Blog comments

Hey guys. Here's a list of the dates of my blog entries with the names of who commented on each one. A little last minute, but I hope it helps.

1/27

Chinchin, Lindsay

2/4

Su, Goli, Katie

2/15

David, Blake, Jennie

2/27

Su, Anthony, Nathaniel, Goli, David

3/6

Nathaniel, Goli, Anthony

3/9

David, Goli, Jenna

3/21

Jennie, Goli, Blake

4/2

Katie

4/9

Jennie, Anthony, Blake

4/14

Chinchin, Anthony, Goli

4/23

Anthony

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

I used to believe that my online correspondences were fully confidential. I could type an email or post a thread on Facebook free of the bothersome thought that it might get read by someone apart from whom it was intended. Perhaps unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Though I still have no idea how digital surveillance works, this class has made me much more aware of its prevalence and its implications for the privacy of our digital interactions.

In truth, the thought of Mark Zuckerberg reading over my shoulder doesn't really bother me. Nor does the notion that the folks at Google might be using the GPS in my Droid to track my every move. These are people I will in all likelihood never meet. But what does cause me a considerable amount of low-level anxiety is the thought of people I actually care about learning things about me I'd rather they not. I'm the type to put a lot of thought into what I write -- papers, emails, text messages you name it. I am fond of the delusion that when I sit down to write something, I can write it in such a way that will leave no doubt as to its meaning. This stems from a certain irrational fear of being misunderstood that has been with me since I was a kid. The thought of someone forming an 'erroneous' impression based on a 'misinterpretation' of something I've written used to cause me all kinds of stress. Even today, if I by chance stumble upon something I wrote that doesn't quite convey what I originally thought it would, I experience discomfort. I want to grab it and tear it to pieces. But I can't, because it's all online and it's never going to go away. Ever. There is simply no way around the deepening of our digital footprints.

The point of all this is simply to say that recent advancements in digital technologies have made 'impression management' somewhat more difficult than it used to be. In school, we're taught to get to know our audience before we sit down to compose. But while we're given plenty of opportunities to write for an audience of, ahem, one, we receive proportionately fewer opportunities to expose our writing to the 'everybody' of the Internet. As we all know from reading Brown, digital audiences cannot be defined by any sort of limit, because anyone and everyone uses the Internet. Never mind talk of the digital divide; the chances of you being able to predict with absolute certainty who will be viewing your party cup pictures on Facebook are about as close to zero as a percentage can get.

For a person with a deep-seated fear of misinterpretation, this is a scary, scary thought. But I am happy to report that after taking this class, I am somewhat more resigned to being misunderstood than I was just a few months ago. I've learned that what's great about the Internet is that it takes existing realities and places them under the microscope, magnifying them to the point of visibility. The ugly little skeletons in our digital closets are a constant reminder that, for all our efforts, impression management is futile. Offline, it's the same thing... all the time, we say and do things that create fissures in our ego shells, exposing the limits of our self-constructed identities. Thing is, we don't notice when there's no record. In keeping a record, the Internet laughs in our face.

The 'problem' is not that we misinterpret... rather, it's that no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot resist the urge to interpret, to assign meaning, to fully understand. So we take lots of shots, and sometimes we shoot a pretty poor percentage. But when we're on, the sharing and communication that result is often magic.

Ode to Elftown

Elftown is a SNS for fantasy enthusiasts. It's a wiki, meaning users can create their own pages and, to a lesser extent, edit the pages of others. This technology allows users -- or 'Elftowners,' as they're called -- an unusual degree of creative control over the 'look and feel' of their site. Opportunities for expression are legion -- via simple manipulations of an easy-to-understand pseudo-HTML design script, Elftowners can create pages for practically any purpose and embed texts, paintings, and graphic designs into the shared environment with ease. There is a team of administrators called the Elftown Council that have the power to remove uploads and even suspend accounts, but from what I can tell, this power is rarely if ever abused. Rather, council members seem content to stay within the bounds of their prescribed duties, trolling the site for copyright violations and breaches of the Elftown obscenity policy and occasionally performing a little bit of maintenance. Their exclusive curatorial access to the site's most heavily trafficked pages allows them to feature the work of users that otherwise wouldn't get much exposure, adding a cultural incentive to council participation. Anyone may 'run' for a council position -- although in truth, it helps to have friends in high places if you want to get in.

So Elftown is one of those online environments where, in theory, anything goes -- although in practice, the prevailing interest in fantasy and sci-fi and the surprising abundance of parents on the site do place some restrictions on what passes as acceptable speech, behavior, and conduct. Nevertheless, the site's DIY sensibility has appealed to a large number of would-be artists, making the Elftown community one that places a high premium on individual expression. People on Elftown like to like to create their own fun; rather than waste hours on Farmville or some other third-party application developed for a secure content site, they'd prefer to waste hours immersed in an interactive text-based role playing game or critiquing their friend's latest comic. In order to play, one must be willing to put themselves out there. It takes assertiveness; one has to feel comfortable in the identity s/he has created for her/himself. What's needed, then, is for people to play nice enough to where others won't feel threatened -- in effect, a tolerant community ethos.

After having spent some time living among the the people of Elftown, I must say I've come to appreciate the community's dedication to diversity. They revel in a technology that minimizes the degrees of hierarchical separation from one user to the next and makes equal access to the community and its culture for all not a pipe dream, but a fact. It is true that the majority of what goes on in Elftown is classifiably stupid. People there dally away God knows how much time rendering sexy portraits of pin-up anime nymphs to hang next to their profile pictures and blowing each other to smithereens with torrents of chatspeak, to name but two of the more popular pastimes I observed there.

But the silliness of it all shouldn't distract from the site's potential as a model for other online community projects. I'm reminded of Jenkins. Imagine, for instance, a social networking wiki similarly devoted to individual expression with a larger goal, such as creating political dialogue or developing funds and resources for an important cause. Is this sort of thing even possible, or would the degree of organization required in pursuing a cause make participation ultimately a matter of rank? Could it be that fully collaborative online environments like Elftown are simply not the best places for serious, purposeful discussions?

Thinking about Davidson and rules of response

As I was reading through Davidson's blog posts, a single objection to her proposal for a more peer-to-peer- oriented student evaluation system popped into my head (for the record, I think it's a great idea)... giving students the power to assess their peers' work and have their work assessed by peers is great and all, but what good does it do the student in terms of feedback and suggestions for growth? As we discussed in class, students tend to put a higher premium on being nice than on being critical. We simply do our best not to get in each others' ways. An instructor following Davidson's suggestions could do a number of things to override this tendency and get his or her students to actually start thinking/reading/responding critically -- they could get the students to sign a contract explaining what kind of evaluation is expected; they could actually grade the students on their grading (not sure if this would defeat the point, but as it turns out it's kind of hard to get away from the whole grades thing); they could even simply devote a good chunk of time to hammering out the importance of proper critical evaluation in class. But would any of these measures actually get the majority of students to care about the quality of their participation in the evaluative process?

It's hard to say, and I guess we won't really know until this method of evaluation starts to catch on. But I have faith that, if more instructors were to borrow from Davidson's approach and start looking for ways to incorporate students in assessments of quality of work, it would gradually lead to a shift in the way students' conceive of their roles vis-a-vis their peers. As Davidson says:

"[V]ery little in our society prepares us for responsible and responsive exchange. Typically, we learn how to please a figure in power. We do not practice or learn principles for helping one another through an iterative, interactive process."

When one person or a small group has exclusive, monopolistic control over what counts as good or acceptable (and, by extension, who gets more pie), then they are the only ones anyone need bother to please or appeal to. These are the rules of authority. And we live in a society where authority and its corresponding notions of the inviolability of expertise are hardwired into practically everything we do. But as Davidson and others have pointed out, the Internet has exposed the limits of expert authority -- and correspondingly, it has foregrounded the importance of sharing and collaboration for building quality bodies of knowledge.

The niceness and deference we regularly accord each other when asked to review our peers' work is simply our learned, conditioned response to the evaluative situation. But there is a difference between niceness and deference; and I think that, whereas we're going to continue needing the former (obviously), the latter simply needs to go. Automatically deferring to the quality of a piece for whatever reason is in reality a deference to the author and a cutting off of the critical impulse, which is simply to respond. The classroom would indeed be a great place to start tweaking these conditioned, deferential responses and adapting them to the current reality.

So what do y'all think? Would a method of collaborative grade evaluation like the one proposed by Davidson really get us to change the way we conceive of our roles as peer reviewers, or would it simply have the effect of reinforcing old hierarchies and modes of response?

Fantasies

One of the more interesting questions raised by EXistenZ is that of free will: to what extent are our actions, thoughts, feelings, and aspirations original to us, and to what extent are they constructed by external forces? In the movie, Pikul poses this same question in so many words while he and Allegra are in the world of the game. Forced to grapple with the uncomfortable feeling that they are being propelled along by an arbitrary external will, unable to choose their own responses to the events unfolding around them, Pikul complains:

Ted: "We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistant, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."

Allegra: "That sounds like my game, alright."

Ted: "That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market."

Allegra: "But it's a game everybody's already playing."

The "unformed world" of the game is, according to the dialogue, not so different from the "unformed world" of existence. Most games are escapes: aesthetically, they simulate worlds, roles, and situations that are obviously imaginary or 'unreal,' and, in terms of their design, contain clear, easy-to-understand rules and objectives that allow the player to feel in control. Free will is very much apparent in single-player adventure games and RPGs -- there are rules and limits, sure, but ultimately, players are allowed to do as they wish, imposing their will on a responsive but passive environment. I remember being blown away by Super Mario 64 (1996), the first fully three-dimensional platformer and one of the first fully three-dimensional games; unlike in two-dimensional platformers, Super Mario players could veer off course and go exploring, spending hours away from the objectives of the game and building objectives of their own. In essence, Super Mario 64 was a groundbreaking fantasy of empowerment, uniquely suited to its time.

What's ironic about EXistenZ is that Allegra Geller has designed a game that is as unnervingly unlike a game as possible. The fantasies of empowerment are swift and fleeting because consequences are always close behind. In Grand Theft Auto, there are no 'real' or significant consequences for killing a cop. Sure, you'll have the entire police force hunting you down, but the worst they can do is kill you and give you a chance to re-spawn and start over. In EXistenZ, Pikul may have enjoyed killing the Chinese waiter, but in so doing he unleashes a chain of events over which he has no control. He cannot see what's coming next, and this causes him some serious existential angst. His complaint, then, is one stemming from feelings of disempowerment -- aren't games, after all, supposed to give us more control and more free will?

The answer is yes, but the funny thing is most of us don't see it that way. We maintain the fantasy that we're pretty much in complete control of our lives -- when we're happy, at least. Questioning this basic tenet of existence leads one down some pretty nasty thought tunnels. So we keep up the fantasy as much as possible. The virtual identities we construct online in digital spaces such as Facebook and World of Warcraft are extensions of this fantasy. They give us the power to conduct 'impression management' and control how the world responds to us as individuals. But ironically, as our technological capabilities catch up with our desire to be whomever we want to be, these identities will inevitably become more fully realized -- more real to us; and perhaps, for that very reason, less satisfying. Our various identities are only becoming more integrated; and the closer our avatars and our SNS profiles get to exposing things about us that we'd rather see left out of the fantasy, the more will we feel disempowered. It will be interesting to watch as these new identities begin to 'bleed through' into the real world, putting us in the uncomfortable position of having to determine our 'real' identities from those that may merely be 'fake' or 'manufactured.'

Ultimately, the lesson here as I see it is that any attempt to fragment existence between 'real' and 'not real' serves the purpose of making us feel better about the fact that there is much in life we can't control. But that's life. There is such a thing as reality -- it simply encompasses all those things we would prefer not to think of as reality, too. And it shouldn't be forgotten that at the end of the day, we do have control over some things. The decision to go online and build an entirely new identity is, after all, a choice -- an imposition of our wills on reality.

S/R 3: EXistenZ

S/R 3: EXistenZ

EXistenZ (1999) is a sci-fi film written and directed by David Cronenberg that explores the limits of how we view reality. Based in a future where ordinary people divide their time between ‘reality’ and astonishingly realistic VR game worlds, it opens with the unveiling of eXistenZ — the latest creation by brilliant game designer Allegra Geller — before a specially selected focus group gathered in a country church. EXistenZ, like other VR games, is accessible via organic “game pods” constructed from bits and pieces of farm-raised amphibious mutants, or “trout.” To experience the game, the gamer must ‘plug’ the pod into his or her “bioport,” a surgical hole at the base of the spinal cord. Once the pod is inserted, the game will begin, constructing a fully immersive virtual world complete with sensations, characters, morals, motives, and choices from the collective thoughts, emotions, fears, and aspirations of the participants. As the group prepares to ‘enter’ eXistenZ, an attempt on Geller’s life by a fanatical assassin acting in the name of “the one true reality” thrusts the designer into the ‘protective’ custody of nervous PR intern Ted Pikul. With Pikul, Geller spends the remainder of the movie on the run, trying to learn the identities of those responsible for the conspiracy against her life. Their search for answers leads them in and out of eXistenZ, where they quickly become embroiled in a ‘virtual’ version of the very conspiracy they have been trying to uncover, eventually losing all sense of where the ‘virtual’ world of eXistenZ ends and the ‘real’ world of existence begins. In the final scene, they appear back at the church, and it is ‘revealed’ that they have been in another game the entire time — this once called tranCendenZ — that neither one of them is actually a famous designer — and finally, that they themselves are the very assassins they’d been trying to catch.

One of the more interesting themes in EXistenZ is that of violence. I never was particularly convinced by arguments suggesting a link between video games and violent behavior; it always seemed to me that the gulf between the world of the game and reality was too great to result in any confusion over the distinction between gunning down cops in Grand Theft Auto and firing an actual weapon at an actual flesh-and-blood person. But Cronenberg’s film presents a very different picture of the distinction — or lack thereof — beween virtual and ‘actual’ violence. Throughout, violent actions are portrayed in an exaggerated, cartoonish fashion, presumably in an attempt to emulate the over-the-top, cartoon violence of video games and low-budget sci-fi movies. While initially comical, these cartoon portrayals become gradually more disturbing as the movie progresses and the characters become increasingly unsure of what’s ‘real’ and what’s not. Pikul makes the first kill, dispatching Gas at the filling station as he is about to kill Geller. We assume, at this point, that he is not in the game — that he is, in fact, in ‘reality’ and that he just did, in fact, kill a ‘real’ person. But ironically, even though Pikul’s next kill — the Chinese waiter — is a character in the game, his death is easily the goriest and most disturbing in the film. We feel more for him than we do for Gas, as his death makes considerably less sense. By leaving us with no perceptible distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ and forcing us to witness acts of violence that could belong to either category, Cronenberg effectively turns our fascination with ‘virtual’ violence around on us with an emphatic twist, reminding us that what’s ‘virtual’ and what’s ‘real’ might not be so different after all.

getting to know the cyberhood

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before ... You can see homophily online and you can see the ways in which people who share physical space do not share emotional connections."

Boyd suggests that, by simply going online and having a look around, we can become more aware of how social stratification really works. This is both sad and encouraging. It is sad that more of us aren't using SNSs like facebook to meet new people from different backgrounds. I for one followed the script described by Boyd pretty closely; as a teenager, I defected from myspace because my sister was in college and she and all her friends were on facebook. And since then, I've pretty much exclusively friended people from my offline network. The potential to reach out to a stranger on the basis of a shared interest or to go rub elbows with my old myspace buddies is always there, but the force of habit is strong.

The suggestion that looking online can help us see things we may have formerly missed is encouraging because it might offer a way out of this dilemma. There is apparently a lot going on online that most of us flat out miss. Like bona fide digital stratification. Being a little more aware of where we go and whom we interact with online -- and then making a conscious effort to try new things and seek out new perspectives -- should empower us to at least have a better understanding of our online capabilities.

But my question is: what's the best way to initiate a meaningful dialogue between people of different classes, nationalities, and culturally defined values? It's one thing to go seek people out, but it's quite another to forge that "emotional connection" mentioned in the quotation above. Should there be any rules? Any guidelines?

Dorian Benkoil on Augmented Reality

I like Benkoil's attitude at the end of the article:

"Of course, there is a 'creepiness' factor in some of this, and it can be frightening to think of the possibilities for invasion of privacy. But let’s see how far the technology goes in the coming months and years — a lot of the apps are still glitchy, require downloads and don’t quite work all the time — then see what objections are raised to how the technology is being used."

AR is definitely creepy... and Benkoil's suggestion that the technology might prove a useful tool for journalists wanting to dig up a bunch of extra information on people during interviews is creepy, too. When standing face to face with someone else, having a conversation, most people like to think that all the communication is out there in the open. It's acceptable to 'read' the other person's facial expressions and tone of voice without him/her knowing about it, so long as any additional 'reading' is done on the sly... after all, it's understood that this is something people naturally do, and the information gleaned from 'reading' other people in this way is strictly conjectural anyhow. But facts -- or, at the very least, what the person you're communicating with wants you to believe to be fact -- are generally mediated and exchanged via speech. If a reporter were to use a smart phone equipped with AR technology to gather facts on an interviewee, it would presumably have to be without the interviewee's knowledge and consent. She would literally be on the record before opening her mouth. Now imagine the not-too-distant future of AR technology... if we could somehow get the data routed through camera lenses in our eyes, we'd pretty much be where Molly is in Neuromancer, minus the retractable finger knives. We could access all there is to know about anyone simply by looking at them. According to the standards of today, this would almost certainly constitute a serious violation of privacy rights... but at least it'd let us dispense with the pleasantries.

Getting back to the quotation above, what I like about Benkoil's attitude here is that he seems to understand the futility in trying to project the moral rules of our current technological paradigm onto the paradigm that is currently emerging. Thanks to the proliferation of SNSs, cultural attitudes towards privacy are already starting to shift... is a shift beyond indignation at the scenario described above really that hard to imagine? Ultimately, limiting prohibitions on technology use puts the power of ethical choice in the user's hands. While the potential for wrongdoing is there, we can't really know the 'wrong' of the matter until we've pushed the envelope just a little.

S/R 2

S/R 2: Neuromancer

Henry Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in a dystopian future where advancements in computer technology have enabled the transcendence of locality and other human limitations, as well as set the conditions for unfettered capitalism and pervasive cybercrime. It follows the story of a washed-up hacker named Case, whose inability to jack into the matrix – “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” and routinely accessed by “legitimate operators” for the purposes of work, play, and interaction – is a result of toxin-induced nerve damage that has reduced him to hustling for drug money in the criminal underbelly of Chiba, a prominent Japanese sea port (56). Case is rescued from this dead end life by Molly, a female samurai under the employ of a mysterious individual named Armitage who offers to repair Case’s nerves as payment for a hack job. As the novel progresses, Case and Molly’s desire to figure out Armitage’s motives leads them into contact with Wintermute, an artificial intelligence (AI) controlled by the highly secretive Tessier-Ashpool (T-A) collective. Through these encounters and his own investigation, Case learns that Wintermute was programmed with a keening desire for purpose and direction that led it to deliberately invade the consciousness of a psychologically damaged U.S. colonel named Willis Corto and ‘repurpose’ him as Armitage, effectively gaining direct entry into the world of human affairs. Having discovered his employer’s will to be essentially that of a powerful AI intent on ditching its ‘natural’ limitations, Case is led involuntarily onto a collision course with the T-A collective, whose various attempts to achieve immortality via cloning, cryogenics, and another AI construct called Neuromancer are gradually revealed over the course of a dangerous mission into the heart of their hive-like, orbital residence to coerce 3Jane, a member of the T-A line, into disclosing the password that will release Wintermute from the collective’s control. Just as an uncalculated betrayal threatens to jeopardize the mission, Neuromancer invades Case’s consciousness and lets him experience fist-hand the futility of an eternal existence devoid of change – a futility he expresses to 3Jane, prompting her to give up the password and release Wintermute and Neuromancer from their technological prisons, to unknown effect.

As this summary suggests, one of the major questions explored in Neuromancer is that of the mind/body divide. Gibson’s analysis of this question is perhaps more pertinent than ever, as it is generally agreed that our routine participation in virtual worlds via the Internet is causing us to become increasingly disengaged from our bodily limitations. Like the masses of “legitimate operators” jacking into the matrix in Gibson’s world, we too have become used to conducting much of our work, play, and social interactions through a variety of digital media that allow us to exchange real, ‘out-there-in-the-world’ experiences for simulated ones. The world of Neuromancer is simply one in which the simulations and their corollary technologies have become sophisticated enough to make total disengagement from biology a viable option. When cowboys like Case refer to the “animal” necessities of “food, warmth, [and] a place to sleep” and emotions like fear and anger as “meat thing[s],” they express a contempt for the body that goes back at least as far to debates in Ancient Athens between Platonists and Hedonists, who took opposite positions on the question of what make us human (‘Is it mind or body?’) (153). Whereas Wintermute, for all its intelligence, will, and careful premeditation, represents the former position, the psychotic, pleasure-crazed Riviera represents the opposite pole of inhumanity in his endless pursuit of sensual gratification. Somewhere between these two extremes lies Case, the utterly normal “statistical animal” whose conscious rejection of a virtual life a la the world of the Neuromancer construct constitutes a profoundly “human” decision to embrace the uncertainties of age, decay, and most importantly, change – in other words, the inseparability of body and mind. What I find to be beautiful about Gibson’s work is that it imagines conditions under which we, like Case, might one day be able to resolve ancient debates over the mind/body split and what it means to be human in our own lives, via our own choices and our own actions. And considering these conditions are already in the making, Neuromancer may in fact be a very instructive fiction.

Neuromancer 3

Marie France’s vision of achievable immortality is fascinating precisely because it couldn’t be more unlike the clone-and-freeze method favored by Ashpool. She conceives of freedom from death as occurring through the medium of personality, testing her theory with the construction of Neuromancer -- an intelligent RAM construct capable of simulations designed to elicit real human emotion. Whereas Ashpool couldn’t bring himself to let go of the ‘meat’ (not until his suicide, that is... his brand of immortality was apparently not much worth living for), M/F recognized that, via AI, she could let her body die without having to let go of the experience of living. Love, hate, fear, piss... it’s all there in the construct... only difference is, it’s forever.

Case, when given the choice to participate in this alternate reality, ultimately chooses the real thing -- even in spite of the fact that remaining in the N/M construct would allow him to spend eternity with the only person he ever really loved. As he explains to 3Jane, “‘I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s full RAM. The constructs think they’re real, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever.’” According to Case’s logic, nothing that lasts forever can be ‘real’ in any meaningful sense, as a big part of the experience of reality is the experience of change and uncertainty. So the concept of living forever by any method is, in his view, a false concept... at some point, the living ceases to be living in any familiar sense. When people talk about downloading an entire human personality onto a ROM or a RAM or some kind of hardware, they often add that doing so would grant that personality a kind of immortality. We may be getting close to attaining this technological capability... but in the end, would it really be all that desirable, living forever in a hermetically sealed system, impervious to change? It may be true, as many great writers have suggested, that life can only be conceived of in terms of variability and decay. Efforts to freeze reality in place, then, run somewhat counter to the nature of existence... the impulse to freeze is perfectly natural, but still... the efforts themselves never fully satisfy. So is there any real point in pursuing immortality? By way of a lot of money and effort, we’re steadily getting closer... and pursuing longevity is no doubt a good thing for discovering cures to major illnesses... but is the goal of living forever really worth all that much?

Neuromancer 2: Us vs. Them 4eva

After reading Brown, we considered the question of whether the ability to connect to anyone at any time -- made possible by the Internet -- is creating more unity among people with opposing worldviews or less. Brown’s suggestion was that neither conclusion is 100% accurate... while happenings like the Evil Bert Laden incident point us to examples of how massively distributable and reproducible media can cause considerable cross-cultural confusion over the significance of a single text or event, leading (in some cases) to potentially violent tensions, they also point us to the inevitability of ‘contact’ in the Internet age and the near limitless potential for peaceful dialogue inherent in such encounters with ‘the other.’ People can insulate themselves from the other in groups, but nowadays, the barriers that separate one group from another are becoming more and more manifestly fictitious. So what does Neuromancer have to say about all of this? For one, the notion of being able to swap sensoriums entails a total breakdown of the barrier between self and other -- one so complete that, if such a capability were to exist, distinctions between individuals would become pretty much moot, except for the purpose of shopping around to find that perfect set of eyes or hands or legs or whatever. Neuromancer is full of descriptions of people exchanging pieces of themselves -- in many cases, literally -- for pieces of other people. Though the technologies used to effect these exchanges are not all web based, one can see how the Internet is already enabling similar exchanges between disparate people, groups, and cultures. From what I’ve seen of WoW, it seems to be somewhat disproportionately populated by beautiful, thin, scantily clad elf women... a product, no doubt, of American culture’s obsession with certain female body types. And in analyzing these avatars, one can’t neglect the influence of Tolkien and D&D and, depending on how far they want to go, a thousand other cultural imports from many different areas of the world. In playing games like WoW and creating various web profiles and avatars across hundreds of other venues, we’re stitching new experiences from recycled material... just like the folks in Gibson’s book. In our world, it’s all virtual... but still, it’s a testament to the extent of our interconnectedness and to the flimsiness of the ‘barriers’ that keep us separate from one another.

So how long do we go on pretending like certain barriers exist when it’s becoming increasingly apparent they don’t, hiding away in groups that define their shared interests in opposition to everyone else’s? Gibson’s answer to this question would seem to be a long, long time. His descriptions of various religious groups, though rarely essential to the plot, nevertheless pass some interesting commentary on our human tendency to factionalize. Even with the technology to literally swap perspectives and the mind boggling potential for empathy and peace entailed thereby, people in Gibson’s world still turn to Zionism, Christian Fundamentalism, etc. ... systems of thought that preach the sanctity of remaining separate from ‘the other.’ The imputation is that there’s something natural about making enemies, just as there’s something natural about making friends. Gibson’s outlook is a bit discouraging if you’d prefer to think that the Internet is broadening our capacity for empathy rather than contracting it or leaving it unchanged... but at the same time, it’s a reminder that we can’t exactly expect our technologies to fix everything for us without any kind of effort on our parts. (Or can we?)

Neuromancer 1-5: Achievable Dystopia?

What strikes me having read the first five chapters of Neuromancer is the extent to which William Gibson’s vision of the post-Internet age differs from the visions presented in Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins and Pierre Levy imagine a society where Internet use enables greater social, economic, and political participation by a wider range of groups and individuals, leading to the empowerment of ordinary people to affect positive social change. Gibson, by contrast, imagines a future where the unregulated flow of data across multiple channels and through the hands of multiple agents does little to disrupt long-standing power hierarchies. In his world, ‘ordinary people’ -- typified by the steady stream of consumers trickling through the shopping areas of Chiba and the Sprawl -- are portrayed as not being particularly concerned for their society. Of course, the story is told from a criminal perspective, leaving certain aspects of Gibson’s future open only to conjecture. Chiba and the areas of the Sprawl frequented by Molly and Case might not be representative of the world of Neuromancer as a whole... Ninsei is after all described as an “outlaw zone,” a place where the governing authorities of Chiba have no real power to stop bad stuff from happening. But then again, the narrator’s suggestion that Ninsei’s lawlessness may be the product of government malfeasance is a serious imputation -- one that, when considered alongside the mysterious Screaming Fist incident and the horrifically violent police crackdown at Sense/Net HQ, makes Gibson’s future look pretty undesirable. This is not a society characterized by more democracy, more freedom, and more meaningful participation by a greater number of people on the basis of the logic of collective intelligence. It’s a global society dominated by totalitarian governments and cheap markets of the senses where law and order is only possible through strict prohibitions on user access to a wide array of potentially dangerous technologies. These technologies do seem to be empowering in that they enable ordinary people to enhance their experience of the world through digital and biological modifications of their bodies, enabling in turn a flowering of new cultural possibilities. But in the book, the question of whether such enhancements serve any purpose beyond sensual gratification is left largely unanswered -- except, perhaps, in the passages explaining Case’s fascination with the cheap chrome shuriken of Ninsei. The fact that Case can “[read his] destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome” suggests that what’s lost in a globally connected capitalistic information society is any sense of cultural uniqueness -- or, to put it more exactly, any sense of the dignity and importance of a person’s uniqueness, which to the Western mind entails certain political rights. A person in Gibson’s world is a databank ready for access, a true resource -- and therefore an object -- in every sense of the word. When anything is possible, everything is cheap.

So I dunno. Anyone take any positives from Gibson’s achievable dystopia? If so, I’d be interested to hear them.

Cyberculture Comparison

Sean's Cyberculture Comparison

Community Attitude.0

In “Evil Bert Laden,” Jim Brown points to the image that appeared on anti-American protest posters in 2001 of Osama Bin Laden standing next to Bert from Sesame Street as an example of a “collusion” -- a collaborative, online project in which the ‘collaboration’ happens unconsciously, often between strange bedfellows (in this case, American memesters and Islamic fundamentalists). According to Brown, “electronic collaboration is not necessarily confined to a concerted effort on the part of a well-defined community [...] [indeed,] conscious collaboration is only part of the story.” As “the Bert Laden episode points out[,] [...] community can also be something that happens to us” (par. 3). Our “globalized, networked” communities are much larger than we think, and they resist definition when the effort to define is based on assumptions about who does or does not ‘belong.’ As soon as we define the values that define ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’ -- the terrorists, the ChillOnes, whoever -- we throw up a wall of separation between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ putting on blinders that prevent us from seeing how ‘they’ are still very much an active part of our interactive sphere. Brown makes the point that, while community-building on the basis of values and other essentials is, as far as we can tell, a basic human reaction to encountering an other, it is at the end of the day just that -- a reaction. The impulse to “buil[d]” communities “around essential identities and nationalisms” can be explained as an interpretive reaction to the appearance of the other (par. 8). If we want to understand the true scope of our interconnectedness in the Internet age -- an age in which the relational nature of things is constantly being exposed by interesting new technologies in interesting new ways -- we’ll need a new way of thinking about community that takes this basic human impulse to interpret to be of fundamental importance in determining why we form communities in the first place.

If I had to sum it up, I’d say the goal of Brown’s essay is to teach us one way of navigating a world where “we don’t always get to choose our collaborators” and where “we don’t always have a say over who uses our texts” (par. 20). The hope seems to be that a new way of thinking about community could lead to a new, more hospitable way of interacting with the other... but are the majority of Web users ready to change their thinking? As Brown suggests, a lot of how we respond to the cultural differences highlighted by globalization -- whether in a way that promotes sharing and acceptance, or in one that merely promotes ‘tolerance’ -- will come down to individual encounters with ViRaL texts like Evil Bert Laden. If each of us could learn the value of adopting an accepting, hospitable attitude toward cultural otherness, then we could maybe train ourselves to control some of our hermeneutic impulses -- to avoid factoring our assumptions about the other into our interpretive efforts, or at least to recognize the effects of those assumptions on our understanding.

The question, again, is are we ready. I as an individual Web user can acknowledge that, even prior to the “rhetorical gesture” of interpellation, I am already “in-community” with the anti-American Bangladeshi publishers who made Evil Bert Laden a household image. But where do I go from there? And to what extent is the concept of being “in-community” with people I have no direct, personally meaningful connection to a useful one for me in my everyday life? These, I think, are the questions most of us will have to ask ourselves when we consider the responsibilities entailed by our “global, networked” interconnectedness as described by Brown -- responsibilities that may not be new, but that are becoming increasingly apparent thanks to Web 2.0.

I Wanna Be an Adhocrat

In his conclusion, Jenkins taps the work of Warren Ellis to describe a society in which government happens not by expert opinion, but by the logic of collective intelligence. Accordingly, Ellis’s Global Frequency “depicts a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. “Conceived... in the wake of September 11 as an alternative to calls for increased state power and paternalistic constraints on communications,” Global Frequency “doesn’t imagine the government saving its citizens from whatever Big Bad is out there. Rather, as Ellis explains, “Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves” (261). This is a rather exciting vision of essentially the same future Jenkins is describing, where advances in communication technologies and in government attitudes toward citizen participation result in a total redistribution of decision making protocols.

What would it mean for us -- “personally and professionally” -- to contribute our time and effort “to a cause larger than [our]selves” such as that depicted in Global Frequency (261)? I personally have never read the comic, but I find this to be a very interesting point of emphasis. Tried and true claims that declines in voter participation can be attributed to feelings of disconnectedness from the political process ring even truer in light of Jenkins’s analysis; our society is one in which the things people do on a regular basis -- like gather around the “water cooler” to talk about work or their favorite TV shows -- are held to be silly, trivial, and even undignified in comparison to the “serious” business of politics. There’s a lot of rhetoric in Washington about the know-how of the “average American,” but to date there has been very little effort to utilize what “average Americans” actually know in crafting, executing, and interpreting legislation. This has been largely due to technological limitations, sure. But as Jenkins points out in the afterword, there are cultural factors to consider here too. The Mitt Romneys don’t want to know what we know -- or perhaps more accurately, they don’t want to listen if doing so will force them to compromise their sense of cultural “place” (read: empowerment). Cultural paternalism of the like practiced by Romney has the ultimate effect of causing people to miss the connections between their personal and political lives, setting the conditions for declines in participation by groups who fail to relate to the Beltway style of political rhetoric. And as long as these attitudes continue to dictate the way politics play out in this country, grassroots parody videos and other forms of new media discourse will continue to remain marginal to the issue analysis process. The key, then, is to get people to rethink what counts as politics.

Cory Doctorow’s concept of the “adhocracy” -- “an organization characterized by a [total] lack of hierarchy” -- is another intriguing notion (262). Equally intriguing is the contrast Jenkins draws between adhocracies like the Global Frequency network and the bureaucracies we currently rely on for so many of our social, economic, and political services. What is it about the thought of having to go to the DPS for a license renewal that’s positively cringe-inducing? The lines, the uncomfortable silence, the sheer lack of interactivity -- I would say it’s the feeling of being shuffled through a big, impersonal system without a bit of say in how you’d like the service to be administered -- or perhaps more accurately, how you’d like the service to be experienced. The vision of Global Frequency is that the quality and delivery of government services will improve when we can begin to harness advances in digital communications toward tapping the collective knowledge and experience of the body politic. It’s a rosy picture of a perhaps distant future -- as Jenkins suggests, we shouldn’t expect bureaucracies to up and disappear, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that civic participation ought always to be pleasurable. But expanding opportunities for meaningful public service is something most people can get on board with... and now that we more or less have the technology to make it happen, we might as well get started.

S/R 1: Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture explores the phenomenon of media convergence – a historically unprecedented, highly interactive coalescence of old and new media practices taking shape in the U.S. and abroad as advances in digital technology broaden – and deepen – access to the means of media production and distribution. Jenkins is primarily interested in thinking about convergence as a “paradigm shift.” A phenomenological “move” from “medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture,” convergence is transforming the way ordinary people relate to the media they consume (254). Jenkins’s “goal” is to change the way people conceive of this relationship – “to help ordinary people grasp how convergence is impacting” their culture and, “at the same time, to help industry leaders and policymakers understand consumer perspectives on these changes” (12). By framing the efforts of online fan communities to enrich their experience of certain pop culture properties as efforts toward greater consumer participation and empowerment, Jenkins articulates a vision of convergence in which “the skills we acquire through play” – namely, the pooling of intelligence for tactical purposes – have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect with other people around the world” (23).

Jenkins tries very hard to avoid utopian thinking about the implications of convergence for democracy. I find this to be one of the more appealing aspects of his book – though he dares to imagine a political culture characterized by greater participation and a higher degree of collective decision-making, he never once tries to spin this vision as an inevitable outcome of the convergence process. In so doing, he keeps the focus on our responsibilities as individuals to a.), understand how the accelerating pace of technological change is impacting our cultural and our capabilities, and b.), act in a way that promotes the ideal of a participatory culture driven by collective intelligence. Where I find fault with his book is its failure to address in detail “[the] need to confront the cultural factors […] diminish[ing] the likelihood that […] [certain] groups will participate” (269). The digital participation gap is a real and persistent problem that Jenkins underplays in focusing perhaps too exclusively on the “early adopters.” Schools, NGOs, and nonprofit community organizations will bear the responsibility of “closing” the digital divide – but even within these organizations, knowledge of how to manipulate, share, and interpret media is very unevenly distributed. The open source movement has attempted to address this issue; but still, there remain many highly “computer literate” groups and individuals – hackers, for instance – who’ve a strong vested interest in disempowering the digital underclass. Jenkins never once suggests that the participatory culture of the future will be one devoid of epistemological hierarchies. But if one of our goals in the age of media convergence is more political agency for more people, we as middle-class, college educated individuals – or “early adopters,” if you will – will have to do more than simply “participate” on the level described by Jenkins. Collective intelligence is not an inevitability, but a cause like any other.

Fanfic communities as... role models? Huh...

I found the portrait of collaborative authorship Jenkins paints in his analysis of the Harry Potter fanfic community to be very intriguing. In the age of media convergence, the individual relationships that shape a story’s development -- between author and original, author and audience, author and editors, etc. -- are all accessible via a single communal space. And the internet makes more such relationships possible, facilitating (potentially!) a greater degree of specialization and refinement. The idea of collective intelligence applies here as well; according to the folks at Writer’s University, “a good beta reader... admits to the author what his or her own strengths and weaknesses are -- i.e., ‘I’m great at beta reading for plot, but not spelling!’ Anyone who offers to check someone else’s spelling, grammar, and punctuation should probably be at least worthy of a solid B in English, and preferably an A” (189).

The second claim -- the one about spelling and grammar -- is interesting. In putting mastery of spelling, grammar, and mechanics on par with knowing whether a certain plot or character arc is sufficiently consistent with the source material, these groups are effectively creating new standards for knowledge. Under the current system of grade evaluation, the education system penalizes students for failing to master some knowledge -- knowledge of how to diagram a sentence, for example -- just as it fails to reward students for mastering knowledge that falls outside the pale of what’s “essential” for their personal development. No matter how gentle the pedagogue, a F in English is a F. It might be “deserved”... but the effect it can (and often does) have on a young learner’s or would-be writer’s confidence is, well, catastrophic. It’s a disincentive to further learning and further effort in the classroom. What the fanfic community does is build and develop a self-sustaining system of rewards for its participants -- all knowledge and all contributions are valued as part of a single, collaborative effort to produce the best fan fiction possible. I wonder, then: would a similar system of rewards for specialized group projects be possible to implement in the classroom? What might it look like, and what possibilities would it open up for “grade” evaluation?

One more thing. According to Jenkins, the “shift” from limited opportunities for authorship to “mass distribution via the Web” and online writing communities “could lead to a heightened awareness of intellectual property rights as more and more people feel a sense of ownership over the stories they create” (188). While more litigation would almost certainly be a shame, I don’t think a “heightened awareness” of intellectual property rights would be such a bad thing if it got people talking about what it means to “own” an idea. As Jenkins suggests, the distinction between “copy” and “original” is blurring. Increasingly, we are being challenged to imagine “original” creation as occurring along a continuum ranging from direct imitation of a single character, setting, or style to highly sophisticated integration of a number of themes and ideas from various cultural sources.

Here, we could learn a lot from fanfic communities, who tend to put the source material first and the individual second. The concept of idea ownership is essential in a capitalistic information society. It helps us determine what’s fair. But people were telling and writing stories long before “author” was a viable career option. When it comes to creative writing and the other arts, a discussion of intellectual property rights could lead to an increased awareness not of what we own as individuals, but of what we share as a single cultural community.

Cybersubculture comparison project topic

For my cybersubculture comparison project, I'd like to look at...

... Disaboom, a SNS for people with disabilities:

http://www.disaboom.com/

... and Elftown, a SNS for fantasy enthusiasts:

http://www.elftown.com/

Ostensibly, these are two very different communities. Elftown is a space where people entertain themselves by creating and interacting with avatars, while Disaboom is a site far removed from the realm of make-believe, where people gather to swap experiences and work through "real-world" problems. For that reason, I'll be focusing on similarities between the two...

Knowledge communities... Surviving: Conflict

Jenkins’s account of the rise and fall of the Survivor spoiling community offers some interesting insight into group identity. In the intro to Ch. 1, he claims “it is [...] crisis, conflict, and controversy” that forces groups to come up with definitions of who they are and what they do (26). Just as in “real world” social groups, the stuff binding online communities together is rarely consciously thought of until an unprecedented action or event forces the members of the community to “articulate the principles that guide them.” Shared goals, mutual interests, emotional attachments to a common source of pleasure or entertainment, whatever -- these are the things one begins to scrutinize when some external event challenges the way he or she relates to the group.

So when ChillOne decides to hold the Survivor spoiling community hostage for an entire season, stringing them along with tidbits of information while never identifying his sources or offering to collaborate with his fellow spoilers, the community starts to react. They argue among themselves -- first about ChillOne’s credibility, and later, his motives. Divisions arise, and the way these divisions are expressed -- via verbal conflict centered on a single participant’s behavior -- prompts each individual member to examine his or her own behavior -- and ultimately, the terms of his or her group membership.

Troubling thing is, this is a story in which a consensus is never reached. Was ChillOne’s refusal to play by the rules and openly collaborate with others a breach of the group’s communal values, or was it simply good sport? The various perspectives on this question are never reconciled, and in the wake of ChillOne, SurvivorSucks undergoes a major depopulation. Rather than come to terms, its members disperse.

It could be that consensus just isn’t all that important in communities whose ultimate concern is entertainment -- there isn’t, after all, that much at stake for such groups. So, when individual participants feel that their goals are no longer meshing with the majority’s, they can simply leave without so much as a goodbye. No strings attached. Immediate, unqualified participation helps groups do stuff without having to worry too much about who’s doing it. In such cases, clear definitions of a group’s identity might not be necessary.

Still, for a knowledge community with the goal of greater collective intelligence, consensus might be a desirable thing. I like the following illustration of how collective intelligence operates within a group, told from the perspective of a spoiler: “Someone might lurk [on the boards] for an extended period of time feeling like they have nothing significant to contribute, and then Survivor will locate in a part of the world where they have traveled extensively or a contestant may be identified in their local community, and suddenly they become central to the quest” (53). To lose the lurker is to lose a potential source of intelligence -- the life of the community consists in good numbers.

So my question is this: what happens to communities when they lack the kind of rules, practices, and/or institutions that make sustainable group unity a real possibility? Was the Survivor spoiling community -- driven, in Jenkins’s words, by “voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations” and “reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” -- always doomed to be just that: temporary and tactical (27)? Could it have continued to flourish had its members found some way to “articulate” a common vision?

As “inspirational consumers” of the like discussed in Ch. 2, we as individuals have unprecedented agency in our choice of affiliations. “Everybody knows something” about this or that... and thus, everybody has more or less equal access to a wide array of digital knowledge communities. If we value our participation in such communities and in the project of collective intelligence, a major challenge will be figuring out a way to promote loyalty to the group in spite of division and conflict. Knowledge may come to depend on it.

Hey y'all.