The serpentine highways reach into the city like surgical tubes feeding the city's heart. A body under constant operation.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Defining the 'internet'
I read this in an article titled: "Web giants to deaf consumers: go away"
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
The Internet Association rushed to eBay's defense, filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the web is far too complicated to accommodate disabled people.I spent many years reading definitions of the internet, of computers, of technology. In those years I ran across a few gems. One, by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, explained technology as:
“The Internet is complicated, and its technical inner workings are regulated not by any government, but by a combination of individual technologists and an interconnected web of technically savvy multi-stakeholder bodies that have overseen the Internet’s evolution from the beginning,” the group argues in its brief.
“the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”I've read a great many things, mostly from the early days of the web, when then-surviving journalists in their then-surviving field spent time writing about and forecasting what the future with the web may hold. And after all that smoke cleared I recall, very vividly mind you, what one of my professors and mentors just audibly screamed from within the room where I had completed an oral defense.
"What is he going to do?"It's complicated. This much I know. I live in its shadow. And because I made an academic exercise, an academic pursuit out of understanding contemporary trends in technology I am in a sense rendered obsolete by my role. This internet does not confer degrees for your interpretation, your research. No, if you can successfully launch campaigns using its many software components then you earn yourself a place in society. But if you question it, if you try to define it then you're simply being reactionary.
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Page views
Keywords, search terms, bot algorithms.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
"it sends a message"
I read an influential book by an equally influential rhetorician named Barry Brummett. The book was titled, "Rhetorical Homologies." In his book, Brummett describes what rhetorical homologies are and how they shape our thinking, action, and understanding. One of the more engaging uses of his analysis is in exploring the ways that warfare and rhetoric were practiced through history to find the homologies that existed between them.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)