Archive for category Theorizing the Web
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.
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.
The Coin, When Spinning, Still Glints in the Light
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Theorizing the Web on September 22, 2010
We exist in a weird moment in history:
- On the one hand, the aggregative power of the web to collect and centralize knowledge and intelligence is laying bare the power of ‘public knowledge’, softening the hard line between expert and layperson.
- On the other, we live in a time where the electoral and political process – the rise of the Tea Party down south and the dominance of Rob Ford in Toronto’s mayoral campaign – are doing much to prove that the democratic political process is reaching a breaking point. At some point, we have to deal with the discomforting and discomfiting reality that the reliance of democracy upon an idea of ‘the people knowing best’ is fundamentally flawed.
Ok, that’s a silly, sweeping generalization. But it’s a sentiment at least worth thinking about.
On the surface, these two simultaneous phenomena look like a contradiction in which we say both that “democracy works” and “democracy is failing” at the same time. But that’s misleading. Crowdsourcing works not because of the aggregated knowledge of the general public, but because it can collect the ‘amateur expertise’ of thousands, which when aggregated, can sometimes prove to be superior to an individual expert. It’s not as if a random sampling of a 100,000 North Americans will necessarily reveal brilliance; it’s that people who self-select to offer up their knowledge can do pretty amazing things when that knowledge is gathered together. The web allows a kind and scale of gathering that simply wasn’t practical before. What is also suggests is that democracy is and never was about ‘the knowledge of the people’ as much as it was skilled guidance of their interests.
But the recent thrust of political movements in North America suggests something quite different. In the Tea Party and Rob Ford we have widespread support for candidates whose actual capacity to govern the massive operating budgets of states and large cities, or navigate the intricate diplomatic complexities of day-to-day politics, are overshadowed by the dissemination of a particular rhetoric in the public sphere. That rhetoric is often superficially appealing – cutting taxes is inherently good – but doesn’t always necessarily line up with considered appraisals of what a given socio-economic system needs.
The web both helps and hinders here. It makes it easier to spread facts; but more importantly, it also makes it easier to spread their backgrounds and justifications. At the same time, as an active rather than passive medium, it also makes it easy to construct a specific world view untouched by contradictory approaches. The web has certainly aided the dissemination of things like ‘Obama is a Muslim’ or the viability of Rob Ford’s subway plan.
But I think it’s a mistake to make that about blame. To simply say that someone who votes for Christine O’Donnell or Rob Ford “is stupid” is to miss the massive socio-cultural networks that allow for their ascent, from the education system, to the length of the late-capitalist work-week to the media’s inability (both economic and cultural) to spread complex information. What’s more, it also fails to take into account the incredible pace at which this new information network has found its place within public discourse. I mean, most schools are yet to teach students about the basics of using Windows or OS X.
If Rob Ford is so popular because he promises to slash $250 million from an $11.6 billion budget, how are people to know that this is: a) a drop in the bucket; b) will likely leave people worse off than not? More complex: If Tea Partiers are committed to the notion that less government is better, when presented with the fact that it is social democracies that consistently have the highest standard of living in the world, will they change their minds?
Democracy is supposed to function through the aggregated intention of a population. The problem is, the overlapping systems of economics, ideology and the networks of public discourse all work to foreclose debate about novel or large-scale solutions, instead encouraging a political situation in which stability is maintained through a tug-of-war between right and left.
So what role, if any, can the web play in breaking the stalemate in which the core need of democracy – an informed, engaged public – is pre-empted by the material necessities of the democratic-capitalist process itself? Can it only work to further fracture the possibility of aggregated political action? Is the web of Facebook and Buzzfeed a kind of Baudrilliardian nightmare come true? Or is there some sliver of hope in the spaces between these two sides of democracy?
Twitter, My Peg Leg
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on August 22, 2010
A while ago, I was walking home at around midnight. Across the road, a woman was also walking, perhaps a few steps behind me. I had to cross the street to get to my apartment and, despite normally avoiding walking straight into someone’s path, I just couldn’t avoid coming rather close to my fellow late-night perambulator – maybe about 3 or 4 meters. She looked up, stopped, and turned the other way.
I was, though totally sympathetic, a bit wigged out by it. So naturally, I twittered the experience.
Though it was something that someone with my personality would have usually ruminated on for a while, by ‘putting it out there’, that slightly manic mental activity that I might usually go through disappeared quite quickly. Cleansed by Twitter, I guess.
It was Lisan Jutras’s great recent column in the Globe that got me thinking about this again. In it, Jutras outlines that thing that we all do – confess online:
This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the need to go public with some personal shame, and where better than the Internet? When I found myself weeping at everything on Glee one day, with neither alcohol nor hormones to blame, I tweeted it, not without misgivings.
“Happens to the best of us,” someone tweeted back. It was nice to hear: a little absolution. But – bonus – the solace goes both ways. I’ve read touching things about friends’ “bad” taste in movies and music that have warmed me to them. I’ve read soul-searching revelations about mental health, love lives, family. It’s always comforting to discover you’re not the first person to have doubts, weaknesses or problems of a specific shape.
[...]
Tweeting can make you feel closer to someone, less alone. If someone is put off by your disclosure, you don’t have to risk seeing their discomfited facial expression, or hear them say, “Ew, really?” You may notice you’ve dropped a follower, but you don’t have to know who.
There’s something interesting here. In a sense, the web is functioning as what I’m starting to call social prosthesis (Many have used the phrase, but I came it across it from Bill Buxton).
Like comparing an artificial leg to a flesh and bone one, it’s missing some obvious benefits: feeling, for one, not to mention the immediacy of being connected to the body and being around other bodies. Lacking both the immanence of a face-to-face interaction, its intimate one-to-oneness, online social interaction can be distanced and strangely textual – as if you were acting out a play in which you were the main character.
But, as Jutras describes, you also cathartically purge particular emotions by making them public. Inscribing oneself in the public sphere – and then receiving absolution in the form of sympathy or empathy – is like the online version of getting a reassuring hug from someone. What’s more, it’s precisely the image of oneself (exterior, looked-at) that produces shame – so why not Twitter it to get rid of it?
[Half-assed theory: "web 2.0" functions in part through and because of the desire to write oneself into the social fabric (to inscribe oneself as text into the public text-ile?). Foursquare, Last.fm, Foodspotting, Yelp, Flickr - they all share this in common. The description of this trend as narcissism - which stems from the desire to see only oneself reflected - is, I think, a mistake, as it misses the exterior constitution of our 'inside selves'. Publicising your activity is a way of not only making it concrete through a form of writing, it is a way of connecting individual action with the social.]
But if something like Twitter as a social prosthetic has its limits – the reduction of the self to a ‘corrupted, lesser image’ – like more advanced prosthetics, the web as social prosthesis can also be superior in some ways. As I once said, the online self is “not touched with the same extravagances or the same tortuous, bodily limitations – of cheeks that blush too quickly, or a mouth that moves a hair faster than the brain”. To engage with others online is to be social through (and not just as) an online representation of oneself – one that, while created by you, is not and can not be entirely you.
So, there’s another type of prosthetic here too that, rather than subbing in for some aspect of sociality, is instead producing a substitute version of experiencing selfhood. It’s the online persona or avatar as a prosthetic for subjectivity.
The prosthetic limb is one attached to regain function. It’s utilitarian. If one could one run with a flesh leg, it is replaced with a prosthetic limb so one can do the same. Similarly, if one cannot in a bodily, social way – i.e. sitting at a bar – engage in heated, controversial discussion, talk about touchy subjects, flirt, be funny, whatever – one turns to the avatar to perform these tasks in a still-social, if differently framed, environment.
This, I think, is where the warning bells about “using the web as a substitute for real life” go off. But key here is that one performs these things ‘prosthetically’ in order to reconfigure the bodily self – i.e. “the real self” (In 2010, I still feel comfortable prioritising the bodily self over its projection). To put it another way, the ‘outsourced’, prosthetic subjectivity is a way of testing out things online that one can then do in real life. Like the social prosthetic, is a way of inscribing a new vision of oneself ‘out there’, which also redefines the vision of oneself out here. But unlike the social, the subjective prosthesis is not an object – a text or image – but a process and experience. (Those distinctions can be broken down – but all in good time).
I think this is why I am constantly talking about the temporal aspect of the web: these interactions that take place in text carry some of the temporal demands of face-to-face interaction. But that slight delay is, in a very practical, basic way, a chance to gather oneself. It’s a cushion. You have a minute to gather your thoughts – so you test out how to express controversial beliefs politely. And next time you’re at a bar or a party…
Of course, the important question is that if one’s Twitter stream is the peg leg – then what part of online life is the parrot?
The Firmware Effect
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on June 25, 2010
Image Courtesy of Chris and Lara Pawluk
The soundcard in my computer, for some unknown reason, makes a small click when you switch the output from speakers to headphones. Every time I do this – which is almost every day – I become inexplicably happy. Something similar happens when I click the eject button in some media player and the CD tray of my computer opens. Click. And then a small rush of pleasure as I hear it noisily open.
Something about clicking a button on a screen and producing a physical effect is intensely satisfying to me. In broaching the barrier of the material and the seemingly immaterial , it vaguely feels as as if one is performing magic. Or telekenesis. Or something.
Perhaps it is for this reason that I always look forward to new pieces of software or firmware for the hardware that I own. When I installed Windows 7 on my laptop, it was no longer the slow, clunky and expensive mistake it was with Vista. It was now the laptop I had wanted when I had bought it. When Sony release a feature-laden firmware for the PS3, I excitedly download it to experiment with what’s new. And, of course, most recently, I hurried to install iOS 4 on my iPhone – even though I knew it would slow my now-old 3G down.
Upon installing a new OS, my hardware changed. These things felt new because the manner by which I interacted with them also changed. A laptop or iPhone with a new OS is not the same object as it once was because it is a window onto a mechanism of interaction – and that window was now different. Or, put differently: my relationship to the object had changed because the software that, by definition, constitutes a relationship between user and hardware, had also changed.
* * * *
Now that iOS 4 is installed on my phone, I am having the strangest reaction.
I keep picking it up and, even if it only lasts for a fraction of a second,I feel something almost akin to surprise: this is still the same old phone. The back is not flat and straight and made of glass. This is not an iPhone 4. It is still the same phone. Huh.
In some ways, this is me living out the Baudrillardian nightmare. Apple’s marketing has so captivated me that the image of the new iPhone has now overtaken my actual one as the thing that is real; my lowly 3G is somehow now less real, rendered as the past on a timeline that is not only about Apple’s product progression, but about my own personal trajectory as well. This phone should be the new one because I should have it.
But at the same time, I am suffering what I call the firmware effect. When our relationship to objects can be reconstituted by software, this non-thing that itself is about constituting relationships, the fixed nature of materiality – its irreversible nature, the cold hard facts of its immanence – feels off somehow. The firmware effect is the result of the ineffability of interfaces, and is exacerbated by the touch screen, itself a mirage and shapeshifter of both form and function. Things that once seemed so solid – buttons that clicked so reassuringly and made things happen – are now replaced and obscured by minute electrical pulses coursing through me, full of intention. Yet they seem to return in unexpected ways, rewiring neural paths, until the clear line between the screen and the material world grows fuzzy.
Perhaps I should print this post out to remind myself of the limits of broaching the material-immaterial boundary. Or would words made of pixels then made manifest on a page only compound the problem and confuse me more?
* * * * *
The other day, my brother and I were driving to a bakery we had never been to before. At an intersection, I couldn’t quite see the street number atop a sign on the other side of the street. I leaned forward in my seat and strained and squinted. But the outlines that I knew would, with just a few more feet, resolve into recognisable shapes, into markings of a code I knew well, remained fuzzy and unclear.
And then, for a fraction of a second – a microscopic eon – I momentarily thought I should double-tap reality so that it would zoom.
So that, by pressing buttons, I would bring it closer to me.
“…but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Theorizing the Web on May 9, 2010
So, for those of you who don’t know (i.e. all of you) the general topic of my dissertation is how literature deals with the changes to the concept of the individual brought about by the web and video games.
And recently, during yet another beer-fueled conversation with a friend, we stumbled upon the realisation that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was basically tailor made for my project. I hope to be able to give you a decent explanation why later.
But I’ve also been thinking about this whole Facebook privacy kerfuffle and why so many of us feel weirded out by the recent changes. What model of the individual are we using when we think about the private and the public?
Well, I don’t have any answers to that yet, but this snippet from the beginning of Wilde’s novel certainly felt like it was worth quoting:
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town I never tell people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?
It’s just a tiny thing. But, at the very least, this notion of inside and outside, the dynamic of desire produced by secrecy, and the manner in which technology – even the painting – allows for the ‘externalisation of the individual’ – well, it all seems like an interesting place to start.
Favourite New Tumblr: Fetishizing the Other [Updated]
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Theorizing the Web, web culture on January 7, 2010
Tagline: “Where post-grad meets post-race”
The folks who brought and continue to bring you SiW fave Slaughterhouse 90210 have now started a new Tumlbr called – wait for it – Fetishizing the Other. The site consists of a variety of unannotated images of some kind of ‘other’ – a racial minority, ‘the poor’, or another kind of subjugated figure – and, well, nothing else.
Edit: I got so caught up with my usual “Tumblr=postmodernism” schtick, I forgot to talk about the actual site. So:
As I said in the comments, Tumblr is so often a place for a kind of distanced, aestheticised nostalgia – full of “hazy photography of models in sundresses; arty experiments in design and typefaces; literary quotes and other fragments” is how I once put it. This Tumblr takes that kind of nostalgia – that affection for the weird, the quirky etc. – and casts a critical light on it. It takes those same out-of-context images and, solely through the use of a site name, critiques that same post-ironic blankness – “we refuse to judge” – that has become so central to both the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of Tumblr as ‘a culture’ (or cultural artefact).
So what is particularly interesting about this site is that challenges the aesthetic of what I often call ‘the hipster web’ – the Buzzfeed-y world of Tumblrs and ironic single-serving sites. If one of the tropes of Tumblr is collapsing past and present, this site not only looks at our racist past, but also suggests that it isn’t as far gone as we think – or gone at all.
Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I know I’ve endlessly yapped about Tumblr, but the thing that has always intrigued me about it is the way it crystallises how images in the contemporary (North American) context are ‘overdetermined’. I think the term stems from psychoanalysis, and regardless of what it ‘actually’ means, I’ve always used it to refer to an object or idea that is oversaturated with potential interpretations, simultaneously meaning more than one thing and remaining impossible to pin down to just one of the meanings. An overdetermined image constantly hovers in the potential of its semiotic multiplicity.
It’s for this reason that I’ve argued that few things are more endemic, or more a paragon of ‘the present’ than Tumblr. Fetishing the Other, after all, simply presents a series of images devoid of context, explanation or an explicit editorial bent (other than the title, of course). Its authors, however, know that you’ll be able to produce a particular kind of interpretation – here, one critical of the way in which difference is made exotic – simply because you, like them, have spent your life being bombarded with both images and a slew of interpretations of those images. We live in a world where things mean multiply, all the time. And so Tumblr, as the stripped-down, context-less blog, simply functions on the interpretive saturation that, in my mind, defines ‘post-post-modernity’ – or whatever the fuck you want to call the current moment.
I feel like I’ve repeated this too often, but it just fascinates me. Hopefully though, this repetition means that a better, more intriguing idea is around the corner. That’s the way it works, right? You repeat one interpretation over and over again until it finally hits you how boring it is, and then you move on to a better, more nuanced one that, at least for a while, feels right.
The Best Blogs of 2009
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web, web culture on December 17, 2009
Oh, as if I wasn’t gonna’ link to this.
So, some smart people – some of whose work I read religiously and really like – got together and talked about the best new blogs of the year. It makes for a fun read, particularly because you immediately get the sense you’re listening to informed people treating the form with care, respect and insight.
As I read it, what struck me as both odd and funny was that, in a sense, ‘blogs’ seem almost passe. Don’t mistake me – it’s not that they’re either unimportant or dying. It’s just that the term no longer captures the zeitgeist in the way it once did. A blog is just another form of publication or communication.
But far from being something sad, to me that seems like cause for hope. After all, it’s at that point that a form stops being a sign for an age that it becomes able to engage with that time without only descending into constant meta- self-reflexivity. Remember years ago, when we all breathlessly chatted about what blogging was and what it was not? That has largely ended. And with that, the cultural force of the form is growing as it starts to turn its critical gaze away from itself and, instead, uses that capacity for meta-commentary – for that constant deconstructive semantic multiplicity enabled by both hyperlinking and the overwhelming glut of context - to engage with the world in a hyper-critical, innovative, rhizomatic way.
The list contains some blogs I talk about here – Slaughterhouse 90210, Hilobrow etc. – and some that I don’t. But I l also love that Rex takes the opportunity to go on about Tumblr. It’s a platform or site or whatever the fuck it is that I also can’t shut up about (here, here, here). But this idea is great:
Tumblr’s make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.
That’s a key element that I’ve missed, as I’ve largely given up on using Tumblr (though I think I’ll be heading back there) and have instead remained a voyeur to the mad exchange of aesthetics and desire that drive the community. I also love that Rex picks Mad Men Footnotes as the paragon of Tumblrdom, particularly the way it makes that it’s-so-Tumblr move of collapsing nostalgia, history, aestheticism and immediacy. That’s still what I love so much about Slaughterhouse 90210, my personal pick for the site that best captures the weirdness of Tumblr. Slaughterhouse too does that thing where it conflates a historical timeline into a messy, always contemporary, singular pile, aesthetically and ideologically reframing both the pop culture artefacts from ‘the present’ and the quotations from ‘the past’ (also neat: the picture is from the present and the text is from the past).
Anyway, the list is full of good stuff and, like Robin, I love the inclusion of Offworld. Go read! It’s a great resource, but it’s also a great way to see how blogging as a form is approached by those who live and breathe it. Oh, also, Joanne Mcneil (who has SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE FEEDS in her GReader! 749!) includes Snarkmarket which, as if you couldn’t guess, would be up in my top three fave blogs of the year (the other two probably being Slaughterhouse and Hilobrow).
Polanski on Tumblr
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on December 11, 2009
Yes of course there’s a Polanski Tumblr. But it isn’t quite what you think. It’s just a series of pictures of scantily clad and naked (young) women in various poses of recline and objectification.
Returning to my central thesis: Tumblr as a cultural phenomenon is doing something weird and interesting and (I think) it’s crucial for us to understand – or at least discuss.
The thing that I’ve been arguing for some time is that Tumblr only works within the overdetermined glut of images that ‘define’ postmodernism. In this instance, you have a series of images that are either: a) artistic, erotic, arousing, or; b) grossly offensive and sexist – all operating under the shadow of a figure who is either: a) a man dedicated to art, or; b) a rapist who happens to make great art.
So it’s only through this pastiche-like (but not) presentation of images that any of this ‘makes sense’. At the same time, there is nothing that prevents this Tumblr from being read as soft-porn. That’s the point. There is no reference point and, while that’s a tired point about ‘postmodernism’, Tumblr is one of the most perfect forms for the expression of the idea.
So there you go. Visit the site. And on the first image you’ll feel very clever. And by the 12th a little creeped out. And that - that inextricability of desire, the image and a broader ideological context – is exactly what Tumblr brings to light.
Writing The Self Into The Social
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on November 16, 2009
For some reason, I have an image in stuck in my head. It’s the 13th century – maybe the 14th – and in a cold, austere monastery, a monk is sitting at a desk, his dark brown robes gathered around him, writing by the light of three or four candles.
He has learned to write recently, having only fully caught the knack of it a couple of months ago. Reaching the end of a scroll, he sits back, neatly and carefully rolls up his sleeves, and takes a moment to look at all the words scattered across the desk. It then occurs to him, suddenly, that when he gets up and walks away, his words will still be there.
It must have been strange for our imaginary monk who, perhaps for the first time, sat witness to the multiple iterations of his self spread out over the rough, worn wood. For his whole life, he had been one person at a time, his memories of himself locked in his head. He could speak; he could tell others. But speech was so fleeting, so performative. And what if no-one was there to listen?
This was one of the things writing as a technology did. It allowed language to exist beyond the self, to operate independently of the person who put the words on the paper. And I imagine it was a strange thing to find oneself in words for the first time – to see the self that you both were and are, laid out in the same space, lying next to one another. Time must have taken on a new meaning. Perhaps space too.
So what happens when the page one writes upon stretches further past some limits of both space and time? What happens when the page is no longer a physical, immanent thing, but a flickering screen, simultaneously accessible by millions. What happens when the page we write upon is a canvas for half the world?
I guess what got me thinking about this was a lovely, melancholy column in the Globe by my latest Twitter crush, Lisa Jutras. In it, Jutras weaves a moody narrative about how the social web has led us to become “wispier version of ourselves”:
As if aware of this, we constantly seem to need reassurance about what kind of person we are. It’s no accident that Facebook quizzes – telling us what colour we are, what character from Mad Men, etc. – proliferate, even though they aren’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. We seem to need the computer to tell us that we exist.
Never was this more evident than when Google Streetview launched: Suddenly my Facebook newsfeed was glutted with photos of people’s own houses. Never mind that they could have taken a photo of their house and posted it the previous day. No, it was as if now, somehow, their house existed in a way it never did before. It seems we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: The computer dilutes our essence, but we continually look to the screen for proof of our own depth.
But, as much as I loved the column, to me, there is a difference between posting a photo of your house and finding it on Google Streetview. The former is an attempt to make yourself exist on the public page, to present yourself to the world and yourself. The latter is like finding public evidence of your own existence already there. When it shows up on something like Streetview, your house does exist in a way in never did before. It has stretched past the limits of your own life and become part of the public world.
For a couple of years now, this has been one my main concerns on this blog – that the web presents a ubiquitous public page that is a space for us to represent ourselves to ourselves. The public nature of the web is an extension of the fundamentally social nature of being, of the fact that we are simultaneously locked in our own minds, while those same minds are only human because of all the things that came from outside it: language, culture, belief etc.
On the web, I exist publicly in a way I never could have before. I like something about that – that someone who otherwise blends into the background, or becomes invisible in a group of people – can inscribe himself onto an open page for others to read. Maybe in doing so, I am becoming wispier. But then, I have always been wispy. Something about finding myself online makes me feel as if I exist more solidly, outside the cacophony of my own mind or the fleeting connections I call friendships.
Perhaps it’s my typical hyperbole, but I like to think of people who write on the web as new versions of that monk, suddenly struck by the fact that the page and its markings have done things to their self and their sense of it. And I dunno’, something about that fills me with hope. Perhaps it isn’t that the web has frayed the threads of the social; maybe it’s that it has projected the entire mess onto a screen we can all see. And for all the disconnection that has engendered, by taking the social and putting it somewhere, perhaps it will also help us confirm that we exist to others and ourselves.
Note: I’m actually pretty sure that most 13th century monks wouldn’t be doing anything so narcissistic as writing their own thoughts down on paper. But let’s just say our monk is a rule-breaker.
