Ghost in the Wire

I need to stay with the silent running for just a bit longer, as I'm finishing up a web consulting project, an interesting departure from my academic work.  But I did have a few days in which, after holding out for a very long period of time, I booted back up the old Xbox and played my newly grabbed copies (used) of Halo 2 and Fable.  I played them both a bunch, albeit within an allotted span of time, and will get back to playing them when I finish up some other work, but for now the Xbox is off and I'm in work mode.  But given that my work right now is in web design, and that my current academic project is about media ecologies at work in Tron and the Matrix movies, the question of technology, and our imbrication with it, is never very far from my mind.

Now, one take on this, which you can see over at Einstein's Corner, is a somewhat mournful gloss on media addiction.  We have become a culture addicted to media, or so the argument goes, and only now, at the end, do we understand how intense our attraction has become and how profound its consequences.  I'm deliberately alluding to the Emporer of Return of the Jedi here, since he is after all the moral and technological father of everyone's favorite malevolent cyborg: Darth Vader.  Darth is freed from his bondage to the emporer, which is above all and before anything else a technological bondage, at the close of Episode VI by removing his technological garment, freeing himself from his addiction so that he can look upon Luke with "his own eyes."  The removal of the technology is also a death sentence, you'll remember, but at least it is a death brought about through a more natural, more axiologically correct approach to that thing we call living.  This theme, a sort of humanism amidst FX, is a constant play within the Star Wars movies, and one can always see the battle with the dark side of the force as a battle against the potential seduction or further integration of technology and the mind-body - Luke's reconstructed hand, for an example.  And like any addiction, there's a dangerous slippery slope to be avoided, for once you start down the "dark path" (of technology) "forever will it dominate your destiny."  Yada yada yoda.

I find this thinking impoverished to say the least, and worse, I think it's politically dangerous.  One cannot help but note the ablism inherent within the view that media addiction is something to be feared, that new media are especially or distinctively addictive, and that imbrication of media/technology and the body is something of which we must remain forever skeptical and eternally vigilant.  I call this view political in the way that any rhetorical schema that works to write supposed ontological truths is political, in that this writing is always already laced with an ideology and a drama that necessarily privileges some beliefs and behaviors and realities at the expense of others.  Here, for example, the addiction narrative presupposes that the body has a normal, natural state and that addiction is a supplement grafted on that destroys and overwhelms that which it supplements.  But what if this supplementarity is actually the original state, and what if the "natural order" is simply the term of art we use to describe a certain generational comfort with a particular subset of these media and technological supplements?  What if human being only comes to be because of these supplements, these so-called addictions?  What if the various frameworks by which we view subjectivity - phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the cogito, intersubjectivity - emerge from the logics and processes of supplementarity rather than being objective descriptors of some universal human essence?

I want to spend some more time with the addiction metaphor and its costs in future posts, but these questions will have to do for now.

Oh and if you haven't had a chance to check out Progcast, you might think about doing so.  The second installment, this time on Iraq and warfighting doctrines, should be up at Progressive Commons sometime this coming week.

I may try to do a Ghost podcast at some point, but only if I can think of a subject and a method suited to it.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I just can't see myself staying with TypePad in the longterm.  For anything less than 15 dollars a month, you're stuck using any number of particularly boring layout and template designs, with no ability to edit the template itself, which seems borderline tech-extoritionist.  I appreciate the ease of the interface, but the lack of flexibility is getting to me.

Consider this a notice to the TypePad people, and a request for any other suggestions regarding blogging software.  [Foreshadow: I'll probably start up another Movable Type installation, but I'm open to alternatives.]

I haven't been posting as much as I have wanted, for a number of reasons.  First, I've availed myself of technological distractions recently, both recreational (Halo 2 and Fable) and otherwise, as I have been spending some time experimenting with various wiki packages and learning more about CSS.  I have also been doing some web consulting of late, and so I've been devoting some time to bettering my design skills.  Not being remotely artistic, and never having really trained to do anything with web design, I've decided that some self-education and exploration are in order.  I do this occasionally, devoting periods of time to researching how certain aspects of new media operate, and since CSS is already determining the next aesthetic revolution for the web, I figured it was time to begin taking it a bit more seriously.  Second, I know that I'm going to switch away from Typepad soon, and so I've been reluctant to post in a venue that I find stifling in a number of different ways, despite its ease.

But there is a third and much more profound reason for my lack of writing.  I have had writer's block.  And it's been an interesting version of it.  I have writer's block now and again - all writers do - but this has been an astoundingly micrological incarnation, in which linking or even constructing simple sentences seemed incredibly difficult.  Now I always recover from these little episodes, and usually become a stronger writer from the experience  But this time I realized that one of the things that was short-circuiting my efforts to write was in fact been my experimentation with CSS and web design.  I've been playing a lot with templates and ordering functions, and have been working pretty intensely with them, probably more intensely than I have in a long time, at least since I was actively running a DGD driven multi-user domain. 

All computer programs, and all computer languages, have a certain logic to them, a set of behaviors that are predictable (usually) within certain known parameters.  To immerse yourself in them is, to a certain extent, to internalize them, and long story short, the logics that inform their functions are very different from the logics that govern academic writing.  Media ecologists take the importance of language systems seriously, but we don't always do a very good job of doing more than that, of experiencing the nature of those differences as something to be treasured or negotiated, rather than mourned or critiqued.  I'm certainly guilty of it at times, as I let the theorist and critic in me occasionally overwhelm my interest in the irreducibility of the media about which and through which I write.  But I also understand that these impasses in my writing, these moments of writer's block, are in fact reflections of the short-term rewiring of my cognitive processes, and that they are, in the end, far more productive than they are frustrating.  Friedrich Kittler has argued that to understand the complexity of our world today, critics need to understand a variety of languages - and that programming languages are just as, if not more, important than learning another foreign tongue.

Having broken through the most recent writing difficulty, I couldn't agree more.  With blogs and wikis taking over and redefining the basic functions of the web, it helps to play around with the guts of programs like movable type and mediawiki (I mention them in large part because they're my favorites so far).  Doing so does much to move one beyond the "this new thing is new and therefore bad (or good)" arguments so common around the advent of new media technologies.  And, let's face it, it's fun.

So it's with the last post in mind that I finally comment on the recent Chronicle piece about the dangers of academic blogging.  Written by the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble, the piece has already received a saturating level of coverage by some very intelligent and witty writers.  Collin Brooke, Planned Obsolescence's KF, and Jeff Rice, for example.  I'll just agree with everything they say, and turn my attention to one  little paragraph near the beginning of the piece:

Don't get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.

My complaint here has to do with the idea of the creative academic.  Let's ask some questions of it.  First, why is it that the academic becomes "creative" by carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom?  Isn't there a way that an academic can be creative without translating their scholarly output into easier consumption for the general public?  I'm sure Ivan doesn't mean to make this the only condition for creativity, but as it's written, it's a somewhat facile attempt at straw support.  Second, how is it that Ivan and his colleagues seem unaware of Google Scholar, whereby the limited and narrow audience of print communications no longer seems so narrow or so limited?  I know it's obvious that Ivan isn't the most tech-savvy of professors - the pseudonym hints at tech skills earned during or shortly after Star Trek: TOS, and I'm doubting much happening at even the TNG level - but come on, with library databases increasingly robust and often storing searchable full text files, Ivan has to have been really ignoring the reference section of his/her school library.  Third, and most importantly, what qualities can we ascribe to the ambiguous and supposedly positive thoughts that first characterized Ivan and his colleagues' understanding of blogs?  Whatever these thoughts were, they must have been what defined the thinking of the "creative" academic.  To me, this signifies the paucity of Ivan's thinking more so than any of the subsequent anecdotes by which the search committee dismissed blogging applicants.  Blogging is not in and of itself a source of creativity; it is a means of dissemination and archiving that necessarily implicates the means by which one communicates, writes, or argues.  To think that maintaining or publishing a blog necessarily connotes creativity is to basically infer value from the novelty of a technological device, rather than to infer creativity from its application.  It shows no knowledge or even willingness to learn about blogging as a particular medium, and little indication that Ivan would even understand that the medium has a specificity worthy of attention.

The negatives that follow the above excerpt, the random reasons by which Ivan and the search committee use their blogs dismiss certain applicants from the pool, can be read in the same vein, only now they have knowledge of specific bloggers by which to contest their naive assumptions about the generic nature of blogging.  The conclusion isn't nearly as disappointing as the starting ground, and we shouldn't really be surprised by the results.  Start with the flaw, end with the flaw.

That Ivan published in a manner seeking anonymity shouldn't be surprising - after abdicating the responsibility of thinking, he might as well abdicate the responsibility of claiming authorship.

Give me a chance to finish making the transition (in other words: expect some fairly substantial style changes). Oh, and I'll fix the links nad blogroll fairly soon.

I came across a very brief discussion over at the Chutry Experiment regarding what Chuck is calling "media times," a phrase that I think points to the various types of temporality depicted within and derived from various media. Chuck, film master that he is, is most interested in the temporality of film, but his brief brainstorm has me thinking about the more generic question of mediation qua temporality. And contrary to first appearances, this is a fairly important and demanding issue, though its importance is probably much more obvious to people who are just learning how to do criticism than it is to people who have already developed a critical faculty.

Here's the reason: one of the problems that critics face, again and again, is that of (accurate) representation. See, most criticism does something along these lines: "X happens in a film or a text or a television show, this X symbolizies, represents, or marks something that I will call Y, and Y is either problematic or beneficial for the following reasons." Now that doesn't sound like a difficult thing to get one's head around, but novice critics routinely scratch their heads when they get to the second part of the critical enterprise, in which X is somehow linked to Y. Why? Well, let's take a quick example of an artifact, say something like the movie Tron. This classic Disney film, one of (if not the) first films to incorporate computer-generated images, tells the story of a programmer who hacks his way back into a program he himself created, a program that has grown and evolved into an evil entity known as Master Control. Master Control zaps the programmer with a laser and transports him into the video game world, and there our programmer links up with Tron, a warrior who would fight the oppressive rule of Master Control. As a programmer made virtual, our lead character has superpowers (not unlike Neo of the Matrix movies) and is able to save the day, free the programs, and redeem his status and reputation in the real world.

Now, there are a lot of ways that one can do that "X relates to Y" part of criticism here. One could argue that it's a Jesus story, told for the video game age. One could contend the film speaks of corporate power, of capitalism, and the need for champions to rise and question its implicit hold on social organization. One could find in it the workings of erotic drive (the programs are very strangely sexed), and with the keen notation of various phallic movements, speak of the films internal gloss on sexual and identity repression. One could note that the two hero figures are male, and that the women in the film are really only there as decorative, quasi-sexual objects, and so it makes sense to read the film as another story of male domination, written by men for men. Whatever. The point is that there are lots of ways in which different Xs can point to different Ys. But this pointing relies fundamentally on some classical notion of representation, on the idea that the content of the film points (implicitly or explicitly) to content not in the film, and that this pointing takes the second set of content (Y) and makes us think about it in terms of X. In other words, the film re-presents Y as X.

Now for young critics, this process is invariably confusing. How are we to know which X-Y statement is the correct one? The only way to answer this question is to provide a metric that celebrates one ideological/critical disposition over another. One needs to accept and agree with certain psychoanalytic precepts, or to believe that religion has a prominent and privileged role in the shaping of the American psyche, or that gender dynamics deserve center stage for political or ethical reasons, and so on and so forth. From one of these groundings, a correct reperesentation can supposedly be selected from the field of possible representations.

The problem of course is that representation is somewhat of a shell game, since the ability to decide the proper interpretation begins with an ideological mastery that is responsible for hiding the shell in the first place. Faced with the fore-ordained awareness of gender dynamics' importance, it's hard not to find gender dynamics represented in an artifact in some way that displeases you or your potential readers. When backed by a utopian political or ideological horizon, it's hard not to see certain artifacts, no matter how progressive, as simply dirtying the skyline. This isn't to say that noting the deficiencies of these artifacts is without merit, only to say that criticism bound to a logic of representation, of X's relation to Y, already suffers from certain pronounced internal limits.

In addition, and perhaps more fundamentally, representation as a critical ground ignores entirely the actual role of mediation, of the temporality of any particular media form. This is why it helps to think the specificity of artifact not through a logic of representation, but rather through a logic of ecology. See, media do not merely represent the world or the word. They present a world or a word; literally they make it present — available to the here and now or preserved for a future here and now. They represent time. A particular time (stasis), a movement of time (chronos), a sense of timing (kairos): every representation is the reproduction of some object or event or person as a present. This is not to say that this act of presentation is what gives media its sense of reality – Heidegger is right to caution against thinking the vulgar temporalization of the present as being synonymous with the more fundamental experience of presence – but rather, this presentation is what gives media what we now think of as "real time," which is to say that it gives to media a sense of the temporality in which one encounters particular disseminations as something happening in the present, or as something happening "now." As a consequence, our perception of time changes along with the way different media organize our sense-perceptions; as certain media become more pervasive in our lives, the perception of their particular instantiation of “media time” in turn begins to structure our general experience of time's passing. As Derrida remarks: “This other time, media time, gives rise above all to another distribution, to other spaces, rhythms, relays, forms of speaking out and public intervention.”

We have to remind ourselves that time is not an ontologically discrete object. We experience time, without doubt, but that experience is always already governed by the inherited practices of measuring time, be it through the minutiae of the hour, minute, and second, the slow change of months or seasons, or the historical perspective produced by conceptualizing a past, present, and future. The existential reality of the passage through time does not, in other words, require that time be measured, but the existence of a measure (or rather, the technics that make measurement possible) necessarily determines how one experiences the passage of time.

A double-edged sword, in other words: on the one hand, the passage of time is utterly existential. Existence is structured, as Michael Hyde likes to say, by the movement of the now to the not-yet. On the other hand, the experience of the passage of that time is, for most people, dictated by the technics by which that passage is measured, i. e. temporalized. Take for instance, the technical reform of time that took place in Western Europe around the close of the thirteenth century: the birth of the mechanical clock. Rather than focus on fixing the calendar, as previous cultures were wont to do, the Europeans spent their time discerning how to measure the hour, to shrink the passage of time to more manageable units. The new hour clock (which took its name from related French and German words meaning “bell” because it made precise the system of bells that announced various points of the day in European cities) helped to dissolve more fluid conceptions of time and replace them with a view of time as quanta. Historian Alfred Crosby writes:

Time had seemed to most people an unsegmented flow. Therefore, experimenters and tinkerers wasted centuries attempting to measure time by imitating its flowing passage, that is, the flow of water, sand, mercury, ground porcelain, and so on – or the slow and steady burning of a candle out of the wind... Solving the problem becomes possible when one stops thinking of time as a smooth continuum and starts thinking of it as a succession of quanta.

The "need" for speed followed immediately on the steps of this discovery. This new reaction, McLuhan explains, manifests because the clock makes it “possible to fix time as something that happens between two points” which transforms the passage of time into a measurable, discrete concept of “duration,” and produces, concomitantly, "our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events." Nostalgia for the old days, when the world passed slowly, without all those mechanical doo-hickies, no doubt followed shortly thereafter. What made possible this shift in the experience of time – a shift that helped usher in the European obsession with quantification and measurement, and subsequently the reimagining of science – is a mediation of time by different set of technics.

None of which is to say that the experience of time is entirely determined by technical apparatuses, or even entirely determined by the psychic imprint of those apparatuses. Heidegger's purpose in Being and Time is not just to think the essence of Being through the facticity of time, it is also to force a rethinking of time that is not beholden to its vulgar/technical reduction to quanta. That such a project is thinkable at all implies that technics cannot control entirely the experience of time. But criticism wedded to representation can never approach the temporal affects of media time, because such critical acts always already map the atemporal logic of representation (in this case, a symbolic logic) upon the more complicated temporalities of the act of presencing.

One of the more consistent hype narratives attending new media technologies is that of displacement and obsolescence, the idea that a new medium will remove [or] replace an older, related medium, and in so doing send that old medium to the junk bin of history. Most of the time, perhaps even all of the time, this particular narrative ends up having little relation to the eventual historical reality, and yet the same story gets trotted out whenever tech-writers or tech-users need something quick and dirty to say about a new technology. Some recent examples: the typewriter will kill writing, computers and hypertext will destroy book culture, blogs will replace online newspapers, and now, the most recent entry, podcasts will "turn radio into a dusty fossil."

And yet. None of these concerns/predictions have turned out to be true, though some have come significantly closer than others. The sublimation of handwriting to the typed word is probably the closest this narrative gets to laying any claim to accuracy. People still learn and practice handwriting, using it for special occasions or venues, like diaries, travelogues, personal letters, or greeting cards, but it is certainly practiced less, and some practices and some professions predicated on proper handwriting (like the master penmens, who were paid to draft important documents) have been eliminated. But still, handwriting hasn't been eliminated as an art; rather, it has morphed into a different symbolic register, now symbolizing the "personal touch" not found in the easy flow and mass production of the word-processed word. The reasons why writing gave way to typing in so many professional situations - the potential illegibility of the script, the slowness it brings to composition - is now the mark of a certain symbolic capital awarded to handwriting, a mark that comes about because typing frees up handwriting to do more than provide the normative, visual means of transmitting the word.

The other examples don't even come this close. With the Half-Blood Prince still flying off shelves, it's hard to say that either hypertext or video games have ended the culture of book reading. Newspapers are everywhere, with blogs largely parasitic off of their reporting efforts. And fear not, podcasts will not replace radio broadcasts any time soon.

So why is this claim so often incorrect? Well, a couple of reasons.

1. The displacement narrative confuses the current function of a medium with the medium itself. In effect, it reduces the potential of a medium to its operational economy. Typing puts word to paper more efficiently than does handwriting, and so handwriting will soon be pictured next to the dodo in the annals of history, or so the theory goes.
2. It ignores the importance of temporality in assessing mediation. Radio has the advantage of "live" broadcasts - commonly referred to now as "real time" - while podcasts do not. Podcasts can fulfill some of the functions of radio, to be sure, but they cannot catpure its rhythms. Those rhythms matter, as they determine the potential and the reception of particular media.

Now, if you carefully limit the displacement narrative to cases in which you appreciate more than mere functionality and look for matching rhythms, you have a much stronger claim. Podcasts have the very real potential of displacing talk radio by providing a flood of talk-radio competitors, whose podcasts can counter the unidirectional flow of radio with a flow that adds in user-controlled start and stops, something increasingly valued by the TiVo generation. And video really did kill the radio star, precisely because it provided the supplement of physical beauty and presentation while matching radio's rhythm.

So tech-writers, how about it? Can we go for a bit more specificity? Pretty please?