer fits. Here was a facet of the web’s decentralized, stateless, anonymous nature that did not lend itself to the polemically positive. To do so seemed somehow irresponsible in a way that optimistically poking at notions of literacy, narrative and print culture do not. This, after all, was about the potential fracture of an established order.
Sure, the conversation has generally been about transparency vs. control, the agency of truth, what constitutes loyalty, plus a thousand other things. But, as Bruce Sterling so carefully pointed out, here were two competing discourses that, it seemed, could find no middle-ground – not just a fight over ‘open vs. closed’, but something more.
Here were some tech publications suddenly talking about this thing called statecraft, a term one associates far more with the Economist. What’s more, it wasn’t just that suddenly tech and geopolitics were overlapping in a way we’d never seen before, it was as if the two suddenly threatened each other – as if the new global network and old global order simply couldn’t work together.
Woah, we all said. And we all breathlessly read Sterling’s piece. And God, it ached man.
A few days after Sterling’s piece came out, a prominent journalism critic–whose name I forget, but whose ‘status’ I remember–said they were disappointed by Sterling’s post – that it was well-written but didn’t deliver in analysis.
But reading the comment, I was reminded: it was the profound, resigned melancholy that underpins Sterling’s post that resonated most clearly and loudly. That, rather than finding a new angle from which to understand this mess, someone gave voice to the creeping sense of fear and worry that even the staunchest technophiles now found themselves – ourselves – feeling.
It’s like, as Sterling writes, you can hear the tired exhalation of breath:
So, well, that’s the general situation with this particular scandal. I could go on about it, but I’m trying to pace myself. This knotty situation is not gonna “blow over,” because it’s been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947. “Transparency” and “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, and now that’s obvious.
The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal; the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info because that’s where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it’s gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.
The nation-state has, since its inception, been about the psychogeographic – the territorialization of space. But it has also, in very intricate, profound ways, not been about the psyche, but about materiality. It has been about these incredibly deep, overlapped networks of money, resources, land and people, these physical things that have physical limits.
Once you paint those lines on a map, it becomes about how you get electricity from one end of the territory to another, how food gets shipped from one city to the next. This is what The Wire was so good at displaying at the ‘micro’ level of Baltimore: it is the sheer weight of bureaucracy that both sustains and chokes the city, and even the most committed psychogeographer recognizes these networks are not so ephemeral that they can be easily dismantled. Layer upon layer upon layer, as these strands threaten to drown us, they also hold us comfortably in place.
These electronic networks, though… these lines made of light dart about so quickly, they sometimes feel dangerous. Here in the world of concrete and bone, I am, if nothing else, bound to my neighbour by the space we share. On one side, her noise impinges into my life, while on the other, the smells of his cooking pushes its way into my mind. If nothing else, this physicality binds us to each other, even when it is in ways we wish didn’t happen.
For years now, I have thought of these digital lines of flight as escape – and in many ways they have been. Aesthetics freed from established physical forms, bodies freed from their skin, personalities freed from a stuttering tongue.
But something about #wilkileaks hovers threateningly, because it seems plausible that the networks of statehood and the networks of the web may be incompatible. What #wikileaks means for accountability and transparency is arguably not quite the same for what it signifies for the future of the state. And maybe we are already too old for it; but maybe we are just young enough that we will live in the upheaval of transition as one global order of states, capitalism, oil tankers and planes gives way to another.
So perhaps that will be it: after the pipes break, we’ll simply wait in water so cold our feet have gone numb, as if we can no longer quite feel what we are standing upon.
As if we are a bit in shock, having just glimpsed some kind of limit. Or a crack, looming just ahead, in the horizon.
A Chrome Frame
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, newspapers on December 7, 2010
Okay, so I just realised that the newly unveiled Chrome Web Store – that in the future will form the basis of ChromeOS notebooks – can be tried out now simply using the Chrome browser.
And, after briefly toying around with it, I’m thinking wowowowowow. I like it. A lot.
First, apps are all done in HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Last week, at more than one conference, I heard unending talk about how hard it is for news and media organizations to develop apps for various platforms. Any serious entity has to now at least make something for iOS, Android and Blackberry, to make no mention of the possible need for WinPho7 and WebOS – in addition to their web and print offerings . But if you can just make the whole thing a web app, then why not?
(I’m aware this isn’t strictly related to the Chrome Web Store, but it certainly shows the potential of how great these kinds of apps can be.)
But more to the point, I really like the emphasis on web/screen/touch focused design. The NYT and Salon apps both use the grid approach, which is so much cleaner and easier to approach than either of those publications’ websites. I’d argue that if you look at the homepage of the Times or the Globe and Mail, they still feel like the front page of a newspaper: a mass of content thrown at you, organized into blocks and columns, and encouraging you to click on stories from various sections.
It’s the mentality of paper, transferred to the web because it assumes that your attention is constrained by the aesthetic object ‘the newspaper’. But it isn’t at all. How many of us, after reading one or two stories at one site, click away to another – often because of the very information contained in the stories we read.
The grid does something else. If newspapers or books focus attention because of some kind of unity of materiality and form that results in ‘the newspaper’ or ‘the book’ – “I am now reading the newspaper” in the singular – then the grid or other screen-focused designs focus this through screen-based aesthetics.
I know I’ve mentioned this five-hundred times, but I keep coming back to Robin’s assertion that the web, in its most open form (i.e. the browser, stock HTML, text etc.) is bad at frames. It’s bad at producing an experiential frame for delimiting the experience of content when the medium itself, by its nature, veers toward the limitless and unbounded. This is what the iPad is great at, and this what Chrome apps (and web apps in general) seem to be aiming for: the circumscription of attention through the creation of new aesthetic forms.
Yeah, I dig this a lot.
Edit: I should add that when I talk about ‘the grid’, I also mean the way these sites react when you click on a story: they often then take up the full screen, without any clutter around them. I guess this is what I mean when I talk about ‘designed with the screen in mind’. It also seems like an interface crying out for a tablet, but Google seem pretty set on the idea that this is for netbooks and Android is for tablets. To me, that’s a mistake.
An Archive of Fragments
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on November 16, 2010
I’m a little obsessed with this promo vid for new private photo sharing app Path. In part it’s because it’s the inverse of Zadie Smith’s take on Facebook – it’s the web and its tech as the impossibly positive, hopeful space, that brings people together as it makes the world better. (It’s also why I said the reasonable space to live in was the space between Smith and videos like this.)
At the same time, it hits a point I’ve been hammering at for years: it’s a web presence as an online archive of personal memory. What’s more, it’s an archive of photos, not text or film. Still snapshots are never how we experience reality, but are only anchors for memory, so that we might chain the fragments together into a narrative that makes sense to us – and, it seems, makes sense of us.
Path is also interesting for other reasons: unlike Facebook or even Instagram, it’s closed. It’s meant for close friends and family, and that’s it. It’s an interesting idea, especially since Facebook just rejiggered messaging to make it permission-based rather than open like email.
There’s probably something a little weird and self-conscious going on too when a video selling you something has an unusually pretty woman smiling at ‘you’ as you watch, but that’s a story for another day.
We Write in Public
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on October 22, 2010
If language works to construct how we relate to the world, does something change when it exists on the web?
Note: The ideas contained in this post are, perhaps more than most here on SiW, meant to mark a starting point of thought. As such, they are little rough and weighed down by ‘academic-ese’. In advance, my apologies.
Upon recently reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy – a book that aims to think about the differences between cultures that do and do not have writing – I was generally amazed at how much of what we take for granted is based on characters scrawled on a page. According to Ong, the invention of writing precipitates cataclysmic, irreversible changes. Things like abstract logic problems – like “if all cars are red, then which colour will the next car that arrives be?” – are generally impossible for those who have never experienced writing. It is not that what Ong calls primary oral cultures are less intelligent – but that certain mental operations require the externalization of knowledge into independent, abstract parts. This fascinates me.
What struck me most, however, was a section about 60 pages in, where Ong describes studies in which people who know no writing at all are asked to describe themselves: what kind of person they are, or whether they are good or bad etc. Their response? That it is best to ask someone else. Ask those who know me, they said. But according to Ong, it was not modesty that prevented them; rather, it was that oral culture doesn’t have the intellectual tools necessary for that kind of critical self-evaluation*:
Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situation of situational thinking. It calls for the isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person, the removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described.
It is writing that allows people to think about who they are because it is only through offloading ideas into the technology of writing that a person might consider themselves at a distance. But it is also because writing, as a mechanism of organising and systemitising knowledge, de-links the immediacy of consciousness and knowledge of the world, demarcating a line between lived experience and the abstract consideration of it. In oral cultures, there is only a now, plus the shared social memory of mnemonic poetry etc – for all speech disappears as soon as it is uttered.
Writing lets you put your experience of the world – and by extension, yourself – somewhere else, and examine it, perhaps as if it were not yours.
* * *
In 2010, however, it seems important to consider how the relationship between the self and the technology of writing might change because of the web. Because in what Ong calls primary oral cultures (i.e those with no writing) the seeming lack of a considered self* has, in a way, to do with where knowledge is. Speech, being something that is heard and then disappears, only exists ‘virtually’ in the shared imaginary space called the social. This could be why those who only know an oral culture speak of themselves as objects to be judged by others. Knowledge is located in the strangely atemporal area of the shared conversation of a group, a thing that is either here now or in the past and present simultaneously as it is recalled through speech. I don’t exist in here, alone, like Descartes contemplating his mind – I exist out there in the community that makes me, well, me. Writing allows for a personal, interior experience because it enables a relationship to the collected knowledge of a society all on your own.
But writing on the web is a strange kind of hybrid because it’s kind of like the oral utterance, but it is still, ya’ know, writing – a phenomenon Tim Carmody very usefully and smartly calls secondary literacy. It sometimes happens in real-time. It’s frequently social and very often public. It, like print writing, exists beyond us and can do things without us; but like the oral, it sometimes disappears into the ether, and is only there for as long as your chat window opens. It can be like a face-to-face conversation, because it can carry ‘temporal demands’: “Nav has entered text”; now answer me. And unlike printed text, it is not, at least in the aggregate, an experience that exists between one text and one reader, but a multiply iterated text experienced multiply by many readers simultaneously (though here I may be pushing things).
Put another way, the web is (for some) the ‘place’ or ‘location’ for a hybrid of speech and writing through which we both produce ourselves as ongoing, textual, imagistic entitites, but also generate ephemeral moments in which the shared, evanescent character of the oral is produced in text. If ‘where’ (and when) speech exists is a defining aspect of orality because of its location in a shared, mutually accessible social space, the location of writing online in a public, shared space would seem to share at least some of its characteristics: immediacy; evanescence; an emphasis on the social or the group; and, a kind of eye toward performance – an awareness that one produces oneself as one ‘speaks’ through typing and having that text be recorded in a ‘space’ accessible by many simultaneously. What the shared imaginary is to orality, the web is to secondary literacy.
* * *
If writing allows the individual to isolate itself from others in his or her own detached consciousness; and orality produces a self that looks at itself through the shared social and communal consciousness; then what happens when something that exists halfway between the two appears?
Well, let’s return to the issue of ‘where your words are’: if, through an online profile/avatar/chat window/Twitter conversation etc., you metaphorically locate part of yourself outside of your body, in the shared public space of the web, then rather than only producing the interiority of print – the isolated self considering itself through text – you have access to a mechanism for considering yourself through the lens of the always-already socialised, public space. Rather than the abstracted, individualist world of print, the virtual provides a space where writing and speech meet to render the individual as the thing that is always inside itself, but now can view itself from the shared space of the outside – a virtual gesture toward a supra-subjective position that considers the individual as the n-1 of the social: the always-already multiple, networked self, broken off and temporarily considered as singular.
So what actually changes?
Well, if print produces the interior, reflective self by disconnecting knowledge and the social, then what if the web, rather than intensifying that late-capitalist emphasis on individualism, produces a self more intimately aware of its position in a network of social relations precisely because it locates part of itself on and in an epistemological construct (i.e. the web) that is itself a network of relations?
But more than that, the web’s hyrbid mode of ‘oral writing’ allows for an externalization of interiority: a technological offloading not just of abstracted units of knowledge, but aspects of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity themselves, the mechanisms by which we relate to ourselves and interact with each other with our mouths, lungs, eyes, etc. And in putting oral-like communication somewhere else through text, the web produces an experience of self that is doubly outside of ourselves: out of our bodies, but also out of our internal consciousnesses.
I’m struggling for examples here. And I know this is all rough, abstract, overwrought and verbose. It strikes me now that is a book-sized idea – or a life’s work – not something for a blog post.
But what if the thing I’m talking about isn’t a simple, easily described social change, but possibly is instead is the quiet arrival of the cyborg: that rather than just reconfiguring the relationship between the social and the self, the web reconfigures the notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ when it comes to the individual, precisely because the web allows for an ‘outside’ for aspects of human consciousness? What if, by locating our speech and writing on the persistent text of the network – the persistent network of texts – the individual, rather than being the starting point of all things, isn’t quite so individual any more?
* * *
*Note: Ong is careful to insist that this is not a question of intelligence or ‘development’; instead, it’s about the epistemological limits of certain modes of apprehending reality.
Magazines: For You? Or By You?
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, magazines on October 21, 2010
I know it’s a little lame to link to writing I’ve done elsewhere, but I thought SiW folk might be interested in ideas about the magazine I rambled about at Techi. Specifically, I’m wondering if the idea as a magazine as a coherent whole might start to change:
There are real benefits to being able to gather the very best of information from around the internet: it lets you put together your own ‘magazine’ tailored to you There’s at least an argument to be made that very concept of the magazine is changing because the multiple, networked nature of the web changes our need for one publication to bring us info on a given topic, whether that’s baking or current affairs. And maybe the idea of a ‘tablet magazine’ that simply recreates the idea of a publication that somebody else put together for you isn’t such a great idea anymore.
Now, apps like Paper.li and Flipboard allow you to put together a personalized magazines based on either social feeds or a mix of those and pre-created feeds. And maybe the future of the magazine is one no longer about editorial coherence, but is instead, a thing dedicated to your own personal interests.
It’s just thinking out loud, really. The big issue is under what material conditions can writing/research be done, and I’m not sure that aggregators, rather than editorial entities, are the structures to look after it. And of course, there’s still an upside to ‘editorial curation’: of someone else pondering what might be good for you to know.
Still, something to think about?
