Lecture Notes Week 12
Technology and MythologyIn past times stories, communicated in songs, dance, visual designs as well as orally:
Contained the laws that protected the land from exploitation and over-use
Guided people on their nomadic travels to the food and water that nourished them, and
Taught them the skills required to produce an appropriate technology.Three things a nomadic society teaches:
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Stay Flexible.
Nurture the stories.
Lecture Notes Week 10
Now, this lecture was based around cyberdemocracy and the Digital Divide. HEre are the following lecture notes:Defining DemocracyIn The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that the 1980s saw the near-universal triumph of liberal democracy
and its representative institutions. He concludes from the dissolution of communist totalitarianism that the current practice of liberal democracy is 'the end point of mankind's ideological evolution [and] the final form of human government'.But what is the nature of the democracy that seems to have prevailed over other models? Some apparently simple definitions of democracy continue to inform popular discussion: the rule of the many ; the rule of the majority and; 'government of the people, by the people, for the people' are three common formulations.Do these simple accounts of democracy measure up to the actual practices of the representative democracy which governs us now? Over the last two hundred years, representative democracy has both broadened (with the introduction of universal suffrage, the extension of government into economic and social affairs and greater protection of free speech) and at the same time narrowed (with the consolidation of the power of parties, the focus on finding compromise between competing special interests and fewer opportunities to exercise effective free speech).Representative democracy as we know it is very much the product of the nations of the industrial age so these simple accounts of democracy do not address the impact of the present period of rapid transition from an industrial to an information economy and the consequent challenge to the power of nation states by global economic and cultural processes. Here's a good site that canvasses some of the challenges that face democracy in the information age.The gap between the simple promises of representative democracy and the complexity encountered in making it work may help explain why the near universal acceptance of democracy is accompanied by an high level of ambivalence about the political process: while around eighty percent of adults in Australia and the USA express an interest in politics no more than half the adult population of the USA follow public affairs in the mass media and where voting is voluntary (in parts of Australian local government for example) at most forty percent, and as few as five percent vote in elections . Even where participation in elections is compulsory it is not unusual for almost one in five on the electoral roll to fail to vote.Summarising the attitudes to democracy indicated by these responses, it is difficult to avoid Moira Rayner's suggestion that there is 'a genuine crisis of faith in the processes of democracy' which she describes as 'cynicism'.The most obvious alternative to representative democracy is participatory or direct democracy, based on the ancient Greek model where all citizens have a right and a duty to be involved in all decisions made. Proponents of participatory democracy argue that there is more to political obligation than the duty of occasionally cast a vote and then provide obedience to the system; there is also an obligation to make the system work. Democracy, they argue, can only work where citizens understand that they have a duty to foster democratic processes as a common undertaking and, most particularly, a duty to participate in those processes. Participation is seen to educate and empower the participant and this is crucial to the health and strength of democracy.Perhaps the search for a definition of democracy can never be concluded, and democratic theory requires constant renewal as new conditions, social formations, technologies and complexity arise. Chantal Mouffe argues in her preface to Dimensions of Radical Democracy that:democracy can only consist in the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics and the necessity of their articulation... [with] no hope of final reconciliation. That is why radical democracy also means the radical impossibility of a fully achieved democracy. However the impossibility of completing the democracy project is no reason for its abandonment. The unresolved dichotomy between representative and participatory democratic models may prompt us to return to the key theoretical accounts of representation and participation to appreciate the crucial role of discussion and deliberation in producing effective democracy. Scott London compares Deliberative Democracy and Teledemocracy. Let us now look at the means for improving the quality of deliberation in contemporary society where the mass media hold such sway.Gaps in the Mass MediaThe increasing concentration, centralisation and commercialisation of the mass media appear to have foreclosed avenues for democratic participation in currently existing representative democracy. However, a number of theoretical counterpoints and interventions suggest that there may be ways in which the arena of deliberation, or the public sphere, may be extended via the application of new communication technologies and a better appreciation of the power of the audience.A number of theorists have argued that there is the potential to remake what Habermas calls 'the public sphere': the domain of social life in which 'public opinion' forms. In the literary salons, political clubs, debating societies, coffee houses and newspapers of England in the early modern period, Habermas argues, political debate flourished to produce an independent sphere of influence from which the emerging bourgeoisie could criticise the state and civil society. Habermas argues that commercialisation of the press in the nineteenth century saw the transformation of the public sphere, and its newspapers in particular, from the journalism of private persons to 'the consumer services of the mass media' which privileged the private interests of owners and advertisers. Nevertheless he sees some potential for the recreation of the public sphere as 'a public of organized private persons' engaged in the rationalisation of social and political power through mutual control of rival organisations which exhibit 'publicness' in their internal structure and in their dealings with the state and each other.When Marshall McLuhan argued that 'electricity does not centralise, but decentralises', he raised the possibility that the electronic media might extend opportunities for involvement in a space similar to the public sphere. Mark Posters has developed this argument to claim that we are presently witnessing the advent of 'the second media age' which is supplanting the first media age of centralised broadcast media emanating from a few sources to many consumers. The second media age is characterised by decentred media systems with global reach that will eventually be readily accessible to all and so produce a new politics based on the communication of many to many.Some would point to the
democratic possibilities inherent in the Internet, extolling its virtues not only as a guarantee of the free flow of information and an opportunity to subvert formal politics by
hacktavism.The municipality of
Santa Monica in California has experimented with these techniques. Reports indicate that it has caused the community to confront otherwise ignored issues like homelessness. While the Internet is an open system, there are distinct possibilities for demotic intervention where universal access can be guaranteed. But the rapid commercialisation of the space, along with the potential to record and analyse all information transmitted, suggests that the Net may quickly become open to even
more effective and invasive manipulation that older media forms. More on electronic democracy:Hans Magnus Enzensberger does not directly address the issue of public sphere but his proposal to place the technical means of media production in the hands of ordinary people amounts to a radically demotic account of the public sphere. He rejects what he calls 'the liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth' and rather argues for 'a revolutionary plan [which] must make everyone a manipulator' so that 'by producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them'. In putting forward his theory of the media, Enzensberger acknowledges the importance of
Walter Benjamin's argument that
techniques of reproduction utilised in photography and film have a liberating potential because of their 'destructive, cathartic... liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage [while] permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation'.There is in Benjamin"s work a crucial shift from the 'ritual' around issues of production and ownership to the 'politics' of audience reception . In this context
Helen Irving's scepticism about the power of mass media effects to impact significantly on the audience"s critical faculties is a useful contribution to the theoretical reclamation of the autonomy of the citizen audience.
Stuart Hall has pointed to the distinctly different processes involved in encoding and decoding media texts and argued that the message intended by the producers may be read in a variety of ways by the audience: they might accept the preferred reading; negotiate their own reading by contesting the preferred message or; produce an oppositional reading by rejecting the preferred strategy.John Fiske argues that viewers appropriate media output for their own purposes, that they talk about it, subvert it and 'read between the lines' to produce their own interpretations. More specifically Fiske argues that the distance between parliament and citizen allows citizens to produce their own 'semiotic democracy' of sceptical readings of the media which incorporate the 'popular pleasure of "seeing through"... whoever constitutes the powerful them of the moment'.In Popular Reality,
John Hartley systematises the political import of audience reception theory when he notes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' from the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiation.This is a significant moment because it returns media theory to the negotiated meaning which produces two-way communication and which is always the ground on which free deliberation occurs. Further, Hartley argues'the shift of emphasis from the real to communication brings with it a shift from a technology of control to a technology of interactive semiotic participation where citizens of the media use TV news as their forum'.What is particularly useful is the precise way in which Hartley sketches the 'citizen of the media' and the means by which he or she participates in democracy. He argues that the readership of mass media creates itself as 'an imagined community whose public sphere is symbolic, but much more real than the Roman Forum ever was for the general public'. This public sphere is located in 'the private domain [of] home, suburbia and television' that can incorporate everything from the reasoned speech of Habermas to simple pleasures of game shows and 'engage readers not only in self-expression and communication, but also in truth-seeking description and critical argument'. It is particularly television that provides 'a mechanism for communicating across class, gender, ethnic, national, and other boundaries' and allows the audience to be citizens of a symbolic community 'as small as their home, town or faction, and as big as humanity'. The politics of this symbolic community is not only evident in the news coverage of formal representative democracy but also in 'other politics... produced and sustained in the interstices of drama serials, nature documentaries and current affairs, or in the relationships between certain stars, styles or music and their fans'.While Hartley returns immense political power to the audience, it is not clear how they might exercise that power beyond changing the channel. He concludes Popular Reality with the advice that 'now the outcome is up to you'. The challenge remains to theorise the means to create greater deliberative participation in democracy generally and existing representative institutions in particular. If the mass media are the main forums for democratic deliberation then citizens must have the potential to make their voice heard or it is not a democracy. While, as was seen above, there are potentials for demotic use of the mass media through the gaps provided by their commercial, competitive nature, by building public spheres for autonomous deliberation and by appreciating the hermeneutic capabilities of the citizen-audience, the questions that remain are: exactly how 'citizens of the media' might create greater deliberative participation in existing representative institutions and how citizens can gain the necessary skills to intervene effectively in the mass media in order to realise their demotic voice.Free Speech and CensorshipThe Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.John Gilmore Deliberation and discussion are key attributes of democracy, maybe talk is the most important element of democratic activity. The ability to convince and the willingness to be convinced are what provide the give and take that makes democracy something for all citizens. And that requires access to free speech.Is free speech a basic right? In Australia we don't have the constitutional right to free speech - that's an Americanism. Only recently did the High Court find that free political expression was implied by the constitution and that was at the behest of a TV station concerned that they would revenue if political advertising was banned. Rather we might view free speech as self-correcting mechanism - in using free speech people make democracy happen.The battle between free speech and censorship on the net has taken many strange turns.
The libel case against Prodigy assumes that the Net is like a newspaper. But it is not mass media in the accepted sense (one source to many receivers) - so shouldn"t the response be appropriate? An American man who had set up a pornographic image bank accessible by means of the Internet, was jailed for trafficking in pornography. Big deal. The thing is - his site/s continue to run without him. The images are there. You cannot retract anything once it has been disseminated.The
declaration of independence for the Internet is very specific about its disregard for traditional ideas about the usefulness and appropriateness of censorship. Compare this with William Gibson"s experiences in Singapore in
'Disneyland with a Death Penalty '. Proponents of free speech on the net continue to oppose the efforts of the
U. S. government to limit free speech on the net.The conflict between free speech and copyright continue to emerge in strange ways. How free can a valuable commodity like information ever be? In September 2000, a music industry group, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), challenged all-comers to test antipiracy technologies called watermarks. Watermarks are codes embedded in the digital-music files that can be used to block copies. Now the music industry is pressuring computer-scientists to stop research that might undermine efforts to prevent the digital copying of music. Scientists have cracked four watermarking methods. SDMI claims publication of research results may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)which extended copyright law to prohibit efforts to defeat copy-protection methods. Some legal scholars believe the DMCA may be against the US constitution, because it has the potential to stifle free expression and academic research into cryptography. For the full story take out a trial subscription at the
Wall Street Journal.Citizen-Hacker: Doing Global DemocracyHow does anyone exercise free speech in the emerging information regime? Where are the opportunities to liberate the life-world technology requires us to think like machines? One space for the recreation of the citizen has been cleared by the hacker, originally computer programmers with a desire to so understand the intricacies of computing systems that they could move freely through machines and their networks to find obscure and hidden information. Hackers regard computer systems not as corporate property but as part the common wealth and do not believe it is wrong to break into systems to look around and understand. They get so close to the machines that they have thought through them and surfed around their coercive contours to reveal their secret substance.The 1986 Hacker's Manifesto captures to heart of the hacker ethos: "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons? We explore... We seek after knowledge?" (Blankenship 1986). In refusing to be bound by the constraints of the expanding communication channel's command and control and the rule of corporations, hackers created the space for a free exchange of ideas down to the level of data.Hackers have a bad name. In the compressed shorthand language of newspapers and TV news headlines, hacker has become synonymous with computer criminal. Chasing hackers gives the authorities the illusion that they are doing something about computer crime, of which hacking is a minor part both in incidence and financially."(Gold and Cornwall 1989: vii, xiii)In his seminal 1985 work Hacker's Handbook, Hugo Cornwall notes two other uses of hacker: "those involved in the recreational and educational sport of unauthorised entry into computers and, more generally, the enthusiasts "who love working with the beasties for their own sake, as opposed to operating them in order to enrich a company?" This, says Cornwall, is "where the fun is? developing an understanding of a system and finally producing the skills and tools to defeat it."(Cornwall 1985: vii)The word "hacking" has a number of meanings that reunite in the work of the hacker: it suggests both cutting through thick foliage and managing or coping with a difficult situation, often with an appropriate application of ingenuity or a creative practical joke. Can you hack it?Hackers are descendants of phone phreakers who used anomalies in the phone system to make free calls. "It all started in the early 60s" on university and research computers where people created unofficial areas of memory to share information and play games. (Cornwall 1985: 2). Before we write off hacking, it is worth considering that hacking, in this very milieu, led to the development of the desktop personal computer and, with Al Gore?s help, the internet.Hackers seek to free information and are at pains to distinguish themselves from crackers, intruders who damage or steal data whether in simple forms such as denial-of-service attacks or in systematic and clearly fraudulent ways such as credit card manipulation. In contrast, hackers since the 60s have adhered to The Hacker Ethic? a code that championed the free sharing of information and demanded that hackers never harm the data they found (Haffner & Markoff 1995: 11).Rather, hackers say, they are searching for the most elegant and concise programming solution, using simplicity and serendipity to cut through the complexity, a regard for the rules would only be a hindrance. They are anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic, anti-centralisation and really believe that information wants to be free. They are both opposed to and utilise both anonymity and security weaknesses in computers. They exist because of the perennial software crisis: that gap between expectation about and actual performance of any given computer program. We are all hackers when we seek ways around bugs, through backdoors, using tricks, kludges, guesses and not quite understanding what we are doing until the program works the way we want it to work. Everytime we get a bit of troublesome software to work we are taking risks, making magic, conjuring up memory and power and tinkering with inter-relations to subtly change the worldHacking "can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer systems. Hacking can describe the determination to make access to computers as free and open as possible?" There is an attitude among hackers that "beauty can be found in computers? (and) the fine aesthetic in a perfect program can liberate the mind and spirit?" (Sterling 1993: 53)Hacking also came to mean anything either particularly clever or particularly whacky, with or without a computer, as long as the tweaking of a complex system was involved: "To members of the computer underground hacking still refers, in the first instance, to the imaginative and unorthodox use of any artefact."(Taylor 1999: xii)Hackers at work on the free speech frontier, "opposing the re-establishment of traditional (property) rights in the newly emerging information society? they oppose the commodification of information?"(Taylor 1999: 61). Hacking is not necessarily an elite sport. Cornwall suggests that you just need a basic knowledge plus "determination, alertness, opportunism, the ability to analyse and synthesise, the collection of relevant helpful data and luck". (Cornwall 1985) 2 As Zetter (2001:137) points out: "Computer and Internet hackers come in all ages, are both male and female and have different intentions. Some are malicious and some are just interetsed to see if they can do it."Hacking has developed beyond its anti-social and avant garde origins to incorporate any approach to any media that seeks to use hidden potentialities and anomalies in that media to open interpretation and debate. Thus the work of "culture-jammers" in adapting bill boards to carry anti-corporate messages is a kind of a hack just as is doing similar adaptation to a corporate web site.Whatever their technology, hackers are imbued with the cynicism of the machine, refusing to accept the "official" story at face value, always digging and exploring to find their own truth beyond the standard explanation. Thinking like war machines, stepping around the surveillance, living behind the screen, the hackers find the space to ride decoded machine languages to free the information. In this, they share the passion, humour, temerity and self-sufficiency of the hoplites and they have thus created the ethos on which a new stage of democracy might be built. Himanen (2001) summarises hacker values: passionate and free work; the belief that individual imaginations can create great things together; and a commitment to existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality. Wark (2001) captures the sense of possibility hackers bring: "...in any process of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old."Hackers resist these tendencies and by producing alternative spaces and routes for information they open up democratic potentialities. While new communications technologies are no panacea for the creation of universal democratic deliberation, they are already playing a part in extending the opportunities for democratic deliberation by1) providing access to debates for a multitude of voices that could never be heard through existing mainstream, broadcast media,2) creating a greater quantity of available information that increases the level of transparency over political debate generally and above all3) allowing people the opportunity to fiddle, improvise and "kludge" their own communication solutions.Let's give the final word to Hugo Cornwall: Computers "can threaten our traditional concepts of freedom, individuality and human worth. I like to believe hacking is a curious re-assertion of some of those ideas." (Cornwall 1985: 111)
Lecture Notes Week 8
This week we looked at Utopia and Dystopia, a very informative lecture. Here are the following lecture notes:They were so obsessed with the fact that they could do it,they forgot to consider whether they should.(from Jurassic Park)When we speak of a global village, we should keep in mind that every village makes villains, and when civilisation reaches a certain degree of density, the barbaric tribes return, from within. Tribes shun their independent thinkers and punish individuality. A global international village, fed by accelerated competition and driven by information, may be host to an unprecedented barbarism.Heim Some further readingsPosters, Mark 1995,
'Postmodern Virtualities' from his The Second Media Age Polity Press Cambridge
Ian Allen on George Gilder on 'Life After Television'The First (electonic) Media Age - centralised disseminationTime now for 'the sociological turn' to appreciate what the systematic study of society reveals about the internet.As we saw in the topic,Welcome to the Screen Age, the early forms of electronic communication technology bore many similarities. Most importantly they were (with the interesting exception of the telephone) unitary systems of dissemination. Mark Poster calls this period the first electronic media age and argues that it was characterised by the use of one source (or relatively few) and many receivers.One person could write a letter, make a film or television program, broadcast a radio program, record an album and thousand could receive that message. For multiple reasons, only certain groups of people could produce and send messages; there were educational, financial and technical restrictions to those who could produce, and to those who could transmit. This is the first electronic media age.What made the telephone so different? The telephone equalised the positions of the sender and receiver of messages / information. Anyone could both send and receive messages with a minimum of technical and financial resources.The Second (electronic) Media Age - decentralised interactionThe latest development to mimic the equalising structure of the telephone is the Internet. The Internet made it possible for an individual to "publish" to a huge audience.Even though it wasn"t available for use by the general public until the 1990s, its growth as a communication medium has sky-rocketed. See this
atlas for a variety of depictions of the growth of the Internet.In Australia household accessing the internet has gone from 286,000 in 1996 to 1.1 million in May 1999, a 16 percent penetration rate and an increase of nearly 280% according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.By the middle of the 1990s there were over 30 million users around the world. In early 2000, it was estimated that there were 262 million Internet users world-wide.As Bill Gates stated - the Internet made it possible for an individual to "publish" to a huge audience.According to Mark Posters, the question being asked is whether the changes the Internet has made, and is making, to communication herald in a second media age characterised by distributed systems of interaction. The interactivity of the Internet is simultaneously being worked out in associated technologies such as the CD-ROM and virtual reality.Modernism to PostmodernismShadowing this split between the technologies of dissemination and the technologies of interaction is the shift discussed by a variety of theorists from
modernism to
postmodernism, from the certainties of the 'grand narratives' of big institutions to the complexities of personal survival for individuals. Ihab Hassan has suggested some of the oppositions inherent in this shift in his book The postmodern turn : essays in postmodern theory and culture.Task: Using a dictionary, look up the meaning of these words and consider how the contrast between each pair reflects the shift from the modern world to the postmodern experience of something far more difficulta nd diffuse than 'the world'.ModernismPostmodernismDistanceParticipationDesignChanceHierarchyAnarchyArt ObjectHappeningCreationDeconstructionDepthSurfaceTypeMutantGenitalPolymorphousParanoiaSchizophreniaMetaphysicsIronyRomantacismDadaismPurposePlayBut who controls the switches?But just as postmodernism is built upon modernism, the second media age is built on the first and is thus largely dependent on the the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is through the combination of old and new technologies that new industries, uses and expansions have occurred, and continue to emerge. The new media brings with it a need for new understandings - particularly political ones - to protect the public interest. These discussions/strategies will need to include:the means to protect rights of accessequity of accessthe means to strengthen and enhance existing community structuresdevelopment of the democratic process/structure (why?)development of a global communitydevelopment of strategies for developing, implementing and enforcing global lawsintellectual property lawsfreedom of speech Virtual reality brings with it even more complex questions about the nature of society.If the medium is the message, then what is the message of virtual reality? Remember that, in virtual reality, a type of cyborg structure exists in which your body - your mind and senses - is part of the medium. Virtual reality duplicates and warps reality. Virtual reality transcends reality. It multiplies the experiences you can have and therefore the memories you can have. It alters the ways in which you construct yourself as a person. If the individuals are changed, then so is the society. This opens up space for new forms of culture to emerge.At the moment, many entrenched social mores tend to dominate the ways in which we use the Internet and virtual reality; but as time passes, perhaps this too will pass, and we will become users necessarily altered by our use of these new technologies. Our subjectivities (the ways we know and recognise our selves) will become subject to our interactions with technology. Particularly with the global community which worldwide communication networks makes possible - virtual communities.Utopia and DystopiaSome of the most powerful myths for and against technology have been intertwined with utopian writing. Utopias (from the Greek, meaning nowhere) are literary works that tell of imaginary places where everything is perfect, usually because people and technology are in harmony. Some famous Utopias are:Plato The Republic 4th century BC
Sir Thomas More Utopia 1516Saint-Simon New Christianity 1825Samuel Butler Erehwon 1872William Morris News from Nowhere 1891The last two hundred years have seen a large number of Utopian experiments where people have attempted to live out the literary myth, sometimes by embracing new technology (as in Robert Owen"s New Lanark) and sometimes by eschewing new technology (as in the Aquarius Festival"s Nimbin). Queensland has been the source of a couple of Utopian experiments, such as Mulga near Chincilla and New Brittania founded by Queenslander William Lane in Paraguay.Technology itself has often been visualised as Utopia - somewhere we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human enjoyment. All the hazards of life will be screened out of the technological "program".Technology will provide us with something "nicer" than the real world (Disneyised?). It will be a guaranteed experience - no waiting for hours on Byron Bay's headland only to miss out on the elusive sight of a whale by the intrusion of mist or fog. We will be able to catalogue and download nature - we will be able to perfect it. Once we"ve recorded it in some hyper-real form, the real thing - with all its messiness and idiosyncratic, disobedient tendencies - will no longer be necessary. We can dispose of nature.Is this a natural thing? Well, let's face it, not much about our society is natural anymore.We will once more become the mythological Adam and Eve in the (perfect, self-created) Garden of Eden. We will have proved ourselves perfect - and no longer exist.The only problem is when somebody / something switches off the lights. When the power goes off you may wake to discover that your technological paradise is really a hell.There have not been many literary Utopias in the 20th Century, but there have been a rash of Dystopias (where technology is used to dominate people) such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949). Orwell also pointed out that language could be corrupted into "newspeak" to obscure the truth. See also his essay Politics and the English Language.Of course the development of new communication technologies has led to another set of mythologies, involving transcending death, nature and humanity. But are there really any liberations from reality, or just distractions? Perhaps the ultimate realisation of the 20th century nomad will be that there really is nowhere to go except home - to reality, to family, to your own body and your own mind.The net or the web (www as designed by Tim Berners-Lee) has emerged as a place to socialize and play‚ a place to visit that is not constrained by the laws of the physical world. Some argue that nothing like this has ever existed before but Margaret Wertheim asserts the theory that there is an historical parallel with the spatial dualism of the Middle Ages. For Christian medievals, Dante's Inferno was a real place. Parallel realities are not new for humankind.If interested in these arguments for the parallels between Dante's century and our own, read Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Erik Davis' article on Techgnosis in Flame Wars points out that the ascent through a MUD to the class of wizard could be the cyber-equivalent of Dante's heavenly elect.Dante scholars stress that The Divine Comedy is a complex puzzle of subtle hidden codes. Cracking codes is also a major theme in many cyber-fictions: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's Neuromancer.When "I" go into cyberspace, my body remains at rest in the chair but some aspect of myself is transported to another arena. Despite its lack of physicality, cyberspace is a real place. I am there. I am not here. The Utopian possibilities become evident.We are entering a new realm for the mind, for the imagination, even a new realm for the "self". Sherry Turkle is one cyber-enthusiast whose research supports the assertion of a collective mental arena for exploring constructions of self. *Nothing evinces cyberspace's potential as a collective psychic realm so much as the fantastic online worlds known as MUDs or Muti-User Domains. To use William Gibson's famous phrase, a MUD is an example of the "consensual hallucination" ( Neuromancer) of cyberspace. As in the physical world, relationships build over time, trust is established, bonds created. What may appear as game-playing can develop into complex domains of pyschosocial exploration. As Turkle writes, MUDs allow "people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self".So we move on to the claim that cyberspace can also be used a realm to explore the "soul".In one form or another, a religious attitude has been voiced by almost all the leading figures of the net. Kevin Kelly from WIRED, VR's Jaron Lanier, VR animator Nicole Stenger. One critic has suggested (David Thomas' article in Cyberspace:First Steps) that Gibson'ôs Mona Lisa Overdrive leads us to view cyberspace as a 'potential cybernetic godhead'. Western culture has within it a deep current of dualism that has always associated immateriality with spirituality. The Heavenly City is that transcendent polis whose entrance is the legendary pearly gates. Michal Benedikt who edited Cyberspace:First Steps writes that one of the key features of the Heavenly City (as described in the Book of Revelation) is its highly structured geometry, a glittering numerical puzzle, 'laid out like a beautiful equation'. Gibson's cyberspace in Neuromancer is described as sparkling array of blue pyramids, green cubes and pink rhomboids. Built from pure data, it is an idealized polis of crystalline order and mathematical rigor.The body exists in 'meat-space', In Benedikt's collection of essays, Stenger dreams of the day when we will create virtual doppelgangers who will remain youthful and gorgeous forever. Unlike our physical bodies, these cyberspatial simulacra will not age, they will not get sick, they will not get wrinkled or tired.Nothing epitomizes the cybernautic desire to transcend the body's limitations more than the fantasy of abandoning the flesh and downloading oneself to cyber-immortality. At the end of Neuromancer a virtual version of Case is fed into the matrix to live forever. Bobby Newmark at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive is also downloaded to digital eternity.To quote N. Katherine Hayles, 'perhaps not since the Middle Ages has the fantasy of leaving the body behind been so widely dispersed through the population, and never has it been so strongly linked with existing technologies' from her article 'The Seduction of Cyberspace' in the collection Rethinking Technologies.Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts insist that that if computers can be taught to parse sentences and play chess, it is only a matter of time before they will be able to simulate the full complement of human mental activity.This view is touted by world-reknowned robotics expert, Hans Moravec in his book Mind Children in which he describes how a human brain could be downloaded using high-resolution magnetic resonance measurements.Respected mathematician and computer scientist Rudy Rucker has written two novels Wetware and Software in which he describes the downloading of human minds.Another champion of the mind-download is Mike Kelly, a PhD in computer science and founder of the Extropian movement. Through a range of technologies covering genetic engineering and nanomachines, Kelly suggests downloading minds into computers as a sort of cyber-waiting room for the day when their bodies can be immortalised.One of the more bizarre aspects of this is the dream of cyber-resurrection. At the start of Gibson's Count Zero, Turner waits for the medics to grow him a new body while his mind waits in a VR simulation of his childhood.So these are the extremes of cyber-dreaming. There is also a more prosaic, more human side to this vision in which we may realise a better life here on earth. Cyberspace can also be a space in which connection and community are fostered, thereby enriching our lives as social beings.Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Communities is one who believes cyberspace offers the hope of a restored sense of community.Whatever world view we have of our selves and the spaces we occupy, virtual or otherwise, with the advent of cyberspace, our conception of our world and ourselves is likely to change. In a sense we are in a similar position to Europeans of the sixteenth century who were just becoming aware of the physical space of the stars, a space quite outside their prior conception of reality. Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space. What history will make of this, only time will tell.
Week 7 Lecture Notes
O.k, this week we looked at Current and Emergeing Applications, including games. Here are the lecture notes for this week:In lofty aerial tracks, where inharmonious ropes intersect on which we whir away, a small-bore camel makes platonic attempts to climb; the fun becomes confused.Hugo Ball, Dadaist In this topic, we will concentrate on a number of technologies that are emerging alongside the Internet and multimedia. Their common feature is that they only realise their full potential when they utilise the capacity of computers to process massive amounts of dataContinuing on from some of the applications mentioned in the Short History of the Internet, here are some contemporary new media technologies that you should know about if you want to be an "information worker" (which probably includes most people who want to get into the media or journalism scene).Instant Messaging (IM)Instant messengers are discussed in more detail in the 1501ART Book of Readings under the later week where the Tutorial Task is to try out some messenger programs for yourself.Portable Audio and PodcastingThe idea of portable audio has been around for a while. People have been embedding audio files into webpages since the early '90s (usually in the .wav or .au format) . The idea of compressing audio is not new but the most popular format seems to still be "MPEG Layer 3" files - commonly called MP3 (a proprietary format) . There are many other kinds of files that are available in audio format which include
MP4/AAC,
FLAC and
OGG Vorbis amoung others.have a look at
Podcasting News for some up-to-date ideas on the area of podcasting.Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and FilesharingThe basic nature of the internet is one of Peer-to-Peer by default (a peer is one single computer or device), but it is this notion of one computer connecting directly to another that has made filetrading so popular. Peer-to-Peer is often shortened to the abbreviation P2P. FTP is the technology that started the ball rolling and since then there have been a number of attempts to make a more robust transfer system.For more about Napster you might like to read the book: All the Rave: the rise and fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster by Joseph Menn.There's a good book that goes into some detail about this p2p stuff called Steal this File Sharing book by Wallace Wang (A Sample Chapter is available for download from the Publisher's Website:
http://nostarch.com/frameset.php?startat=sharing ).For more about the idea of Darknets and the entertainment industry's attempts to thwart filesharing see Darknet : Hollywood's war against the digital generation by J. D. Lasica.For more about the changing nature of Intellectual Property and Copyright law with regards to the internet I highly recommend that you should look for anything by Lawrence Lessig. Larry writes about some very interesting and important things that face everyone who plans to work in the media or creative industries. He writes in plain English without most of the legal jargon which surrounds a lot of the other internet law academics. Voice over IP (VoIP) and Voice ChatAnother relatively new phenonmenon is the advent of affordable VoIP services. This basic idea is that you have a broadband connection in your home, such as an ADSL connection, and instead of making telephone calls with the trusty old telephone, you can speak to other people via a special digital phone that goes through a VoIP provider (which are some ISPs at the moment). The main benefit is that it is cheaper to make these digital calls.Does this sort of technology pave the way for the next technology which might be video conferencing calls from home to home?Free and Open Source SoftwareSome of you might have heard of this before, but if you haven't I think it is worthwhile at least knowing about this idea. It can get quite nerdy if you get into it but for the purposes of this class we will only cover the basic concepts.Free and Open Source Software refers to a kind of software that is different to Proprietary Software in a number of significant ways. Firstly the software is Free for you to use and distribute. You may download the software from the internet at no cost.Part of the way that Open Source works is the idea of Copyleft (which is, as Richard Stallman says, "copyright flipped over").
Copyleft is the core concept behind putting stuff out there for free. The legally binding contract that controls use of Open Source software is called the
GPL (GNU General Public Licence) and it protects people who invest time into making really good programs that are not sold for commercial gain. The free and open source model was the way to do things in the computing community until the dawn of companies such as microsoft who said that proprietary software was the best business model for making profits.So if you are sitting there and thinking, "so what? i don't care, windows works for me... i surf the web, i get my email.. i write my assignment in office.. big deal...".My first comment to that is "so did you buy all of your software on your computer, or is that a pirated copy of Windows or Office you've got on your system?". So economically, legally, and morally - free and open source software offers a way to get completely free software that actually works, and does what it says it will do without having a bunch of restrictions on how you might want to use it. Some common examples of open source programs:As an alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser you should try out
Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Firefox is a lot quicker at loading webpages and does not have all the problems that IE is plagued with.As an alternative to Microsoft Office there is
OpenOffice. You can download it at a cheaper netcheck rate at GU from
the Aarnet Mirror site. Just pick the most recent version for your operating system. The
GNU/Linux Operating system (based on the aging UNIX OS) is a completely free alternative to Microsoft Windows or MacOS. It is admittedly a bit nerdy still to use Linux, but you rerally can do anything on linux that you can do with windows. Now more than ever, GNU/Linux is easy to install and try out. (speak to your tutor if you would like to know more about it). A lot of computers that host websites run linux behind the scenes. There is so much more software that is free and open source that you can get from the internet if you are interested. Try searching in a search engine for the name of some software you have that you'd like to find an open source version of. It's totally worth it to shake free of the grip of big companies. The Creative CommonsSome other people have taken the idea of Open Source Software and applied it to other areas of creativity to come up with what they call
the Creative Commons. (there's an
Australian version of the Creative Commons as well).The basic idea of open source then applies to other stuff like music, writing (like web page text or documents) and video or movies, and so on. So if you want your work to be free from copyright but still be subject to legal protection of some of your rights as the original creator, you can apply a creative commons license to the things you create.This is the most important part about open source for all of us involved in this course - as creators, as writers, as thinkers in these times of strict copyright laws and p2p file-sharing and so on. You can use Creative Commons licenses on your blog content, on your photos and images, on your music files, on your home page,It gives us the freedom to use information responsibly, morally and legally without fear of being sued (or being ripped off) by some big corporation who has enough money to hire a team of lawyers to make full use of the legal system.Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image.-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of ManVideo Games Studies includes the following types of games:Arcade GamesFreestanding games machines, still popular in amusement arcades.ConsolesComputer GamesMUDsMMOGs Approaching Video Games in an Academic Way: Some Theoretical ConsiderationsMedia Effects and Games; The Persistence of Effect; Games and Utopia; Thinking about video games as a new form of cultural practise... in the same way we now think about newspapers, radio, television, films... what are some ways to approach thinking about games that might be unique to this genre?Narratology vs Ludology vs ... ?People have studied video games from a range of existing disciplines, in particular media studies and often psychology (often focusing on aspects that are perceived to be negative or related to some current moral panic - like addition or anti-social behaviour as some ones that have been done to death). Narratology is the study of video games from the perspective of them being stories or literary works. People who follow this sort of approach think that games can be studied like "texts" in the same way people study other "texts" (most commonly the book, but the word text can include other cultural products like films, paintings or music). Ludology, in contrast to narratology, is not concerned with the story elements of games but rather with the Game and Play elements. People who have written work that is classified as ludology tend to follow the argument that the story elements in many games is there for decoration only, and is incidental to just playing a game. So we can see that video games studies is one example of how existing academic disciplines and theory can be applied to the study of a new cultural form.
Lecture Notes Week 6
This week we looked at Digital Narratives, and following are the lecture notes for week 6:NON-NARRATIVE:Michael Nash inVision After Television - Technological Convergence, Hypermedia, and the New Media Arts Field, (Renov & Suderberg 1996Nash bases his argument in the theorizing of Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1997).Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001)Documents NOTES FOR ?REPRESENTING THE REAL? LECTUREDR DEBRA BEATTIECase-Study www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowdDigital realismWhat has been the impact of the digital revolution on our notion of ?actuality?? What is ?digital realism? and how does it differ from our earlier notions of realism in cinematic images? In Cinema Futures (1998), Thomas Elsaesser declared that the documentary was already an example of an audio-visual practice that raised issues of ontology and epistemology ?irrespective of the changes digitisation might bring to the already highly problematic status of the image as truth, evidence or document?. (1998:22)As part of Renov?s Theorising Documentary (1995), in the light of the new technological developments of what was termed ?to scitex? or to retouch digitally, Bill Nichols discussed what he saw as the implications of digitisation for the truth claims of the documentary. The term ?scitex? has fallen from use but the practice is inherent in almost every digital image we see. Nichols suggested that the implications of this technology would be decades working themselves through the culture but argued that ?scitex? was a ?nuclear explosion? in the world of documentary theory. He suggested that there were perhaps two ways of dealing with it. ?Either?, he said, ?accept that the postmodernists have misused language to confuse the term of ?objectivity? conflating it with ?truth? ? or roll with the ?epistemological blow? (Renov, 1995:56) and revert to the Griersonian privileging of the documentary as an art over a science. He also argued that defining the documentary would now require turning back to considerations of how materials could be subjected to ?creative treatment? and yet not totally fictionalised. This consideration is topical even more so in 2003 with the rise of reality TV programs in the documentary slots and this was addressed by Brian Winston in his keynote at AIDC this year as he too expressed concern at the definition of ?actuality? and made his argument that ?prior witnessing? and ?serious intent? were necessary constraints of the Griersonian definition.Nichols went on to state that the factual status of documentary could only be maintained if there was a ?measure of cultural agreement as to the mimetic power of the camera (being) sustained? (1995:57) Not only has it been sustained in the early part of the twenty-first century but as a culture we seem to have given over our own internal understanding of reality and loaded up the referential weight of the images given to us - particularly those presented to us via the broadcast media. In Crossing the Digital Threshold (1997), Scott McQuire takes up this issue of the impact of digital technology on the way that we perceive images arguing that the emergence of an image-saturated culture in which the difference between ?direct? and ?indirect? perception ? what we see ourselves and what we see via the mediation of a screen ? has become increasingly unstable?. (1997:57) and that underlying the excitement and controversy aroused by the digital threshold is the potential for digital technology to ? reconfigure our habitual relationship to camera images?. (1997:53)Previously our relationship to the film image had been conditioned by the belief that what we saw was once - in some manner ? real. Cinematic credibility had been defined by classic Hollywood cinema and conventions established in the 1910s and 1920s ? conventions such as montage, shot matching, continuity, to name a few. How does the digital threshold impact on this situation? McQuire queries the fascination of contemporary cinema audiences as they are faced with what are said to be ?perceptually realistic? (1997:58) images of dinosaurs or intergalactic space ships or exploding bodies when these are images that themselves have no physical point of reference in the real world. He also discusses our willingness to believe in the?truth? of the documentaries about dinosaurs. The growing sophistication of digital image manipulation is promising to transform not only the aesthetics of the documentary image, but also its epistemologyIn Walking with Dinosaurs (1997) we have none of Winston?s ?prior witnessing? and the full impact of Nichols ?nuclear explosion?, yet it has been accepted by audiences as one of the BBC and ABC?s most popular documentary series. How does the ?desire underpinning the documentary impulse? (the classic phrase coined in Andre Bazin?s The Ontology of the Photographic Image? (1967:14)) fit now with ?photographic? images against which no authentication is possible? As we move into the emerging digital platform of delivering broadband programs over the Internet, is documentary, as Elsaesser suggests, to be the first casualty (1998:21)? We are entering an era where ?actuality?, the core of the definition of the documentary genre, is inhabiting an increasingly fluid space. In the digital world, what is real? The digital domain extends in an unprecedented way the ability of the filmmaker to control the film image, providing for a level of intervention that includes the minutiae of the pixel. The role of the digital artist is more akin to that of the painter. The boundary of what is real is indetectably blurred. The dominant model for identifying the past pre-digitisation has been the gathering of material residue, which could then achieve the status of an historical document once its authenticity had been verified by historians. What are going to be the parameters of the emerging model?The first scene of my online documentary FJ Holden consists of images of a beach at Greenmount that my family and I visited regularly in the late fifties. The digital photographer and I returned to the very same spot of my childhood memory and photographed an FJ Holden car which was a version of the exact model that my mother and father owned - these were my pointers to convey ?a sense of the obdurate real? to the viewer but the ?obdurate real? required that each image was digitally cleaned to erase the high-rise buildings that could be seen on the horizon. (The ?obdurate real? is a phrase from Lesley Stern in the paper she delivered at the AIDC. It refers to the detail out of place, the detail demanding attention. That first scene of The wrong crowd sets the scene of Queensland in the 50s and it was to the ?obdurate real? that I gave my attention, as we pixillated out of existence the crowd that now inhabits the once less populated Greenmount of my memory-momentThe digital threshold is fundamentally about extending a filmmaker?s ability to control the film image, providing a level of precise intervention down to the ?atomic? level of the pixel ? more like painting than photography. Once an image is digitised, it becomes another form of graphic. Regardless of its origin, it becomes pixels, easily altered, substituted for one another ? an atomic re-arrangement of the dimension of Nichols? ?nuclear explosion?; and yet there is a new fascination on the part of audiences who are still seeking ?perceptually realistic? images, for example of dinosaurs and space ships, things which themselves have no physical point of reference, but which the audience applauds for their (digital) realism.Narrative and non-linearityAlong with digitisation, the non-linear nature of the net-based documentary is also challenging our earlier definition of creating a story or an argument from pre-existing documents. When a story is told in the theatre, the oldest of the art forms, the audience sit, watches and listens, when a cinema narrative is engaged with, the audience sit, watch and listen, when a novelist?s narrative is followed, the reader turns the page sequentially, when a radio narration is listened to, the audience remains within earshot so as not to miss a moment of the sequence as it unfolds. In the online environment, the audience have the ability to interact and to intervene to affect the course of the narrative.This is one of the essential challenges we were to confront within the production of the online documentary, The Wrong Crowd. What are the nature and the potential outcomes on the computer screen for engaging with a narrative in some of the traditional senses but with the added dimension of the control of the mouse? Is our engagement with the mouse online not much different to our relationship to the remote control in the present environment or will it mean much more? At the Creative Web conference in Hobart in October 2002 and at the AIDC series of sessions entitled Reframe (February, 2003) much of the debate centred on this unknown of the future architecture of the televisual broadband viewing experience. Generation wise, the adults who will be the major demographic for the use of broadband entertainment in the future will be the children who are reading the open-ended books today that allow them to progress to page 7 or page 11 of the text depending on their answer on page 3. Open textual navigation of narrative will not be a new experience for the broadband generation.In Vision After Television - Technological Convergence, Hypermedia, and the New Media Arts Field, Michael Nash argues that that most crucial fact of life in the post-television generation is ?the eventual collapse of the networks into a single bitstream of information that will enter the home as user-determined programming and services? (Renov & Suderberg 1996:390) Within this post-television context, Nash addressed the state of a narrative in a non-narrative environment and argued that the ?death of narrative is a hugely misunderstood notion in the new media discourse?, claiming that jumping form one place in a text, film, or song to any other place in any other text, film or song doesn't actually ?constitute a "non-narrative experience"?. He asserted that the tyranny of the single narrative line though a data space authored by one person has already been overthrown in literature (Umberto Eco), but it is being supplanted by the new narratives written, he says, ?by the course that consciousness takes through information fields. ?The impulse to 'narratize' experience is endemic to the structure of consciousness and takes root from our mortality?. (Renov & Suderberg, 1996:392)Nash bases his argument in the theorizing of Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1997). Jaynes research led him to believe that the act of retrospection ?has a large element of created imagery what we call narratizing ? of what the experience should be like, rather than what it actually was like?. (Jaynes, 1990:29). For example, ?the thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth?. There is an argument that ?purpose and cause (are) inextricably woven into the spatialization of behaviour in consciousness? (Jaynes, 1990:64)?I think it?s the same, narrative, non-narrative. I?ve done both, I know it?s exactly the same. When you do both, you know you?re dealing with the same kinds of problems anyway? says French feminist filmmaker, Chantal Akerman in an interview with Christina Creveling, (1977:138) Michael Tarantino in Bordering on Fiction (1995) discusses Akerman?s Histoires d?Amerique (1988) in which she constructs a series of tales dealing with Jewish diaspora during the 30s and 40s. ?Although the film employs actors and scripted text, the characters simply face the camera and recount their experiences. ? It is narrative stripped to the bone and it reveals the essence of Akerman?s cinema: an emphasis on storytelling, pure and simple, which is able to connect many disparate threads. For Akerman, some narratives are fabricated and others are found. But they are all united by the teller? (Tarantino 1995:50) Later in the Creveling interview, Akerman asserts that ?you must always write first when you want to make a film. Language precedes the visual plan? (1997:140) So what were the qualities of the narrative that needed to be included in the visual plan submitted for The Wrong Crowd?In Story and Discourse (1978) Gerard Genette?s theory of narrative, which he termed ?narratology?, is outlined, for the first time giving us a vocabulary to talk about narrative. This then new branch of modern literary theory provided for a neat distinction between what constituted narration and what did not - what is description. Narration moves the plot forward, and description doesn?t. Within the computer gaming industry, there is emerging a new element within the hitherto descriptive scenes - a narrative element is now required, called ?cut scenes?. These are cinematic events to move the story of the game along, and television writers are being employed to inject dramatic tension into the game by writing these ?cut scenes?.Mieke Bal?s text, Narratology (1985) which builds on the work of Genette, argues that each narrative requires actors, a narrator, text, story, and ?fabula?, a series of connected events, experienced by the actors. In writing the visual plan/interface design for The Wrong Crowd, the narration and the description were required to be melded into a navigable form. The narrative had to be constructed by linking elements of the database in a particular order. The trajectory designed within the Scenes Menu is intended to lead the user from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The intention to produce one of the first ever online documentaries by merging database and narrative into a new form led me to seek to maintain the logic of replacement, a characteristic of cinema, in temporal montage fashion, whilst exploring the spatial montage characteristic of the computer screen as it constantly intruded and needed to be embraced.Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001) argues that the next generation of cinema broadband cinema ? will need to add multiple windows to its language as a matter of course and gives as examples such as the famous scene in Bladerunner where Harrison Ford clicks through the images on the screen in front of him as he searches for the truth about the origins of the cyborg. Manovich also cites the innovations of frames within frames employed in Peter Greenaway?s Draughtsman?s Contract and Prospero?s Books as potential prototypes for the new artform. The implications for this in constructing The Wrong Crowd site was to explore the innovation of being able to add horizontal layers to the narrative, and for the frames containing these layers to remain on the screen simultaneously; for example, included in links are the original newspaper stories, for interested users who wished to go to the source material and read the stories for themselves. There are added extra family photographs and graphics that can be ?clicked? on as hotspots within the QTVR scenes to take the user in more deeply to the postmodern nature of the history related. The ?world events? button on each page emphasises the idiosyncratic/individualistic nature of the text. They are world events that interested the kind of person I was and give a clue to what, in the more local context of a police family and a police state, were the global issues and images that concerned me.Learning a new language and content is formAs Manovich points out, media studies still lacks any framework for addressing the most fundamental quality of new media ? its programmability. For this Manovich suggests we need a framework that might be termed ?software theory?. With categories borrowed from computer theory, he leads us into discussions of ? interface? and ?database? from an aesthetic consideration. As a content creator, I have had to reach an understanding of the HCI (the human computer interface) in order to provide for a documentary online experience. I have had to learn the ?new? language of the software applications used to author and access new media product online in order to create a different kind of viewing experience. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) popularised by Macintosh since 1984 and made for a screen ruled by straight lines and rectangular windows, became my new screen. The tools I learnt to use to create on this screen were a mouse, a web browser, a search engine, and a cut and paste function as well as copy, delete and find.There was a constant tension in the early stages of the site?s design between the programmer?s preoccupation with navigation and mine as the filmmaker with narration. Navigation implies a map and the content creator, to a greater or lesser degree, can plot a pathway through this map. The viewer can then follow this pathway, or deviate, or continue in a line as the mood takes him/her. Navigation is via a map and the mode of transport is the mouse. Prospective visitors to the site ask similar questions based on the temporal expectations of the old media ? how long is it? when is it finished? how do I know when I?ve seen it all? All four program makers at the AIDC Reframe session reported this audience expectation of the temporal element that surrounds the documentary in its online form. In an attempt to translate into terms intelligible to the old media audience, the seventeen QTVR ?movies? of The Wrong Crowd are approximately each one minute in duration. As a content creator, how long can I expect a viewer/user to stay on the site? Molly Reynolds from Beyond Online argued at the AIDC Reframe session that six minutes was the average stay and around twenty minutes was the length of stay on a site that was performing well in terms of ?stickiness?. If my site ?performs well?, it is possible then to follow the whole seventeen scenes in one sitting in a linear fashion.The essence of new media however is that is programmable, and as programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures ? if/then and repeat/while, then my narrative must be by definition non-linear. Building a narrative in a non-linear environment meant embracing the essence of what Manovich calls ?modularity?. Within the site, there is a collection of discrete objects ? GIFs, JPEGs, text, wav files and QTVRs, and all are stored independently on a network. Each element can be accessed on its own so it has been imperative to create content that if deleted would not render other parts meaningless. In the computer age, descriptive ?stand-alone? information is everywhere. The other side of the ?modularity? coin is interactivity. One of the key requirements of the Australian Film Commission?s funding was that the project be interactive but as Manovich argues, to describe computer-based media as ?interactive? is almost a tautology as it means stating the most fundamental fact about computers, that they are all about pressing buttons and choosing linksWe are in a transitional phase where content creators are beginning to understand the implications of the new technology. We are learning the ?language of new media? and how to communicate with the new media technicians, the digital artists who will create the animated paintings of the twenty-first century.
Lecture Notes Week 5
This week we ventured into the rehlm of Virtual Reality, Virtual Philosphy and the Screen Age. Here are the following lecture notes for week 5:Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It's a conjuring trick. the thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires?William Gibson Johnny MnemonicImage-making, no matter how manipulative, doesn't replace reality;it becomes part of it.Sidney Blumenthal The Permanent CampaignTV is images of a life not really lived anywhere but arranged for the viewing.Benedikt Suggested further reading
Allegory of Plato's caveMatrix Some quotes from the movie:Morpheus: The desert of the real.Neo: Why do my eyes hurt? Morpheus: You've never used them before.Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about your senses, what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then all you're talking about are electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
Matrix pushes the boundaries of computer-generated effects as it explores a possible future world where machines dominate humans but keep them in ignorant bliss of their real state. The machines in Matrix create a totally illusory reality for people, constructing their identities to suit the purposes of the machine.Has it already happened? To what extent are our identities constructed by our consumption of corporate media product? Where do our identities come from? Would we care if the machines did take over? Consider the destruction of the automobile and our willingness to co-operate with it. How have the technological developments of the last 200 years affected the way we understand the world? What are the changing accounts of what is rational and what is reasonable.Has film and TV production techniques changed the way we see the world?Towards a Critique of Virtual Rationality Behind the goggles, under the earphones, strapped into the machine, I am lost in virtual space, fighting impossible pterodactyls, dodging imaginary bullets, looking for a way to the equally improbable next level. This is not happening in my imagination. It is all so real in this artificial place that my heart rate is up and my hands are clammy. This reality may be virtual but that does not make it any less real and it raises the possibility that mundane reality is no less virtual.The 19th and 20th centuries saw the exponential development of communication technologies that have radically altered the economy of the planet. These changes have also set in train a shift from the certainties of the literary age and the rationality of
logical positivism to the still emerging screen age and an attendant virtual rationality.A number of thinkers have sought to come to terms with these new, "possible" ways of viewing the world where the line between reality and appearance is so blurred that there is no discernible difference between the two:Guy Debord = "Society of Spectacle"Unberto Eco = "Hyper-reality"Jean Baudrillard = "Simularacum"William Gibson = "Cyberspace as Consensual Hallucination"Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari = "Becoming Media"\This shift may be as significant to human history as the shift from oral culture to literary culture that occurred in Greece and the Near East about 2,500 years ago.What is being left behind? For two and a half millennia, the line between reality and representation has been fixed in the pure rationality that emerged from one reading of the Socratic method, the endless questioning that came at the end of the oral period. Because
Socrates' claim of ignorance was written down as ironic by his disciples,the pure rationality he espoused was used to limit and control reality.
Plato developed a rational argument that reality was expressed in hidden forms that could only be appreciated by an elite who thus had the duty to use the arbitrary powers of the police state to enforce a harsh idealism. Plato's pupil
Aristotle bent pure rationality into the arbitrary categories of scientific enterprise. Socrates left a heritage of a pair of schemes forever drawing boundaries around the chaotic, random exuberance of life.And where has pure rationality of the literary age brought humanity after two and a half thousand years? The excesses of political power and a science stumbling over its own limitations have together taken us to the brink of annihilation: population explosion, enviromental crisis, nuclear armageddon, a terminal loss of purpose. But then there is another, ever deeper irony. At the moment literary and mathematical culture encircles the globe, it creates the technology and the technology creates the culture that will supersede it.The allegory of Plato's cave has become real: the forms flicker for all to see on the walls of our caves - the cinema, television and computer screens - and the world is categorised in immense databases that can be accessed in seconds. Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product. Suspended in a computer space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges in a world of digital sensations. But instead of bringing the reign of wisdom, the screens cannot hide the chaos and complexity that make up the world. Instead of bringing certainty about one world, the screens mirror the confusions of current scientific theory (especially quantum theory) which embraces such abstractions as Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle, and offer us a myriad of possible worlds.While there is always the chance that pure rationality will reassert itself with official stories designed to produce certainty and doctored to produce compliance, there is also the growing possibility that the technological nature of the shift from literary culture to screen culture spells the end of official stories, and thus centralised power and thus the containment of knowledge. Everything we had thought to be "true" turns out to be an illusion, and our illusions become truth.Even the divisions and understanding of the difference between the mind and the body are problematised. One of the central myths of Western society is that of
Cartesian dualism - the split between the mind and the body. While postmodernists are busy abandoning the concept of this split, technology is creating a world where the abstract split becomes concrete. In this space, however, it is the cyberbody (not the mind) which is immortal, while the human body (the animating soul outside the cyber body) is mortal. This is a direct reversal of current understandings wherein the body is mortal while the soul is immortal.As Margaret Wertheim points out, in
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, we are seeing a return to dualism, a return to a belief that humans are bipolar beings consisting of a material body and an immaterial 'essence' that is potentially immortal. There is a notion that this 'essence' can be separated from the body and transformed into the ephemeral media of computer code.The high stakes of the human knowledge game demand a return to the Socratic milieu to fossick for alternatives. In the ignored and under-rated work of the
Sophists and the Cynics, we find something more that sophistry and cynicism. We find another Socrates who uses pure rationality to challenges the certainties of pure rationality and so begins the refusal to comply with the distinction between reality and representation. Above all, in his appreciation of the contradictory and counterfeit nature of reality, we find some useful signposts for the construction of a virtual rationality.eXistenZSome links about David Cronenberg's movie eXistenZIMBD
dataRoger Ebert's
reviewJeff Berwitz
reviewSuggested further reading
Burr Snider 'Jaron' Wired 1.2Precursors to Virtual Reality The Screen Age really began with the advent of cinema a century ago but even before that there were technological advances that were setting the stage for virtual reality.TelegraphIn 1837 Samuel Morse first sent electrical impulses down a wire in patterns that could be reinterpreted as a message at the other end. He sent the first public telegraph message in 1844. By 1845, Morse could transmit the first message along a telegraph line over significant distances (from Baltimore to Washington DC).
Morse's code of dots and dashes was an early binary system and it prompted the laying of cable between continents that allowed immediate communication around the globe, a process that continues today as Neal Stephenson documents in
Mother Earth, Motherboard.TelephoneIn 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone which allowed sounds, including the human voice to be transmitted over long distances.The telephone"s point-to-point system of transmission was a forerunner of today"s interactive Internet, as opposed to the broadcast system of one source to many receivers that developed from the printing press and radio and was brought to the screen by film.PhonographThomas Edison invented many of the devices we use today. While his most famous invention is the lightbulb, in 1876 he recorded and played back sound on wax cylinders. This device led to the development of cassettes, records, CDs and other sound-recording devices.RadioIn 1895
Marconi invented a process of
wireless telegraphy that allowed messages to be sent over long distances by modulating electro-magnetic radiation. Initially radio carried Morse code from point to point and, in amateur hands (or
ham operators), produced an international web of independent communication. By the 1930s, radio was modified to transmit and receive all manner of sounds and thus the radio industry was established allowing the immediate and simultaneous broadcast of information to mass audiences. In Australia, broadcast radio was
pioneered by the ABC. Different formats of radio broadcast developed depending on whether the transmitter modulated the amplitude (AM) or frequency (FM) of the radio wave.CinemaBy adapting the antique practices of the camera obscura to the emerging chemistry of light sensitive emulsions, 19th century inventors developed photography. By using a mechanical device to shine light through a number of photographic images in quick succession, the Lumiere Brothers (among others) created the early forms of cinema which relied on the "persistence of vision" or the propensity of the eye to retain an image for about 1/16the of a second at a time. By showing images at 1/24th of a second, projected film gave the appearance that the movement portrayed was flowing naturally . In 1929 a reliable system was developed that allowed the simultaneous and synchronized transmission of sound. The first full-length feature movie was produced in Australia. For everything you could ever possibly want to know about the movies try
Movie Database.Television In 1926 John Logie Baird first demonstrated television that was gradually refined until it could broadcast sound and moving pictures together. By the late 1930s, TV was ready to be marketed to a mass audience and was presented in London and at the 1939 New York World Fair. World War Two intervened and it wasn"t until the late 1940s that TV gained a mass market in the USA. TV was introduced into Sydney and Melbourne in 1956 and to Brisbane in 1959.How TV worksLight is filtered by lenses onto a photoelectric surface, which is read by an electron-scanning beam which turns the information into an electrical current. That encoded information is stored on videotape, edited into a program and broadcast either as electro-magnetic radiation to be picked up by the aerial attached to your TV or sent directly down cables. However that information arrives at the TV it is then sent to an electron gun which, in a reverse of the camera process, rapidly shoots rows of pixels (color and darkness information) at the photosensitive screen of the TV. There are a number of different TV formats:PAL (used in Australia and the UK)625 lines @50HzNTSC (used in the USA)525 lines @60HzSECAM (used in France)625 lines @50Hz Some distinctions and developmentsAn important distinction in television history is between the public broadcasters which are funded by government (like the ABC and the
BBC) or public subscription (like the
PBS in the USA and Channel 31 in Australia), and commercial broadcasters who are funded by advertising. Another distinction that is rapidly becoming significant is that between free-to-air network TV and pay/cable TV. The Internet has allowed the process of watching TV to become far more interactive, with viewers analysing and discussing what they are watching via interactive web pages.Elements of Virtual LanguageThe growth of the communications industry over the last century has produced a new grammar of sound and image. Just as we have learnt a way to read the written word (which is formalised into the rules of grammar), we have also learnt ways to read audio-visual language, but these rules are still under development and are open to constant challenges as people find new ways to communicate effectively.This material is dealt with in far more detail in my subject ART2504 Basic Video Production. Below are just a few key concepts:Musicused to suggest the mood of the story (try watching a horror movie without the sound)SFX(sound effects)added to create maximum impact of the visual effects from a better explosion to canned laughter and applauseFramingshow key elements completely and at appropriate sizes, give plenty of headroom and don"t let one important element obscure anotherCompositionrather than merely centering an image, make sure it has a dynamic relationship to the frame by structuring triangular images that utilize the effects of perspectiveShot sizesuse a variety of shot sizes to create dynamic effectsBCUbig close upCUclose upLSlong shotMCUmedium close upMLSmedium long shotMSmid shotVLSvery long shotXCUextreme close up Camera movements: moving the camera can also create a dynamic set of imagesPanrotating the camera on the horizontal plane to right or leftTilttipping the camera on the vertical plane up or downDollymoving the camera towards or away from the subjectTrackmoving the camera left or right, often along tracksZoomfrom a fixed spot, using the camera to zoom in (tele) or zoom out (wide) on the subjectCamera height and angleplacement of the camera in relation to the subject can suggest the attitude of the subjectPOV (point of view)the camera takes the view of the subjectVirtual Reality (VR)The imagination is a powerful force in the development of technologies. The history of tools is the history of humanity"s desire to extend its power. For an interesting exploration of this topic see
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentinean writer 1899-1986) and the first part of his short story "
Tløn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in his book Labyrinths.Virtual Reality is a system that enables one or more users to move and react in a computer-simulated environment. Various types of devices allow users to sense and manipulate virtual objects much as they would real objects. This natural style of interaction gives participants the feeling of being immersed in the simulated world. Virtual worlds are created by mathematical models and computer programs. Some other definitions:An immersive, interactive simulation of realistic or imaginary environments.
Jaron LanierA form of human-computer interface that relies on spatial imaging and the illusion of being present within a computer-generated environment.F HamitA computer-generated simulation of a 3D environment that allows the user to view, manipulate and experience the contents of that environment so it is indistinguishable from a real environment.Mike Di StasioAlternate terms for VRartificial realityvirtualityanthropocybersynchronicityHow does VR work?Virtual reality works byengaging the senses through various hardware including goggles, headphones, gloves and body suits to the exclusion of the real worldconvergence of techniques used in simulation, animation and computer games - entertainment as the catalyst for other purposes.Types of VRDesktop VR = Window on the World (WOW)3D simulation on computer screencontrol generally by mouse or joystickutilises VRML or similar program to give the sensation of moving through an environmentnow ubiquitous in games such Doom, Quake, Mario Bros and Nanosaur, and in other applications such as architectural walkthroughs Immersion VR =
Head Mounted Display (HMD)a.k.a. Binocular Omni Orientation Monitor (BOOM)with goggles containing two miniature LCD screenscontrol by dataglove, 6DOF mouse, wand, spaceball Projection VR =
Computer Assisted Virtual Environment (CAVE)Projected into extended spaceHi-res stereo imagesPolarised eyewearElements of VR1. VisionThe production of 3D films in the 1950s attempted to move beyond the two dimensions of the screen. Two cameras would film the same scene from slightly different angles. The film had to be viewed using polarised eyeglasses. The glasses were not popular with the public, the images on the screen were not very sharp, and the films themselves were not very good. They were quite popular for a short period of time. But it wasn"t long before lack of profits saw the project abandoned. Many of the films were re-released as traditional 2D films. VR is still working on the best ways to give the impression of a substantial world and here are some key issues:Convergence- the visual illusion which results in two parallel lines appearing to move closer together the further away they areThe point at which they would appear to meet is known as the point of convergence, or disappearing point.Depth of Field- gradations in tone, especially light and colour, which produce the illusion of distance in a still imageClassical Egyptian images, for example, often disregarded depth of field, hence the flat two-dimensional look of them.Parallax- also called parallatic shift, the apparent displacement of the position of a celestial object on the celestial sphere when viewed from two different positionsFor example, the lunar parallax is defined as the difference in position of the moon on the celestial sphere when observed from a particular point on the earth"s surface, as compared to its position if observed at the same time from a point then at the centre of the earth"s disk facing the moon.Resolution/Acuity- the clarity or fineness of detail attained by a monitor or a printer in producing an imageIn relation to computer monitors, resolution is defined as the number of pixels per unit of measurement (such as inch or centimeter) on a video display. The word resolution is commonly used to denote the total number of pixels displayed horizontally or vertically on the video display.2. SoundTechnology already available to create 3D sound through stereo sound, binaural headphonesEssential elements: fidelity, volume and direction 3. TouchThere are 4 types of sensation:Tactile - forces acting on the skinForce feedback - forces acting on muscles, joints, tendonsMotion - platforms may provide real motion to augment simulated motion Manipulation - psychological illusion of existing in a virtual space using the six degrees of freedom (6DOF) The 6DOF are accessed through a range of controls besides the mouse and the joystick: wands, spaceballs,
surfball, 3D mouse, position tracker, biofeedback. The 6DOF are:x, y and z axes corresponding to the first three dimensions = height, breadth, depthroll - movement around the horizontal axisyaw - movement around the vertical axis, usually on a slantpitch - downward slanting movement 4. Taste and SmellVarious hygiene and technical problems limit the development of these inputs, so they are still some way off.VRML - Virtual Reality Modeling Language.This is the technology enabling online worlds to be rendered graphically.VRML was codeveloped by Mark Pesce, a man of considerable influence within the community of cyberspace builders and technicians.
His website includes a speech entitled
IGNITION that he gave at the 'World Movers' conference in which he outlines the inspiration he received on reading a William Gibson short story, the story 'left me dazzled with its brilliance, drenched in sweat, entirely seduced. For here, spelled out in the first paragraph in the nonsense word "cyberspace", I had discovered numinous beauty; here in the visible architecture of reason, was truth'.Problems with VRProduction issuesCartoon-like graphics limit the involvement of the user.The lag time means that the virtual environment is often slow to react to human input.The user"s perspective is limited in current manifestations and does not reach the normal human range of about 160 degree vision.The number of senses involved is limited to vision and sound (no touch, taste or smell).Kinaesthetic dissonance is the mismatch or absence of feedback.Physiological IssuesPsychological Issuessimulation sicknessmotion sicknesseyestrainheadaches / dizzinessaddictionbrainwashingeffects of intense interactive pornography / violencedesensitisation / devaluing of "real-world" experienceVR Applicationsmilitaryindustry
training / educationentertainmentweather simulationarchitecture / town planningenvironmental simulationmolecular modeling
surgerytourismdisabled assistancepsychiatric careadvertising
Lecture Notes Week 4
This week we looked at the Internet, i suppose most people think that the internet is quite a simple programme but in reality it is a complex spiderweb. Here are the lecture notes for this week:(Cyberspace is) a common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent, invisible concert of inquiry deal-making, dream sharing, and simple beholdingBenediktCyberspace's corridors form wherever electricity runs with intelligence. Its chambers bloom wherever data gathers and is stored. Its depths increase with every image or word or number, with every addition, every contribution, of fact or thought. Its horizons recede in every direction; it breathes larger, it complexifies, it embraces and involves. Billowing, glittering, humming, coursing, a Borgesian library, a city: intimate, immense, firm, liquid, recognizable and unrecognizable at once.HeimCyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become leaf on the wind of a dream.NovakSuggested further reading
Dibbell, Julian 'A Rape in Cyberspace'Hobbes Internet TimelineThe Internet, The Web and CyberspaceThese three terms are often used interchangeably, as synonyms, but they mean different things. The Internet is the sum of interconnected computer hardware and the software that runs it, the Web is a particular application of the Internet that is particularly easy to use and Cyberspace is the sum of users' imaginations as they use the Internet.The InternetThe internet, is a network of networks (what is often called an internetwork ). These networks include servers, mainframes and personal computers and many other devices that use CMC (computer-mediated communications) technology, loosely interconnected by the telephone system and, more recently, broad-band cable and satellite services, to link people around the world into an information-sharing system.A group of researchers from across the U.S. were already working on a system that they had called Packet Switching which is essentially breaking down messages into small chunks and transmitting them from one computer to another. These independent researchers thought such a method might work for connecting computer systems across long distances. This was exactly what the people at RAND were looking for so they struck a deal and they set about applying existing concepts to this networking problem.The US Dept of Defence originally put the funding behind the network but the system was also hi-jacked by researchers to share information at a distance and
ARPANET developed. It was about downloading academic data, but the early designers and users soon added extra functions such as email that took on a life of its own as hobbyists, hackers and the counter-culture turned ARPANET to their own purposes with BBS - Bulletin Board Servers and
MUDs - Multiple User Domains. Many accounts of early hacker life on the internet go into some detail in describing the social world of early internet users (some good examples of the hacker texts being Suelette Dreyfus' Underground and Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown).World Wide Web (WWW, or Web)
The World Wide Web, or Web for short, is one particular use of the Internet that emerged in the 1990s as people generally began to see the potential for computers to communicate with each other as a matter of course. The Web merges the techniques of (i) internetworking and (ii) hypertext to make an easy-to-use, but powerful, global system that shares all information accessible as part of a seamless hypertext space. The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world.CyberspaceA working definition of cyberspace might be: A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies. Is it a "consensual hallucination" or another form of reality? It might be a third order activity but it is real enough when you can make a living out of it. We must distinguish the virtual communities of cyberspace from virtual reality (interactive computer technology that creates the illusion of being immersed in an artificial world that exists only in a computer). While we may see these technologies converge in the future, they are still quite distinct at the moment. The technology requires more bandwidth ... which will soon be available down Pay TV cable ... as well as the development of software for the PC which is cheap and effective.Watch the Film "Warriors of the Net" for an overview of the idea of Packet Switching and internetworks.You can see it @
http://www.warriorsofthe.net/ or look for it via Google video (
http://video.google.com).Early Internet ApplicationsSome of the early internet applications that were instrumental in defining the nature and use of the internet are as follows.Electronic mail (Email)File Transfer Protocol (FTP)Internet Relay Chat (IRC)MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc.More Recent Internet ApplicationsSome other more recent internet applications that we will discuss later in the semester include the following:Instant Messaging (IM)Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharingPortable Audio (MP3s, AAC, FLAC, OGG, etc) and PodcastingVoIP and Voice chatNetiquette and Bad BehaviourNetioquette is etiquette on the Internet. Since the Internet changes rapidly, its netiquette does too, but it's still usually based on the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do to you. It is important to remember that for people to live together in any society, not only do they need rights (to participate) but they also need to accept their responsibilities in keeping society together. The social construction of reality requires civility between participants.The need for a sense of netiquette arises mostly when sending or distributing e-mail, posting on Usenet groups, or chatting. To some extent, the practice of netiquette depends on understanding how e-mail, the Usenet, chatting, or other aspects of the Internet actually work or are practiced. So a little preliminary observation can help.Poor netiquette because you're new is one thing, but such practices as spam (unsolicited email) and flaming (abusive communications) are another matter. They are bad behaviour that disrupts other people's use of the internet.Another aspect is hacking. Look at the case of
Kevin Mitnick who got into the US Air Defence System in his youth and later did a year for reading a computer company's email. Was he jailed for seeking to exercise his rights to know what was going on? For a bit of fun you can visit
Takedown and help hunt down Kevin, or you can play the
Fugitive Game.
Viruses have the potential for massive damage for little input. The case of Queenslander
Clint Haines is instructive. The question remains - who benefits? Is it only those selling security services?Many of the rules of this virtual society mimic those of non-virtual life; call back, don't insult people, always reply to personal email quickly etc. But they are often more quickly and effectively administered in the virtual world. In a chat environment, for example, if someone is operating outside the understood rules of Netiquette they are removed from the site until further notice. It's almost medieval! Rudeness is grounds for banishment.One of the most interesting things about the Net is how much more polite and caring people appear to be to those in their virtual community than in their non-virtual community. People who have never passed a word with the guy next door will maintain a network of relationships within a virtual community, ranging from close friends and lovers to acquaintances.Conduct on the Net includes the use of emoticons - those cute little faces and shorthand phrases that reflect your emotional state. Here are a few examples:: )A smile: (A frown# (AngrylolLaughs out loud; )A wink: 0SurprisedThere is a more extensive listing at
Useful Internet Emoticons.
Data-rape,
alt.humour.tasteless vs rec.pet.cats ... These sites, and others like them explore the issue of stories as threats. Language is given an exalted and problematised position on the Internet because, so far, one form of linguistic - text - is the lifeblood of the Net.Economics of CyberspaceThe economics of Cyberspace is still developing. Perry Barlow's
'Economy of Ideas' gives an almost utopian account of the economic possibilities inherent in cyberspace and the information economy:Information is an activity, experienced not possessed, propagated not distributed.Information is a life form, it wants to be free, replicating in the cracks of possibility, perishable and always changing.Information is a relationship between sender and receiver, the meaning generated has a unique value to both.Information may be commodified, but most importantly it is its own reward. -As the early utopian goals of the Internet meet the financial forces of convergence we can expect to see further rapid change and a lot of instability.
Internet shares have taken a beating on the stock exchange in the last year because there was just not enough substance in many shares to justify their price - they are
built to 'flip', not built to last. Comparisons have been made with the investment craziness that surrounded other over-promoted, under-performing ventures such as the
South Sea Bubble, tulip mania and Tokyo land prices in the 1980s.The most important commodities on the Net are credibility, a distinctive point of view, familiarity and exclusivity. People will probably pay for these things when they in turn can make money from them but the Net will resist total commercial control because people willingly provide a huge amount of information and discussion they want to stay in the public domain.There are vested interests that oppose cyberspace becoming the scene of economic activity, referring to it as a "black economy". What they are really mourning is the lack of bureaucratic/government control over the Net. As always with new technologies, the issue of who controls the buttons is of particular interest to governments and big business. But as Rupert Murdoch works out how to get a percentage, cyberspace will become respectable.The growth of cyberspace is generating a new grammar that is shaping a new approach to economics. Its interactivity suggests new ways to think about capital that reflects new ways to do things with each other:Social network capital - the value in person to person interaction though we might never meetKnowledge capital - the value in ideas means that sharing information equals sharing powerCultural capital - the value in the values we share and that allow us to live creative lives in a civil society.One interesting flashpoint in the economics of cyberspace is the area of
copyright which is "the exclusive right granted by law to the creator of literary, musical, dramatic or artistic works to make and dispose of copies of (and otherwise control) those works for a certain number of years".It is important to appreciate that while the law of copyright does not apply to ideas, it does apply to the expression of those ideas and so it does apply to material on the net. You cannot copy material without the express permission of the copyright owners. When people said that the net means the end of copyright, they are really pointing out how the web allows you to link to other people's material without copying it.Some info-anarchists elaborate on
Proudhon's claim that 'property is theft' to argue that intellectual property means that the owners of that property are attempting to steal your mind. They set out to undermine the corporate dominance of cyberspace by 'repurposing' corporate and government homepages and trading in illegally copied software called warez.The Possibilities and Problems of the Information EconomyIn future topics, we will explore various possibilities and problems inherent in the information economy, but here we consider its viability as an economy. While the possibilities are only constrained by human imagination, the problems are quite mundane. It is the practical problems that bedevil the information economy:what is your product?what is your market?how do you get people to pay for what you've got? andabove all, how do you make a living out of an idea?But beyond all these "economically rational" considerations, there are the important social considerations - is this the kind of world we really want to make: no job security? kids glued to computer and TV screens from an early age? poor eyesight, poor posture and a bad attitude to the real world?ConvergenceThe last ten years have seen a growing tendency to Convergence as the possibilities of communication technology develop. This concept works on a number of levels:Information technologies are converging as computer technology provides the means to draw together telephone, radio, television and print so that they can be accessed from the one point.
Lecture Notes Week 3
This week we looked at the Birth of the Computer, it was interesting to take note of, and here are the lecture notes for this week:A History LessonEvery abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic - perceptive, affective, acting, thinking, physical, and semiotic - but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus Further suggested reading:
' Economy of Ideas' BarlowComputer History - read all the main links from this page but not the small links at the bottom of the pageGibson, William 'New Rose Hotel'Babbage, Turing and the Birth of the Computer
Charles BabbageAda Byron, Lady Lovelace Sketch of the Analytical Engine Alan Turing Bletchley ParkCHAC History PageXerox PARC, Apple and the PC
Xerox PARCApple II Visicalc IBMDigital Research, Inc Bill GatesThe Microsoft Conspiracy!!holes are starting to appear in Bill Gates' empireTriumph of the Nerds .Introduction to William Gibson
William Gibson BiographyAn interview with William GibsonCyberspace GlossaryStudy guide to NeuromancerNotes on Burning Chrome Further readings
EnculturationGlobe e-JournalPre/text e-JournalLecture Notes Week 2
This week we looked at looked at the media theory, it was an interesting perspective towards digital and communicaiton technologies. Here are the lecture notes to week 2:Communication Studies (USA)1920s - Bullet (Inoculation) Theory = Maximum effects1930s - Application of Statistical Method1940s - Minimum Effects1950s - Looking for effects - connections to psychology1960s - Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message1970s - Mixed Effects - The Spiral of Silence1980s - Return of Maximum effects - Manufacturing ConsentMedia Studies (UK)1950s Raymond Williams - Culture in Everyday Life1960s Stanley Cohen - Moral Panics1970s Glasgow School - News as Ideology1980s Stuart Hall, Birmingham School - Rncoding/Decoding1990s Ien Ang - Active AudiencesCulture Studies (Europe)1930s Walter Benjamin - The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction1940s Frankfurt School - Reality defined by Culture Industries1950s Situationists – Society of the Spectacle1960s Habermas - The Public Sphere1970s Louis Althusser - Media as Ideological State Apparatuses1980s Baudrillard – Simulacra1990s Fraser - Subaltern counterpublics
Lecture Notes- Week 1.
Even though i am posting these lecture notes later in the semester, i find it more beneficial if i post the lecture notes now, as i can review the notes at a more indepth level. The first week we looked at a basic introduction to technology and here are the lecture notes:Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?Chorus from TS Eliot's The Rock Required reading
The timeline of Communication HistoryCity of BitsResource Center for Cyberculture StudiesBabel - Glossary of computer abbreviationsThe American Communication Association Site This subject is designed to give students both hands-on experience of new communication technologies and a critical awareness of the theoretical debates around the area. Let's look for some wisdom amongst all this information!What are New Communication Technologies? Some things to consider are:CD-ROMmultimediaInternetvirtual agentsinteractive TVvirtual realityvideoconferencingtelepresencingSMS - text messagingbroadbandwirelessweblogsWhat are old communication technologies? How do we distinguish between old and new communication technologies? Under what circumstances will new communication technologies become old communication technologies? Let us begin by analysing these notions of communication and technology.Defining Communication and TechnologyWhat is communication? Communication is any process that transfers, transmits or makes information known to other people.The basic model of communication was explained by
Aristotle in his book
Rhetoric about two and half thousand years ago:The speaker produces a message that is heard by the listener. This account of communication is simple but effective where communication is face to face and the communicators have a common background. Unfortunately the world is no longer like that and a more complex model has been suggested by
Shannon & Weaver in their book The Mathematical Theory of Communication which suggests that a
better model is:The speaker produces an effect on the transmitter which sends a message (which is degraded by the noise of the transmission process) that is intercepted by the receiver which converts it into an effect that is heard by the listener. Because it does not allow for the difference in codes dictated by the use of metaphor (a figure of speech that implies but does not state a connection between two things), the Shannon and Weaver model discounts a couple of other factors that further complicates the communication process:
intersubjectivity- the listener interprets the message and changes it as they send it along- communication is between people and they always want to argue about things, interpreting them in the light of their own experience- the active audience produces feedback
intertextuality- no message is ever complete- any message gains its meaning (for a particular person) from all the other messages that person has previously received and sent While the preponderance of communication since the invention of the radio has been in the broadcast mode, new communications technologies are interactive and so accentuate this problem of interpretation.What is technology? Technology is the scientific study of mechanical arts and their application to the world.
Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies are extensions of human body ... the tool is an extension of the hand, the wheel is an extension of the leg and the book is an extension of the eye. An Australian-based performance artist whose work addresses this idea of technology as extensions of the human body is
Stelarc.McLuhan also argues that, in so far as the communication is an extension of the mind, the medium in which that communication occurs is, itself, the message. This insight suggests some interesting possibilities in the move from analog to digital technology:
Analog technology functions by representing various forces (through dials) and the relatively imprecise modulation of those forces.Digital technology relies on storing bits of
binary information (whether the current of electricity or light in on or off) and allows for the precise modification of forces.The shift from analog to digital can be good (as in linear to non-linear video editing) or not so good (try tuning a digital car radio while driving along). While digital technology is in the ascendance, there are those that find the texture of analog offers something more appealing than the certainty and flat surfaces of the digital domain. Some musicians prefer the modulated electronic sounds of the Theremin or the Moog.Applying McLuhan, in the shift from analog to digital perhaps we are moving from representational old communication technology that allows many shades of gray to a much more black and white, on or off digital system that nevertheless encourages us to communicate exactly what we mean
