Media Theory – Page 4 – Roy Christopher

January 27, 2014

Dispatches from Digital Dystopia

David Hoffman once summarized George Orwell’s 1984, writing that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Aaron Swartz, Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, Adrian Lamo, Aaron Barr, and Edward Snowden have all been pawns and prisoners of information warfare. As the surveillance has expanded from mounted cameras to wireless taps, hackers have evolved from phone phreaking to secret leaking. It’s a ratcheting up of tactics and attacks on both sides. Andy Greenberg quotes Hunter S. Thompson, saying that the weird are turning pro. It’s a thought that evokes the last line of Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown (1991) which, after deftly chronicling the early history of computer hacker activity, investigation, and incarceration, states ominously, “It is the End of the Amateurs” (p. 301).

These quips can be applied to either side.

Sousveillance: Steve Mann — Sousveillance device via Steve Mann, 1998.

The Hacker Ethic — as popularized by Steven Levy’s Hackers (Anchor, 1984) — states that access to computers “and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total” (p. 40). Hackers seek to understand, not to undermine. And they tolerate no constraints. Tactical media, so-called to avoid the semiotic baggage of related labels, exploits the asymmetry of knowledge gained via hacking (Branwyn, 1994; Lievrouw, 2011; Lovink, 2002; Raley, 2009). In a passage that reads like recent events, purveyor of the term, Geert Lovink (2002) writes, “Tactical networks are all about an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other. Necessary illusions. What circulates are models and rumors, arguments and experiences of how to organize cultural and political activities, get projects financed, infrastructure up and running and create informal networks of trust which make living in Babylon bearable” (p. 254). Sounds like a description of the tumult behind Wikileaks and Anonymous.

In This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012), Andy Greenberg explores the infighting and odd cooperation among those out to break and build boundaries around certain strains of information. It’s a tale of rogues gone straight, straights gone rogue, and the weird gone pro. It’s a battle over stiffly defined contexts, lines drawn and defended. He writes of the leakers, “They take an immoral act out of some special, secret culture where it seems acceptable and expose it to the world of moral human relationships, where it’s exposed as obviously horrific” (p. 311). Theirs are easy acts to defend when the extremes are so evident, but what about the more subtle contexts? As danah boyd puts it, “Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.” Privacy is not secrecy, but they’re so closely related that the former seems to be lost in the fight against the latter. They’re also so close as to be constantly conflated when debated.

We Are Anonymous

Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). Informal groups of information insurgents like the crews behind Wikileaks and Anonymous keep open tabs on the powers that would be. After a cameo in This Machine Kills Secrets, Aaron Barr takes a more central role in We Are Anonymous (Little, Brown, 2012) by Parmy Olson. A high-end security consultant, Barr set out to expose Anonymous unprovoked, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of the line. Again, hackers are easy to defend when they’re on your side. Wires may be wormholes (Stephenson, 1996), but that can be dangerous when they flow both ways. Once you get locked out of all your accounts and the contents of your harddrive end up on the wrong screen, hackers aren’t your friends anymore, academic or otherwise. The recent DDoS attacks on several major torrent trackers should be raising more eyebrows on both sides.

Hackers of every kind behave as if they understand that “[p]ostmodernity is no longer a strategy or style, it is the natural condition of today’s network society” (Lovink, 2002, p. 259). In a hyper-connected world, disconnection is power. The ability to become untraceable is the ability to become invisible (Kluitenberg, 2008). We need to unite and become hackers ourselves now more than ever against what Kevin DeLuca (2007) calls “the acronyms of the apocalypse” (e.g., WTO, NAFTA, GATT, etc.; p. 47). The original Hacker Ethic isn’t enough when Shit is Fucked-Up and Bullshit (Wark, 2012). We need more of those nameless nerds, nodes in undulating networks of cyber disobedience. “Information moves, or we move to it,” writes Neal Stephenson (1996), like a hacker motto of “digital micro-politics” (Lovink, 2002, p. 254). Hackers need to appear, swarm, attack, and then disappear again into the dark fiber of the Deep Web.

Lovink (2002) continues: “The world is crazy enough. There is not much reason to opt for the illusion” (p. 259). Who was it that said Orwell was 30 years off? Tactical media is where we watch the ones watching us.

References:

Branwyn, Gareth. (1994). Introduction: Hackers: Heroes or Villains? In Knightmare, Confessions of a Super-Hacker. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

DeLuca, Kevin M. (2007). A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans. In, R. Sandler & P. C. Pezzullo (Eds.), Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27-55.

Greenberg, Andy. (2012). This Machine Kills Secrets. New York: Dutton Adult.

Kluitenberg, Eric. (2008). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media, and Technology. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Lovink, Geert. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Olson, Parmy. (2012). We Are Anonymous. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

Raley, Rita. (2009). Tactical Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1996, December). Mother Earth, Mother Board. WIRED, 04.12.

Stephenson, Neal (2012). Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. New York: William Morrow.

Sterling, Bruce. (1991). The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam.

Wark, McKenzie. (2012). Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, & Class. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

January 6, 2014

It Toggles the Mind

Twenty years ago, Arthur Kroker described the predominant spirit of the times as a “spasm” (1993). What Bruce Sterling (1998) describes as “that violently oscillating 1990s state when you feel totally hyper and nauseatingly bored. That gnawing sense that we’re on the road to nowhere at a million miles an hour.” The feeling has expanded to the point where detached irony is our default emotional setting. David Foster Wallace called it “Total Noise” (quoted in Gleick, 2011, p. 403): An all-consuming cultural state that “tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric” (Wallace, 2012, p. 301). It’s information anxiety coupled with complete boredom (Gleick, 2011). What happened to the chasm between those two extremes?

Always two things
switching.
Current runs through bodies
and then it doesn’t.
It was a language of sounds,
of noise,
of switching,
of signals.
…
On again.
Off again.
Always two things
switching.
One thing instantly replaces
another.

It was the language
of the Future.

— Laurie Anderson, United States

Constructing sameness is an essential intellectual activity that goes unobserved. — Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think

A skeuomorph is a design element that remains only as an allusion to a previous form, like a digital recording that includes the clicks and pops of a record player, woodgrain wallpaper, the desktop metaphor, or even the digital “page.” It’s obsolete except in signifying what it supplants. N. Katherine Hayles (1999) describes the concept, writing, “It calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new” (p. 17; cf. Tenner, 2003, p. xii). Skeuomorphs meditate the liminal space between uncomfortable shifts and an uncertain future, translating the unknown into the terms of the known.

Translation is always an amalgam of hope and nostalgia, combining the yearning for home with the urge to press forward into new territories. — Matthew Battles, The Sovereignties of Invention

Just like a cramped muscle, the solution to Kroker’s metaphorical spasm is to stretch it out. In the most general sense, my central research question concerns the process by which we mediate our lives with our technologies. What I call The Medium Picture is that process, what it helps, hides, and hinders. A medium is literally a “middle, intermediary state” (Gleick, 2011, p. 153), and that is the place I’ve been investigating. Skeuomorphs bridge the threshold, obscuring the transition, and that is their purpose when it comes to adapting people to new technologies. They soften the blow of the inevitable upgrade. But every new contrivance augments some choices at the expense of others. What we lose is often unbeknownst to us.

… multifunctional lidless eyes watching, outside-in and inside-out; our technology has produced the vision of microscopic giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time out of the picture, contracting space to a spasm. — Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

With his finger ever on the flickering pulse, William Gibson (2012) writes, parenthetically, “(This perpetual toggling between nothing being new under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work)” (p. 51). That binary belies a bulging, unexplored midsection. The space between that switch from one extreme to the other, that is what The Medium Picture is about.

References:

Anderson, Laurie. (1984). United States. New York: Harper & Row, p. 22.

Battles, Matthew. (2012). The Sovereignties of Invention. New York: Red Lemonade, p. 84.

Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 43.

Douglas, Mary. (1986). How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, p. 60.

Gibson, William. (2012). Distrust That Particular Flavor. New York: Putnam.

Gleick, James. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kroker, Arthur. (1993). Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh. Montreal: New World Perspectives.

Sterling, Bruce. (1998, October 4). Viridian Design. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Tenner, Edward. (2003). Our Own Devices. New York: Knopf.

December 24, 2013

Flyover Culture: The Death of the Mainstream

We’re all home for the holidays. Looking around the living room today at the family assembled there, most were clicking around on laptops, two were also wearing headphones, one was fingering a smartphone. The television was noticeably dark and silent with each of us engrossed in his or her own digital experience, be it a game, a TV show, or some, social metamedium. Jaron Lanier (2008) writes, ”…pop culture is important. It drags us all along with it; it is our shared fate. We can’t simply remain aloof” (p. 385). But what happens when we don’t share any of it anymore? Narrowcasting and narrowcatching, as each of us burrows further into our own interests, we have less of them in common as a whole. The mainstream has become less of a stream and more of a mist.

What We Share

A friend of mine noted recently that The Long Tail has gotten so long and so thick that there’s not much left in the Big Head. As the internet-enabled market supported a wider and wider variety of cultural artifacts with less and less depth of interest, the big, blockbuster hits have had ever-smaller audiences. This wasn’t the case just a decade ago. The audiences seem to decrease in proportion to the size of the screens. I have found this splintering more and more in the classroom as I try to pick somewhat universal media artifacts to use as examples. Even the biggest shows and movies I brought up this semester left nearly half of my students out, and if I ever got into the stuff I actually like, I was greeted with little more than cricket sounds. The postmodern promise of individual viewpoints and infinite fragmentation is coming closer to fruition.

Cultural divisions as such used to be framed as high versus low culture. New Yorker writer John Seabrook (2000) argues that we have evolved past such hierarchies into what he calls “nobrow culture.” Definitely erring on the high side, Seabrook doesn’t know Stormtroopers from Sand People. Depending on which side of the high/low fence you stand, he and his ilk have “condescended and/or pandered,” in the words of Hal Foster, to you for far too long. The mixing of high culture’s concerns with low culture’s lack thereof only makes sense if there’s a market in the middle. The mainstreaming of anything requires a middle class.

Middle Class, R.I.P.

The middle class is traditionally thought of as the masses of people who are above “working” class but also not quite “upper” class. By definition, membership in the middle class requires a certain amount of discretionary income. Mainstream pop culture relies on that. As that income diminishes and less of the extant money is spent on media due to an increasingly tech-savvy populous, the funding for frivolous entertainment decreases. Art and commerce have always been odd bedfellows, but their offspring are the least interesting children in history. Focus groups, product placement, and everything “brought to you by” a brand are not cool conventions. Mix that division and decline with pop culture’s obsession with its own past, what Simon Reynolds (2011) calls “retromania,” and we get reality television, ubiquitous advertising, and endless remakes and remixes. Reynolds likens the state of the culture industry to global economics, predicting an inevitable crash: “The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivatives and indebtedness” (p. 410-420). If the rest of pop culture ends up like the demonetized music industry, then we can bury the middle class next to the mainstream.

None of this is to say that underground culture is inherently better. It’s never made much sense to describe something aesthetically in terms of the mainstream, and now it makes less than ever. Working the ends against the middle trying to get the best of both worlds, so-called “nobrow culture” ends up with the bad of both without any of the good. Watered-down, diluted, widely disseminated, what’s left of the mainstream is the cultural equivalent of the muddy, middle heartland, viewed from an airplane window. It’s flyover culture.

Wittgenstein (1953) once said there was no such thing as a private language. The presumption being that a language only works if it is shared. The same can be said of culture. It only works if it is shared. Here’s hoping we can continue to find some overlapping dirt to dig.

References:

Anderson, Chris. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling More of Less. New York: Hyperion.

Lanier, Jaron. (2008). Where Did the Music Go? In Paul D. Miller (Ed.), Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 385-390.

Reynolds, Simon. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: faber & faber.

Seabrook, John. (2000). Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing. New York: Knopf.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing.

————

This post benefited greatly from discussion and correspondence with Mark Wieman and Tim Baker.

November 10, 2013

It’s Tricky: Burgeoning Versioning

More mornings than not, either my fiancée or I will wake up with a song securely stuck in one of our heads. Yesterday morning in hers was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi (2009). Once she found and played the song, I noticed something a bit off about it. I wondered if it had originally be sung by a woman and if he’d just jacked the chorus for the hook. I distinctly remembered the vocals being sung by a woman but also that they were mechanically looped, sampled, or manipulated in some way.

Upon further investigation I found that the song was indeed originally Kid Cudi’s, but that singer/songwriter Lissie had done a cover version of it. Her version is featured in the Girl/Chocolate skateboard video Pretty Sweet (2012), which I have watched many times (Peace to Guy Mariano). Even further digging found the true cause of my confusion: A sample of the Lissie version forms the hook of ScHoolboy Q’s song with A$AP Rocky, “Hands on the Wheel.” This last amalgam of allusions was the version I had in my head [runtime: 3:26]:

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So yeah, I sampled your voice. You was usin’ it wrong.
You made it a hot line. I made it a hot song.
— Jay-Z, “Takeover,” 2001

Citing Serge Lacasse, Justin Williams (2013) makes the distinction between the sampled and nonsampled quotation illustrated above. The former being the straight appropriation of previously recorded material, and the latter being like the variations on a theme found in jazz or covers like the Lissie version above: A song or part of a song performed not cut-and-pasted. Building on Gérard Gennette’s work in literature, Lacasse (2000) calls these two types of quotation autosonic (sampled) and allosonic (performed). Of course the live DJ, blending and scratching previously recorded material, conflates these two types of quotation (Katz, 2010), and when we bring copyright law into the mix, things get even more confusing.

Run-DMC: Raising Hell (1986) For instance, the song “It’s Tricky” by Run-DMC (1986) is primarily constructed from two previous songs. The musical track samples the guitars from “My Sharona” by The Knack, and the hook is an interpolation of the chorus from the hit “Mickey” by Toni Basil (1981). Explaining the old-school origins of the song, DMC told Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, “I just changed the chorus around and talked about how this rap business can be tricky to a brother” (quoted in McLeod & DiCola, 2011, p. 32). Tricky indeed: Twenty years after the song was released, Berton Averre and Doug Fieger of The Knack sued Run-DMC for unauthorized use of their song. “That sound is not only the essence of ‘My Sharona’, it is one of the most recognizable sounds in rock ‘n’ roll,” says Fieger, The Knack’s lead singer. As true as that is, it’s not the most recognizable element of Run-DMC’s “It’s Tricky.”

Ice-T‘s track “Rhyme Pays” (1987) samples a guitar riff from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (1970). I remember the first time I heard Faith No More‘s 1989 cover version of the Black Sabbath song and wondering why in the world they’d be imitating an Ice-T song.

I guess I owe Kid Cudi an apology.

References:

Carter, Sean. (2001). Takeover [Recorded by Jay-Z]. On The Blueprint [LP]. New York: Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam.

Katz, Mark. (2010). Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lacasse, Serge. (2000). Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music. In Michael Talbot (Ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 35-58.

McLeod, Kembrew & DiCola, Peter. (2011). Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Williams, Justin A. (2013). Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop. Ann Arbor: MI: University of Michigan Press.

October 27, 2013

Ambient Networks: You Are Here

“How did you get here?” asks Peter Morville (p. xi) on the first page of his book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005). It’s not a metaphysical question, but a practical and direct one. Ambience indirectly calls attention to the here we’re in. It is all around us at all times. In Tim Morton’s The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), he explains it this way:

Take the music of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Early postmodern theory likes to think of them as nihilists or relativists, bricoleurs in the bush of ghosts. Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” features a repeated sample of her voice and a sinister series of recorded messages. This voice typifies postmodern art materials: forms of incomprehensible, unspeakable existence. Some might call it inert, sheer existence–art as ooze. It’s a medium in which meaning and unmeaning coexist. This oozy medium has something physical about it, which I call ambience (p. 103).

City Wall, Helsinki, 2007 — “City Wall,” Helsinki Institute for Information Tenchnology, 2007.

“Ambient” is a loaded, little word at best. You wouldn’t be alone if the first thing that comes to mind upon reading the word is a thoughtful soundscape by Brian Eno. In Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press, 2013), Malcolm McCullough reclaims the word for our hypermediated surroundings. Claiming that we’ve mediated aspects of our world so well that we’ve obscured parts of the world itself. Looking through the ambient invites us to think about our environment–built, mediated, situated, or otherwise–in a new way. McCullough asks, “Do increasingly situated information technologies illuminate the world, or do they just eclipse it (figure 1.3 below)?” (p. 20). He adds on the book’s website, “Good interaction design reduces the ‘cognitive load’ of artifacts. It also recognizes how activities make use of context, periphery, and background. But now as ever more of the human perceptual field has been engineered for cognition, is there a danger of losing awareness of how environment also informs?” How much can we augment before we begin to obscure?

McCullough’s background as a design practitioner grounds his inquiry in the cognition of the user (He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan). That alone sets Ambient Commons apart from most other books in the field. It’s not against technology, and it’s not cheering it on. It’s a call to more mindful use.

Framing some of the same concerns within the wiry window of networks, Anna Munster’s An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (MIT Press, 2013) is also a call for more mindful consideration. “Aesthesia” reinstates experience in and of the network, which is possibly the most pervasive of all our mediating technologies. Using William James’ radical empiricism, viral media, video art, Deleuze and Guattari, and Google Earth, Munster’s approach pushes us past the day-to-day relations of data to the underlying assemblage of networks. Like Peter Krapp’s Noise Channels (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), An Aesthesia… pulls the background to the fore; it makes the ambient evident.

“Ambience points to the here and now,” Morton (2010) continues, “in a compelling way that goes beyond explicit content… ambience opens up our ideas of space and place into radical questioning” (p. 104). Just as poetry calls attention to language, ambience calls attention to place. You are here.

References:

Krapp, Peter. (2011). Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

McCullough, Malcolm. (2013). Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Morton, Timothy. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morville, Peter. (2005). Ambient Findability (Preface: You Are Here!). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Munster, Anna. (2013). An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

October 18, 2013

Lessons of My Wounded Knee

I’ve spent the last month in a leg brace and the first two weeks of it on crutches. The experience has slowed me down in many ways, not all of which were bad. I’m not recommending cracking a kneecap to get reacquainted with reality, but a good jarring of the sensorium might help us all once in a while. As Doug Rushkoff said recently, “Reality is the human’s home turf.” Nothing brings reality crashing back in like crashing into reality.

In addition to my patella, I also smashed my phone. The cracking of its screen left it useless for texting or taking pictures. Ironically, the only thing it will do now is send (provided I know or can find the number) and receive calls. I also haven’t been wearing headphones as my injury already makes me an easy mark. These two things — no texting and no headphones — reconnected me with aspects of my days I’d been avoiding or ignoring.

Also, I’ve had to change up my commute. For one thing, I haven’t been able to ride my bike to work (obviously), which is what I was doing when I crashed. And I haven’t been able to take the train because I couldn’t walk that far on crutches. It should also be noted that there are only a few CTA train stations with elevators. Stairs were out of the question for a few weeks. This put me on a multiple bus-route commute that took me through parts of Chicago I’d never seen.

Possibly the most important factor that has made this an enlightening experience is sociological rather than technological. Collectively we tend to other the impaired among us. That is, there seems to be a clear delineation between the impaired and the normal; however, if one of us is only temporarily injured, we sympathize, empathize, or pity them.

In the month that I haven’t been texting or listening to music and have had a bum leg, I’ve had countless uplifting and informative conversations with people whom I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise and who wouldn’t have spoken to me for one reason or the other. All of the above has made me feel far more connected than any technology or so-called “social” media.

Speaking of, I posted this on Facebook about a week into my recovery, and I repost it here because it garnered the most response of anything I’ve ever posted on there:

My smashing my knee into the pavement at the origami triangle fold of traffic that is the intersection of Elston, Fullerton, and Damen in Chicago has shoved me out of my comfort zone in several ways. One thing I noticed today on my temporarily revised, much-longer commute to campus is a lot of needless anger: a man walking by the bus stop, angry at his dog for being a dog; a lady with her children, angry at them for being children; people on the bus, angry about being on the bus; the bus driver, angry about the people on the bus; and on and on.

I’m not exactly happy that my right patella is fractured in two places, and I’ve certainly had good and bad days since I broke it, and I’m not better than any of those mentioned above, but I try to smile at everyone, laugh at my fumbling around on crutches, do my work, and generally let others carry the anger.

It’s so easy to be angry, but it doesn’t take much more effort to be pleasant, and being pleasant makes everything easier for everyone.

Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be quite so uncomfortable, but sometimes being forced is the only way for it to happen. It feels like I needed it.

With that said, a physical therapist saw me out walking with my leg brace on the other day. He stopped and asked me about my injury with genuine and professional interest. He then informed me that a broken patella is the most painful kind of injury, which, he added, is supposedly why it is the chosen punishment for those late on their loan or gambling payments. I don’t recommend getting behind.

September 22, 2013

Satisficing and Psychic Erosion

A few years ago, I realized that I was wearing the wrong size pants. All of my pants were too short. Though I’d been buying the same size pants for years and coping accordingly, the realization was sudden. As soon as I was able, which took a few more months, I ditched them and bought all new, appropriately sized pants.

For a long time I used a stereo pre-amplifier I’d gotten at a thrift store to play music from my computer on larger, better-sounding speakers. The increased sound quality was amazing, but the volume knob on the amp had a short in it and often required readjusting. One speaker would go out, and I’d have to go jiggle the knob to get it back.

Pick Any Two.

These two cases are examples of what Herbert Simon called “satisficing.” That is, dealing with decisions that are not optimal but just good enough. Simon claimed that since we can’t know all of the possibilities or consequences of our choices, satisficing is the best that we can do. In other words, we all satisfice in some way on a daily basis. The problem is when a situation starts to wear on you in barely noticeable ways, slowly eroding your psyche, something seemingly small can quietly build into a real issue. I thought my pants were okay, not realizing for a long time that their ill-fitting length made me uncomfortable and wore on my confidence. Though my faulty volume knob was chronic annoyance, I never thought it was that big a deal.

And — in the biggest of pictures — it wasn’t, but the habit of making do, dealing with the okay instead of the optimal, can be dangerous. In his latest appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show, Louis CK addresses a version of satisficing that can erode our psyches in the worst way. By avoiding sadness, we erode our humanness. “Sadness is poetic,” Louie says “You’re lucky to live sad moments.” [runtime: 4:51]

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Being a person, present in the moment, is not always sad, but with our technologically enabled avoidance of sadness, we satisfice our lives away. “You never feel completely sad or completely happy,” Louie says. “You just feel kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die.”

August 14, 2013

Take It Easy: Television Still Matters

According to Marshall McLuhan’s most famous aphorism, no TV show will ever be more important than the existence of the television as a medium. He never said that the content didn’t matter, he simply said that it didn’t matter as much as the medium itself. Justin Theroux is one of my favorite actors, but his own dismissal of television’s content has been poking at me for weeks:

If I was roped into a seven-year TV contract I’d probably hang myself. It’s a TV show — selling cars, cereal, soda pop… The shows are incidental to the commercials. I always laugh when TV shows pat themselves on the back for being cutting-edge. I mean, an interracial kiss on Ally McBeal is cutting-edge? I’ve never been shocked by anything on television, except the news (IMDB).

Marshall McLuhan

Though I agree with Theroux’s sentiments about TV’s commercialization, to dismiss the medium wholesale is to recklessly miss out on a phenomenon that defines the way we see the world and that has for generations. Since 1960, about 90% of American homes have hosted at least one television set (Spigel, 1992). Film might still be the more powerful medium overall, and the internet might be the newest, but television has a circulation, a frequency, and an intimacy that movies only borrow from time to time and a continuous nature that is rarely replicated online. Television is still the medium that tells our stories.

Moreover, we live in a world composed of the stories we tell, and all of the programming on TV is presented as entertainment — even the news (Signorielli & Morgan, 1996). Cultivation theory states that heavy watchers of television tend to believe that the world outside their homes is like the one they see on the screen (Gerbner, 1967), and the average daily viewing time of seven hours per household and three hours per person has been stable for decades. Where a rented movie or content streamed online offers one a point of krisis, a juncture at which a decision must be made to find something new to watch or to stop watching altogether, broadcast television does a good job of stringing viewers along via overlapping episodes and enticing cold opens. Frequent viewers also tend to be less selective, regardless of their stated preferences, and watch each show until it ends (Signorielli & Morgan, 1996). Sometimes we want to turn on and make decisions; others we want to turn off and just be entertained.

All of that adds up to one thing: content matters.

Television

The TV’s got them images
TV’s got them all
It’s not shocking
Every half an hour
Someone’s captured and
The cop moves them along
It’s just like the show before
And the news is just another show…
— Jane’s Addiction, “Ted Just Admit It,” Nothing’s Shocking

Tom Hanks once said that film is for directors, theatre is for actors, and television is for writers. Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls being developed for TV, Dexter originally being a series of novels, as well as Veronica Mars‘ originally being planned as a young-adult novel speak to this. A show like Breaking Bad moves like a novel, while many movies are adapted from short stories. And a recent show like the Sundance Channel’s The Writer’s Room showcases broadcast, screen-based storytelling. The printed page and online flickering signifiers notwithstanding, television is the medium where writers get to shine.

I take it easy
The ice is thinning in the valley of the jeep beats
And when the freaks come out I hug a TV
Somehow a channel zero bender’s less creepy…
— Aesop Rock, “Easy,” Bazooka Tooth

“TV shows matter,” writes David Wong (2012). “They shape the lens through which you see the world. The very fact that you don’t think they matter, that even right now you’re still resisting the idea, is what makes all of this so dangerous to you — you watch… so you can turn off your brain and let your guard down. But while your guard is down, you’re letting them jack directly into that part of your brain that creates your mythology. If you think about it, it’s an awesome responsibility on the part of the storyteller.” I might not see the end of broadcast television, but even if it goes away, I don’t believe that the structure of the serial narrative will disappear. The idea of the TV show will endure. No matter what we watch it on.

References:

Farrell, Perry. (1988). Ted Just Admit It [Recorded by Jane’s Addiction]. On Nothing’s Shocking. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers.

Gerbner, George. (1967). Mass media and human communication theory. In F. E. X. Dance (Ed.), Human Communication Theory: Original Essays. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 40-60.

Rock, Aesop. (2003). Easy. On Bazooka Tooth [LP]. New York: Definitive Jux.

Signorielli, Nancy & Morgan, Michael. (1996). Cultivation Analysis: Research and Practice. In Michael B. Salwen & Don W. Stacks (Eds.), An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Spigel, Lynn. (1992). Make Room for TV: Televsion and the Family in Postwar America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Wong, David. (2012, August 6). 5 Ways You Don’t Realize Movies are Controlling Your Brain. Cracked.com

July 22, 2013

Borg Like Me by Gareth Branwyn on Kickstarter

As you know, my interests tend to veer from the high-tech to the underground, from authors to zine-makers, from science to punk. Well, my friend Gareth Branwyn is a bit of both. He’s been an editor at Mondo 2000 and bOING-bOING, as well as at both high-minded WIRED and the D.I.Y.-bible MAKE. He recently stepped down as Editorial Director of the latter and is currently compiling all of his various and important writings into one volume, but first he has to fund the project.

I interviewed Branwyn years ago (2001), and he told me then:

One of the great things about being so bloody old is that I’ve had a chance to experience every flavor of fringe media from the mid-’70s on. I caught the tail end of ’70s hippie media, then the punk DIY movement of the ’80s, then the ’zine publishing scene of the ’90s, and then web publishing in the ’90s.

He’s never left the scene, making his one of the most important voices in (any) media today. Borg Like Me will be indispensable for understanding 21st-century media mayhem. Don’t take my word for it, check out a 25-page sample of the book [.pdf], and watch the video on its Kickstarter page. A worthier cause you’re not likely to find or fund.

June 27, 2013

My Rosi Braidotti Piece on H+ Magazine

My piece about Rosi Braidotti’s latest book, (“Beyond the Body with Rosi Braidotti,” from June 1st, 2013), was picked up by h+ Magazine.

The site describes itself like so:

h+ covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing — and will change — human beings in fundamental ways. We follow developments in areas like NBIC (nano-bio-info-cog), longevity, performance enhancement and self-modification, Virtual Reality, “the Singularity,” and other areas that both promise and threaten to radically alter our lives and our view of the world and ourselves.

More than that, h+ aims to reflect this newest edge culture by featuring creative expressions of humanity on a razor’s edge where daily life and science fiction seem to be merging.

I’m sure you’ve already read it, but here it is anyway. Thanks to Peter Rothman for spreading the word(s).