Tag: Media Theory

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Steven Johnson: No Bitmaps for These Territories

When a friend of mine loaned me Steven Johnson’s first book, I had no idea what he was getting me into. On the surface, Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) looks like most other books on the subject of computer interfaces, but how many times must I be warned not to judged books by their looks before I start to believe.

Johnson’s books each tackle a different topic than the one before, but they all wander wide enough for you to see the color outside of the lines. Where Interface Culture seemed to be about interfaces, it was about, well, interfaces — but interfaces like I’d never thought of them before, in places I’d never seen them before. Emergence (Scribner, 2001) was about emergent phenomena and network culture, but again, in ways that I hadn’t seen discussed before. Johnson writes about the signs of the times, but no one else sees what they signify quite like he does.

His latest book, Mind Wide Open (Scribner, 2004), is an autoethnographic romp through the neurobiology of his brain. It’s not quite like reading a Charlie Kaufman script, but it’s close. He also co-founded FEED online magazine, and writes for Wired, Discover, Slate, Salon, and many others.

I’ve returned to Interface Culture many times since that first read, and in turn, I asked Johnson to return with me [Special thanks to Jonathan Field for additional input].

Roy Christopher: I want to go back in time a bit to your first book, Interface Culture. Its title betrays the broad scope of the book, but in the meantime, the interface has expanded in our culture: Everything from media, to branding, to communication is, in effect, an interface. Did you see this expansion when writing this book?

Steven Johnson: In a (slightly self-congratulatory) word: yes. There were a few things I think I ended up being wrong about, and more than a few that I failed to anticipate, but the general argument has held up very well over the eight years that have passed since I wrote it. The argument, simply put, was this: in a society where information is proliferating at an exponential rate, and where information is valued above all else, the tools we have to manage and filter that information — our interfaces — become the most important symbolic or “sense-making” form in the culture. It’s not exaggerating things to say that Google is the defining mode of self-representation for our society, and Google is, in the end, just an interface to the web.

RC: What are your thoughts on our political system as an interface? Everything in this country has evolved so much over the past century, except government. How well do you think it works in today’s world so far as serving the public interest and public good?

SJ: I tend to be an optimist about a lot of things, but the state of the government is not something that puts me in a half-full kind of mood. We’re clearly in a transition phase right now, one that might well last another ten years, if not longer: a small and vocal (and well-publicized) part of the electorate has realized the power of information revolution, and they’re demanding that politics be revolutionized accordingly. (Just today, one of the heads of Moveon.org announced that they had “bought” the Democratic Party in 2004 and it was time for the old guard to hand over the keys.) But a lot of us still think about politics the old-fashioned way: as a remote force over our lives that we can’t control in any real way. I said after Dean imploded that his campaign was a classic study in the clash of two overlapping paradigms: the internet had transformed the way people raise money and mobilize supporters and that had led to Dean’s spectacular rise in late 2003, but the decision that people made about who to vote for was still governed by the tradition of seeing someone on TV (or, if you were really lucky, seeing them in a town hall meeting in person.) And that created an imbalance — because all the early indicators revolved around money and activist passion, which created an artificial sense of Dean’s inevitability. But the “actual voters” didn’t really dig him.

RC: As long as we’re talking about interfaces, what about branding? What about the homogenization of the landscape where big-box retailers are concerned? This is a personal pet peeve, but I like to see different things in different places when I travel. I hate to see the same four stores, or the same coffee shop in every town. Is there any company you think is respecting regional culture even as they move in and set up shop?

SJ: I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, but I think there’s a risk of sentimentality here as well. I mean, Starbucks is everywhere, which means by a certain standard the world has gotten more homogeneous. On the other hand, the world is now filled with far more places where I can order a triple-shot iced latté with good espresso. Ten years ago the number of places serving a wide range of coffees was pretty small, outside the ten biggest cities and maybe a dozen college towns. But thanks to Starbucks, even airports and shopping malls now have a huge palette of coffee options to choose from. Same goes for Barnes & Noble. Their outlets regularly carry Interface Culture in stores, despite the fact that it never came close to being a bestseller. But you would have been very hard pressed to find a book like that in a nonmetropolitan/academic bookstore ten years ago. (And then there’s the whole Amazon phenomenon, where everyone with a web connection now has access to the most obscure titles in print.)

So for the people outside the urban centers, I think the chains have largely been a force for more diversity, not less. The question is whether the chains are killing off the diversity in the cities themselves. I don’t think anyone has done a convincing study of this yet. My hunch would be it’s pretty much a draw: Soho is filled with J. Crew and The Gap now, but five blocks over in NoLiTa there are more small designers in one-room shops than there ever were in Soho. There are fewer indie bookstores now, but frankly, I don’t need indie bookstores with Amazon. And there are like a thousand Starbucks in NYC, but all the classic small coffee shops I know of are still thriving.

RC: In Emergence, you uproot the free-content-with-advertising model of mass media and propose an opt-in, information-exchange model. You envision a world of media with less ads, but rather a more open exchange of information between companies and consumers. As someone who cringes at ads filling every available space, I like the idea. Do you think there’s a way to get past the privacy issues, or protect privacy, and still implement such a model?

SJ: Amazon sends me email announcements when there’s a new release that it thinks I might be interested in, given my past purchasing history. I’d estimate off the top of my head that they’re on target about thirty percent of the time (often it’s notifying me of something I’ve already purchased, though not from them.) That means that two-thirds of the time they’re completely off base in anticipating my interests, but still I welcome those emails. I mean, what’s the batting average of all the other advertising in my life — all the billboards and radio plugs and subway banners and random TV spots, not to mention the spam? It’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent, if you add it all up. So when someone shows up and says, “thirty percent of the time, I’m going to point out something you really might want to buy,” I say: “Great, keep it coming.”

As for the privacy issues, I don’t know. I worry about health and financial records — and personal information about my family — getting into the wrong hands. But I don’t care about someone tracking the DVDs that I buy, as long they give me a one-click method of shutting down their recommendations if they’re not working for me.

RC: What’s the new book-in-progress all about?

SJ: It’s a pure work of persuasion, arguing that popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today’s television or games — much less the internet — than you did a few decades ago. It will definitely be the most controversial of my books, but I think it’s also going to be a fun read. It’s called Everything Bad Is Good For You, and it’ll be out in the U.S. in early May.

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The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu

Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and finding out what the kids are into. This lengthy tome is about how most of us came to be knowledge workers in the factories of information.

The Laws of CoolTo call this book “exhaustive” is an understatement. I can’t stress the reaches of Liu’s research or the sprawling implications of his book enough – and reading it is quite the lengthy process. Every time one thinks that Liu has found his bounds, the next chapter opens another door on which one wouldn’t have even thought of knocking. Yet, it’s a cohesive work, written with unwavering wit and erudition.

Exploring the Foucauldian climate of the corporate control culture, set off by IT and the mainframe, Liu shows how managers came to be “seduced by the system” (as Ellen Ullman put it in her book Close to the Machine). They used the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers – even where there had previously been no problems. His use of temperature-related tropes (e.g., “hot,” “cold,” “warm,” and especially “cool”) is confusing at first, due to the previous uses of such terms (i.e., as slang or as in McLuhan’s ubiquitous probes). These temperatures eventually come together to illuminate the weather of the twenty first century workaday, from the stifling of hot emotions by the cold machine to the warmth of friends and family and the cool of today’s assimilated, yet über-hip “knowledge workers” (“We work here, but we’re cool,” quoth Liu).

Taken whole, The Laws of Cool is a high relief, topographical map of the workscape of the early twenty first century. Couple this with Ken Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto and you have a crash course in post-Marxist labor studies.

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A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark

A Hacker Manifesto is the Big Picture of not only where we are in the “information age,” but where we’re going as well. Adopting the epigrammic style of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, as well as updating its ideas, Ken Wark establishes so-called “knowledge workers” as an unrecognized social class: “the hacker class.” Wark also updates Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, and a host of others: Continue reading “A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark”

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war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music

TurntableWe live in a realm where once clear boundaries have been reformed, pushed back, reconfigured, and often blurred beyond recognition. The age-old stable image of photography — once considered by most as a reliable visual representation of some brief slice of reality — is now suspect due to digital editing techniques. The same fate has fallen on film, the word, and music of all kinds.Whereas modernism adheres to the idea that there exists but one real “truth,” postmodernism sees all things shifting according to perspective. It finds no central truth, only changing points of view. As we will see through the course of this essay, the commodification of music has gone through a similar change — from a stable central authority to myriad shifting forms.

Where all of the aforementioned forms used to come down to the public from one source, like the divine word of God, or the idea of one central “truth,” the digital now allows most anyone to create, recreate and distort coded information of all kinds. In the music of the marketplace, the center of power was the record company. The decree was the packaged product — the record album, the cassette tape, and the compact disc.

Band of the Hand

Twenty or so years ago, the Hip-hop DJ emerged as a vigilante on this landscape of music as commodity. While remixing and recontextualizing the product, he decentralized the power of the record company. DJs break the code. They reorganize the power structure in the world of sound. The product is no longer the be-all, end-all, but just another piece of the new story. The center does not hold:

The DJ cultivates and manages singularities: the bifurcation points on the edge of chaos, where dynamical systems manifest their emergent properties and transcend the sum of their elements. The speakers emit alchemical sounds, cut and pasted by needles in deep grooves, manipulated by human hands on black wax. It is a pastiche of ever-shifting, hand-engineered, sonic references. The dialectic of the two turntables unfolds in time. Beats juggled for the meat jungle. Scratches snatched for the daily catch. Crowd control, cruise control, remote control, the discotheque as Panopticon: A command-control system with the DJ at the helm. Several systems work at odds and in conjunction to make waves in the scene. This is a language sans nouns; a lingua franca consisting only of verbs: motion, phase transition, aural morphology, all moving at the speed of left and right.

As the Universe of sound finds ears, vibrating shards meld into sonic calling cards: An ever-shifting musical identity that gives way to unrelenting multiplicity. Thanks to technology often perceived as obsolete, the entire history of sound is available for data-mining. The DJ is an archeologist of vinyl plates. Digging in the crates, (s)he returns with pieces to the amorphous puzzle. A cartographer of soundscapes unknown and yet unformed, the DJ makes the maps and the terrain simultaneously on the fly.

Sound manipulation is the foundation of all musical forms. The individual control of audible vibrations is what allows musicians to create aurally aesthetic sounds. As Paul D. Miller writes, “When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ on December 6, 1877, history changed. It became malleable in a form never before seen on this planet. Experiences of events, and the moment-events themselves could be captured, edited, sequenced, and distributed. What Edison did was take the voice and reduce it to its basic component: sound.”[1] This is what the DJ in Hip-hop does when he combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create entirely new compositions. The music represents a future without a past.[2]

The Ones and TwosSurf, Sample, and Manipulate

Where turntablism was the most exciting thing happening in music at the turn of the millennium, the art of the remix has moved online. The power of the record company has suffered another blow as the power of the DJ has been networked. Call it “uploadphonics,” “bootlegging,” or just plain “remixing,” but whatever you call it, it is a war of intellectual property, a war of copyrights, a war of the freedom of speech and most of all a war of sound. Online, underground remixers like 2 Many DJs, The Evolution Control Committee (whose slogan reads, “We’re so next year.”), Rick Silva a.k.a. CueChamp, Cassetteboy, Bit Meddler, and many others “surf, sample and manipulate” (in the words of Mark Amerika).[3]

Rick Silva calls uploadphonics “a tight spiral outwards of creativity that makes a music in tune with the ideals of the internet, a soudscape to fit the netscape.”[4] Record companies, in an effort to retain control, are fighting a moving target. Indeed, a moving target made up of moving targets: peer-to-peer networks are completely decentralized. The file trade is made from node to node, without central control. The center does not hold.

As I write this I am (re)mixing music. Through my KaZaa Lite P2P client, I’ve downloaded a cracked version of Sonic Foundry’s Acid 3.0 mixing software, as well as a plethora of songs in MP3 format. In the past few weeks, I have been able to literally re-work many of my favorite songs. Lifting a beat from one, a guitar lick from another and vocals from a cappella versions, I’ve made entirely new compositions that none of these artists ever intended, and then uploaded them for distribution to others. Anyone with a connection to the Internet wields the same power. Think of it as a massive, collective phase transition: the record companies put out solids (records), the Hip-hop DJ melts them down into liquids (remixes, etc.) and the home-computer remix kids boil the mass into gaseous vapor (molecules of sound, splitting and recombining without end). While there is still product coming down from on high, the “central truth” no longer holds ultimate power. There is no divine sonic word. There is only sound and infinite ways to put it together.

“In a recent post to boomselection.com an assignment was given out,” writes Rick Silva in an article from 2002 on online remixing, “a call to remix Eminem’s latest track was followed by a link to the MP3 of the a capella version. A week later boomselection released a subsite dedicated only to the Eminem remixes because the response had been so positive. The tracks were rated and posted. The number one track was number one mainly because of its amazing turnaround time. Within ten minutes of the assignment, someone had turned in a bootleg. The remixer took ten minutes to download the a capella, find a track roughly the same BPM, sync it, record it, encode it to MP3, FTP (upload) it, and mail out the link.”[5] All of this is good fun for fans and remixers, but a virtual nightmare for the recording industry.

Two weeks prior to the release of Eminem’s 2002 record, The Eminem Show, an advanced copy found its way onto a popular peer-to-peer network. As widespread downloading ensued, Eminem’s record company was forced to release his record a week before it had originally planned. “The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex,” writes John Perry Barlow on the digitizing of intellectual property. “Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.”[6] Since the replication of a file in digital format doesn’t decrease its quality, nor does it have limits, this is where the ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and digital bootlegging collide head-on.

Jay-Z / Dangermouse — The Grey AlbumNo one has brought this collision to the attention of the mass mind like DJ Danger Mouse. His Grey Album, which meshed the a cappella vocals of Jay-Z’s Black Album with music lifted from The Beatles’ White Album, was an internet sensation that set off a shitstorm in boardrooms and bedrooms everywhere. Record company suits were scrambling to kill it, and bedroom remixers were scrambling to outdo it. The record (in its modern form: the physical compact disc) was squashed by a cease and desist order from EMI (who own the rights to The Beatles record), but its children replicated: The Brown Album, The Rainbow Album, The Slack Album, etc. (the latter of which is an amusing blend of Jay-Z’s vocals and music from Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted record by DJ n-wee). The remixing continues — and so does the battle to stop it.

The United States Copyright Act states that “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means… for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”[7] The art collage band Negativland tested this clause long before Eminem was asking the real version of his oft-remixed song “Without Me” to “please stand up.”

Negativland — U2In 1991 Negativland released a single titled “U2” which sampled the Irish supergroup’s hit single “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The song and the release of the single were both part parody, part critique, and part media prank (some off-mike comments by Casey Kasem were also a part of the composition). It was quickly sued out of existence by U2’s label, Island Records.[8] Not to be beaten so soon, Negativland released a magazine in 1993 chronicling the court case. “The Letter U and the Numeral 2” was sued out of existence by Negativland’s own label, SST Records (also for alleged copyright infringement: Negativland used SST bumper stickers and press releases in the publication).[9]

“We live in a world where nothing is what we were taught it was,” Negativland write in the introduction to their 1995 book on the ordeal. “Art is business, business is war, war is advertising, and advertising is art. We are bombarded with information and entertainment. Negativland responds to this environment by making music that uses fragments and samples from existing media of all kinds.”[10] For Negativland, if it’s on the airwaves (or the internet), it’s fair game for fair use.

Bits and Pieces

While the legalities of remixing are still squirming under the weight of innovation, the format of music has shape-shifted as well — from atoms to bits.[11] The advent of the Compact Disc changed recording in many ways, but the fact that a band could now do over an hour of music (without having to release a double LP) was one of them. Where the CD killed the LP, shrunk cover art, and caused the public to buy all of their albums on a new digital format, the MP3 ends the tyranny of any multi-song format of the past. We’re now back to the single (without a B-side). A single made of bits, not atoms. A single awaiting a home on the mass storage device of your choice. A single awaiting a new beat, a new vocal track, or a new time signature.

“Just as a Powerbook is a processing-machine,” writes online remixer Tim Jaeger, “and Max/MSP is audio software with which users can program, code, and construct their own virtual instruments, combined they become meta-samplers and schiz-machines. Max/MSP consumes other instruments only to turn them into new, different instruments for others to use and produce new instruments with. The same with turntables, or small CASIO keyboards spitting out sampled rhythms from old New Order records.”[12] It’s music as shareware, open source sound, armed audio warfare… Embrace the postmodern: Reduce, reuse, recycle. The future of music is in our hands: Let’s remix it.

Notes:

1. Cumulus from America; Cartridge Music: Of Palimpsets and Parataxis, or How to Make a Mix by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid).
 2. Band of the Hand by Roy Christopher, Born Magazine, 1997.
3. “Uploadfonix” by Rick Silva, 21C Magazine.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “The Economy of Ideas” by John Perry Barlow, 1993.
7. United States Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107, 1988 ed. and Supp. IV).
8. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
9. Spin Magazine, May 1993.
10. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
11. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, Vintage, 1995.
12. “Scatter(ed) Dynamics” by Tim Jaeger, posted on the macrosound discussion list, January 3, 2003.

[Media Reader, #8, 2005]

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Year-End Top Ten List, 2003

My friends and I always used to do year-end top ten lists of our favorite records of the year. Thinking back through 2003, I decided to archive my favorite ideas of the year. Not that I was let down by music this year, on the contrary, I heard plenty of good records in the ’03 (e.g., Aesop Rock, Kinski, Cex, Prefuse 73, Radiohead, Ilya, Interpol, Mogwai, Tomahawk, Deadsy, Why?, The Blood Brothers, The Mars Volta, Atmosphere, The Roots, etc.), but I thought this would be more interesting. We shall see. Continue reading “Year-End Top Ten List, 2003”

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N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl

Kate HaylesDigging deep in the texts of both literature and science, N. Katherine Hayles exemplifies the reconciliation of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” better than anyone I know. Her refusal to concentrate on either side of the fence, instead insisting on plowing new ground on both sides, has lead her to some of the most intriguing research currently being done. Looking at texts from all sources and angles, Hayles is always seeing new things that others overlook. Continue reading “N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl”

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Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture

Ricocheting from such subjects as The Matrix to James Joyce, Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press) is a dazzlingly ambitious compendium. As in any collection of essays, it is a mixed affair, however, given its scope, and despite the occasional lapse into impenetrable jargon, it is an important addition to the burgeoning world of cyber-theory. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture”

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Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink

Have you ever been to a party where every conversation was of interest? Didn’t think so, but as host, Geert Lovink, the founder of Nettime, might just pull it off.

Lovink’s latest book, Uncanny Networks (MIT Press), is a roller-coaster ride of discussion that ranges from art to politics, techno-tribes to dot.com IPOs, radical politics to futuristic fantasy. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink”

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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.

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Peter Lunenfeld: Critic as Curator

Peter LunenfeldPeter Lunenfeld is the director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA) and teaches in the graduate Media Design program at Art Center College of Design. He is considered one of the preeminent critics and theorists of the intersections of art, design, and technology. Afterimage referred to his edited collection, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press, 1999) as “the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there.” Continue reading “Peter Lunenfeld: Critic as Curator”