I wrote this piece as an article for a local Providence, RI publication a little less than a year ago. Specifically I wrote it for publication in late January/early-February 2006. As I was going through my personal archives this weekend, I realized that a lot of it still has significance.

As you read it though, keep in mind that this is almost a year old and it was written for a slightly different audience than that which reads this blog. Any way, technostalgia it is:

Be it through a blogger evangelizing the merits of 'Web 2.0' or your awkward co-worker ‘friending’ you on MySpace, it's become clear that it won't be long before we're all enslaved by our sleek new machines. This won't happen through any sinister plot on the part of your Dell laptop or that shifty-looking eHarmony man: it's going to happen because it’ll just be too easy and convenient not to succumb. We'll willingly offer control of our relationships, identities, careers, and entertainment to the machines and their software, which know so well how to please us. As Simon Ings wrote in his 1999 science-fiction novel, Headlong: “When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

So what's left for us if digital enslavement is only a pleasurable and useful matter of time? Is there any form of resistance to the rise of these convenient machines and their handy programs? It has been trendy of late to reminisce about a time when we had control of our digital inventions. The mid-to-late 20th century was a period when the slow crawl of the buffalo and the speedy hunting-spin of the westward-bound farmer (oh, come on, the banker was too easy!) not only demonstrated our dominance over the American continent and its fauna but, more importantly, our dominance over computers. This of course refers to Oregon Trail, the terribly awkward, unrealistic, and clunky program. I can't help but believe that part of the pleasure in the game came from knowing that we were, in every way, superior to the machine through which we played. Today, when Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games rule the roost, Oregon Trail has reappeared as a nostalgic alternative.

This isn't the only outmoded technology to reemerge from the techno-cultural depths. PowerGlove, a Boston-based speed-metal band, is one of many to dust off their favorite SNES game soundtracks and play elaborate cover versions. In fact, the collective fixation on late-20th century entertainment technology has gone further than some might think: for one, some on the somethingawful.com message boards have made a hobby of feeding popular songs into SNES emulators and bringing them down to the low-tech level of Super Mario Brothers. These characters are more widely known as chip-tune artists.

However, the phenomenon goes beyond an 8-Bit rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or a blistering power-metal emblazoned version of the Tetris theme song. This technostalgia has been developing as a natural byproduct of the increasing infiltration of new media and new media networks into our everyday lives. Perhaps the most interesting case of primitive-digital resurrection is the reappearance of the animated GIF. Displaced by the superior quality and dynamic capabilities of Flash animations, the animated GIF has long been relegated to the “I Have My First Internet Websitepage!!!1” style of production. But with the unstoppable, iron-shod march toward digital domination, some have begun to take a second, comforting look back to the time when GIF was king. Or, rather, when Man was king and the animated GIF was but our lowly page.

Choosy Media Artists Choose GIF

GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 as a (then) high-quality compression for images. Among image compression formats, there are many superior to the GIF: JPEG, for example, has 16 million colors to GIF's 256, and PNG has even greater compression. Back in the pre-Web days, however, GIF was a step above the rest. An animated GIF is merely a sequence of individual GIFs in a single file and displayed in a specific, timed order. We've all seen them before: that stutteringly spinning logo that reads “NEW!” or “FREE.” What you're witnessing is an animated GIF in action. This is the dormant form it has taken in the dark corners of the Web, waiting for the day when it would once again be appreciated. GIF was the first among the image compressions that are still in regular use, and it seems to hold a special place in our hearts: It's that old dog limping to the corner to die.

But, wait, there's life in the old girl yet!

The resurgence of the animated GIF has been slow and almost imperceptible because it never really left us. One of the best-known places to find a fine GIF, animated with a something of a creative eye, is ytnmd.com. You're The Man Now, Dog hosts many simple, idiosyncratic animations coupled with looped sound files. The site gets its name, and the contributions their style, from the founder’s original image depicting a tiled image of Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. Over this is written the words “YOU'RE THE MAN NOW DOG.COM” in ‘zooming’ black letters, as an audio file of the actor exclaiming phrase repeats. Though this is not an animated GIF, it has spawned many “YTMNDs” that are. More importantly, though, ytnmd.com's word-of-mouth success has helped establish the animated GIF as a friendly home for pop-culture, the very subject matter that has fueled the medium's comeback.

What is it about animated GIFs and pop-culture that have led them into a symbiotic relationship? Animated GIFs provide a humorously awkward lens through which to view familiar images of popular culture. These creations contrast with our increasingly accessible and customizable popular culture feeding technologies. Netflix will deliver a bewildering variety of movies to your door, Last.FM will predict your music taste with alarming accuracy, and with TiVo, who needs network executives to dictate programming order? We are welcoming these technologies into our lives with such speed that consumer convenience and product adaptability have become expected in a growing number of cultural outputs. In stark contrast, the new breed of animated GIFs are deliberately reactionary, shoving a brick in the smooth-flowing, customizable entertainment environments we're building around ourselves. Ironically, it is the popularization of individualized, user-friendly technology that has made the creation and distribution of animated GIFs open to anyone who wants to invest 30 minutes of time learning how to make them. Thus the animated GIF is being reborn as populist detournement, using not only the images of the dominant culture, but the tools as well.

Giffords and the Gallery

Two signs that the animated GIF and the retro-techno trend has strong footing in the art world: First, The New York Times ran an article on January 21st [2006: this dates the article] about a show at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea featuring artists including Cory Arcangel, whose hack of Mario Bros. for SNES deleted everything in the game except for the sky and clouds, and collective Paper Rad, whose GIF-laden site, paperrad.org, says it all. Secondly, I recently came across an animated GIF created by influential net artist, Olia Lialina. Her activity in this area, alone, should convince even the most hesitant to recognize the medium and its artistic significance.

A closer look at Lialina's Animated GIF Model reveals that she is, in some ways, missing the point, the essence of the GIF. Her animation depicts three versions of herself in different costumes, engaged in three different activities: spinning, hoola-hooping, and playing the accordion as different colored backgrounds scroll from right to left. She certainly captures the playfulness of the medium, but trips up in two major aspects that may prove troublesome should artistic practice for the animated GIF continue in her direction: the subject of the piece is her own image, and it’s just too smooth. The essence, the very charm, of the animated GIF lies in its inability to keep up with itself, the fact that you really could see something much fancier just about anywhere. The artist's focus on herself also fails to live up to the outward-looking potential of the form; despite her personal position within pop-culture, the animation is about her rather than her as Olia Lialina, the well-known artist. In the end, the piece begins to mirror the very ego-oriented and slick techno-culture that the animated GIF has come to rebel against.

A more optimistic path for the animated GIF has been laid out by the creator of umeancompetitor.blogspot.com, known only as “893.” Affectionately calling them “giffords,” 893 not only creates brightly throbbing animated GIFs that are simultaneously engrossing and amusing, but he instructs readers of his blog how to make their own “giffords.” The result is work that eerily reworks pop-culture imagery and retains the populist spirit of the medium while demonstrating that the animated GIF can be more than an old-school video game rip-off – more than a hobbling image compression format.

It may not be much, but the return of animated GIF—along with other technostalgic excursions—is a pacifier as our culture and society move inexorably toward a sleek and customizable, entirely technology-enslaved future. We look back on the days when our machines pitifully and playfully attempted to impress us with 8-Bit graphics and an assortment of “beeps.” Perhaps Oregon Trail tells the story best. We've traveled far with a westward home in mind only to face the question of whether to pay for the ferry or take our chances rafting the river. And as always, though we know it ends up in the same place, we'll take the river, if only to linger on this side of the final barrier for a moment longer. The resurgence of the animated GIF and whatever technostalgias that may follow are only momentary diversions as we march toward our Oregon of mechanized, all-encompassing convenience.

Posted by Nathan at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can guess by the sudden uptick of visitors to this blog that the new issue of Fast Company has come out. Welcome, and I apologize in advance for the typos that nefariously populate my archives. I often write fast and neglect to edit, but I'll do my best in this entry.

In my continuing attempt to actually read everything I tag with "READTHIS" in del.icio.us, I recently read Jaron Lanier's piece "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" in Edge. This came out back in May and all the big-shots have already responded to it, but I'm going to work out a point that struck me while reading it.

Lanier covers a lot in the article so I'm not going to attempt to react to every piece of it, rather I'm going to focus on a single point that continued throughout his piece. The central claim to the article is that we should not be so trusting in peer-production models as we have shown ourselves to be lately in the whole social-network, Web 2.0 frenzy. Overall, I agree with his conclusion that not everything in our world should be governed collectively, but that doesn't imply that networked, affective production is somehow not worthy of a place in society. The issue I'm going to write about, however, is the manner in which Lanier separates the individual and the multiple (the collective). Really I have an issue with the fact that he separates them so cleanly at all.

This false separation first shows itself in the introduction when he writes:

"... it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality"

What he is saying here is that the individual author imbues his text with personality - an identity - and that the peer-produced text lacks any such identity as it is presumably muddled by a mass of self-styled editors. I would agree that an individual author gives his text an identity of its own, separate from the author himself. Yet when writing, we bring in many different influences, references, and citations; no work is created in isolation and the name of the author on some level merely conveys a surface identity for what is really large array of input, however indirect. So, yes, the text has an identity of its own, and yes the individual author bestows it, but it is hard to say that this identity is at all individual.

The same applies to our own identity and subjectivity as it exists in a networked world. We can understand this when we take some basic concepts of multiplicity and subjectivity from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. As we interact on, and use social networking sites, blogs, wikis, search engines, etc, we create multiple tendrils of subjectivity that intersect and contradict with each other and with those of our peers. I think the best example for this is on del.icio.us. I bookmark and tag a site for my own future reference. This then becomes visible to my "network" and anyone that would like to see it. By tagging this site, the work perhaps of another individual, I am indirectly tagging this creator's identity, adding meaning to it. At the same time, I have also managed to tag my own identity in the process by revealing to my network that this was a site that I thought worthy of remembering. This is a very basic example of how networked interaction scrapes away at the notion of autonomy and individuality on the web.

To bring this back to the article, Lanier laments the loss of individual, meaningful, one-on-one production. The process I just described in the above paragraph involved at least two one-on-one interactions. Me with the site and me with someone in my "network" looking at what I had tagged. I'd say that these one-on-one aspects are the central reason for the utility of del.icio.us. Yet, at the same time there is the popular global level of del.icio.us where the bookmarked pages and tags are aggregated, some rising to the top, other mired in single tag obscurity. Lanier's approach is flawed because he laments the global effect without acknowledging that it is the emergent effect of many, meaningful local actions. To extend this to Wikipedia, about which he writes, a change in the article in some cases could be seen as the global effect of local actions on the discussion page. Wikipedians often argue in that behind-the-scenes area about the content of the article, eventually changing th text itself. This is a bit of a stretch, I admit, but we have to look at both the local action and global effect together rather than simply take the global effect as something that as magically appeared.

[For the Fast Company readers, I suggest you check out the archives, but here are a few suggestions (again, apologies for the typos): The Network of Identity and the New Interactive Protocol, The Control Society and The Social Web, and The Social Web as the Reified Archive.]

Posted by Nathan at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I read Luciano Floridi's piece in TidBITS and was generally agreed with him on most point about his idea of "the infosphere." To take a broad view, for Luciano, our culture is moving more and more into a state where data is perceived on equal ground as matter. In other words, interaction with digital/informational objects will not only hold as much siginificance as physical objects, but also hold as much conceptual significance in our every day actions. He predicts, more or less, a merging of this "infosphere" with the non-informational world. One of the best real-world examples he gives of this is RFID technology which will quite blatantly bind physical and informational spheres.

Before I get into my complaint with the piece, let me first point out one section which I very much agree with:

"By remolding the infosphere, digital information and communication technologies have brought to light the intrinsically informational nature of human agents. This is not equivalent to saying that people have digital alter egos, some Messrs. Hyde represented by their @s, blogs, and https. This trivial point only encourages us to mistake digital ICTs for merely enhancing technologies. The informational nature of agents should not be confused with a "data shadow" either. The more radical change, brought about by the reshaping of the infosphere, will be the realization of human agents as interconnected, informational organisms among other informational organisms and agents."

In understanding the operation of identity and subjectivity within these new media or - to be more expansive - informational networks, we have to move away from the idea that our interactions with and within these networks cannot be separated from our larger subjectivities. We may be able to close the browser window and ignore the tendrils of identity emanating from our implied center, but they continue to exist within the larger network. This informational network is an archive, and those are the terms through which we must view identity and subjectivity. By archive I don't mean some dusty room in the basement of a library, but the expansive network consisting of individuals and social institutions & constructions. And it is this point - that subjectivity flows through and throughout our networked world - that brings me to my complaint with Floridi - however minor.

The article approaches this shift into an informationally driven and networked world as the sudden change that new technology will bring. Essentially taking the techologically determinist position. It is critical to recognize that this prediction is not so radical as many might see it. (Though I don't believe Floridi saw it as overly radical - he began the piece with the wonderful quote: "They say there are only two kinds of predictions: wrong and lucky.") There are two particular texts to look at as precursors to Floridi's "infosphere." They are Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and Deleuze's essay Postscript on Societies of Control - 1982 and 1990 respectively.

Archaeology outlines the author's concept of the archive as the expansive, all inclusive network containing multiple and heterogeneous aspects of our society. Where Foucault says "knowledge," Floridi might say "information," very similar terms when taken within their own contexts of degreed digitally networked spheres. What this shows is that the idea of an "infosphere" has existed even before the technology that will supposedly bring it to life. The infosphere in Fiordi's piece seems merely to be a reifying step in a larger teleology. As for Postscript, this essay begins to deal with technology in a more direct way while at the same time reacting to and modifying the Foucaultian notion of discipline. Where Deleuze writes about a more modular form of control, Fiordi writes about the idea that ignorance of information becomes no longer and excuse. Both express the larger concept that our subjectivities are the result of interaction with this larger archival network. We cannot separate ourselves from this ever creeping infosphere, just as we cannot sever our ties to the modular ideals of the corporation.

Overall then, it is a small complaint. I agree with Fiordi's general concepts, but wish that he would have contextualized it to a further extent, framing it less as a prediction than as an observation of a lager, continual trend.

Posted by Nathan at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My attempt to actually read everything I've tagged with "READTHIS" on del.icio.us continues with Daniel Palmer's The Paradox of User Control. In the essay, Palmer constructs a critique of the popular notion of an increasingly active media user by citing a handful of past critics from Raymond Williams to Lev Manovich. Through these citations, he builds an opposition between a mediasphere that empowers users through customized production and a mediasphere that operates as a mode of capitalist social control through isolation and modulation. In the end, for him, the utopian views of multiple subjectivities are merely illusions, and recent changes in media-interaction are hung with a dark cloud of the capitalist mode of production.

While he hits all the right points, and without a doubt consults the right sources, I don't agree with his essential separation of a society of control and a mediasphere enabling of multiple subjectivities. These two points are not at all in opposition within new media networks. In fact, the distribution and archivization of subjectivity furthers the tools of a society of control. The paradox of user control is not a paradox at all: the tools that empower the user, simultaneously and unconflictingly contribute to a socially-driven, modular discipline/control.

There's one critical aspect that Paradox does not adequately cover (granted, it's a four page piece): flow of data/media in relation to identity and subjectivity in a networked archival environment. Palmer only seems to discuss the user as a consumer and a producer and doesn't point out that the user is also the material from which that which is consumed, is produced. This is overwhelmingly clear in social networking sites where the constant honing of the profile page is one of the main activities. The user is not just controlling what media s/he experiences or interacts with, s/he is customizing him/herself for the the consumtion of others. What this shows is that we can't separate ourselves onto the two ends of an economic exchange, but we are inextricably woven into that exchange as the good - as the media - itself.

This further complicates when we see that we are not the only ones modulating our identities. As I've often written about here, the very protocol of interaction in these social media is classification. We modulate each others' subjectivities through a wide variety of means. One simple example here might be in del.icio.us where the actions of a user within another's 'network' determine not only what the user will see but how he is seen by others through their tagging activity.

Thus the control that Palmer talks about still does occur, but it occurs not solely from some capitalist ubergeist, but from ourselves, our multiple tendrils of identity, and the emergent effects of the resulting network. Our very participation in the new economy of mass customization makes us complcit in the modular control of (in)dividuals within our larger society. Nor are we over individualized as a result, but increasingly interconnected not as singular entities but through criss-crossing archived subjectivities.

Posted by Nathan at 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent a good part of my day yesterday attending the Identity and Identification in a Networked World symposium, put on by the Information Law Institute. The presenters are all doing very interesting work in an area that tends to draw my thinking. Fred Stutzman and danah boyd, whose work I'm familiar with, were there, but I also enjoyed Ryan Bigge's slot and got to see Dick Hardt's often-talked-about Identity 2.0 presentation.

One idea that I would have liked to bring up to hear the thoughts of all the presenters and attendees, had there been enough time after the Social Networks panel (or if I had been brave enough to volunteer a question), is the idea of the socially constructed identity. It seemed that most of what I heard took the stance that individuals were the central actor in the construction of their own networked selves, which I suppose rises partially from the illusion created by the format of an online social network profile. I would have like to hear discussion on the proposal that we are less autonomous than we seem when we interact online, and not simply in online social networks, since the perceived walled garden of these systems is not nearly as sound as it may seem.

danah actually touched upon this issue in her talk about the "Top 8" on MySpace. She explained that the "Top 8" essentially is the user allowing him/herself to be defined/affirmed/identified by another. I think this is the critical aspect that we need to look at in online social networks - we don't simply place ourselves into the network, we place the network into us. It, of course, goes well beyond the "Top 8," but that is a clear and very visual example of our decreased singularity within these networks.

This concept also operates through the archival nature of our identities. I was so glad to hear Fred address this in his presentation. It's this idea that we are interacting in a very archival environment - where every interaction is recorded (or could be recorded) to the point that archivization is often the purpose of interaction - that drives identity within a networked world. What this conference could actually have been discussing is what happens to our selves when we interact within a globally networked, and largely accessible, archive. The social construction of identity only happens as a result of this reified archivization, the issue of identity from a business and software position is essentially an issue of how to enact control upon this system and our selves within the system.

Instead of going on a tangent about control in networked environments, I'll simply link to an older entry on this blog in which I react to Alex Galloway's (who also was in attendance, I hear) response to Deleuze's Postscript to Societies of Control.

Posted by Nathan at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)