Friday 11am Section- Immemory

I was not terribly intrigued by the majority of the content of Chris Marker's "Immemory." In fact, I took very little interest in the sections of his digital memoir that I read until I reached the french poetry. I speak about as much French as the average American (that is, almost none), but I couldn't help but notice Marker's introduction to the text. He raised the question of why he wouldn't just tell readers/explorers to not bother with this section if they didn't speak French, much the same way as he warned explorers in the cinema section if they lacked prior knowledge of Vertigo. I reread to make sure I had the context right, and when I realized that Marker was probably talking about Hitchcock's Vertigo, my interest was piqued.
I left the poetry section almost immediately (under the assumption that there was little material of interest to me) and began searching for Vertigo. Unsurprisingly, It was under the cinema section and could be accessed by clicking a still from the opening sequence of the movie. What I read was interesting commentary about Hitchcock's obsession with dopplegangers, Scottie's romantic quest to fight time and death, and some information about the Vertigo tour of San Francisco.
While the information was fascinating, what I realized along the way was much more important. I began to appreciate Marker's memoir as a navigable digitization of memories. I became entertained by dissecting his brain, going through the places he had been and the sights he had seen. Once I realized the level of immersion and freedom I was given in exploring Marker's past, my level of understanding and enjoyment rose significantly.

“One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries—and not on the integrity of natural objects [….] Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical” [Haraway, 163].

Haraway writes about ‘integrated social systems’ creating the practice of ‘experimental ethnography’ [162]. This practice results in the reduction of human action and interaction to protocol, to ‘statistical modes of operation’. This reminds me of Moulthrop’s vision of the future of hypertext: “Hypertext and hypermedia are also interactively ‘cool,’ so following this analysis we might conclude that they will undergo a similar implosion, becoming ever bit as institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks” [You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media, 42].

Hypertextual structure mirrors the free-associative structure of the human mind. If hypertext becomes institutionalized, molded to a [social] protocol, when pushed to its absolute limit, it follows that operations of the human mind and agency will become constrained when pushed to their limit as well. And what is this limit? Haraway seems to argue that the complete and fluid integration of human and machine is the ultimate limit of human agency.

On a completely separate note: I was confused by Haraway’s letter substitutions [usually ‘d’ for ‘ti’, etc.] They were relatively prevalent, but seemed inconsistent [?]; I couldn’t find a pattern [“The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumphon, and producdon [166]]. What was her intention?

Emily for Matt's section

History and Technology

Friday 11 AM Section - Blog Post #7

Gitelman’s article touches on an interesting concept: the temporality of the Web. Specifically, she raises the question of whether it is possible to archive the history of an entity such as the World Wide Web when it is always changing. Although it is true that at any given moment, a webpage can be modified and most likely will soon be viewed in a different version, these characteristics do not need to serve as enemy to history but instead can ensure that knowledge of historical events will survive.

This realization comes after following the recent history textbook controversy raging in Texas. As a Texan, I’ve kept up with this battle which points out how history can be preserved in two different mediums – the textual and the digital. In the case of this history textbook, only a few people have the privilege to decide what historical events are included. Anything not deemed important enough is not included and thus, this information becomes hard to find if the textbook is your only source of information. The Web handles these two issues differently. With the Web, anyone can access and modify its content (readily seen at sites such as Wikipedia). Yes, this means that crucial information can be deleted but the possibility of it being reinstated is easier and can occur quickly. In the meantime, one site does not make the whole entity of the Web, so the same information most likely exists elsewhere or, as this week’s readings also pointed out: digital information leaves a trace. When it is deleted, is it truly gone? Lastly, perhaps we should stop trying to mold a medium to fit and neatly archive our history. History is always changing. It needs to thrive in a medium that is also always evolving. It seems fitting that the Web would be used as the medium of choice for this task but there are lots of kinks that still need to be worked out.

Kirschenbaum - Screen Essentialism and Storage Media

I enjoyed the Kirschenbaum reading this week because of how he brought some subjects that I’ve thought of subconsciously to an academic discussion. For example, I’ve always felt that there is a bias in new media studies toward using the screen (and consequently the GUI) as the focal point of computer analysis. This idea of “screen essentialism” fits in well with Kirchenbaum’s analysis of inscriptions and codes, particularly with regards to storage media. I find it interesting that the average technology user is more adept at understanding and diagnosing problems with physical machines, but is often useless when the problem becomes digital. In section on Wednesday, I got the feeling that the group felt it made sense that we could be expected to fix our bicycles and cars, but not our computers. I don’t understand this because many computer problems involve understanding the role of each physical component, just as on a bike. Although I usually can’t see these parts, that shouldn’t prevent me from understanding them. If I were to put a bikes gears and brakes in an enclosure, the rider would still know what the problem was. Unlike me, Kirschenbaum seems to understand this behavior and when says,

“Greater and greater storage capacity will only serve to further dematerialize the media [[storage devices]] as their finite physical boundaries slip past the point of practical concern.”

As computers get better, our detachment to how they work only gets stronger because we have to think about computer’s limitations less and less. That idea fits in well with his discussion of how computer text is ephemeral, which makes sense when you think about how text is moved around within a computer and between computers.

Friday, 11am section.

The “New” Medium of Space

In “Navigable Space”, Lev Manovich discusses the progression and development of space as a recurring theme throughout media’s history. Beginning as early as novels, space has been used as a way for different types of media to capture the user’s interest and imagination through the manipulation of perspective and trajectory. What is very interesting though is how new media has allowed for totally new ways of experimenting with the concept of space, allowing space to become a medium in and of itself. Furthermore, the power of space as a medium lies in its representation and the tension between the virtual and the real.

A primary concern of Manovich in his writing is to express how the concept of space in media is not unique to new media. In literature, many writers take advantage of the perspective of a character to allow the reader to explore and interact with his/her surroundings. For example, in Huckleberry Finn, “subjectivity is constructed through conflicts between the subject and nature, and between the subject and his enemies” (14L)[1]. We will see how navigation, exploration, and interaction are recurring themes for space as a medium. In a similar manner, other forms of media such as film and even painting achieve the development of space by the manipulation of perspective and the interaction with environment. However, as media has developed in modernity, the ability of space’s function as a medium has profoundly expanded.

In film, this new development can be readily seen. Because of the ability to have a moving perspective, space becomes a much more dynamic and interactive object. 2001: Space Odyssey and Star Wars as well as motion simulators are cited by Manovich as examples of how 3-D flythrough can visually create navigable space. With the advent of video games, navigable space takes on a whole new meaning. Games, such as Doom and Myst, allow the player to move through space, exploring and acting. This achievement is of great importance to Manovich because it helps define space as a medium. Space is important, he asserts, because it intimately links looking and acting, and makes exploration a goal in itself. Examples he provides for Doom and Myst include the connection between observing the character’s environment and interacting with it as well as the satisfaction obtained purely from exploring the virtual world. As put my Manovich, “movement through space allows the player to progress through the narrative, but it is also valuable in itself. It is a way for the player to explore the environment” (2R).

Once navigation and interaction are recognized as crucial features of space, the power of representation becomes apparent. The first aspect of representation that Manovich discusses is the dichotomy between space and objects. In early virtual spaces, Manovich saw the problem that “there [was] no space in cyberspace” (5R). Specifically, spaces were merely a collection of objects separated from a static background, typified by the Pacman video game. “What was missing from computer space is space in the sense of medium – and environment in which objects are embedded and the effect of these objects on each other” (6R). In this area, modern video games have reached full integration. However, Manovich suggests that other uses of space as representation have yet to fully reach their potential. For example, he compares navigation through a database and the search for information as an important navigable space in new media. Also, he recognizes navigable space as a functional new way to visualize and analyze data. However, Manovich asserts that these types of spaces have yet to integrate space and object effectively.

Another dichotomy that arises in space as representation (and the representation of space) is the tension between the real and the virtual. As Manovich illustrates with his example of the “Aspen Movie Map”, a virtual space can be a mode of a real representation. In this case, space is created by the aggregation of photographs mapping out the city and put into an interface. On the other hand, in the example of “Legible City”, the virtual can be a derivative of the real. In this case, the map is based on a physical city, but buildings are replaced by representative 3-D letters according to proportion, color, and location. Through navigation, the letters cumulate into text. Finally, in the example of “The Forest”, the virtual can resemble the real but function as a release from the constraints of the real, in this case through the freedom of movement. As these examples illustrate, the advancement of technology in new media has created a tension in the representation of space: on one hand, space can be isotropic, imaginative, and limitless; on the other hand, virtual space can effectively recall the space of human anthropology. We can make the real virtual (e.g. data representation), or we can make the virtual seem real (e.g. abstract film, games).

Within these tensions, the power of space in new media is really seen. One media object that we studied that demonstrates this potential is The Cave. In The Cave, the user wears special glasses that both work with the 3-D imaging and track the user’s position and direction of perspective. These glasses are an important part of The Cave because they made the experience totally immersive while still allowing freedom of movement. In addition, a controller was given to the user to manage the navigation through the virtual world. The virtual worlds we experienced demonstrated the freedom virtual space can have in integrating space and objects, and in blurring the distinction between real and virtual. For this reason, The Cave is an excellent indication of the experimentation with virtual space possible in the future.

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[1] Because original page numbers are unavailable on the PDF of “Navigable Space”, pages will be designated by the PDF page and either L or R for the left or right hand side of the PDF page.

Kelly Dobson and the animal-human/machine distinction

"The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine... Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."

This passage from Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" helped me to make sense of some of Kelley Dobson's work. The Omo, especially, is striking in the way that it was developed - it has multiple layers of different materials on its surface which replicate the animal feel of muscle, fat and skin, but it doesn't make much of an effort to take on the form of a recognizable animal. The omo is simultaneously natural and "art)ificial" in this sense - it occupies the space between animal-human and machine that we're increasingly finding very comfortable and desirable. The lengths to which Dobson goes to make the patterns of the omo's breathing and the experience of holding it feel "natural" and animal don't necessarily conflict with her ultimate choice to have the omo appear non-animal - more plant-like, actually - in a visual sense.

I like robots, and this made me start to think about the ways in which other robots I've read about or experienced have crossed this animal-machine boundary. Some do so in an obvious way - like the robot dog Aibo. But one robot, called the BigDog, transgressed this boundary in a more complex way. The robot, which can be seen online here (very worth watching) is designed to stay upright on four legs on rough terrain, ice - even when pushed by a human. Its legs are animal0id in terms of their joints, but the robot as a whole is not intended to serve as an animal replacement - it's more useful in terms of traversing or carrying things over rough, uncertain terrain. Who knows how the scientists who developed BigDog determined the algorithm that keeps the robot on its feet - but the results are unsettlingly animal in appearance. The robot responds to the terrain just like a horse or a dog would - the comments on the video uniformly express discomfort with the way it moves & the terrifying sound it makes. Clearly the developers were inspired by nature in the development of this robot, but there seems to be no accounting for the unexpected success with which the robot mimics animal movement. The discomfort I experienced was certainly a different reaction from my "aww" response to the omo, although both are transgressions of the animal-machine boundary - I would guess the difference lies in the magnitude of the physical power attained by the animal-machine.

Apologies for the late late post!

Blog post 7

I find it incredible that we are beginning talks about how we communicate with machines, specifically computers. I never thought when I was interacting through the use of my computer, either through social networking sites, data extraction, or just leisurely activities, that I was actually communicating with my computer itself. Every website that I visit is recorded in some database that categorizes myself. This makes me wonder how I, as a human being, am categorized according to a machine in comparison to all others using the internet.
Every piece of information that I put about myself on the internet, although all of it may not be completely accurate to my true self, is recorded and documented as part of my “profile”. So, what does this mean for my public, or social, self? Am I part of a system that simply divides me into categories that can relate to almost anything, or anyone, else on the internet? (specifically social networking sites)
In any case, Dobson’s pieces made me think deeper about how social networking sites help develop a persons public self, but also how it defines your private self. I think that it’s had more of an impact on my development to become myself without my knowing. So, in essence, the use of communicating with my computer helped shape me?

Blog post #7

Gitelman’s writing introduces me to an understanding of the temporality of the Internet that is utterly fresh and revealing. Despite the synchronic character of the Internet, just like that of most of other forms of media in our age, the Internet does not annihilate the possibility of a history of itself or the contents it transmit. Rather, the way that the Internet functions enables generation of new mode of manifesting history. Gitelman reveals the traces of the history of human labor through drawing our attention to Internet errors as well as focusing on protocols. I find it striking how revealing it is to concentrate on the commonplace “Error 404” which we all experience while surfing the Web. In my experience with the Internet, the moment of confronting the “Error 404” page is almost always incredibly unpleasant, not just because of failure to open the page that I am looking for, but also because at that moment it almost feels like the Internet changes its appearance and reveals its true nature which is not a favorable one. It’s a moment when the established role of the Internet being a helper which naturally accomplishes whatever command I give is thrown into a crisis. And maybe that’s precisely why I have always been so ready to just close that tab and forget about the whole failure. Yet Gitelman makes me realize what is at stake in doing so – I push away my awareness of the truth that the benign Internet is entirely based on protocols and is essentially inhuman. More interestingly, such occurrences are referred to as errors despite the fact that they are simply products of the most common feature of the Internet – the constant changing and updating of Web pages. Gitelman points out how common it is for pages to be moved or deleted or go out of date, a fact that I have been seldom aware of when I utilize information found on the Internet in one way or another, such as creating a link on my own page or bookmarking a page. But now it is really interesting to think about what this weird kind of temporality of web-based documents tells us about the nature of a document that bases its argument on web-based documents that might simply disappear one day and thus cannot be guaranteed access to? Also what does this temporality say about the Internet as a space when it threatens the Internet’s ability to establish its own authority?

- Qian

Anna's session

Thursday section - Archiving New Media

In “New Media," Lisa Gitelman investigates the historical and theoretical problems of media production, more specifically those of the Internet, and the conditions of reception that operate from competing frames of reference and experience. She questions what constitutes “new media” and demonstrates how access to records and documents determines the way in which we, as users of the World Wide Web, perceive media history. In describing the process of archiving electronic data, she says: “Today’s errant search result reminds users that the complete work…is less of an ‘autonomous object’ than the ongoing result of its own making, remaking, and reception” (Gitelman, 124). This suggests that the Internet is not a self-governing, independent entity, but rather a revolutionary technology that is used collectively by consumers to create unanticipated cultural consequences. Just like history, it is constantly being re-written to better fit the changing times.

How do we sort and store digital information? What is our cultural memory? What new kind of knowledge will exist in the future as a product of this archival system? These are some of the questions that come to mind when thinking about the Internet and its repercussions/influence on the way in which we process information.

S03 - Machines and communication

It felt really amazing to listen to someone like Kelly Dobson who manages to establish a much more intimate connection to the machines than I have ever seen before. Perhaps that is the reason I am so terrible with computers and technology in general. For me, a machine was always a tool that helped me communicate better to other people or just made my life easier. It never occurred to me that I was communicating with the machine too.

I had a friend in high school who liked to somehow talk to his laptop (I'm not sure how he was doing this). The rest of us always thought it was because he didn't have any friends so we tried to hang out with him more. However, he sensed what we thought and never really wanted to hang out with us. Now, when I remember it, I know that I used to think that communication with the machine was a sign of increasing alienation, but Kelly Dobson's talk made me question that. Now I think that what she does is an amazing way of learning new modes of communication and I think that what my friend was doing was his way of finding the right mode of expression and that the mistake maybe wasn't his, but mine and all the others' around me who couldn't understand that.

However, the reason I never felt particularly attached to computers was probably because I was afraid of being too exposed. When I was really young and was using my mother's computer, I was always afraid she would be able to see that I was playing games too much or just downloading music illegally. I felt computers overexposed me and revealed parts of my personality I sometimes didn't want others to know about. Because of that, I tend to agree with the Cyborg Manifesto that cyborgs break the division between public and private. As Kirschenbaum points out, everything we do on our computers can probably be somehow traced. There is always a history of web sites we visited or terms we searched on Google. It is true that we can delete those (perhaps not completely), but the very notion of being forced to constantly delete something we do not want to be seen might give a strange feeling of being too exposed.

On the other hand, there is also a feeling of being just a number among other numbers. That is the feeling I have when I see how fast information circulates the Internet. For example, even on Facebook updates often disappear from News Feed very fast. If we google something a few times over time, the web sites that come up may change really fast. The notion of multitude of information balances the notion of being overexposed on the Internet for me.

David Paesani Assignment 2

It is not without some irony, and, indeed, this my point, that I compare Jameson's resolutely Marxist ideal of cognitive mapping that he, he who has the feeling he is one of the few Marxists left (Cognitive Mapping, 347), posits as a means of maintaining a stressing on “the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class struggle in which he or she is situated” (353) with the hyper-fantastic and rampantly capitalistic realm of lived virtual experience in Second Life. SL, though ostensibly fulfilling the requirement of creating an imaginary space in which one can locate oneself within a larger social totality, nonetheless fails to provide a space immediately attractive to revolutionary political action; to the contrary, it is the very space where the conquest of the imaginary by capital is most stunningly profound.

Cognitive mapping is attractive and essential for political action because any such action is only manageable if, as Jameson says, following the failure of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, one can successfully map one's own place in relation to the larger imagined social totality (353). This is essential today more so than ever, for today, in our postmodern world, we are “now exposed to a perpetual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed” (351) as opposed to our previous conceptions of space as first organized on a Cartesian grid and conceived as homogenous (classical) before moving towards a radical alienation between truth and experience (349). In our current milieu we are compelled to find a new means with which to navigate the imagined space of our reality without the comfort of that immanent grid or the specifics of distance the play of the dialectic of truth and experience allowed the great modernists. Rather to the contrary, there is no space from which we can create any distance,; separations and distinctions are no longer hard and fast, rather they bleed and blur into each other. And while this is not in and of itself a bad thing, we might expect Jameson to say that it serves to radically decenter every aspect of our lived heterogeneity to the degree that any purposeful movement becomes impossible without a larger whole against which to move. This is why the Workers could be so successful on a local scale while losing their potency immediately upon entering into a larger cognitive space, lost like a solitary gust of wind in a hurricane.

Second Life is a fascinating example of the consequences of this postmodern spatial situation. On the one hand, SL is precisely the kind of imaginary 'space' where one can imagine a representation of one's self firmly in relation to a larger social totality, in this case, the SL community. In this sense, it is precisely the kind of mechanism for imagining the project of cognitive mapping. However, it is limited with respect to its social totality being only the artificial and commensurately imaginary community of SL, wholly distinct from an imagined relation to real material conditions which dictate the organization of the social totality. But that is not to say that there is nothing real about what happens on Second Life; quite the contrary, the real material of capital has infiltrated its imaginary realm in every conceivable money-making way. The developers and designers of SL charge membership fees for their premium memberships, fees rewarded in-world with fake money with a degree of equivalency to real money itself. Virtual 'land' may be bought and sold, and, indeed, there is a whole economy unique to SL which nonetheless is directly tied to the real life economy outside its servers. Indeed, there is a whole host of entrepreneurs who have made real-life fortunes in profit at manipulating the economy of Second Life, users who literally manipulate imaginary relations for real economic gain. In this way, this program which seems to bear a potential for radically mapping one's subjectivity as it relates to a social whole in order to effect social change becomes one more site of the colonization of our social imaginary by the juggernaut of capital.

The question remains then: to what extent can we learn from SL how not to perform a cognitive mapping project (whose shape Jameson makes to pretensions to anticipate, leaving it open to the imagination, as it were)? Or rather, how can we establish an imaginary space where capitalism is never the motivating force? For what seems certain is that if we rely upon corporations and companies to produce such a program for us, we are doomed to re-enacting the same.

Dobson, Kirschenbaum & The Personalization of Machines

Today’s guest speaker, Kelly Dobson, really fascinated me by her art. I thought that the way she wanted people to be more aware of the connection between robots and media in general with the way humans interact and live their daily lives was very interesting. This led me to think of an idea that I have talked about in previous posts and one which kind of goes along with the Kirschenbaum reading for Monday. This idea is that of information, who can see it/use it, and what it is really for.

Way back when, in the beginning of the semester, we talked about Facebook and privacy issues, we think we’re in control of the information that we put out there, but we aren’t. Kirschenbaum illustrates in “Mechanisms; New Media and the Forensic Imagination” that once we copy any sort of information on a floppy disk, (or any internal or external storage space for that matter) the data is actually marked on something which we may never be able to fully delete. Along with showing that we can never really exterminate data, on a deeper level, we can postulate that once a piece of information gets out, as it can never be contained, what is done with it. Dobson expands on these questions/fears when she showed the video in which she was talking to “Blendie.” During this exhibition, we could see that she clearly controlled what “Blendie” was doing…until “Blendie” started to talk back. This scared me a little bit because, while I’m not going to go all Terminator-the-machines-are-going-to-kill-us on the blog right now, I will say that it made me wonder, and I know this will sound crazy, if “Blendie” could ever be in control of us. While it was evident that Dobson controlled the “Scream Body,” she also showed us “Omo.” She had control over “Omo”’s way of “breathing,” but she did mention that “Omo” responds to its user, and while that does give comfort knowing that it is an individual thing, it is also knowing and sensing things about us that we may not want it to.

These ideas are just some of the things I was mulling over while thinking about Dobson and her connection to the readings, and I’m sure if my previous posts have been any indication of my train of thought, I’ll be musing about these ideas in future posts.

Gitelman, Thursday Section 2pm

“One might say that users of the World Wide Web today resemble the students in an art history lecture who sit facing a screen and consuming slides of prints of paintings as if they were the actual paintings themselves”(Gitelman 26).

Gitelman makes this analogy after she discusses that the “least recently modified” webpage is in fact different than it used to be, because although the title of the page is the same, its location and thus place in the world wide web has changed, making it almost entirely something different. While the paintings shown in an art history lecture are merely pictures of the paintings, they still retain a quality of being those pictures. The internet is quite unique, however, in that it is constantly changing, adapting, and modifying itself, making the identity of the “least recently modified web page” not necessarily valid. This web page by CERN was meant for the Internet, but the New York Times articles were not meant to be .pdf files. In a sense, as Gitelman writes, the Times pages on the computer are “distilled: they are scans of films of pages” (124). I began to think about eBooks, the Kindle, and various other electronic book readers, and how it might apply to this analogy. While the words of the text are identical on the electronic reader, it is still quite something different, in that they are simply scans or digital versions of the book. In this case it is a fine substitute, unnoticed by the reader; yet still, similar to the pictures of paintings at the art history class, it is “presented in ways that ignore or elide the physical” (126).

During Anna's lecture on Monday on the "weirdness" of digital history, I found myself specifically thinking about Wikipedia because of the unique way in which it can be used as a proxy to think about many of the questions that were raised in the Gitelman reading and in class.

One point Anna brought up was the link between the index of time and the act of writing. In newspapers or encyclopedias, the content of the writing is linked to the point of time during which it was written. Any adjustments that are made to the text are printed in a later edition of the text, but the old text still remains. Thus the new version and the old version of the text tell us something about what happened in between. Maybe there was a mistake in the text, or more importantly perhaps there was a shift in society that made the adjustment necessary. Dictionaries are modified every year, and it's not because the old version was wrong, but because the meaning and usage of words changes gradually with the passage of time. Being able to see these changes is undoubtedly useful information.

The same is true for history. A significant portion of historical academic writing consists of rehashing and reinterpreting prior historical writing, and trying to untangle the "truth" from whatever biases the author might have been subject to during the time period in which he/she was writing. This article for example attempts to vindicate Ulysses S. Grant from culturally biased historians. However, who is the author of this article to say that he himself is not also tainted by cultural, political, and structural factors that led him to this interpretation of Grant's actions? It is precisely here where, as Gitelman puts it, history is "another victim of postmodernism"

But back to Wikipedia. When someone modifies a wikipedia page, (to my knowledge) the earlier version of the entry no longer exists. Neither is there a visible time stamp next to portions of the page, which may have been modified at different times. Thus when interpreting things that we see on Wikipedia, we are not able to contextualize the content of the page in any meaningful way (not to mention that we don't know who the author is). This is weird. Not weird because they are "intensely labored points of contact, but rather that they are treated as if they are not." I wonder, as we become more and more accustomed to getting information from databases like Wikipedia, if the trajectory of the meaning of terms, events, and people will be succumb to such erasure.

S03 - blog post #7

Upon seeing Kelly Dobson’s work today in class, I had to wonder to what extent her work is really meant to be used and to what extent it exists simply to call into question traditional assumptions about human/machine relations. This question was most obvious to me in the context of her Scream Body. When she described it, she mentioned how screaming is not construed as socially acceptable in many situations, so the Scream Body helps to circumvent societal norms and allow one to scream any time, any place. Looking at the clunky bag that comprised the Scream Body, though, I can’t help but be skeptical. Is it really going to draw fewer stares if you are wearing a huge bag on your chest all day and periodically putting your mouth up to it as opposed to screaming in public? I would feel more socially uncomfortable wearing the Scream Body all day than simply screaming when I am in a secluded enough location.

In addition, other works of hers seemed to complicate, rather than simplify, the action that they carried out. Blendie, for example, requires much more human exertion than a traditional blender. While it may be true that a Blendie user will feel more in sync with his machine, I must ask at what cost. Technology serves to facilitate all of the various processes that would take too long for a human to complete without them (or which can simply be completed more quickly using the technology). I could walk to the library and look up information in print form, but Google has made it more efficient to find the same information from my room. I personally don’t feel the need to become attuned to the various machines that I use throughout my day. Rather than the gap between RL and VR in which meaning is made, the gap between human and machine seems less about meaning and more about convenience. While exploring this gap may be the goal of a program like Second Life, there is no equivalent program that has the explicit purpose of looking at the gap between human and machine; the gap in Second Life allows users to project versions of themselves and explore their identities, while the gap between me and a blender doesn’t serve any exploratory purpose in my life.

I did find it interesting to consider the question of temporality in terms of her work, though. For example, the Omo (the breathing machine) grows steadily more in sync with a certain person as it spends more time with that person. If new media is supposed to make us in some way crave the ever-permanent present, though, why would an object with such a clearly temporal structure be desirable? Shouldn’t we want something more automatically in sync with us, something that immediately becomes a part of our present rather than taking time to adjust to it?

Role of new media/technology moving forward

Kelly Dobson has been my favorite guest speaker by far because of the way her art is not only thought-provoking but functional. Her wearable organs, such as the screaming lung, was a funny look at how technology can be integrated with individuals, like portable media devices but in a much more "natural" way. By natural I mean that the wearable organs address problems that are much more humanistic than an ipod's providing portable music. Likewise, her breathing device, the OMO (sp?) was meant to help calm people by steadying breathing patterns. Her use of technology this way was interesting and thought-provoking.

However, this aspect of technology raises some important social questions for me. How does new technology and new media affect the concepts of communication, caring, and comfort? Typically, technology does not invoke such thought because it deals with pioneering realms. The realms of portable media were previously unheard of. However, the way in which Kelly Dobson's technology acted as a replacement for some kind of human or primitive function makes me wonder how these ideas I have suggested (communication, caring, and comfort) may change in the future.

For example, "Blendie", and her other responsive appliances seem to revolutionize the idea of communication. If a household appliance can respond so specifically to our sounds (if we speak its language of course), how can our idea of communication change in the future? The way OMO created a sense of comfort in the user, the same way a person would have previously, also challenges the concept of comfort. Her vast examples of robots interacting with humans, most provocatively with an infant, questions the meaning of "caring". My first instinct was to think that technology replacing human function and interaction suggests a degradation of social functioning. But, maybe her art is not revolutionary in this respect because new technology has always been doing this. Or, is it possible that new technology is just changing the definitions of these words all together. In light of the Haraway's reading of cyborgs, is society as a whole shifting to a cyborg community, where the division between person and machine is blurring?

(sorry for the late post)

Blog 7: Kelly Dobson, Danah Boyd

In her essay "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites", Danah Boyd argues for the importance of the public in the development of the self. As Nancy Fraser describes, publics "are arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities." For Boyd, the internet in general, and social network sites in particular, are becoming increasingly important means for learning social norms and constructing social identities.

I contend that Kelly Dobson's art pieces might do for the psychological and emotional (or 'private' self) what MySpace and Facebook might be doing for the public or social self. [Please bear with me, as this is not a fully formed thought.] For instance, Dobson's OMO is a machine companion that mimics human traits and it provides 'empathic relationships with humans' (http://marynowsky.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/kelly-dobson-machine-therapy-omo/). OMO helps provide therapy for the individual, but does so in that way that gives agency to the person who needs care. OMO expands the possibilities for technology to intervene in the construction of the self, but in a very different way than MySpace or Facebook. Here, OMO allows the individual to reflect and heal emotionally, thereby constructing a healthier psychological identity.

I'd like to keep exploring the possible relationships between technology and the development of the self, and will be doing so in the context of my second paper.

Wednesday 2pm Section

Donna Haraway writes "Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. 'We' did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts'." (176).

Her position to me is quite fascinating from the psychoanalytic perspective, which she tends to lump in with Marxism and other theoretical practices as failing to challenge or, more radically, merely reinscribing the dominance of the ontological phallogocentric order. It is interesting to me in how it negotiates and elides its own desire, insofar as desire is the grounds for any political project. In this sense, we can see that while Haraway explicitly wants to challenge existing structures of desire, those same structures, insofar as we are structured by desire, must have produced her desire for this kind of radical politics. This raises some interesting questions.

To what extent can we say that all political aims are mappable onto existing structures of desire, mediated by the Man/Woman binary and all its symbolically intertwined ramifications? And if one's politics is to abrogate and disrupt that structure, is there a way we can understand this? What is our model? Or is this the very superficial impossibility delineated by a conservative symbolic order to protect itself from radical change?

Wednesday Section, Gitelman post

Gitelman describes clicking a mouse as "the user's most certain experience of an instant in time." It is the way for us as users to guide a computer to reveal the virtual material we want to see. The history browser and "back" buttons, then, should reveal a short history of our thought processes. Displaying the history of your web browser shows all sites that were visited in the past day, week, or month. This isn't a permanent record of sites visited or exact replicas of the versions of sites visited, though...

When you view your history, you have the power to delete any websites you wish not to be shown (I'm sure there are more complex ways of finding a list of every site an IP address has visited, but in terms of everyday knowledge, we believe we can edit our history). Also, when you click a link to view one of those visited sites, you cannot be certain you are viewing the same exact version of the page as you did before. Take a Facebook Homepage as an example. When you return to it, it will automatically update with new information and the version of the site you once saw is gone forever.

So what does the "back" button allow us to do and what does a browser history actually record? I am interested in hearing others' thoughts!

WS: The Cell Phone and the Comfort of Tracking

In the opening lines of Agre’s text, “Surveillance and Capture,” Agre makes clear the historical specificity and development of ideas concerning surveillance:

“Ideas about privacy are, among other things, cultural phenomena. They are shaped through historical experience, they condition perceptions of newly arising phenomena, and they are reproduced or transformed in all of the same complicated ways as other elements of culture” (Agre 740).

Issues and reservations concerning privacy has continued to be a contentious topic for many people. With such measures taken by the state like the legitimated use wire-tapping, access to information, consumer spending tracking, and other tracking technologies, anxiety is always awakened in these discussions, as references are immediately made to “Big Brother” or the “Panopticon”. However, there has been a simultaneous boom with other forms of tracking such as GPS technologies, tracking packages, and social networking sites that function as a means of self-surveillance. I would like to focus on the literal tracking through space that Agre discusses in his text, with particular attention to GPS technologies.

Global Positioning System technologies, when compared to other modes of tracking, perform all of the necessary computation at the location of the object of tracking, versus a series of snapshots that capture one’s location at a given moment through the video image from the camera. This distinction, although seemingly insignificant, is key to the distinction between surveillance and capture that Agre makes.

What I would like to turn to now are two examples of tracking. 

Example 1: iPhone commercial

In this advertisement, the iPhone provides a means for users to not track their friends, but rather to see where they're at and meet up with them. This real-time GPS feature makes tracking appealing instead of unsettling.  What is so interesting about these media phenomena are the ways in which they are being promoted and even heralded as protective, as is the case in the Family Locator cell-phone capability.

Example 2: Verizon's Family Locator plan

Verizon’s description of the Family Locator plan (via Verizon website)

“Peace of mind is right at your fingertips. Securely locate your family members' locations from your Verizon Wireless Device or the web. The locate feature provides you with the information you need to stay aware and stay in touch.”

The advertised device’s use of GPS technology seem to make the distinction between technologies of capture and technologies of surveillance harder to define. Here privacy and security seem to loosen their grip on each other in the public imaginary. In fact, it would seem that these technologies of surveillance and self-surveillance becomes a comfort, a means of tracking and capture using real-time locations. Why are these technologies, many of which are GPS based seen as alluring, whereas visual-based surveillance, like those from cameras, instill fear and mistrust? 

Going further, and turning the synoptic eye back to a discussion of panopticism, in what ways can we see panopticism as almost a comfort? How can the somewhat perverted allure of panopticism become a means of coping with the crisis of modernity and the death of God? The eye in the sky has now been replaced with the eye of the machine or tracking system. In what ways, if any, can we see this as being pleasurable, in those spirals of pleasure and power, which were mentioned earlier in the semester? If visuality is no longer fundamental for technologies of control and capture, but rather one’s actions, then how can we see the obsession with visual surveillance as a symptom of such a loss?

(late post) - Monica