Not because I don’t think it’s the most innovative and appealing product to come along since the original Mac itself; not that it hasn’t received strong reviews; not because I don’t think that this product marks the beginning of a new trend in digital devices that will change our relationships to our technology. From BoingBoing:

Apple now has a DUTY to export this interface to their entire product line. Today’s iPhone naysayers probably don’t appreciate the significance of the UI shift that happened today. The computer industry may once again — at the hands of apple — never be the same again. The interface reminds me of the scene in the film Minority Report where the pre-crimes unit staff were manipulating and viewing multimedia data using direct gestures. I feel like we’re getting a taste of that kind of direct interface control today with the iPhone.

And not because it’s not freakin’ sexy.

It’s not even that I don’t have the money for the 8-GB model; not because I think 8 GBs is too small (even considering I have a 60-GB iPod packed full); not because I think the AT&T rates are outrageous or too expensive; not because AT&T is the weak link in this deal (can you say EDGE?); not because it’s a first-generation product; and not even because I know there will be a better one in a year.

I have a year left with T-Mobile. (Did I mention how much I hate contracts? Why don’t companies, instead of having us sign ridiculous contracts — even more ridiculous when we’re talking about technology under Moore’s Law — why don’t cell phone companies and providers rely on their abilities to innovate and give the best deals? I know: I feel stupid for even asking.) Not that I really have a problem with T-Mobile’s service. I just want an iPhone, and I detest my stoopid Razr.

Therefore — alas! — I must wait another lust-filled year. Probably a good thing, though it will be a long, green year. Stoopid contracts.

Chew on that for a while. Thoughts to follow.

Being Digital

It’s both about new content and about looking at old content in different ways. It’s about intrinsically interactive media, made possible by the digital lingua franca of bits. And it’s about the decreasing costs, increasing power, and exploding presence of computers.

Being Digital addresses an inexorable movement toward the digital, made possible by the computer. New media is concerned with the cultural implications of that movement — at least how it concerns us in the Humanities. It’s not about dismissing the old, but the legacy of the old and its continuing influence on the new. Its about interaction, politics, access, economics, and ubiquity.

I think that if anyone were to ask me what the study of new media is, I could get away with quoting Negroponte above. I have been thinking for a while now about a definition of “new media,” and I’m leaning more toward media-studies understanding of it: one that is local and political, contingent on whose interests it’s serving. For example, “new media” in a Humanities department is much different than “new media” in medicine. Yes, there is some overlap (as digital technologies affect all areas of contemporary life), but how we understand it is a matter of politics.

Professionally, I guess my interest in “new media” has been in its influence on art primarily, and its affect on pedagogy secondarily. Perhaps the former is my theoretical interest, while the latter keeps me practically occupied.

Just thinking out loud here. As a tangential concern, I have been thinking about a section from a CTheory interview with Bruce Sterling about the Dead Media Project:

CTHEORY: There are some extraordinarily interesting things in your archives, like Inuit carved maps, Zulu beadwork, Inca quipu. How do you define these as “media?”

Bruce Sterling: In Dead Media Project we define media as a device that transfers a message between human beings. So a dance is not a “medium,” because there is no device involved; but a bouquet of flowers can be media. Flowers can carry a very important message if you can understand the “flower code.” People have used all kinds of things to record data and carry signals: fire, string, clouds, flowers, light, electricity, ink, wax, vinyl, tape, wire, cloth — the list just goes on and on.

There must be a device involved. Interesting, but perhaps a good way to hone one’s understanding of media studies. This takes me back to a question I have been pondering for a long time: is the computer a medium? Some would say no.

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal, and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.

Read more . . .

Indeed, Baudrillard and Enzensberger are also concerned with people’s ability to respond. By “response,” Baudrillard means an ability to repay so that no one has power over another: “power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid. To give, and to do it in such a way that one is unable to repay, is to disrupt the exchange to your profit and to institute a monopoly” (Wardrip-Fruin “Requiem” 281). For Baudrillard, this monopoly is in effect a silencing of opposition. Baudrillard sees us living in an era of non-response that is characterized by current media. He, like Enzensberger, seeks to end this silence by restoring the possibility of response.

Enzensberger, in his essay “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” seeks to posit a theory of the media, something he sees lacking in current Marxist theory. His project aims to release the “emancipatory potential which is inherent in the new productive forces” of electronic media (Wardrip-Fruin 261). For Enzensberger, electronic media have a revolutionary potential that can challenge by forming new connections by giving the common human a tactical advantage in the ownership of these media. Since the use of the media presupposes manipulation, according to Enzensberger, we must therefore make everyone a manipulator (265). Instead of receiving the media’s messages passively and being manipulated through those messages, Enzensberger sees new media as “oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition. Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity” (265). Enzensberger sees new media as helping to form a collective method of production, thus ending the individual’s isolation through the connections formed by these media. Armed with tape recorders and video cameras (he wrote this in 1970), wage-earners can illustrate and display social conflict in everyday life and get the community actively engaged in how to best address those problems (267).

Yet Baudrillard is not so optimistic. He sees that any use of the codified forms of media necessarily controls the message of those media: “there is no response from a functional object: its function is already there, an integrated speech to which it has already responded, leaving no room for play, or reciprocal putting in play (281). For example, delivering any message via the television is succumbing to that medium’s form and being controlled and manipulated by its already codified system of power. Like McLuhan’s lesson, the medium is the message for Baudrillard as well: “But transgression and subversion never get ‘on the air’ without being subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their meaning” (282). It is the “passage to the generality of political action which puts an end to the singularity of revolutionary action” (283). Baudrillard concludes that the message does not matter as long as the codes of transmission remain mixed and controlled. He suggests that the codes themselves must be modified in order for any revolutionary messages are transmitted (287).

Perhaps this is where new media enters the picture. Boal, Baudrilliard, and Enzensberger were all writing their respective pieces in the early seventies, several years before the introduction of the personal computer and two decades before the Internet. Yet, it seems to me that the networked computer is being used more along the lines of Certeau’s tactic than the outright revolutionary ways envisioned by our theorists. In using computers for their personal productivity, the wage earner undermines the univocality of the capitalist. Yet, the obvious question here is whether or not networked computers allow their users a response? I could cite the obvious example of file sharing upsetting the powers-that-be, the MPAA and the RIAA, not to mention the blogging community, open source, and the whole hacker community. Perhaps the latter is an example of the digital revolutionary: she has been condemned by the corporation and upheld as the hero of the information age by those whose fat wallets are not threatened.

The trick here seems to be not only the ability to control and the access to computers, but a mobilized community of users who seeks to make their voices heard. Does the polysemous Internet even have a chance?

Bush, in his essay “As We May Think,” invents what he calls a “memex,” or a sort of Victorian contraption with wheels, pulleys, and switches that can catalog a person’s interests in such a way as to provide a record, or “trail,” of knowledge through association. Bush sees the human mind working not necessarily by reason, or though predictable algorithms, but by association and chance that forms a “web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (44). His “memex” is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications [can't you hear the RIAA and MPAA groan?], and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility” (45). Yet, unlike the finite capacity of human memory, the memex can enlarge and make permanent the transitory pathways of neurons in the brain.

Bush’s memex, as he conceives of it, is an analog machine, replete with little cameras that take detailed snapshots of materials on microfilm. However, his quaint vision right out of Babbage’s century need not be a representation of crude writing implements and dead media, but may bypass the senses all together, so that no translation would be necessary: since all forms from the external world are transformed to various electrical currents, might it not one day be possible to connect these currents directly to the currents that make up the human nervous system? Bush seems to think so. His memex, then, becomes a literal memory augmentation, so that a human’s “excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (47).

Another fascinating aspect of Bush’s essay was his passing suggestion that human languages are not particularly adapted to communicate with machines. Instead of suggesting ways to design the machines to deal with this, he suggests that language will inevitable change. Here begins a disturbing notion of the humans changing for the technology, and not vice versa. I’m reminded of the marketing for some Intel gadget which said “You’ll find a reason to use it.” Well, why should we? This seems to suggest that how we want to work takes a secondary consideration to how the designers (and capitalists) may want us to work. Perhaps if computers have difficulty with human languages, they need to be revised, not us. I’m sorry, I do not want to have to learn a new way of writing just to communicate with my PalmPilot — I can’t even type, for goodness sake.

Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis” suggests that we should live in a symbiotic relationship with our computers, for we will each benefit the other, but does not address necessarily how we can do this. Computer keyboards and monitors are just not enough for a symbiotic relationship. I kept thinking of Star Trek’s computer working with Geordi to solve a crisis. The computer was able to create a likeness of another human — one that Geordi was physically attracted to — to work with him on solving a particularly difficult problem, one no doubt that would have caused the destruction of the galaxy if they were unsuccessful. This type of relationship seems to be what Licklider is going for: one that uses the strengths of each to augment the other’s weaknesses. Good idea. How do we do it? We’re back to interface and design.

Nelson’s “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Intermediate” tries to envision an interface, or at least a structure, that would allow humans to organize their digital lives in any way they wanted. Rather than a hierarchal structure, Nelson’s ELF (evolutionary list file) would be organized according to the user’s desires, and it would be able to evolve as the user does. I like Nelson’s idea, but his essay becomes bogged down in the abstract; I don’t think he even had a good idea of just how something like an ELF could be implemented.

What’s most interesting about Nelson’s piece is its conclusion: he posits his “philosophy” that complex and flexible file structures will enable the creation of new media, “the hypertext and hyperfilm,” and will facilitate the ever-evolving order of the human (143). What Nelson means by “hypertext” is not it’s Web manifestation of today. Our hypertext is not really hyper because it can be organized linearly. Nelson seems to desire something more like a holodeck, something that works symbiotically with the user to create a truly interactive and evolving form: “it has become possible to create a new, readable medium, for education and enjoyment, that will let the reader find his level, suit his taste, and find the parts that take on special meaning for him, as instruction or entertainment” (144). Indeed, no human writer (programmer) could construct all of these varying contingencies; therefore, the only conceivable way to write these environments is to allow the computer a role in the creative process. Not only would this happen for artistic expressions, but also for the mundane structures of our lives. The medium must be flexible enough to go anywhere we want; Nelson continues:

Last week’s categories, perhaps last night’s field, may be gone today. To the extent that information retrieval is concerned with seeking true or ideal or permanent codes and categories — and even the most sophisticated “role indicator” syntaxes are a form of this endeavor — to this extent, information retrieval seems to me to me fundamentally mistaken. The categories are chimerical (or temporal) and our categorization systems must evolve as they do. (144)

Indeed, what is literature or art or philosophy but “categorization systems”? These systems change over time, and in this postmodern zeitgeist, they are not necessarily trying to find the truth. No one view is any more correct than any other; wouldn’t it be great if our computers mirrored this idea?

It seems, however, that the trend is going the other way: you must conform and use M$, or your will be invalid. I think Nelson would be appalled at the notion of a thinking monopoly. Indeed, how does Windoze influence and structure how we work, how we think, who we are? Instead of the computer dictating who I am, I would prefer to be the one dictating.

A whole world separates these two artificial beings. One is a theatrical counterfeit, a mechanical and clocklike man; technique submits entirely to analogy and to the effect of semblance. The other is dominated by the technical principle; the machine overrides all, and with the machine equivalence comes too. The automaton plays the part of courtier and good company; it participates in the pre-Revolutionary French theatrical and social games. The robot, on the other hand, as his name indicates, is a worker: the theater is over and done with, the reign of mechanical man commences. The automaton is the analogy of man and remains his interlocutor (they play chess together!). The machine is man’s equivalent and annexes him to itself in the unity of its operational process. This is the difference between a simulacrum of the first order and one of the second.

Read more on Bog Jelly.