Friday, February 29, 2008

Pseudo Experience

McPherson’s paper “Reload” was particularly interesting to me. One of the things that she emphasizes is the idea that the Web (and more specifically, the Web browser, and even more specifically, some websites) provides an experience with a sense of control that in itself is a pseudo experience. McPherson refers to this experience as “liveness” and when surfing the net, we have a sense of control through movement.

The cursor, or the pointer, is a “tangible sign of presence implying movement” and “seems to embody our trajectory, an expression of our movement and our will.” McPherson goes on to say that this movement only feeds our obsession with immediate gratification. When surfing the Web, we are constantly bombarded with articles, links, and pages dedicated to things of a “current” and “breaking news” kind of nature. We also complain when a page takes too long to download (“nine seconds??? I have to be at work in three seconds!!!”) but as McPherson says, “even the waiting of download time locks us in the present as a perpetually unfolding now.”

“…Web references the unyielding speed of the present, linking presence and temporality in a frenetic, scrolling now. We hit refresh. We feel time move. We wait for downloads. We still feel time move, if barely. Processors hum, marking motion.”

However, McPherson notes the Web’s sometimes “marked inability to keep up with the present, recycling older stories in order to take advantage of the vast databases which underwrite the Web, old content repackaged as newness.” I myself have definitely experience this. Just recently, I was reading the New York Times online and clicked on what I thought was a new story about the climate conditions for the Olympics in Beijing, but it was actually a several month old story that I had already read. This recycling of old news by way of accessing “vast databases” of archived information brings to mind Bush’s idea of how our archives should be properly used, a way of moving forward by being able to access older ideas and build upon them (“a record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.”). But I don’t think this is the way in which Bush envisioned the information being “consulted;” instead it is being reused and not to a point where it is truly useful. McPherson goes on to say that “what is crucial is not so much the fact of liveness as the feel of it.” Does repackaging these old stories help us move forward? Are we really moving forward as long as we “feel” it?

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