Tag: Communication

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remixthebook: Guest Post and Tweeting

In 1997, I wrote a piece about turntablism for Born Magazine called “Band of the Hand.” Years later, I wrote a related piece for Milemarker‘s now defunct Media Reader magazine, called “war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music.” I’ve been revisiting, remixing, and revising these previous thesis pieces ever since. I eventually combined the two and posted them here, but I’ve also written other things that spin off from their shared trajectories.

This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted a piece on the remixthebook site. remixthebook and its attendant activities situate the mash-up as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. With that in mind, I tried to go back to the writings above and update them using pieces of relevant things I’ve written since. If you will, my post is a metamix of thoughts and things I’ve written about remix in the past decade and a half or so, pieces which also represent material from my other book-in-progress, Hip-hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture. It’s a sample-heavy essay that aims to illustrate the point.

Here are a few excerpts:

Culture as meaning-making requires participation. In addition to the communication processes of encoding and decoding, we now participate in recoding culture. Using allusions in our conversation, writing, and other practices engages us in culture creation as well as consumption. The sampling and remixing practices of Hip-hop exemplify this idea more explicitly than any other activity. Chambers wrote, “In readily accessed electronic archives, in the magnetic memory banks of records, films, tapes and videos, different cultures can be revisited, re-vived, re-cycled, re-presented” (p. 193). Current culture is a mix of media and speech, alluded to, appropriated from, and mixed with archival artifacts and acts.

…

We use numerous allusions to pop culture texts in everyday discourse, what Roth-Gordon calls “conversational sampling.” Allusions, even as direct samples or quotations, create new meanings. Each form is a variation of the one that came before. Lidchi wrote, “Viewing objects as palimpsests of meaning allows one to incorporate a rich and complex social history into the contemporary analysis of the object.” It is through use that we come to know them. Technology is not likely to slow its expanse into every aspect of our lives and culture, and with it, the reconfiguration of cultural artifacts is also not likely to stem. Allusions – in the many forms discussed above and many more yet to come – are going to become a larger and larger part of our cultural vocabulary. Seeing them as such is the first step in understanding where we are headed.

…

Rasmussen wrote, “there is no ‘correct’ way to categorise [sic] the increasing diversity of communication modes inscribed by the media technologies. Categories depend on the nature of the cultural phenomena one wants to investigate.” Quotation, appropriation, reference, and remix comprise twenty first century culture. From our technology and media to our clothes and conversations, ours is now a culture of allusion. As Schwartz so poetically put it: “Whatever artists do, they are held in the loose but loving embrace of artists past.” Would that it were so.

The whole post is here.

Many thanks to Mark America and Kerry Doran for the opportunity and to everyone else for joining in on the fun. Here’s the trailer for the project [runtime: 1:21]:

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Zizi Papacharissi: A Networked Self

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic powerhouse. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, she probably makes you look lazy. She holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from my own University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Communication Studies from Kent State University, and a B.A. in Economics and Media Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Since getting those, she’s been busy: She is a professor in — and the head of — the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the author or editor of three books — most recently A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) and A Networked Self (Routledge, 2010) — and countless articles and book chapters, and a frequent speaker and lecturer on issues of connectivity and community, as well as public and private concerns. Many thanks to Zizi for taking the time to discuss a little of all of the above with me.

Roy Christopher: If you had to sum it up for the uninitiated, what would you say your work is about? What are your major areas of concern?

Zizi Papacharissi: I am interested in social and political things people do online – and offline. I see little value in drawing a distinction between offline and online that treats the two as separate worlds and thus claims some of these interactions as real and others as virtual. To me, that is like suggesting that a phone conversation with some one is less real, because it becomes possible through the use of a medium. And many media historians have of course talked about how early reactions to the telephone prompted similar conversations about the complexion and reality of mediated conversations.

I do think it is meaningful, however, to think of offline and online spaces, and understand then how people traverse through these spaces in their everyday routines. People adjust and adopt their behaviors as they move from one space to another, so as to handle their interactions in a way that permits them to attain an optimal balance = happiness. Spaces draw out different aspects of our personalities and inspire us to do different things (or might leave us completely uninspired).  We also frequently design or reorganize spaces so as to suit our personalities. There are particular types of behaviors that work better or facilitate communication in certain spaces (for example, speaking loudly in crowded bars), but are utterly discouraged via the organizational logic of other spaces (yelling in a yoga class). I am very interested in how individuals develop behaviors that allow them to traverse through offline and online spaces fluently.

I do not find the term “social media” particularly useful. All media are social, in their own unique ways. To claim that some media are social implies that there are other media that are a-social, or anti-social. It also suggests social media are more social than other media not qualified by that label. I do not find that to be the case. The phrase also ascribes a certain  neutrality to the term medium, and I do not believe in that either (media are neither good, nor bad, nor are they neutral, á la Melvin Kranzberg). I prefer to think of technology as architecture — in case that was not abundantly clear already 😉

RC: danah boyd‘s equation for privacy entails context and control. With the convergence of technology and its blurring of boundaries you discuss in A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) — especially those that define space and time, public and private, active and passive, producer and consumer — how are we to maintain control of these shifting contexts?

ZP: I agree with danah and find that this is a tremendously meaningful way of explaining privacy to the public and to policy-making communities. I have a slight preference for the term autonomy, over control. Perhaps it is because I am Greek 🙂 In A Private Sphere I use Deleuze’s work to explain how control is ultimately not about discipline. So, control, from the perspective of the individual or from the perspective of society, or institutions, is about offering a number of possibilities so that people can choose ‘freely’, while not being restricted yet still perfectly guided by a defined set of possibilities. Autonomy is about having the right to determine what those possibilities will be, to choose from them, or to refuse them altogether. Autonomy also is suggestive of self-reliance, independence, self-governance and reflexivity of the self – or individuation.

I suppose I find that ultimately, life is about philosophizing your way out of  the concept of control to a state of autonomy, and that might be why I am partial to the latter word. But in the end, you know, it is just a word. A definition.

RC: The web and mobile devices have changed the ways we connect with each other, but has social media really changed the nature of those connections? (i.e., some claim that Facebook is changing how the youth define “friendship.” I know what the literature says on this, but I wonder what you think.)

ZP: The youth has always redefined things, and I hope they never stop. It is what they do best! Otherwise, what is the point of being young?

On the topic of “friendship”, the literature shows that people handle their friendships in different ways across different spaces, and that has always been the case. We have always had friends from a number of social spheres (work, college, childhood, through mutual/spousal/ familial acquaintances), sometimes these spheres overlap and sometimes they do not, and we socialize with friends on a number of spaces, including spaces facilitated by internet platforms. Friendship means different things to different people. We also adjust and evolve our perspective on friendships as we mature through the different cycles of our lives. So everything that “the youth” is doing on Facebook needs to be understood in this context.

So, if anything, we might say that the word is being redefined, not the actual meaning of friendship, or closeness. It is a matter of language evolving, so as to reflect our practices. Weak ties can be actually be very strong, but is that really a term to be used to describe anyone? Who wants to be told:  “I do not consider you a friend, but you sure are a meaningful weak tie to me” or “Btw, I also consider you an important acquaintance.” So, as a society, we must come up with words that value and provide social context for these connections that may now be maintained and activated in more convenient ways.

Friendship  is an abstraction, a word invented to refer to and measure other emotions that are also aggregates and temporally sensitive. But friendship, or whatever it might be called in the future, is not going anywhere. It has always been a survival strategy for social beings, and will always be.

RC: Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the adoption (or lack thereof) of communication technology in general changes the idea of communication (what I’ve been calling the “Tyranny of Adoption”). For instance, the diffusion of the cellphone has made it a personal assumption, a requirement in many cases (One can see this with social networking sites and lifestreaming media as well). How do we temper the spread of technology with our personal needs and desires?

ZP: I think we need to find a place for technology in our lives. In that sense, we blend technology with our own humanity and resist or challenge the tyranny of adoption. In our everyday lives, we routinely make decisions about what works or what does not. So, we do not choose to buy and use just any car, we buy the car that will fit our needs, our budget, our personality. We also choose to not buy a car, and rely on public transport. We choose clothing, houses, appliances that are compatible with our lifestyles and enhance our lives. We may not always make successful or optimal choices, but we are driven by the need to select. At the same time, our choices are shaped  by the options we have  at hand. And our socio-cultural context may present some of these options as more appealing  or popular than others.

I am not sure that we will ever be able to fully escape the tyranny of the popular, or adoption. Afterall, the capitalist backbone of our economic system rewards the popular. But I think of it less as a tyranny and more of as a habitus. Ultimately, they may both be understood as systems of control, but I suppose a habitus also embeds the notion of reflexivity, socio-cultural context, taste – it is a richer way to think about this. So, in a sense, we might think of not the tyranny of, let’s say, Facebook adoption, but rather, the Facebook habitus, as a way of socializing us into (and remediating) schemata, tastes, and habits  about friendship.

RC: Are you working on anything, have anything coming up, or just a topic I missed that you’d like to mention here?

ZP: A lot of people these days are interested in the notion of affect, or jouissance, and affective networks. I think there is a lot of potential in thinking about affect, as it permits us to understand content creation as both play and work; to look at the internet, in Trebor Scholz’s terms, as both playground and factory.  Lately I have been very interested in the performative aspect of play online, specifically as it applies to performances of the self in everyday life. So I have been reading a lot of performance theory, and working with the “as-if” aspect of play to understand how people imagine, perform, then redact and remix identities online.

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McLuhan the Younger: Two New Books

There have been plenty of people touted to carry the mantle left behind by Marshall McLuhan — Neil Postman, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Levinson, even Jean Baudrillard, but no one has been working more behind the scenes and under the radar to keep his legacy alive than his own son and sometimes co-author Eric McLuhan.

Eric McLuhan has amassed a significant body of work in his own right, including Electric Language (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto Press, 1997), the forthcoming Theories of Communication (with Marshall), and The Human Equation (BPS Books, 2011; discussed below), among many others.

One of Marshall’s most important and most overlooked works was co-authored by Eric. The posthumously published Laws of Media (University of Toronto Press, 1988). In this book, they tackle the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as needlessly linear (a task I’ve attempted myself), writing, “The Shannon-Weaver model and its derivatives follow the linear pattern of efficient cause — the only sequential form of causality” (p. 87). Formal cause was a lesser known but chronic concern for McLuhan.

[T]he formal causes inherent in… media operate on the matter of our senses. The effect of media, like their ‘message’ is really on their form and not in their content (Marshall Mcluhan in Gordon, W. T., 2005, p. 10).

In Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2011), Eric brings together three pieces by Marshall and an extended essay of his own (“On Formal Cause”) that references them, as well as historical context provided by his new introduction and a Foreword by the inimitable Lance Strate.

Aristotle’s definition of formal cause — one of four causes he defined, and the one that contains the other three — reads the “essense, idea, or quality of the thing concerned” (Bunge, iii; what Heidegger would call “the thing thinging”). McLuhan saw Aristotle’s oral orientation conflating formal and final cause. This view and the Shannon-Weaver model are the results of left-brain thinking, and we need a right-brain perspective if we are to cope with the new electronic age. “Communication theory necessarily concerns the study of the public and not of the program,” McLuhan wrote in an unpublished letter to Archie Malloch. “The ‘content’ of any performance is the efficient cause which includes the user or the cognitive agent who is, and becomes, the thing known, in Aristotle’s phrase” (p. 10). He goes on to cite his mentor Harold Innis as the first to show that the alphabet is what split Greek thought between “thinking” and “being” (p. 30). “Literacy become synonymous with Western civilization that divorced ‘subject’ from ‘object’ and thought from feeling, just as the dominant metaphors of mechanism widened the separation of  ’cause’ and ‘effect'” (p. 31). Knowledge of the alphabet distances us from knowledge of formal cause.

And understanding formal cause is tantamount to understanding our new media ecology. It was at the center of McLuhan’s work. Eric writes, “Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time” (p. 87). McLuhan wrote, “effects precede causes” (p. 43). The bright light of the future casts shadows on the present from forthcoming events — that’s formal cause.

[Media] Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns. It does not seek quantities, but satisfactions and understanding (p. 8).

Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have the character of formal causality (McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen, NAC, 1975).

McLuhan mentioned predicting the present in his work several times, and an observance of “daily miracles” like his oft-studied subject Chesterton. He also approached all of this mass-media mess from what amounts to a systems point of view: figures, grounds, environments, anti-environments, sense ratios. He was trying to get outside of it all to see what it was doing from the highest possible vantage point.

So this is all about perspective. And McLuhan pointed out that perspective is a mode of perception that involves a single point of view — or fragmentation, in space and time, in painting and in poetry (Gordon, Hamaji, & Albert, 2007, p. 139).

The perspective is part of what makes The Human Equation by Wayne Constantineau and Eric McLuhan (BPS Books, 2010) so effective: the vantage point, the human as central concern, the human as center of the universe. This is “Book 1: The Human Equation Toolkit,” and the toolkit consists of numerous sets of four related concepts, tetrads, not unlike the ones in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers’ The Global Village (Oxford University Press, 1992), and those included in the aforementioned Laws of Media. The Human Equation starts with four embodied positions — standing, lying down, sitting, and kneeling — as the basis of all extensions thereof (i.e., media, technology, etc.). Co-authored by the late mime Constantineau, that the book’s foundation is comprised of body positions should come as no surprise.

This short book is rife with odd new perspectives on our media, culture, our place in the universe, and indeed our bodies themselves — much like so many of Marshall McLuhan’s own odd shorter works.

This year marks the centennial of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, and his work is as relevant now as it ever was. Here’s to everyone who’s keeping his legacy alive, especially his son Eric McLuhan.

References:

Bunge, M. Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. Metaphysics, 32, Bk. 1, ch, iii.

Gordon, W. T. (2010). McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum Books.

Gordon, W. T. (2005). McLuhan Unbound, #14. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

Gordon, W. T., Hamaji, E, & Albert, J. (2007). Everyman’s McLuhan. New York: Mark Batty Publisher.

Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. R. (1992). The Global Village. Oxford University Press.

National Archives of Canada. (1975, July 2). Marshall McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen.

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Distant Early Warning: Coupland on McLuhan

If I had to pick a patron saint, a hero, or a single intellectual influence for my adult self, it would undoubtedly be Marshall McLuhan. If you’ve spent any time at all reading my work, you’ve seen his name and his ideas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (Atlas & Co., 2010) is the latest biography of the man and differs from previous versions in many ways, not the least of which is the author. Having struggled through several of Douglas Coupland’s novels, I had my reservations about his writing this book. I am glad to say he eloquently quelled most of my concerns.

The world weighs on my shoulders
But what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy
But I worry about you — Rush, “Distant Early Warning”

There are several things that people often overlook or misunderstand about McLuhan that Coupland nailed in this book. One was his devout Catholic faith, which rooted his thinking in many ways once he found it, and another was his deep disdain of the media and its attendant technology. In spite of his insight, foresight, and prescience, he hated this stuff. Coupland points out many times that McLuhan wouldn’t have liked our current reliance on technology and connectivity one bit, but he would’ve found it interesting. Another of Coupland’s key insights is that, above all else, McLuhan was an artist, “one who happened to use ideas and words as others might use paint” (p. 16). Seen in this way, a lot of his work might make a hell of a lot more sense to newbies, critics, and haters alike. Like the best artists, he was a pattern perceiver of the highest order.

There’s really no considering this book, its author, or its subject without considering Canada. Yes, Canada, The Great White Wasteland that brought us Rush, hockey, Bob and Doug McKenzie, Justin Bieber, Coupland and McLuhan, as well as the latter’s most obvious forebear, Harold Innis. It’s cold up there, folks — cold and spread out. It makes one appreciate the human element.

“Call it religion or call it optimism,” Coupland writes, “but hope, for Marshall, lay in the fact that humans are social creatures first, and that our ability to express intelligence and build civilizations stems from our inherent social needs as individuals” (p. 165). Or, as McLuhan himself put it, “The user is the content” (Take that, so-called “social media experts”). McLuhan’s consistent focus on the individual is what has kept his ideas fresh in the face of new contrivances.

I know it makes no difference
To what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg
And I worry about you — Rush, “Distant Early Warning”

My problem with Coupland’s past work has had less to do with his writing ability (he’s an excellent writer) and more to do with his appropriation of Salingerisms, and not even a biography could escape. Coupland alludes to Catcher in the Rye by comparing McLuhan to Holden Caulfield on page 111. It’s an apt comparison, and it characterizes The Mechanical Bride-era McLuhan accurately, but I have to admit being irked at the reference.

With all of that said, You Know Nothing of My Work made me proud (I fancy myself something of a McLuhan scholar, so this is meant as a heartfelt compliment), and it made me cry (Though I already knew the story of McLuhan’s last days, a word-man unable to use words is still one of the saddest things I can imagine). I’d like to think Marshall McLuhan would’ve liked this book. It’s treats him with respect, humility, and humor, and I think it “gets” him. What else could he want from a biography?

————

Here is a scene that illustrates the heights of McLuhan’s fame, what Coupland calls “every geek’s dream,” and this book’s namesake: Marshall Mcluhan in Woddy Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) [runtime: 2:43]:

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Word Power: Watch What You Say

When I was six years old, I propped a 2×4 up on a brick in our driveway and jumped my Evel Knievel Signature Schwinn Stingray a few inches less than a foot off the ground. My grandfather saw me trying to achieve escape velocity and told me to keep it up, that it would “earn me some money one day.” Well, I’m still pedaling toward inclined planes attempting to leave the earth’s surface, but I’ve never earned a dime doing it. The point is not my inability to parlay my propensity for doing dumb stuff on my bike into a career, but that the things we say to each other often have long-lasting impacts we could never anticipate. The smallest utterances can shape a person’s life.

Language leaves lips for lines and spins through circuits
We send and receive and talk in circles
When we leave and the circles are broken
What happens to all the words we’ve spoken?

Riding BMX got me into making zines. I saw an article on them in FREESTYLIN’ Magazine and decided I wanted to do one. When I wasn’t riding my bike, I’d be in my room with photos, Sharpies, and gluesticks, cutting and pasting my visions on half-folded eight and a half by eleven pieces of paper.* During one of those sessions, my dad told me I should work for a magazine. I ended up doing just that (and the web equivalent) for several years.

If I were forced to pick a single answer to the question “what do you do?” I would probably say I’m a writer, though I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. Hell, I made C’s in both English 101 and 102, but In my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for my first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art. I give the credit for my newfound confidence to my Abnormal Psychology teacher.

When I moved away from Seattle the first time, I used to keep in touch with local cable access celebrity the Reverend Bruce Howard (you can find clips of his ranting on YouTube). Once, during a long-distance phone conversation with him from Alabama, he interrupted himself and told me out of the blue that I had a great speaking voice and that I should use it. I’d never really thought about it because, as you know from hearing your own voice on recordings, I thought I sounded weird, but coming from such a dynamic speaker, it made me rethink it. I have since become an instructor and a regular public speaker. Part of my having the self-assurance to make this leap was Rev. Howard’s comment.

These are all positive examples, but it works both ways. In communication studies classes, we teach that communication is irreversible. Once you put something out there, you can’t take it back (I always think of the courtroom scenes where they strike something from the written record even though everyone in attendance already heard it). As the above examples illustrate, in butterfly effects of the word, even the smallest comment can leave a lasting impression. Be careful what you say to your friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, and others around you. Your words can have impacts you never imagined.

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* So fervent was my zine-making that I got a copy machine for my high school graduation present. I still have one, and I do still make zines once in a while.

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danah boyd: Privacy = Context + Control

danah boyd is one of the very few people worthy of the oft-bandied title “social media expert” and the only one who studies social technology use with as much combined academic rigor and popular appeal. She holds a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley’s iSchool and is currently a Senior Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. As the debates over sharing, privacy, and the online control of both smolder in posts and articles web-wide, boyd remains one of a handful of trustworthy, sober voices.

boyd’s thoughts on technology and society are widely available online, as well as in the extensive essay collection, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (MIT Press, 2009). In what follows, we discuss several emerging issues in social media studies, mostly online privacy, which has always been a concern as youth and digital media become ever more intertwined.

Roy Christopher: Facebook is catching a lot of flack lately regarding their wishy-washy Terms of Service and their treatment of their members’ privacy. Is there something happening that’s specific to Facebook, or is it a coincidental critical mass of awareness of online privacy issues?

danah boyd: Facebook plays a central role in the lives of many people. People care about privacy in that they care about understanding a social situation and wisely determining what to share in that context and how much control they have over what they share. This is not to say that they don’t also want to be public; they do. It’s just that they also want control. Many flocked to Facebook because it allowed them to gather with friends and family and have a semi-private social space. Over time, things changed. Facebook’s recent changes have left people confused and frustrating, lacking trust in the company and wanting a space where they can really connect with the people they care about without risking social exposure. Meanwhile, many have been declaring privacy dead. Yet, that’s not the reality for everyday folks.

RC: Coincidentally, I just saw yours and Samantha Biegler’s report on risky online behavior and young people. The news loves a juicy online scandal, but their worries are always seem so overblown to those in-the-know. What should we do about it?

db: Find a different business model for news so that journalists don’t resort to sensationalism? More seriously, I don’t know how to combat a lot of fear mongering. It’s not just journalists. It’s parents and policy makers and educators. People are afraid and they fear what they don’t know. It’s really hard to grapple with that. But what really bothers me about the fear mongering is that it obscures the real risks that youth face while also failing to actually help the youth who are most at-risk.

RC: NYU’s Jay Rosen maintains that his online presence is “always personal, never private.” Is that just fancy semantics or is there something more to that?

db: The word “private” means many things. There are things that Jay keeps private. For example, I’ve never seen a sex tape produced by Jay. I’ve never read all of his emails. I’m not saying that I want to, but just that living in public is not a binary. Intimacy with others is about protecting a space for privacy between you and that other person. And I don’t just mean sexual intimacy. My best friend and I have conversations to which no one else is privy, not because they’re highly secretive, but because we expose raw emotional issues to one another that we’re not comfortable sharing with everyone. Hell, we’re often not sure that we’re comfortable admitting our own feelings to ourselves. That’s privacy. And when I post something online that’s an in-joke to some people but perfectly visible to anyone, that’s privacy. And when I write something behind a technical lock like email or a friends-only account because I want to minimize how far it spreads, that’s privacy. But in that case, I’m relying more on the individuals with whom I’m sharing than the technology itself. Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.

RC: Hannah Arendt defines the private and public realms respectively as “the distinction between things that should be hidden and things that should be shown.” How do you define the distinction?

db: I would say the public is where we go to see and be seen while minimizing our vulnerabilities while the private is where we expose ourselves in a trusted space with trusted individuals.

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Ed. Note: It has come to my attention that what Jay Rosen actually said was, “In my Twitter feed I try to be 100 percent personal and zero percent private.” Apologies to everyone, especially Jay, for the misquote.

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Howard Rheingold: Virtual Cartographer

Howard RheingoldMy friend and colleague Brandon Pierce let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

Culture is driven by technology. Contemplate, for a moment, all of the devices that have changed your life in profound ways; or attempt a regress to your mental and physical state of being before the birth of the World Wide Web. Undoubtedly, you will notice your life is now inextricably linked to and tangled within technologies that pervade our daily experience (technophobes excluded). Our relationships, interests, and attitudes have all been cultivated by technological innovations made within our lifetime. Depending on the individual results of these developments, one can view the changes as mind-amplifying progress or a march toward a synthetic, controlled existence.

All of the above notwithstanding, Howard Rheingold is trying to give us a compass and a map, to help us navigate these times of speedy techno-social change and begin to understand where we’re headed. There are people in this world who live in the future. They envision, design, and play with unheard-of devices; they organize physical communities that reflect their virtual connectivity; they live in a world that integrates technology and reality in novel ways. Rheingold knows these people. Hunting out the territories where technology meets human relationships is his business.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus Books, 2002) is Howard’s latest attempt to shine a flashlight into the future. This future is home to inhabitants that navigate daily life with devices that are literally remote controls for the physical world, devices that are electronically integrated into our everyday environment. Radio chips, reputation systems, wireless internet nodes, Global Positioning Systems, person-to-person texting, and wearable computers all contribute to a vision of commerce and communication at hyperspeed. How these developments will be handled, by government, corporations, and everyday people, is yet to be determined, and how these technologies will manifest themselves in society is yet to be clearly conceived.

In times where technological innovation is in overdrive, it is difficult to predict or prepare for the future. Governmental regulation cannot keep up with technological advances (you can’t tame an animal that you can’t catch). Smart Mobs wants to make us conscious of potential changes. Extrapolating trends into an uncertain future, Howard Rheingold is attempting to help shape it with socially conscious dialog.

Brandon Pierce: Smart Mobs deals with the convergence, or overlapping, of multiple technologies. You argue that this new synthesis will manifest “emergent properties” that will be profound and unpredictable. Can you articulate this idea for our readers (i.e., why is the future of pervasive media and technology so much more than merely obtaining wireless internet access in the park or receiving baseball scores on your mobile phone?)?

Howard Rheingold: We’ve seen, at least twice before in the past two or three decades, the way the convergence of information and communication technologies have created new media that have had profound, widespread, and largely unpredictable effects. The television screen and the microprocessor made possible the personal computer as we know it. The personal computer is something that amplifies the ability of people to communicate, create, and do their work. It’s not just a television screen and a microprocessor. It’s an entirely new medium. In fact, it was regarded as a toy in its early days. The effect it has had on the way we do business and in the pursuit of knowledge, in academia, science, and medicine, have all been profoundly changed by the personal computer in ways that were not predicted. With PCs merging with communication networks (originally the telephone network with modems, but then over to cables and wireless networks) you get something that’s not just a computer connected to a telephone; you get an emergent network, like the internet, which spawned the web and digital communication and all sorts of other phenomena which were not predicted beforehand. So we’ve learned something from this, but can we apply what we’ve learned to the future? We look at the internet, and it’s been limited to the desktop, whether in a home or an office, but now, as we move on to devices we can carry, today there’s mobile phones, maybe tomorrow there will be wearable computers and, for some, PDAs (personal digital assistants). That’s not going to be just carrying the internet around; it’s going to be an entirely different phenomenon.

BP: You have participated in the dialogs that have cultivated consciousness and management of the consequences of techno-social revolutions. Despite our limited knowledge of the complex dynamics of change, are there any unifying themes or concepts that underlie revolutions such as these?

HR: I think that it’s not just our blind inability to forecast. In fact, if you look at what drove the internet’s social communication, email was the killer app, along with newsgroups, mailing lists, chat rooms, instant messaging. These were just a huge driver of the internet. And with telephones, well, people like to communicate . . . socially. That’s obvious. And we’re seeing with the early use of the new media, the text messaging and SMS messaging (20 to 30 billion messages annually, worldwide), that social communications are something that people value. If you look at what people have done with these various forms of social communications, the kinds of communication that technology can afford, the telephone allowed one to communicate with someone far away, in real time. The internet makes it possible to communicate with people you’ve never met, but with whom you share some mutual interest. Mobile communication is used mostly by people who already know each other, to coordinate their activities in real time, and although that seems fairly simple, that can lead to profound changes, because the way people organize their activities is really what drives the evolution of civilization.

BP: In the U.S., wireless nodes are sprouting up quite quickly, accompanied by rapidly growing networks, while text messaging and G3 devices have yet to show their faces. Is there room in the U.S. market for both the G3 devices and wi-fi laptops to be successful?

HR: The fact that text messaging has not taken off in America — the way it has in Europe, Asia, Africa, and starting in South America — has a lot to do with the failure of the American operators to market it properly. Unlike Europe and Asia, there were many competing standards, so you could not send a text message (or could not until very recently) from your phone to your friend’s phone, if your friend had a different operator than yours. In Europe they had a standard, so you could send a message no matter who your friend’s operator was. Secondly, in places where it has taken off, texting is cheaper than making a voice call, and the receiver does not have to pay anything, only the sender. Again, the American operators did not market it that way. The third thing is that in most places, texting first took off among teenagers. Again, American operators did not begin by marketing it to teenagers. They’re changing that, but they started by marketing it to thirty-ish executive geeks. There may be other cultural reasons, but there’s no way of finding out what those are while these major marketing obstacles are in the way.

G3 is how the phone companies refer to third-generation cellular phones, which have music and video capabilities. The infrastructure for doing that, centrally, requires buying expensive portions of the spectrum and installing a top-down infrastructure that’s very expensive, and it takes a long time to install and to make it work. At the same time, other technologies are being utilized by armatures. People are using low-power devices to connect to the internet, and make small networks in their neighborhoods. These devices are selling at a million and a half per month. Telephone companies are laboring to build expensive infrastructures that might be too expensive for people to use, while people spontaneously build networks themselves, the way the internet was done. Wireless nodes are beginning to provide high-speed access to people in cites. The advantages are found in using the spectrum in ways that are not known or allowed.

BP: The evolution of virtual reality technology has not mapped directly onto the path that you plotted for it. Do you feel that any aspects of that particular phenomenon are evolutionary dead ends?

HR: I think clearly that VR has not taken off. I did say in my book that it would take 10 to 15 years for the processing power alone to be sufficient to provide an experience that could compete with what we’re used to on television. So we’re about 10 years into that period, and it’s getting there. But clearly other things have happened in the world that have been much more important, bigger, and unforeseen. Once again, nobody predicted the web when I wrote Virtual Reality (MIT Press) in 1990. So I think it remains to be seen whether the technology will be able to provide a compelling experience, but I think the compelling use of the internet has come along that has been more significant.

BP: Web theorists have suggested that the internet challenges many of our fundamental notions about time, space, self, etc. They exist differently in the virtual world. Web time has been called “sliceable” or “shapeable,” custom fit for each individual (or possibly containing a myriad of distractions). How does your “softening of time” theory relate to, change, or enhance these previous theories?

HR: There’s some indication that the use of mobile phones to coordinate activities has changed those properties. People don’t have set appointments; time has been “softened.” It’s not “I’ll meet you at 1:00 P.M. wherever,” it’s “I’ll send you a message once I get downtown this afternoon,” and then people negotiate actually when and where they’ll end up. Another change was pointed out by an urban planner by the name of Anthony Townsend. People are using their telephones and PDAs to get work done while in their car, walking down the street, or sitting in the park. These are times when they would not have been accomplishing tasks, business-related or social tasks, before. That means that people are doing more things than they were previously, and that speeds up the metabolism of the city. That might lead to good results for some people and bad for other people. We don’t really know, but it’s important to note that those changes are occurring.

BP: Some opponents of wireless networks and virtual communities argue that we will emerge from the “age of instant access” as isolationists with underdeveloped physical and social skills. They talk of cities whose denizens devalue public spaces and natural communication and are totally dependent upon and useless without their mobile devices. What is wrong with this mentality? Can these mind-expanding gizmos enhance human interactions or enhance public spaces?

HR: First of all, I don’t know that I would argue that, in general, that people are becoming more civil to one another. Look at interactions that people have in traffic, or listen to talk radio. I think people are as impolite to each other as they have always been, but they seem to be more in a hurry, in general. But does that have to with technology, or the automobile, or skyscrapers, or capitalism, or suburbia? I think it’s simplistic to try to nail it down to one cause. I think, however, that the problem is in generalizations. It’s clear that while for some people, the internet, like many other things, can be a way of distancing oneself from other people. It’s clear that, for many people, using online communication, just as their grandparents had used the telephone, is a way to connect with other people.

BP: Dialectics are central to your work and your treatment of them is usually quite balanced. For example, “The bottom-up, grassroots forces of innovation and community clash and with and dodge the punches of the top-down control of the corporate world.” Describe the sort of interaction that will need to take place or for these two opposing forces to work in some form of symbiosis.”

HR: There are a lot of different forces of conflict. There are existing industries and emerging industries. There are old business problems and new business problems. There are old ways of regulating public goods, and there are new ideas about regulating public goods. I think what I’m trying to drill here about virtual communication, using technology to communicate (as we did with the telephone, or the internet), is that people did not use it in ways that society had planned. So, we can see that telephone operators and cable operators . . . they have certain plans for what they would like to see with populations in the future, how they would like to see the populations of the future behave with regards to communication and technology. In general, I think we can see that Hollywood studios, the recording industry, electronics manufacturers, television industry would like to go back to the days of broadcasting, where people were consumers of content that was broadcast to them. The only choice you really had was changing the channel, never really creating content, unless you worked for one of the major studios. Now, when we look at the internet, we see that many people created it. Yet, the telephone companies created an infrastructure that was useful, computer manufactures created computers, but the internet was some “thing,” like a shopping center that was built by a bunch of contractors. But it emerged from the cooperative effort of everybody, acting in their own self-interest. So, the PC revolution consisted of users. Bill Gates was one. The internet consisted of users. In the future, the user could become consumer.

I think what we need is not one side or the other, but a balance between the large scale infrastructure that can only be built by major corporations or regulated by national government, and the bottom-up stuff. I think citizens should be allowed more leeway, and new technology should be given an opportunity by better serving the people that use it, rather than the companies that sell it.

BP: …And for another example, “The liberating, creative, and opportunistic dimensions of the ‘instant access’ age are shadowed by the Orwellian image of a ‘panopticon’ of psychological imprisonment and privacy invasion. What factors are important in driving this dichotomy toward a healthy, humane solution? Will the tradeoffs (privacy for convenience) be worth it?”

HR: This is a complex issue, but there is one simple way of looking at it: Who has control over information? The person who owns the information, such as whose medical histories it is, record of transactions it is . . . or others. People want to sell their products, and there could be a healthy market in this. All the merchants want to do is find people who are more likely to be their customers. Provided a method for doing this, that is what commercial interests want. People do not want to be bombarded with spam and junk mail. They see it as some form of identity theft, and they don’t want people to spy on them any more than the constitution allows. So I think the question of future technology is who has control of these. Is there an off switch where you can turn off the information being broadcast about you, and if so, is the default mode on or off?

It’s very difficult right now in California to pass legislation preventing banks from selling, not just your account information, but all the transactions that you make on your credit card (which is a big issue) to hundreds of thousands of other institutions. The California legislature has failed twice in the past two years to pass a bill about that because the banks spend a lot of money on lobbying. They spend a lot of money on politicians who then owe them something. So, although individuals say they care about privacy, the political process is tilted in favor of institutions that profit from having control of information.

BP: Tell us about any new projects you have in the works.

HR: In a couple of weeks I’m going to launch the smartmobs.com website, a resource center of all the resources that I did put in my bibliography, and a community blog of new developments related to the chapters in the book.