It looks like Slate has picked up on something I've often written about on this blog.

Posted by Nathan at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I really wanted to like E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities by Marcel O'Gorman. I really did. The jacket tempts with promises of a path toward reforming the liberal arts education, armed with the tools of critical theory and digital media. This is a promise that some of my particular intersecting interests would have some grand, noble purpose. Perhaps it was my inflated expectations but I found that several significant weaknesses make it over all, an underwhelming read.

My first major criticism lies in the first chapter in which O'Gorman itemizes and responds to the criticism he received on a paper that was not accepted for publication in an unnamed academic journal. His essential premise - that we should question the underlying structure of academic writing and the cultural norms and institutions it supports - is a fine one, but by placing it in the framework of criticizing the critics who rejected his piece forces the reader to interpret the writing as bitter and vengeful. As he addresses each specific comment made on the non-traditional essay he submitted to what can be assumed is a more traditional journal, the over-arching sentiment is that the editors were clouded by an out-dated academic apparatus and could not value his innovation as such. O'Gorman undermines his own point about the structure of academic writing through the structure of his own writing. This is not the result of innovation on his part, but a lingering aura of bitterness surrounding the section.

As the reader moves beyond the first chapter, s/he is confronted with a broad discussion of "imagetexts" and visual theory that should be quite familiar to most anyone who has read any television/video studies material. Yet instead of this being presented as foreground for further analysis, O'Gorman is satisfied to re-cover the basics applying new "punceptual" terms to familiar concepts. (The "puncepts" were clever for a little while, and I was willing to go along for the ride, but by the end they seemed superfluous.) Much of what he covered was not even particularly exclusive to digital media - that is, much of his analysis did not address the networked aspects that have become critical to deal with in digital media. Needless to say I was disappointed.

Thirdly, I disagree with his dismissal of the archival aspects of new media as a significant, institutional molding force. He claims that the potential for archivization that new/digital media have brought has been over-hyped in that it merely reinforces the existing academic structure. Yet he fails to consider that significant use does not imply useful significance. We have to consider that it is more than scholarly work that has become increasingly archival and that to say something is "archival" does not mean that it is in any way static. Archivization as we see it emerging in both academic and non-academic spheres has become increasingly tied with subjectivity and and interaction. We must tie it more to the concept of Foucault's archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge than with the concept of the traditional library. This view allows a broader and more dynamic process of archivization, but also one of greater cultural importance through which exist and express.

Despite my complaints, the penultimate section of the text reframed the entire piece. In this section, O'Gorman provides sample lesson plans for educators interested in expanding academic exercise into new media. Perhaps this should have been billed as the focus of E-Crit: It frames the book not as a study of digital media, critical theory, and their coming influence in the academic apparatus, but as a pedagogical tool aimed at influencing practicing educators not versed in these fields. In this light, the criticisms that it lacks a depth of analysis and that it does not properly address the significance of the archive in new media, both become insignificant.

Perhaps then I do not take issue with the text itself but merely the cultural apparatus through which I have experienced it. As a book with all the metatexts surrounding it proclaiming it to be something it is not, it falls short. As a long essay suggesting incremental change in pedagogical practice, it serves its purpose. But then again, as the first chapter demonstrates, I think O'Gorman might enjoy taking his readers out of their comfort zone by placing his writing in unexpecting environments.

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I'm not going to be too lengthy tonight, but I want to get in a thought on Elaine Peterson's essay "Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy" and the subsequent reactions.

Peterson's piece, as can is clear from the title, takes a stand against folksonomy as an effective organizational system. David Weinberger and Thomas Vander Wal both respond to the merits of this alternative system more effectively than I ever could, but I think there is one point that seems to be avoided in the discussion of its value. Critical to the importance of folksonomies is their operability on both the local and global levels: tagging for personal reference contributes to a global referential framework. Items will be sorted as it is useful for personal use at the same time as an individual's organization interacts with that of other individuals creating an emergent, global effect.

This is all well and good if the participants keep to themselves and tag purely on the basis of personal use, but in the types of folksonomies that we see popping-up, this is certainly not what happens - and this is where Peterson slips into the confusion between social-bookmaring and folksonomy. In social-bookmarking, the effect of feedback within the emergent system plays a more central role than it might in a blind folksonomy. Two examples of influential feedback iIn del.icio.us: users are prompted to use common tags when posting something that has already been tagged; and when a user discovers new links through his or her network or through a global aggregation. Effects like these diminish the purity of the folksonomy to be sure and move it away from the solution that Vander Wal suggests - that of a taxonomist taking cues from a (presumably blind) folksonomy. Instead of the Vander Wal solution, the global effect has an increased role as this central arbiter.

Over all, I fall on the side that folksonomies are indeed useful as an organizational tool, but, as I'm sure David and Thomas would both agree, they are certainly not a cure-all for the archive fever that has taken us.

Posted by Nathan at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week I found an essay that hits particularly close to my own interests, "The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism" by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga. It hits all the key points I hit on this blog: art, new media, identity, control, etc. He even references a very similar base of work that I'm familiar with including the Surveillance Camera Players and Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive." Yet while nothing he writes is inherently disagreeable to me, there is one underlying assumption running throughout the piece that doesn't recognize fundamental protocols of interaction on the web.

Zúñiga begins with the familiar (and entirely correct) theme of dismantling utopian visions of the internet as some sort of idealized Habermasian public sphere. Yet from this he jumps to the idea that it is necessarily a distopian space where corporations surveil the masses - clearly delineating the individual and the crowd. I can't disagree that the internet has proven to be the best data mining tool ever known, but I think the implication of "data mining" is short-sighted and not recognizing either the construction of "the corporation" or "the masses."

Data mining implies an unseen few taking data from the seen and unknowning many. This isn't exactly what's happening. This doesn't want to acknowledge is that the process of archiving the data takes place, increasingly, of our own volition. We can't simply say "data has been gathered" as though some man in a suit came to my door with a bag into which he put all my data. We have to recognize that interaction has been designed - or has developed, depending on how techno-determinist you are - in such a way that the archivization has become a primary interactive protocol. That's just the thing about the corporation as it is outlined in a piece like The Postscript to Societieties of Control: it is less and less the few deciding how to control the masses - largely by defining them as such - it is ourselves taking on the role of both the mass and the few. When Deleuze writes about "the corporation" in Postscript, he is speaking less about Coca-Cola specifically than a social construction in which the individual is concurrently affirmed and aggregated. This is the concept of corporation that we must take into account when discussing archival interaction via the web.

Zúñiga's view is certainly true with more traditional data mining such as spyware, but these methods will fade in time as the population grows accustomed to these technologies. This is why we must see controlling archivization as being enacted through ourselves and our peers and encouraged by the Deleuzian corporation.

A section of the piece that also highlights the distinction between the few and mass that I'm taking issue with is in his discussion of Brooke Singer's "SPV2". This piece involves a variety of digitized surveillance methods aimed at the artist herself and opened for participants to view and enter information themselves. Zúñiga describes it like this:

"By publicly revealing her data-self, Singer turns the user into a data-voyeur while giving the user a glance at the sort of data that exist within the Internet in relation to each one of us. To further drive this point, Singer has also included the Join Me! category which allows users to enter one’s own name and/or zip code to effect the visual representation and give one just a taste of her/his own data-self."

Zúñiga reads this as a critique of a corporate (Coca-Cola style) internet, which it certainly can be. Yet i think it is more useful as an observation of contemporary web-based interaction. The artist reveals her data and receives the same from the participants. This is no different from MySpace or del.icio.us. Interaction has become centered on the revelation of data: the more complete, the better. The Singer piece is not about the Coca-Cola/singular-controlling eye on her (or the implied "you"), it is about the crowd's eye on her. Instead of placing herself as subject to the gaze of the few, she is subject to the gaze of many: a reversal of traditional power structures.

Posted by Nathan at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Though the goal of reading everything in my "READTHIS" category on del.icio.us is more or less futile given the rate at which I tag pages with that particular string of letters, the tagging date and the reading date are getting closer. I've just finished an excellent essay on CTheory.net by Mark Winokur called "The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace." It's a well prepared and thorough piece, but also a lengthy and though-provoking one, so I'm going to limit my reactions to the section on the gaze as it relates to the panopticon as a conceptual structure for the internet.

First of all, it's key to note that the essay was written over three years ago, before many of the subjects of this blog (social media, etc) became major topics of discussion. I think that the popularization of all things we like to slap with the label "social" these days on the web has given us a wealth of examples of how the gaze and surveillance over the internet can be viewed. Winokur likes to contrast the internet-optimists (hypertext theorists most noticeably) with the more fatalistic critics, always taking the side of the fatalists who aim to reveal the power structures of larger institutions and ideologies. When discussing the gaze he pits those who see/once-saw the internet as the ideal anti-institutional method of communication against the idea that the physical architecture shatters any notion that the internet could be something other than a tool of late-capitalism. He specifically cites the client-server model as the reason why we are not in such a great new era: we still essentially have centralized control with overbearing power compared to those residing at the ends.

My issue with this is not in his conclusion: I would whole-heartedly agree that these unnamed idealists are wrong to think that the internet has that particular revolutionary potential. I've always fallen on the side of the debate that especially developments in the social web are ideal tools of control, augmenting and replacing outmoded apparatuses. Where I disagree with him is that I wouldn't say that these social media are effective tools of control because they follow a centralized system, but precisely because we've found ways to perfect their controlling capabilities through less centralized ways. We need only to look at distributed peer-to-peer networks to see that not all of "the internet" is a glorified hub-spoke network.

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

Blogs are perhaps the best example here. A common stereotype of the blogger is the lonely teen who "rants" on his/her LiveJournal which no one probably reads. The imagined audience that the act of blogging implies is conceptualized along similar lines as the ficitive guard in the panopticon: a regulating, normative force. But at the same time, this lonely teen probably reads one or two other blogs by kindred spirits and thus is taking on the role of the guard him/herself. This can be extended to most actions within social media. Through every step of interaction, we are placed simultaneously in the position of the one watching and the one being watched.

To bring it back around to Winokur's piece, my main point is that I agree with him: the internet is a particularly effective tool of control. Where I differ is in how it achieves this end. Rather than imitating older models, it reshapes them creating a more idealized self-regulating subject.

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