Papers
Binding Time in Digital Civilisations: Re-evaluating Innis after New Media
Global Media Journal Australian Edition, 2009
The spectacular history of the computer’s power for calculation and command over distance has tended to divert attention from its very mixed record in mediating time. Gradual refinements in digital storage technologies have not overcome the tendency for digital artefacts to degrade, corrupt and disappear. The most distinctive feature of computer media though, is the diversification of spatiotemporal configurations that they have come to mediate.
This article returns to the seminal work of mid-20th century communications theorist Harold Innis, for an ethical framework that deals with this space/time imbalance. Just before computers were developed, he devised a method for analysing civilisations according to how well balanced the dominant media of an era were in relating to time and space. Space-binding media (such as papyrus or electronic communication), facilitate command and control over territory and support empire building. Time-binding media (such as stone and spoken communication within social hierarchies), operate to maintain cultural continuity and tend towards more stately and priestly structures. Innis’s media ethics is based on societies finding a balance between these functions.
The computer has become the dominant media platform of the current era. From the first design, command and memory were on the same circuit. However, as Innis feared, their implementation was always out of balance, as command functions were cheaper and more effective than memory or storage. More recently, it can be argued that more sophisticated time-binding features are better supporting demotic uses of sound, image and text, managed in archives and cultural networks. This paper explores the value and limitations of Innis’ theories for an understanding of the current epoch of internet media.
Blogs and the crisis of authorship
Paper presented at BlogTalk, May 2005
The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog.
In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.
Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.
Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.
Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.
Neither gaze nor glance, but glaze: relating to console game screens
SCAN Journal, Vol 1, No. 1. January 2004
Drawing on John Ellis's comparison between the screen - viewer relationship in Television and Cinema, this paper develops a reading of how players tend to relate to console games. Where the relationship to the screen of cinema is famously the gaze, Ellis argues television is the glance.
The player of console games is different again: not glance nor gaze, but glaze. The glaze is immersive (eyes glaze over), sticky (holding power); and self-reflective (identification with avatar).
Why the Digital Computer is Dead
(2002) ctheory.net article a106, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
This paper critiques the popular overemphasis on the concepts of the 'digital' and of 'computing' in order to argue that computers might be conceived as a media form characterised by events of invocation: summoning up logical, performative and aesthetic events.
The invocation is a multi-layered mediated speech event: the invocational act. It is not so much evidence of 'advanced' technology as an adaptation of existing themes in the cultural imaginary.
Computers as Invocational Media (PhD thesis 2001)
PhD thesis 2001, Macquarie University
This thesis argues that computers are invocational media. It shows how this technological lineage can be defined not only by the power of computation, but also by the power of invocation — storing, generating and recalling images, sounds and simulations. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, a wide literature on computer, medium theory and actor-network theory, it argues that invocational media are based on the ‘genetic element’ of invocation. The cultural practice of invocation, which has an ancient heritage, mixes command and memory to produce decisions. Invocational media not only answer calculations; they also invoke any number of dynamic new media environments. Summoning concepts from cultural milieux, they have been called on to invoke (among other things) ‘intelligence’, ‘life’ and even ‘reality’.
Invocational media are as significant as previous historical transitions in media technology. If television brought secondary orality (Ong), invocational media bring nth oralities: chat, queries, e-mails and ICQ. Although technology has displaced conventional magic, tropes of magic recur in technology’s cultural imaginary. Invocational magic is domesticated and commodified. Hobbled together from surveillance, spectacle, command and control technologies, its powers are conditional. Users must answer ‘avocations’: standards that condition everything that is invocable. Invocational aesthetics are distinctive. Disregarding the computational aesthetics of pure mathematical form, users appreciate the emergent qualities of the invocational aesthetic: playable games, responsive interfaces, and immersive experiences. Everywhere, invocations are polyvocal, calling to wider assemblages. Hyperlinks combine technological systems, textual conventions and mediations of social commitments in producing invocationary speech acts.
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