Tuesday, February 19, 2008

illusion of continuity?

To generalize, one of Galloway’s main themes is the protocol of continuity. From pages 64 – 69 he lists the techniques that the Internet uses to “create a pleasurable, fluid experience for the user.” (64) This idea seems similar to a lot of other theorists we’ve read who talk about the transparency of interface and its pleasurable illusion of causality in HCI. I wonder however, how this pleasurable continuity fits in with the digital (separated, discontinuous) aspect of the Internet. Galloway gives a good example of this with the technique of “prohibition against low resolution” on page 67. This technique basically exists to produce a whole, continuous picture, concealing the digitized pixels that actually make up the image. It seems also that the “objects” which Galloway defines as the form of the internet are also digitized: “pure positives…heterogeneous elements…radically independent from context…” (74). He continues to say that “different objects are understood as such due to their irreconcilability, their separation within a machinic process.” I am interested and would like to discuss in section if or if not Galloway’s argument reconciles the discontinuity/continuity of form and protocol. Is continuity simply an illusion (like causality) that exists solely for the pleasure/ease of the user, and which masks the true discontinuous and digital form of computers?

In a way this reminds me of a lecture a few weeks ago (Feb. 4) where P. Chun spoke about the desire for historical continuity in Vannevar Bush’s essay—his assumption that historical gaps or discontinuities were accidental and should be avoided by developing memory-aiding technology such as the memex. I don’t think it is accidental that this has come up again—perhaps computers and the Internet have fulfilled with their protocol some sort of natural (or cultural?) desire for continuity of actions and thoughts.

As an end note, Deleuze writes on p 6-7 that “the disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.” It would be interesting in section to talk about how continuity fits in to Deleuze’s societies of control. How does this connect to Galloway’s idea of continuity of protocol (or perhaps the illusion of it) and the internet?

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