Test 1

edededed

Deleuze…and DPI

Video Teaser: Surfin USA The Beach Boys
Why is this here? “Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports” (6)

Note: It’s Deleuze and DPI because that’s the aspect of the pairing which worked most effectively…also the Packateer 8500 remains somewhat elusive

Thoughts:
Popular discussion of how control and discipline operate today can have a tendency to lack absolute clarity in terms of definition. A degree of overlap is definitely present. As evidenced by the focus of the second half of my last reflection, when discussing recent events the intertwining of the two within the panopticon of contemporary society can become a little confusing. So, in this light Greg Elmer’s ‘interlocutive concepts’ approach is more than welcome. Panoptic surveillance is a more useful term when it is viewed as interlocking with our understandings of control and discipline. Without one, you can’t have the other.

Viewing Elmer’s overview and critique of surveillance studies in conjunction with Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, and summarizing brutally we can proceed thus: Societies of control are replacing societies of discipline, the factory is replaced by the corporation, the school is replaced by perpetual training: continuous control becomes a way of ordering society. As if we all were trapped in the Myth of Sisyphus nothing is ever finished. As these structural changes develop capitalism mutates. Once tracking dictates our behaviour we will definitely be in the societies of control (so right about the moment when I cant skype because Bell decided then?)

In the panopticon we were/are anxious about being watched, and we modified our behaviour because of that fear but in the society of control it’s even more insidious. While discipline wanted to teach me something (don’t post that drunk picture because people are watching), control doesn’t care about that (you can’t actually upload that because you can’t access the server at this certain time). As the importance of institutions in our societies recedes so too does discipline: but in conjunction control increases.Control is decentralized so it’s all around, and the control society is temporal. It slows down us down.

And so to throttling. An unpleasant term if ever there was one, it is nonetheless a key issue that cuts the core of why we should care about issues related to control on a broader level than merely just modifications to our own individual behaviour. Embedding control in technology can be seen as pertaining to a coercive system of government: our reception of knowledge- in terms of speed- is decided upon by someone else. Fenwick McKelvey’s article on DPI (hi!) articulates the risk this poses to democracy when he states that “Control does not stop us from communicating; it simply marginalizes non-prioritized communications. Control permits free speech, though a free speech with instrumental marginalization.” Obviously this is a concern…So once control has seeped into all parts of the network is there any way of removing it? Its invisibility is part of its strength. If we can’t see it how can we remove it?These discussions reminded me of a Greek couple I know who remember life under dictatorship. Their approach to willingly imparting information and control of that information is radically different from that of my peers. Their main argument against full and unwitting participation in the society of control is that we can never know how long our system will be in its current state – systems of governance are not immutable, they change. Why risk future reprimand for your actions today through wanton participation in surveillance society?

But back to dealing with the embedding of control in ICT. Can we see signs of movement towards better regulation? In certain parts of the world yes: the European Parliament passed legislation protecting net neutrality at the beginning of April.

Democracy is not simply achieved. It is a constant work in progress. Keeping systems of control at bay and keeping corporations and institutions who seek to enforce control in check is a necessary part of maintaining a healthy democracy today. Raising awareness about the importance of net neutrality and lobbying for regulation is a key part of that.

Works Cited

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59(1), 3–7.
Elmer, G. (2012). Panopticon–discipline–control. In K. Ball, K. Haggerty, & D. Lyon (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (pp. 21–29). New York: Routledge
McKelvey, Fenwick. Deep Packet Inspection and Control over Communication

Foucault & Facebook

Video teaser: Who watches the watchmen?
Why is this here? Are we living in the panopticon? And what does that mean for our behaviour?Also it’s a great film and great song so it’s a win win reference really

Thoughts: Before beginning this response diary I spent around 15 minutes on Facebook. Given I had already been on the website numerous times today, what was I doing? I didn’t have an event to look up or any freshly tagged photos to scrutinise, there was no piece of personal or political breaking news to check out. But there might have been. To the untrained eye I was lazily scrolling down, perusing the pages of my acquaintances. But to the canny observer I was engaging in a complex act: curating my online self, by controlling what those watching me can see while at the same time fuelling the same process in reverse by observing, watching, stalking – controlling even, those in my circle, my ‘friends’. To maintain a certain profile I know I have to exploit facebook’s algorithms to the best of my ability. It’s certainly possible to learn how to manipulate elements of EdgeRank, though as we can never really know how it works, a tantalizing mystery remains- ultimately, what makes online popularity tick is as elusive as it often can seem to be in the offline world.

At first reading Foucault’s writing on tactics of power, punishment and its complex social function can seem distant and removed from practical application today. Yet sifting through the texts the relevance becomes overwhelming. Whether it is considering the political investment of the body as a force for production, viewing power as a strategy, admitting that power produces knowledge (175) or most explicitly : “ the theme of surveillance and observation, security and knowledge, individualization and totalization, isolation and transparency – found in the prison its privileged locus of realization” (217): the link is clear. The virtual embodiment of the panopticon is to be found in your Timeline. Were Foucault to meet Facebook scrutinizing his reaction would be worthy of the most voyeuristic reality TV show.

On a more pernicious, insidious level, when we get to the microphysics of power we learn that “Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.”(182) Ah Facebook! Once again the correlation is clear. The forum on which we continually, relentlessly, expose the minutiae of our private lives exerts powerful discipline upon us. There is nothing lazy or innocent about my simple act of scrolling. By engaging in the act I further the discipline. I am a watchman watching the other watchmen. The extent to which this behaviour is becoming normalized and what the long term consequences will be on our behaviour is only beginning to become apparent. We are consumed with subjecting our own bodies,making them docile, through our own permanent performance on a technology of the self. Sometimes it can seem that we seek to be monitored as the ultimate validation.

The 2013 NSA/Five Eyes surveillance revelations have brought the more macro side of these issues to the fore in popular culture. Discussion in class surrounding this aspect of surveillance once again crystallised what has been for me a near constant source of frustration this past year. Try as I might, I fail to comprehend how people can so willingly trust private profit driven corporations and at the same time so distrust public bodies of all levels. This is a terrifying indictment of the state of democracy today. People all over the world are more willing to trust private companies to look out for their well-being than they are to trust the people they elect to represent them.

Surveillance fatigue is understandable, especially when you consider the sheer extent of the resources being applied to developing the ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, what does it matter if you were being watched?’narrative. The amorphous ‘government’ seems to be the target for distrust, suspicion, frustration and anger. While it is natural that there has been a significant level of backlash against State power and bodies engaged in surveillance, there is an issue pertaining to the ambiguous direction of anger.Surely equal measures of responsibility need to be apportioned. The development of a culture of surveillance is as much the fault of the private corporations which have built, developed and monetized systems and services which implicitly and explicitly make engaging in behaviour related to surveillance the norm.

One of the most absurd public interventions since the Snowden revelations was Mark Zuckerberg’s recent phone call to Obama,after which he announced – on Facebook unsurprisingly that : “When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.” Well, in response to that I would like to call up Mark and ask him a question: ‘If our privacy is your number one concern why have you spent so much time and energy building an empire which inherently seeks to circumvent and destroy that same privacy?’

The panopticon isn’t just the Five Eyes, it’s all of us, its facebook, twitter, google. Its a monster born of a molotov cocktail mixing McCarthyism, the Bush doctrine, and coked up capitalism.

In my more radical moments this can sometimes seem to me to be advanced/digital capitalism’s swan song. But perhaps it is merely a last laugh as capitalism affixes the final nail in the coffin of liberal democracy. And the anesthetic is so complete that I don’t see a revolution coming any time soon.

Works Cited
The Body of the Condemned, Docile Bodies & Panopticism in Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader. (P. Rabinow, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. (pp. 169-210)
Kincaid, J. EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick.

JoAnn Yates & NationBuilder

Video Teaser: Political Database marketing video circa 2004
Why is this here? Despite now looking like an ancient artifact from innocent bygone days this is a fascinating look into the ‘early’ days of database politics!And they have BIG computers…

Thoughts: Sometimes I think Organizational Communication should be taught to anyone who wants to work in any non solitary workplace, simply because even cursory study of this field can provide one with the basics for understanding behaviour in and of organizations. A few months ago I was looking for a way to describe the field to someone who felt removed from any conception of what it was. After some floundering I came to this: It’s just people and emotions, power and interests: human beings embedded in systems, organizations that are supposed to be conducive to efficient production.

In ‘Managerial Methods and the Functions of Internal Communication’ JoAnn Yates takes us on a journey of discovery through the history of railroads to the development of systematic management. In so doing we learn of a model that today seems visible all around us. Though its current incarnation may have morphed and distorted, its impact can undoubtedly still be felt. Anyone who has ever been to a staff christmas party or received a company newsletter knows that!

Now when railroads and telegraphs came along and brought with them a revolution of the scale of a rupture of space and time; systems of efficiency and basic rules and standards were obviously needed. The development of internal communication as a management tool through newsletters and memos served to maintain a veneer of personalization of this systematized workplace.

I found the most intriguing element of this week’s pairing to be within the view of systems as not simply coercive but also as productive. I fundamentally agree with this. Systems are necessary not just for organization but also for production. Only an inadequate interpretation argues that systems are only confined to the professional realm or to the capitalist system. Nor are they confined to production of material capital, among other things, systems also organize and produce social capital. Indeed the proliferation of social media and the subsequent escalation of investment in curating social capital should be evidence enough of this. Despite all of this it is all too current today to lazily reject ‘systems’ as the harbingers of control and suppressors of individuals and their freedom.

Before turning to NationBuilder, there is one element to consider further: does this lazy antagonism towards systems extend to the realm of politics? I would argue that it very much does, and that this discontent represents a very real fracturing of liberal democracy as a system. When asked what they think of when they think of political campaigns our class responded with three words: ‘slimy’; ‘backhanded’; ‘rhetoric’. By no means do I believe that this is a unique response. In itself that is a fairly damning statement about the state of politics in Western liberal democracies today. It is in the process of becoming a failed system. Today, particularly in the wake of the financial and economic crisis which began in 2009, efforts to renew representative democracy are desperately needed.

For many actors the way to do this is to try to revitalize the relationship between politicians and the communities they seek to represent. In this frame the rise in popularity of systems which structure their action around combining traditional community organizing with new technological whizzery and savvy use of data analytics can be seen as an effort to revitalize representative democracy. NationBuilder, NGP VAN, the New Organizing Institute all of these organizations seek on some level to bridge this ever increasing chasm…

Does this pairing of Yates and systematic management with NationBuilder work? To a large extent it very much does. Nationbuilder is a total system, it is, by its own admission “everything”. Many of the features of ‘classical’ systematic management can be observed: newsletters as downward internal communication, your aggregated profile as upward communication (despite the fact that its provision may be involuntary). But thanks to targeting this communication is far more perfect than it ever could have been before. Message optimization, voter segmentation, beta testing, data mining and analytics: do they systematize representative democracy or do they subvert it?

Finally, the rise of database politics isn’t just about data and algorithms: it’s also about buying and selling a way of doing politics. And anyone concerned with the state of democracy is obliged to ask: what values does this way of doing politics privilege? Do these systems turn citizens whose confidence should be won through debate into consumers whose vote can be bought through tailor made recipes? Perhaps the embedding of data into systems such as NationBuilder are making us subjects, ourselves encoded into the system in order to guarantee greater efficiency for the political system…

Is this key to be found in regulation of data? Again, the profoundly anti statist bias that is so popular in western society today muddies the water. If we reject regulation, the political system and the state, then what is there to protect us from its excesses?

Work Cited
Chapter 1 in Yates, J. (1989). Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bruno Latour and Wii

Video Teaser: Johnnie Taylor Hole in The Wall…groovin Latour
Why is this here: Sometimes a door is just a door. Or is a wall hole just a wall hole? Or sometimes a hole in the wall is a bar…

Thoughts :In many ways it might have made a great deal of coherent sense to begin the course with Latour. Humans delegating responsibility to technology seems in many ways to be the recurring theme of our reflections. The non human actors which are shaping our lives are everywhere. We are willingly handing over work or effort to wall holes on hinges and sleeping policemen. I enjoyed Latour’s approach but I didn’t have as much of an appreciation of the pairing with the Nintendo Wii, mainly because it is a marginal technology (particularly for me). As such it is challenging to get on board with a detailed argument that infers it with power in everyday life. What about all of the other technologies guiding our daily lives inside and outside of the home? As Latour himself notes, in his defence of nonhuman actors, we are “constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance”(159)?

Latour could perhaps have been paired with a more relevant technology- perhaps Google Maps. We delegate the directions in which we move every day to be dictated to us by a non human actor. Here, the prescription could be the inputting of departure and arrival destinations, the subscription can be changing a route you might usually take because the application suggests a faster one, the pre-inscription would be that you as the user are expected to be able to navigate, to follow the route, the circumscription would be that the application can only give you instructions for routes that are featured in its database. The conscription could be your capacity for mobility in acordance with the instructions (ie, able to walk physically, able to afford transport costs financially, have the skills to drive a car). And if the device you are using the application on changes- for example say it loses internet connectivity- your guides/routes can no longer be updated with real time information concerning traffic delays so you accept the prescription changes to an approximate route, rather than an exact route for you to take.

In Latour’s vision it can feel difficult to know where we end and where technology begins, after all there is no clear distinction between non humans and humans! The difference is only in figurative action!

If there is a symmetry of agency between humans and technology, does that mean we want the same things? Or that we act in the same way? We both want to get from point A to point B in the most efficient manner possible. If attributing human or non human roles and actions is in itself a choice (160) does that mean that these roles are arbitrary? And therefore who is to say whether the navigator is the programmed guide in my phone speaking softly or is the navigator infact me choosing to follow the application’s choice of best route?

Perhaps we should be favouring a fluid approach to all this in the same way we have considered gender as a spectrum and not as a binary. After all these machines exist in a social shaped environment too, which is reinforced every time we delegate more work to them. When Latour states “The distinctions between humans and nonhumans, embodied or disembodied skills, impersonation or “machination”, are less interesting that the complete chain along which competences and actions” (165) we can infer that these boundaries are not distinct, but instead are blurred.

To bring it back to the class pairing who is to say if Wii – as a technology to which my staying fit and healthy has been delegated by the state- is more nefarious than my bike or the friendly fitness instructor at the YMCA?

Whether you think that this is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ is dependant on which technology it is being applied to; and to a degree, on your own political or ideological beliefs. If you belief that the state can or should play a role in promoting or protecting well being of citizens then this could be fantastic. If, however, you espouse a more libertarian point of view more sinister overtones may emerge.

Perhaps when the thing itself acts and the actor is the network, and all of our human actions are recorded and used to inform the nonhuman actions then we become obliged to reconsider our human agency in regards to decision making… because while I am happy to receive guidance and aid, perhaps even protection, from nonhuman actors, I do not really want them to make decisions on my behalf…

Works Cited
Latour, B. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 225–258).
Millington, B. (2009). Wii has never been modern: “active” video games and the “conduct of conduct.” New Media & Society, 11(4), 621–640. doi:10.1177/1461444809102966.

Judy Wajcman and Hackerspaces

Video teaser: Great Minds – Ada Lovelace!
Why is this here? Ada Lovelace was largely written out of history for many years. Today she is gaining increased prominence, often being referred to as ‘the world’s first computer programmer’. Could her new found popularity be due to the confluent rise of women in technology initiatives?

Thoughts: Viewing gender as a construct used to organize society isn’t really an issue for me given it’s a belief I share, but how do we relate this to technology?

Judy Wajcman’s ‘From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience’ is an engaging read and useful overview. Pairing it with the insights into Hackerspaces shared by guest speaker Cristina Haralanova served to anchor Wajcman in a proximate reality through the focal point of Montreal’s hackerspace Foulab. Thinking about hackerspaces as technocultural spaces, the specificity of ‘geek’ culture and closed communities helps us to consider the gender shaping of technology in an everyday way.

Gender isnt a binary, it’s a spectrum. And the way we construct it leads to exclusion. When we perpetuate gender stereotypes we shape our society and then we build them into things but because only some groups are building or ‘shaping’- other groups are being excluded. This is applicable to all realms of life, the emphasis here, of course, is the social shaping of technology.

Technology doesn’t just represent us, it also conditions our ways of doing and of being. So when we perpetuate gender stereotypes in toys where boys build and girls care we instruct children that these are the modes in which they must act and enact their being. When we take this to the level of technology, and more specifically ICT the dominant modes of creation wherein boys learn to build allows them as they grow up to learn to program and code; whereas girls who learn to care are only allowed to watch and observe. Never acting, only enacting.

Using technology effectively demands a certain skillbase. Because of that those who have access to certain monopolies of knowledge can be ‘in’ but those who cannot are ‘out’. The slogan ‘if you can’t open it you don’t own it’ underscores this system of exclusion.

Wajcman’s definition of technology as a web or network which combines artifacts, people, organisations, cultural meanings, and knowledge, while being social and technical all at once, is inherently relevant and highly resonant in today’s blurred intermedial landscape. And it’s an awful lot more accessible than Haraway’s deconstructions.

One of the points raised by Cristina that I found most engaging when she highlighted that the ‘lack of women in technology’ is in many ways a Western perspective. The statistics she cited to prove can seem surprising: in Kuala Lumpur 65 % of computer science students are women, whereas in Quebec only 25 % of computer sciences students are women. This is a fascinating real -world concrete example of how we construct and enforce gender norms- there is no essentialist reason there are less women in technology.

So is cyberfeminism the answer? Can we be freed from the patriarchy by digital technologies? YES! but not if we can’t use them. If we do learn how to ‘open’ or at the very least operate them, women can re write and re wire technology to undermine and deconstruct their gender biases. It’s through education that things will change- not just theorisation! By endowing women with the concrete skills needed to intervene on the network; and by creating the technological space in which young girls can develop the cognitive capacities to imagine and build new digital technologies. Hackerspaces may have been the key sites for the development of the attitude that everyone can deconstruct and repurpose technology, but they remain exclusionary. Initiatives such as Ladies Learning Code, run by women and open to everyone, aim to spread the same message. By explicitly addressing gender and education in their name and raison d’etre they tackle issues of exclusion and monopolies of knowledge head on. As this type of initiative develops it is time to acknowledge that gender constructs hold us all back, and encoding these constructs into technology- whether that be in video games, childrens’ toys, or the overrepresentation of ‘male’ subcultures on wikipedia- is hurting us all. So it’s time to learn to code- oh Brave New World!

Works Cited
Wajcman, J. (2007). From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience. Information, Communication & Society, 10(3), 287–298. doi:10.1080/13691180701409770
Haralanova, C. and Megelas, A. Foulab Montreal HackerSpace: A Place to Meet, Learn, and Do-It-Yourself.

Mobile Phones & Donna Haraway

Video teaser: Google Glass demo (quite possibly imagined)
Why is this here? Will the rise in wearable tech make us all cyborgs? What will we do with this power? This video demo of a day with Google Glass doesn’t really espouse a ‘revolutionary transformation’ attitude. This dude basically uses them in the same way he could also use a smart phone. And there is certainly no hint of a post gender world evident here.

Thoughts

I have worked in a job where I became a slave to my smart phone. It may have been an Iphone as opposed to a Blackberry; but it still had a disproportionate control over my life. What do I mean by that? Well my ‘office’, as in working space, or place of employment, had no boundaries, my working day did not begin or end when I entered a building. But by accepting to work in the environment I did, I had already accepted those terms. Yet the technology was both friend and foe. I could leave the office and still be there. But while that brings freedom, it also brings imprisonment. The phone was an extension of my self. Does this mean I was a cyborg? I’m not convinced it does, or that it does not, or whether there is a connection that is applicable here at all.

There’s a lot to do with gender here before we even get to Donna Haraway. Many working women (and men) will argue that these tools enable them to work remotely and thereby facilitate work life balance. Others will argue that they allow professional concerns to encroach on personal time. Enslavement versus empowerment: the machine can facilitate either approach. Is that the heart of all this? Is what we believe about gender binaries and roles and the public/private sphere more important than the actual technological object? I think so. Because when people generally discuss the ‘freeing’ nature of the smart phone in the professional sense it’s generally wrapped up in a ‘isn’t it great that women – who are mothers and carers- can now still have a career, and compete with the boys’ attitude. This type of statement and belief maintains and compounds gender binaries, as opposed to dismantling them. The woman is still first and foremost mother and carer, now its just easier for her to manage all her roles thanks to technology!

Emerging technologies have always had an effect on the manner in which work is organized and the tools used for it; if that wasn’t the case neither the industrial revolution, nor Fordism would have happened. Perhaps Taylorism gives us the best comparison because what we are talking about is the development of new work practices using the best methods and tools available in order to optimize efficiency. Catherine Middleton’s article ‘Illusions of Balance and Control in an Always-on Environment: a case study of BlackBerry Users’ is a well written, engaging and accessible piece on these issues. I enjoyed reading it because while her research was carried out in 2007, I felt personally familiar with the statements made by her respondents. While of course we each have some degree of control over the devices in our lives, I do think that these technologies nonetheless foster an ‘always on’ mentality; and as such legislation to protect workers from requirements of constant connectivity should be developed.

And now to Donna Haraway…
I am a feminist and to be perfectly honest sometimes I feel that pieces such as The Cyborg Manifesto make it harder to convince and persuade people that if they believe in equality between men and women they are feminists. So much of the work of everyday feminism is just that. And we’re not just trying to smash the patriarchy; we’re also smashing binaries and boundaries everywhere too. So Donna Haraway’s Cyborg should be my friend, after all she is against all these constructions and false boundaries. But: she’s against identity politics and that’s pretty problematic for me because as an actual woman who is busy being in the actual world I have to deal with the patriarchy and the constraints it places on my existence everyday and just denying it hasn’t made it go away yet.

Another reaction I had in response to The Cyborg Manifesto was sadness. Because too often today we are reminded that recent technological advances and the ensuing blurring of boundaries is not always or uniquely a force for good. Blurred boundaries between the public and private sphere aren’t necessarily ‘freeing’; often they have led to an an anarchic culture of ‘freedom’ where no rules apply, one result of this has been an outpouring of vicious misogyny, most readily observable in ‘trolling’.

In addition, the cyborg isn’t as free from constructed boundaries as Haraway dreamed it might be. Because by rooting her cyborg in a techno utopian post gender future she herself constructed boundaries around it.

Personally, I don’t want to be a cyborg or a goddess. Neither reflect my experience as a woman, being in the world, as I feel I am everyday. They carry with them connotations not quite as pervasive as typical gender stereotyping but pervasive nonetheless. Haraway’s cyborg, designed to deconstruct boundaries which have been artificially constructed , is in fact too rooted in discourse of techno-utopianism to be non-gendered. And of course there is a role of irony and myth and allegory, I simply don’t want that role to interfere with the trying to break actual boundaries.

Feminism, like so many other movements, has been subject to its fair share of divisions; divisions that endanger the movement, divisions that do us all a disservice. I would like a movement, where goddesses and cyborgs and real life women stand hand in hand on the barricades, which now so often built of code.

Works Cited

Harraway, D. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”. Socialist Review 80 (1985), 65-108.

Middleton, C. “Illusions of Balance and Control in an Always-on Environment: a case study of BlackBerry Users.” Continuum 21.2 (2007), 165-178.

mp3s, Microsoft Word & Friedrich Kittler

Video teaser: Microsoft word 2010 business letter writing guide!

Why is this here? This tutorial, one of many of a similar ilk to be found on YouTube, provides an interesting insight to the transmission of conventional formatting and “proper” approach to communication, which are obviously part of a very specific discourse. This one is particularly amusing given it suggests that a 12 year old Justin Bieber fan would want to draft a business letter as fan mail. An individual of that demographic is very much a digital native and formal letter writing in this style is likely quite removed from the method and medium they might choose themselves to communicate with their celebrity idol.

Thoughts
Kittler’s Afterword to the Second Printing isn’t the most accessible piece of academic prose I have ever come across, by a long shot. However, the interplay between this week’s theory and things was engaging.

Let’s lay down the definitions we are going to work with here: Kittler outlines a discourse network as a network which enables us to “select, store, and process relevant data” (369). Sterne, referencing Zoe Sofia, emphasizes that the container technology is used to store data and its attributes are analogous to that of an apparatus or utensil (827).

Kittler’s ‘discourse network’ concept is an eminently useful one; particularly when applied to technological objects. However, I think that it is in its juxtaposition with the concept of the ‘container technology’, originally conceived of by Lewis Mumford, and as outlined by Jonathan Sterne in The mp3 as cultural artifact, that the discourse network takes on formidable relevance to our lives today.

That may seem like a far reaching claim, but if we stop to consider that almost all of the media and technology objects we interact with on a daily basis could be categorized as container technologies, and I believe they can be, because the information society privileges and fetishes objects which store, or, contain information, we must consider what then happens to that information. We try to access it. Its hard to conceive of an object where it just remains stagnant, or locked up. Sterne elaborates on Mumford and Sofia’s thought on container technologies that transform (828), but he does so without drawing upon discourse as an additional explanatory tool. I think that’s a mistake.

If we apply the concept of the discourse network to these same container technologies some intriguing aspects begin to emanate from the overlap. The discourse network is the key to access. If a discourse network is defined by its ability to select and process data, then it follows that they are networks that have transformative power, because they enable information (data) to be accessed, by transforming it, or making it readable/viewable/listenable etc. Indeed in more advanced or complex discourse networks there is no doubt also an issue of interpretation of data.

Let’s apply this to a different object from the MP3 or Microsoft Word. Consider a USB stick. It’s a container technology which stores my data. Alone, it can’t select or process but when it is plugged into another piece of technology it becomes a discourse network because it provides me with my data in a readable format because it selects and process the files, ordering them alphabetically, and applying various other bits of code that make up the internal architecture of the USB key so that I can access it. Its capacity to do that is integral to its very being. But it needs to be connected to something else to become a discourse network: the computer which reads it is a transformative discourse network. Perhaps more explicit categorization such as this would enhance the understanding or applicability of these concepts. Other objects I think the same arguments can be made for, include printers and computers; privilege cards with points for shops; and libraries. They are all both containers and discourse networks: the key is that interaction is needed to access the data. That interaction is with other technological objects and with people manipulating the objects! The data and inherent meaning only becomes readable and worthwhile when someone interacts with and interprets it: when they process it! So, perhaps we, as human beings, are discourse networks ourselves…

Now let’s talk gender! Sterne touches upon the gender coding of container technologies. I found this aspect of the reading somewhat problematic because if we accept that container technologies have been gendered as feminine because they are utilities and are designed to be unobtrusive (827) we are accepting troubling and toxic gender stereotyping; and furthering it by including it in our discourse surrounding technology. Sterne acknowledges gender coding is outdated however he still uses it as an analytical tool. I don’t necessarily disagree that it does convey an explanation as to how certain technologies are neglected in favor of others, but use of this approach should be accompanied by a condemnation of the biases inherent within the practice.

Works cited

Kitter, F. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Sterne, J. ‘The mp3 as cultural artifact.’ New Media & Society, (2006) Vol 8 (5): 825-842. Web.

 

Spam & Martin Heidegger

Video Teaser: Monty Python’s Spam Sketch (1970)
Why is this here? Spam is one of Monty Python’s most famous sketches; and though funny on its own merits, the term ‘spam’ as we understand it in regards to internet communication comes from this sketch. Also, did I mention its hilarious? It is. Especially after you’ve read a lot of Heidegger.

Thoughts
What is the relationship between Heidegger, his thoughts on technology and spam? I missed the main class on this, however ensuing discussions in subsequent classes and outside of them, as well as reading and research have helped slightly elucidate the interplay here, though not very much. Enframing and revealing and concealing are all fine and dandy; but how does any of this relate to our understanding of how we conceive of spam? Gordon Brown once offered me a million pounds sterling- should I have printed the email and (en)framed it?! More seriously though, the introduction to Finn Brunton’s history of spam is not only an engaging read but also an, invitation to understand the essence of spam, which he reveals to be “the project of leveraging information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention.” (4) Following this definition, we should understand that spam has to exploit external resources to exist- it can’t be in and of itself.

We are conditioned by the technology that is all around us, that we fail to recognize or even see. What’s the modern day equivalent of Heidegger’s hammer… The internet? After all it is a tool that it necessary for a significant portion of the global population to work. It does enframe our existence today. Is the idea that spam is this too?

Ok, now let’s talk about the standing reserve, or what I understand it to be. Everything has an untapped, unexploited potential– and once that potential has been exploited nothing can ever be what it was before, it has been transformed. As Finn Brunton explained so succinctly, spam is created by our actions on the internet, it exploits the untapped potential of our online behavior – our standing reserve- so in this way ‘we’- our behavior and our technology- are the standing reserve of spam… I can just about see how this connects, but I don’t really see the value of this understanding. The aspect of it that does interest me is more related to services that overtly and successfully make profits from our unknowing provision of free labour on the internet. In this a useful further theorist to reference is Marc Andrejevic and his ‘digital enclosure’ where every action and transactions generates information. (2007, 2). I don’t think spam successfully generates value as much as other exploitative yet ‘socially acceptable’ presences on the internet…

All these thoughts combined reminded me of the re-captcha project. Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of ‘captchas’ which were designed to prevent spam programs from accessing sites, developed re-captcha in order to make the act of filling out a captcha ‘useful’: when you fill out a re-captcha you are contributing to the digitization of books, over 100 million words a day are digitized in this way which adds up to over 2 and a half million books a year. Now that’s a lot of books. And Google now owns re-captcha; which means that the digitized books belong to google…Here, a significant amount of free labor is being used in a process that ultimately will bear a profit for google. Labour is the standing reserve, we are unaware that the act of filling out the re-captcha plays any role other than one of allowing us to access whatever site we are trying to at that moment, but our act is part of a much larger process. Von Ahn’s latest project poses even more of a problem in this regard: Duolingo aims to translate the internet for free- by helping people learn languages by translating sentences- in his Ted Talk about this, Von Ahn extols the virtues of how this could never be done by paying professional translators- it would simply be too expensive, and that his new service provides a new ‘a fair business model for education’, yet at no time does he acknowledge that this is an overt case of free labor and exploitation in the digital economy. To return to Heidegger once again, here knowledge of a language could be seen as a standing reserve, we are transformed by the act of translating for free, because we are now learning a new language, our knowledge of languages is transformed forever, and we have given up labor for free, without even realizing… As Finn Brunton says of the unwitting residents of the Pitcairn islands and their role in the creation of spam; here too we have been “unknowingly conscripted”. (1)

While of course I value the act of questioning our ways of thinking, and our ways of being, I must admit that I have wondered, in the context of these readings, whether within the context of this course which aims to ‘reveali’ the relationships between theories and things; are we the students of the class, the standing reserve for the course?! But then that really does seem a bit far fetched…

Works Cited
Andrejevic, Marc. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007.
Brunton, F. Spam: A Shadow history of the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology 1950. http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Technology.html

 

My BitCoin and Harold Innis

Video teaser: What is BitCoin? Video guide

Why is this here: This snappy and short introduction to BitCoin is an insightful guide, not only to how BitCoin works; but also to the discourse surrounding the “decentralized digital currency”. The short video manages to convey several popular and pervasive attitudes today: banks and centralized authority are framed negatively, as are ‘arbitrary’ limits. The most striking example of this is the astonishing statement that “When everyone has access to the global market, great ideas flourish”… Is this a case of neoliberal economic theory is dressed up in faux egalitarian rhetoric?

Thoughts
Pairing BitCoin with Harold Innis’ ‘The Penetrative Powers of the Price System’ was certainly an intriguing way to start the course as, at a first glance, and after some, albeit cursory, analysis, the relationship between the two did not appear particularly clear to me.

Yet on closer reflection some parallels emerge.

Let’s start by considering value. Innis believes that those who have power attribute value: that has not changed with BitCoin. The same principles apply. In popular discourse BitCoin has been referred to as gold 2.0 While that may be a snazzy soundbite, it points to several interesting dynamics surrounding the crypto-currency: first of all, the physicality of actual gold was based on its existence as a finite physical resource, this also applies to BitCoins there is a finite overall amount of them. Both are mined, though mining gold 1.0 required physical labor whereas mining gold 2.0 requires a powerful computer. And, both accrue value when price is affixed to them by a system of speculation. Here, however I would argue the similarities cease, because as securities and stock exchanges developed regulation also developed to balance the system. The extent or form of that regulation is related to ideology and belief systems, it mutates depending on place and time, but nonetheless it remains a primary reason why people trust the system. There is no reason to trust BitCoins more than the ‘conventional’ or ‘established’ currency system; in fact I would argue that there are more reasons to distrust it.

Innis’ concluding remarks in this piece note the “effectiveness of the price system” in driving societal change, he ties it to the decline of feudalism, and to the rise of ‘neotechnic capitalism’. Does it follow then that BitCoin is another expression of what could be construed as a teleological narrative? If we consider BitCoin as a threat to the current currency system, does it follow that it is creating a new and better system? Is this being driven by the price system? How could BitCoin fit into Innis’ model? I’m not convinced that he would believe that this algorthim based, decentralized ‘value’ system really is a currency, because despite its increasing popularity, it hasn’t had the power of a nation state affixed to it.

I consider the most intriguing aspect of BitCoin to be the challenge it presents to the current currency system, which is in effect a challenge to the State and its concordant financial institutions. Currencies, as we know them, exist as a tool of the nation state unit in its traditional form. But the world is changing. The primacy of the nation state is no longer what it was; its nature has been challenged by the development of global institutions of both political and economic character, as well as both public and private. Both the European Union and Goldman Sachs, though different in aim, identity, and form, could be considered examples of this. So is the development of BitCoin symptomatic of the breakdown of currency as a nation state centric model? Is one further result of globalization?

BitCoin exists outside of the regulatory system and we simply have no way of knowing what BitCoin’s overall aim is; does it in fact seek to replace and subsume all currencies? The notion of a crypto-currency which is anonymous and non-dependent on conventional financial infrastructure is wrapped up in an anti-politics, anti-state bias; which would be fair enough if it wasn’t for the fact that it is not actually subverting capitalism. It’s ‘anti-capitalist’ veneer is misleading. It is profoundly and inherently capitalist in nature. It elevates speculation as an activity to a point where it is something of worth and value in itself. The only other institutions that do that are stock exchanges. And while speculative capitalism is not an ideology I espouse, or find worthy of merit, at least there is a system of rules and regulation. With BitCoin there is not even that security.

This is a source of some concern and frustration to me. That people are more readily willing to engage with an ‘outlaw’ currency created by a mysterious, pseudonymous figure is perhaps an indicator that representative democracy and its financial and economic institutional systems are in a more profound and entrenched crisis than we are willing to admit. There is no guarantee that BitCoin has anyone’s interests at heart, or indeed even that its ideology will remain what it is today. As a private institution it can change, dismantle or disappear whenever it so chooses. In a democracy however, citizens can vote a government out of office. As the government has a role in selecting and appointing the heads of financial institutions (Central Banks, Federal Reserves etc) citizens therefore have some form of role or say in who leads the financial institutions. One could argue that that role has been betrayed repeatedly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as evidenced by the continued onslaught of financial crises and crashes, whose true victims are often people whose lives and financial transactions are far removed from Wall Street, and other stock exchanges. Nevertheless the salient point remains, that a system challenging the status quo whilst refusing to reveal its identity, is not to be trusted. Arguably, BitCoin’s growing popularity with the broader public is less based on its anti-system ethos and more on its appeal as a get rich quick scheme. Here too, though we quickly encounter a further dilemma: it is considerably easier to lose your money within the BitCoin system, a point which may only be becoming clear gradually. It was forcefully illustrated this week when a cyber-attack spammed BitCoin servers . Now, of course a proponent of the crypto- currency could argue that the same thing happens in conventional trading of commodities; and currencies themselves can collapse, yet while this is true, such an argumentation only serves to highlight that more than anything else BitCoin is essentially, a venture capitalist operation. It may be a participative one, open to all, but it is still part of a system which privileges people within the same monopoly of knowledge. It doesn’t challenge capitalism, its merely a mutation within the system that will ultimately most likely enable the same groups who most profit now, continue to do so.

Work cited
Innis, H.A. “The penetrative powers of the price system.” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4.3 (1938) 299-319.