A couple random thoughts to illuminate your weekend (yeah, like anyone is going to read this over the weekend).
Harkening back to last week's discussion of Manovich...
In his "where were the theoreticians" litany on page 6, Manovich decries the lack of critical attention re: new media (with some reason). I think one thing that complicates any sort of critical study of new media is that we are so immersed in it. In the past, when new phenomena arose in areas of art and culture, they (and the discourses that accompanied them) were generally situated within discrete, isolated locations (books, museums, even cinema houses)--locations you could visit and then leave. But how, in the early 21st century, do you get away from new media? How do you study something, find critical distance, when you are daily in the midst of it? When your cell phone is buzzing in your pocket, as you sit at your computer, downloading files to your PDA, listening to music, thinking about that film or television program you're going to see tonight?
It seems that in order to say something intelligent about new media, you need to turn a few things off first. That's one reason why I don't own a TV, why I don't have a PDA or a cell phone. Because I feel I need that critical, even contemplative, distance in order to work in the field of new media (as a web and graphic designer, not to mention high-tech academic). I need to be able to get away from it in order to think about it (I need to be able to escape the badgers!). I need a life outside of my field, which is to say I need a life.
But then perhaps the critical distance I aim for is just a myth. Which takes me to Katherine Hayles work.
Am I the only one who gets a little anxious when humans are described as "post," that is, "as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines" maintaining "homeostasis using feedback loops" (7-8)? I understand it, but being likened to a machine sure makes me squirm in my epistemological seat.
Then again, as a zen buddhist, I can certainly see myself as a "collectivity, an 'I' transformed into the 'we' of autonomous agents operating together to make a self" (6). This is remarkably similar to what one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, says about buddhist psychology. Is it OK when he says it, because he puts it in such anodyne terms, but less OK when it's in robot (or theory) speak?
One final observation. Yesterday I was angsting over the temporary filling that has fallen out of my mouth. It's not that I was assailed by pain as by the anticipation of pain to come. At the same time, my fairly new computer has been doing some very weird things lately, and I spent a few hours troubleshooting. After some time I noticed that the anxiety I was feeling about my malfunctioning computer was remarkably similar to the anxiety concerning my malfunctioning mouth. Truly my computer is as much a part of me as my teeth are, perhaps even more so, since a good part of my consciousness might be said to be contained within my external hard drive, whereas my teeth (on good days) just grind things up.
That said, I should return to my reading, to see how much more of a cyborg I am than I want to be.
[Here is not a link to dancing anything]
Posted by Joseph at February 28, 2004 12:32 PMI'm a little curious: why the assumed necessity of critical distance? Have you felt the need to get or maintain critical distance from books in order to effectively study codex literature? Should film studies students get away from film? Sure, plenty of people lose the ability to think critically about activities they engage in on a daily basis, or things they take for granted. But aren't we busting our humps for lousy pay simply *because* of our inclinations to collapse that complacency, to analyze things that most people would rather leave alone? Hell, sometimes I'd like some critical distance from critical distance.
I think Hayles is deliberately trying to give you the jibblies with her wording... witness her breakdown of why How We Became Posthuman is called How We Became Posthuman. (Huh, italics tag doesn't work in comments? Why's that, I wonder?) It's not meant to be comfortable to be the "I" in that "we," seeing that past-tense, done-deal "became" attached to a modulated form of "human." But -- and I'll admit that I've not finished yet -- I think that this discomfort is actually her way of inducing critical distance. So far, she's been arguing strongly for the necessity of embodiment. It's not "posthuman" like "humans are obsolete," but "posthuman" in the sense of "okay, human, that's given. Now what's next?"
But then, I AM reading this on a weekend, and furthermore it IS 3:30 in the morning, so I could be talking nonsense.
Posted by: Jess at February 29, 2004 03:33 AMdear jess, you never talk nonsense!
it's true that i've never made it a point to create critical distance from codex books to study codex books but that's because i can close the damn book and do something else. my point about new media is that if i'm completely immersed in it, i can't step away from it, like i can from a book. that is a difference i see between old (codex) media and new media.
that said, i agree with your reading of hayles. i actually like her stuff a lot. her point, it seems to me, is that it's not that humans are becoming machines, but that we've always kind of been like machines but have been privileging other definitions of the human, definitions that are actually more "oppressive" than human-as-machine.
and now for a little critical distance from critical distance...
Posted by: joseph byrne at March 2, 2004 12:06 PMok. i realize that it can be dangerous to wade into these discussions when i've only read bits and pieces of a theoretical treatise, but here goes anyway. it seems to me that in her discussion of how information lost it's "body" hayles doesn't seem to deal much with the definition of information.
and since i will one day (ostensibly) *be* an "information professional", i can't help but think about how exactly is this term being used/thought of/constructed. Where for instance on an information continuum might Hayles' concept of "information" be placed?
by information continuum, i refer to something resembling the idea that information can exist in a myriad number of forms, i.e. data, information, knowledge, intelligence and/or wisdom to name but a few.
an exercise that i vividly remember from one of my *library science* (ugh....isn't there a better way to referring to this discipline?) classes was one in which we were asked to work together as a group to organize this continuum (that's what librarians do, after all...) from least complex to most complex.
i also remember that in our insulated librarian's world (where believe it or not, there was a student who complained that this kind of discussion was too *theoretical* and didn't really teach her anything practical as a future librarian.... which then opened up the whole discussion about professional versus graduate school..., but i digress..)
my point, however, is that as a group, we had no problem deciding that data was first, followed by "information" as a collection of data. The trouble started during the debate about what constitutes knowledge, intelligence and wisdom and how they relate to data/information and/or one another.
so my next question is this: does Hayles deal with this problem in a part of the book still unread by me? is it even important to her discussion?
just thinking *out loud* and trying to process the reading. and feed the blog, of course.
feel free to ignore me as you wish....
Posted by: Melissa at March 2, 2004 12:57 PMok. i realize that it can be dangerous to wade into these discussions when i've only read bits and pieces of a theoretical treatise, but here goes anyway. it seems to me that in her discussion of how information lost it's "body" hayles doesn't seem to deal much with the definition of information.
and since i will one day (ostensibly) *be* an "information professional", i can't help but think about how exactly is this term being used/thought of/constructed. Where for instance on an information continuum might Hayles' concept of "information" be placed?
by information continuum, i refer to something resembling the idea that information can exist in a myriad number of forms, i.e. data, information, knowledge, intelligence and/or wisdom to name but a few.
an exercise that i vividly remember from one of my *library science* (ugh....isn't there a better way of referring to this discipline?) classes was one in which we were asked to work together as a group to organize this continuum (that's what librarians do, after all...) from least complex to most complex.
i also remember that in our insulated librarian's world (where believe it or not, there was a student who complained that this kind of discussion was too *theoretical* and didn't really teach her anything practical as a future librarian.... which then opened up the whole discussion about professional versus graduate school..., but i digress..)
my point, however, is that as a group, we had no problem deciding that data was first, followed by "information" as a collection of data. The trouble started during the debate about what constitutes knowledge, intelligence and wisdom and how they relate to data/information and/or one another.
so my next question is this: does Hayles deal with this problem in a part of the book still unread by me? is it even important to her discussion?
just thinking *out loud* and trying to process the reading. and feed the blog, of course.
feel free to ignore me as you wish....
Posted by: Melissa at March 2, 2004 12:58 PMWell, Hayles does deal with the nature of information, although her definition probably wouldn't look self-evident to anyone. Information for Hayles (or at least for the historical cyberneticians she describes) has to do with pattern and randomness, and particularly -- if I'm understanding this right -- with picking the right message from a chaos of possible messages. In other words, signal and noise alike can be information -- Hayles talks about "the interplay between pattern and randomness" on 25 -- but what allows messages to be effectively sent and received is the ability to determine what parts of noise and signal are relevant. I think. Some of Hayles' subjects end up coming up with "selective" and "structural" information -- selective information is "calculated by considering the selection of message elements from a set" (55), while structural information "indicates how selective information is to be understood; it is a message about how to interpret a message" (55). Beyond that, and in fact up to and including that, I don't pretend to understand.
Joseph, you make a good point about not struggling to achieve distance from the codex because it isn't as encompassing and, for lack of a better word, life-invading than new media. But I think there's a conflation here of medium and culture. You can close the book, but you are equally able to turn off the cell phone, leave the computer, realize that palm pilots are SO five minutes ago, etc. It's not easy, but then, putting down the book probably isn't that easy for most of us. You can't escape the posthuman culture by doing these things, but -- and here's my point -- neither do you escape literate culture or print culture by closing the book. If Ong taught us anything, he taught us that the way you use words has effects far beyond the words themselves.
The difference, I think, is one of boundaries... Hayles talks about the permeable boundaries of postmodernity, with information flowing between device and human. In other words, the objects of new media have invited themselves into our bodies to live with us, in a way that the objects of print culture never did. This feels like it needs a concluding sentence, but I don't got one.
Posted by: Jess at March 2, 2004 02:48 PMMelissa, I would say that Hayles's definition of information is primary historical--it arises out of the activities of the Cybernetics Group and the Macy conferences, which she discusses. See also the short Prologue on Alan Turing, which I realize I should have assigned explicitly. That said, "information" is one of the slipperiest word's around, and you're stealing my thunder--I'm going to ask the class to define it tomorrow night!
Posted by: MGK at March 2, 2004 04:42 PM