Friday, June 19, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
A prison without walls: The smartphone and the pendulum
Like Poe's, this is a story of true terror and true error. Both form relevant themes through which we should address the need to access the practical world through digital information
Whether you believe it or not, some think that cellular phone technology emits enough radiation to cause brain cancers within the immediate vicinity of the ear used by the cell phone operator.
Whether you believe it or not scientists attribute the carcinogenic and tumor-causing effects of radiation to its ionizing effect upon the atomic make-up of organisms near its source.
Cellular phones emit radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves used by the phone to communicate with cellular towers. Smartphones ferry user information in the form of clicks, swipes, voices, choices, or text entered to those towers so that it may ultimately reach and receive responses from a virtualized space visualized on the smartphone screen representing a target computer, webpage, phone, or cloud process somewhere else in the world. The electromagnetic waves emitted by cellular phones is the connection that researchers draw between cellular phone use and instances of head and brain cancers in users. The use of smartphones exposes users to a type of radio frequency radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. Major regulatory and health bodies deny that it has ionizing potential but some of them place a caveat upon cellular phone use by suggesting that users limit head exposure. That's a principle of moderation akin to saying, "Yes, fire is dangerous but can be used safely; here's how." The analogy simplifies the relationship too much. Most fire we can see. Radiation we cannot.
The connection between cellular phone usage and brain cancer rests unreliably upon the habits of cellular phone users. If developing cancer from the radiation emitted by cellular phones requires pressing the phone to the side of the head for hours a day for years at a time then the blame teeters between the device manufacturers 'prescribed uses' for their products and owners deviating from those prescriptions. The behavioral link between overuse (in whatever form that may take) and the thing overused (natural or human made) forms one tier of morality. And that moral is moderation. Moderation is observed practically in order to avoid being poisoned by the overconsumption of something. That notion transcends new communication technologies and rightly so. Technologies cannot reframe relationships and reality to such an extent that morality no longer applies to them. Therefore, we can discount neither the manufacturers' complicity in offering new products as opportunities to break a moral or the users of new products who do. Morals are ultimately personal as are the decisions made and their judgment. Therefore, the decision to use a device with enough power to expose a user to harmful radiation is the pendulum, which swings with the user's whims. But which way does the pendulum swing? In one direction we use the smartphone in a way that harms us physically. But we're not definitively sure if it really is harmful in the way that we think. In another direction we remain below a threshold for any risk of being physically harmed by keeping the cellular phone away from our heads. But the pendulum swings in other, conceptually different ways. Let's take a look at them.
The larger issue about cell phone radiation rests upon the power of a cellular phone and to what ends that power is put, either by us or by those who control the tethers that this phone places upon the lives we live contingent to smart phone use. To simplify my point, today's smartphones represent surplus power: surplus computing power, surplus power consumption, and surplus power to distract us. We have to remind ourselves of this context. Each of us is condemned, by practical necessity, to carry around a fully capable microprocessor with a view screen, touch sensitive interface, a mechanical eye and ear to record events, and powerful enough communication capabilities to remain in unbroken contact with a global cellular network that stretches the globe and dots the sky above. That is the big machine behind this smart little device. The cellular phone is the prodigal son of Cold War military, espionage, and spy technology. It is an agglomeration of technologies, network platforms, and standard uses, some of which the spooks inaugurated into practice and others which existed only in their wet dreams. Sure, some of the features are fun, and yes, the phone expands the opportunity for certain activities to occur expressly because the phone has capabilities to facilitate the occurrence of those activities. For example, a smartphone can access the internet and its search capabilities, which enable a user, with only the name of a place, to chart out a way to reach it. It can also play music or allow you to substantiate, by photo or video, your experiences. But the smartphone and its capabilities is only an interface for the technological amber of our contemporaneous online culture. Some call this the web. The web is both the technology for interfacing with the the internet and the extensive digital content of online communication. The cellular- or smart-phone provides access to it and users continually access it and feed it. Communicated ideas, experiences, co-presence, affiliation, and all manner of other relational human symbolically mediated activity, which has probably motivated contributions to the content of known and practiced human activity for eons are now being rehashed, edited, and re-experienced as ways of being for others to follow, try, or respond to. All of this occurs in a quasi-public phantasmagoria of numerical rankings of subscribers, likes, views--a mathematical substantiation of fame, aura, self-importance, which smuggles into human affairs the appearance of objectivity and by doing so raises the stakes artificially for those participating in these multimedia, multimodal, online fora. Engaging in computer mediated communication, using the mode described above does not determine the method or the outcome. While modes of existence might facilitate their perpetuation, the 'free will' of humans explains how changes can and will occur over time and not simply due to necessity but also to the vagaries of human interaction. When we make connections like these we are, as well, artificially placing knots in the vast and complex tapestry of human symbolic existence as a matter of course on our way to making a point. Here's mine.
We are condemned by an increasingly virtualized, online, mobile society to assume a digital avatar as a matter of course: to being hired, to finding a mate, to making and keeping far-flung friends, and finally, in essence, to be. To be now, is to be online. But what makes being online so easy or so interesting? Well, because its sheer scope, the continuous and ever-present access to interactive stimulation, the benefits flatly available on a screen that don't exist in the immediate vicinity of a user otherwise. Simply because online represents a great wish being fulfilled. Wherever you want to go, it takes you. Whatever you want to be, it allows. It's as if we humans are merely shells for a nervous system, which is itself a parasite trapped in those shells. Early cultures called this a soul. Neuroscientists have sexier names for this phenomenon. Those who study symbol use as a uniquely human phenomenon recognize that when you are given a name, you can become a word in that deep stream, and this provides a means for the virtualization of a self-identity. And now, online serves as that murky aquarium resting on the pedestal where the parasite crawls out to be 'at home.' So yes, the online world fulfills a dream of the soul, a wish of the self, a tropism of the neuroscientifically defined brain area. And to put it simply, if we find value in being there, we go there, and for as long as it provides us with acceptable value we will continue to go there.
But that larger point I wanted to make is this. In this pyramidal age of machines the makers of the machines follow innovation curves that lead toward more: more features, more power, more, more, more. What some of us are carrying around is perhaps more power than we really need. It is more power than we need if we're to believe that it produces ionizing radiation at levels enough to alter the nuclear material of our body's cells. But to what does all this surplus power go?
We can think about this for some time. Some of that power goes to the interface and the values that bigger screens, more storage, better sound, and better color bring to the user. We can also look upon this as a better hole through which to peer into this dreamscape of wish fulfillment that occurs online. And this is one slave hook enabled through surplus power. As Steve Jobs noted at the dawn of the consumer computer revolution, the surplus computing power to which his company had access allowed it to make a computer with a more readily accessible interface to expand participation in computing and to revolutionize how we interacted with computers. The child of this moment was the mouse-navigable graphical user interface. And Jobs' last child was the prototype for social control into the twenty-first century: the smart phone that you cannot live without. As we follow this innovation curve toward more computing power into the future the power of these devices and their ubiquity will make them an absolute necessity. At this point, the question of the volitional requirements to participation will disappear. But volition was never really the bigger issue here, it's a more absolute description of freedom. And here's the trick.
Freedom of movement will remain, more or less, without impediments. But we are already beginning to see the parasite slip out of its fleshy cuticle. Thinking is beginning to move from us to the device in our palm, or on our lap, or on our desk. And that microprocessor with multimedia interface will serve as the central hub in a person's networked existence without which that person will no longer be able to live in the world, first, enabled by the device, and finally, necessitated by it. So a greater existential threat exists outside of our close and frenzied interactions with touch-sensitive scrolling interfaces of imagery, sound, video, and text--having an online experience adjusted to shape our understanding of reality. Online is becoming the new inside and the resting place for our one constant and essential companion, our decision making self, now supplanted as a search query carrying out in real time what people once did in thought. And the vast artificial intelligence behind connecting queries to search hits and the spell checking and suggesting algorithms all serve to level up a certain population of smartphone users while potentially leveling down others to a standard presumptively imposed by the design of the interface that is seen and the software code that makes the millions of microdecisions to turn your query into your wish fulfilled.
But the trickier question is when all that power will be used to control us more completely. The glib answer is when there's enough power. The processing power in the smartphone need not do more other than standardize our existence as an identity, a location, and a history all substantiated as digital information. And that's all it needs to do. The qualification to the answer, 'when there's enough power' would be when 'we've reached a critical mass of a type of user.' That user is the pliable meat seen through the phone's camera's eye held at selfie stick length away. That user decided to purchase a smartphone, make small, fidgety kinds of choices to use this phone all the time, and lose most other abilities to decide that the smartphone's search query could not provide through a search 'hit.' At the other end of search is a Valhalla, a wish fulfilled, a behavior-enforcing reward, and through these termite trails of search and return we create a user-customized experience. To the extent that we never turn this experience off we cede to its reality, and in doing so we become a more predictable, and predictably controlled smartphone user. The processing power of our smartphones, in the long run, is going to facilitate greater control over our choices and by dint the activities that characterize our existence. Our prison becomes the protean datascape, which encapsulates our interaction with practically acquired information for understanding and living our lives.
Whether you believe it or not, some think that cellular phone technology emits enough radiation to cause brain cancers within the immediate vicinity of the ear used by the cell phone operator.
Whether you believe it or not scientists attribute the carcinogenic and tumor-causing effects of radiation to its ionizing effect upon the atomic make-up of organisms near its source.
Cellular phones emit radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves used by the phone to communicate with cellular towers. Smartphones ferry user information in the form of clicks, swipes, voices, choices, or text entered to those towers so that it may ultimately reach and receive responses from a virtualized space visualized on the smartphone screen representing a target computer, webpage, phone, or cloud process somewhere else in the world. The electromagnetic waves emitted by cellular phones is the connection that researchers draw between cellular phone use and instances of head and brain cancers in users. The use of smartphones exposes users to a type of radio frequency radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. Major regulatory and health bodies deny that it has ionizing potential but some of them place a caveat upon cellular phone use by suggesting that users limit head exposure. That's a principle of moderation akin to saying, "Yes, fire is dangerous but can be used safely; here's how." The analogy simplifies the relationship too much. Most fire we can see. Radiation we cannot.
The connection between cellular phone usage and brain cancer rests unreliably upon the habits of cellular phone users. If developing cancer from the radiation emitted by cellular phones requires pressing the phone to the side of the head for hours a day for years at a time then the blame teeters between the device manufacturers 'prescribed uses' for their products and owners deviating from those prescriptions. The behavioral link between overuse (in whatever form that may take) and the thing overused (natural or human made) forms one tier of morality. And that moral is moderation. Moderation is observed practically in order to avoid being poisoned by the overconsumption of something. That notion transcends new communication technologies and rightly so. Technologies cannot reframe relationships and reality to such an extent that morality no longer applies to them. Therefore, we can discount neither the manufacturers' complicity in offering new products as opportunities to break a moral or the users of new products who do. Morals are ultimately personal as are the decisions made and their judgment. Therefore, the decision to use a device with enough power to expose a user to harmful radiation is the pendulum, which swings with the user's whims. But which way does the pendulum swing? In one direction we use the smartphone in a way that harms us physically. But we're not definitively sure if it really is harmful in the way that we think. In another direction we remain below a threshold for any risk of being physically harmed by keeping the cellular phone away from our heads. But the pendulum swings in other, conceptually different ways. Let's take a look at them.
The larger issue about cell phone radiation rests upon the power of a cellular phone and to what ends that power is put, either by us or by those who control the tethers that this phone places upon the lives we live contingent to smart phone use. To simplify my point, today's smartphones represent surplus power: surplus computing power, surplus power consumption, and surplus power to distract us. We have to remind ourselves of this context. Each of us is condemned, by practical necessity, to carry around a fully capable microprocessor with a view screen, touch sensitive interface, a mechanical eye and ear to record events, and powerful enough communication capabilities to remain in unbroken contact with a global cellular network that stretches the globe and dots the sky above. That is the big machine behind this smart little device. The cellular phone is the prodigal son of Cold War military, espionage, and spy technology. It is an agglomeration of technologies, network platforms, and standard uses, some of which the spooks inaugurated into practice and others which existed only in their wet dreams. Sure, some of the features are fun, and yes, the phone expands the opportunity for certain activities to occur expressly because the phone has capabilities to facilitate the occurrence of those activities. For example, a smartphone can access the internet and its search capabilities, which enable a user, with only the name of a place, to chart out a way to reach it. It can also play music or allow you to substantiate, by photo or video, your experiences. But the smartphone and its capabilities is only an interface for the technological amber of our contemporaneous online culture. Some call this the web. The web is both the technology for interfacing with the the internet and the extensive digital content of online communication. The cellular- or smart-phone provides access to it and users continually access it and feed it. Communicated ideas, experiences, co-presence, affiliation, and all manner of other relational human symbolically mediated activity, which has probably motivated contributions to the content of known and practiced human activity for eons are now being rehashed, edited, and re-experienced as ways of being for others to follow, try, or respond to. All of this occurs in a quasi-public phantasmagoria of numerical rankings of subscribers, likes, views--a mathematical substantiation of fame, aura, self-importance, which smuggles into human affairs the appearance of objectivity and by doing so raises the stakes artificially for those participating in these multimedia, multimodal, online fora. Engaging in computer mediated communication, using the mode described above does not determine the method or the outcome. While modes of existence might facilitate their perpetuation, the 'free will' of humans explains how changes can and will occur over time and not simply due to necessity but also to the vagaries of human interaction. When we make connections like these we are, as well, artificially placing knots in the vast and complex tapestry of human symbolic existence as a matter of course on our way to making a point. Here's mine.
We are condemned by an increasingly virtualized, online, mobile society to assume a digital avatar as a matter of course: to being hired, to finding a mate, to making and keeping far-flung friends, and finally, in essence, to be. To be now, is to be online. But what makes being online so easy or so interesting? Well, because its sheer scope, the continuous and ever-present access to interactive stimulation, the benefits flatly available on a screen that don't exist in the immediate vicinity of a user otherwise. Simply because online represents a great wish being fulfilled. Wherever you want to go, it takes you. Whatever you want to be, it allows. It's as if we humans are merely shells for a nervous system, which is itself a parasite trapped in those shells. Early cultures called this a soul. Neuroscientists have sexier names for this phenomenon. Those who study symbol use as a uniquely human phenomenon recognize that when you are given a name, you can become a word in that deep stream, and this provides a means for the virtualization of a self-identity. And now, online serves as that murky aquarium resting on the pedestal where the parasite crawls out to be 'at home.' So yes, the online world fulfills a dream of the soul, a wish of the self, a tropism of the neuroscientifically defined brain area. And to put it simply, if we find value in being there, we go there, and for as long as it provides us with acceptable value we will continue to go there.
But that larger point I wanted to make is this. In this pyramidal age of machines the makers of the machines follow innovation curves that lead toward more: more features, more power, more, more, more. What some of us are carrying around is perhaps more power than we really need. It is more power than we need if we're to believe that it produces ionizing radiation at levels enough to alter the nuclear material of our body's cells. But to what does all this surplus power go?
We can think about this for some time. Some of that power goes to the interface and the values that bigger screens, more storage, better sound, and better color bring to the user. We can also look upon this as a better hole through which to peer into this dreamscape of wish fulfillment that occurs online. And this is one slave hook enabled through surplus power. As Steve Jobs noted at the dawn of the consumer computer revolution, the surplus computing power to which his company had access allowed it to make a computer with a more readily accessible interface to expand participation in computing and to revolutionize how we interacted with computers. The child of this moment was the mouse-navigable graphical user interface. And Jobs' last child was the prototype for social control into the twenty-first century: the smart phone that you cannot live without. As we follow this innovation curve toward more computing power into the future the power of these devices and their ubiquity will make them an absolute necessity. At this point, the question of the volitional requirements to participation will disappear. But volition was never really the bigger issue here, it's a more absolute description of freedom. And here's the trick.
Freedom of movement will remain, more or less, without impediments. But we are already beginning to see the parasite slip out of its fleshy cuticle. Thinking is beginning to move from us to the device in our palm, or on our lap, or on our desk. And that microprocessor with multimedia interface will serve as the central hub in a person's networked existence without which that person will no longer be able to live in the world, first, enabled by the device, and finally, necessitated by it. So a greater existential threat exists outside of our close and frenzied interactions with touch-sensitive scrolling interfaces of imagery, sound, video, and text--having an online experience adjusted to shape our understanding of reality. Online is becoming the new inside and the resting place for our one constant and essential companion, our decision making self, now supplanted as a search query carrying out in real time what people once did in thought. And the vast artificial intelligence behind connecting queries to search hits and the spell checking and suggesting algorithms all serve to level up a certain population of smartphone users while potentially leveling down others to a standard presumptively imposed by the design of the interface that is seen and the software code that makes the millions of microdecisions to turn your query into your wish fulfilled.
But the trickier question is when all that power will be used to control us more completely. The glib answer is when there's enough power. The processing power in the smartphone need not do more other than standardize our existence as an identity, a location, and a history all substantiated as digital information. And that's all it needs to do. The qualification to the answer, 'when there's enough power' would be when 'we've reached a critical mass of a type of user.' That user is the pliable meat seen through the phone's camera's eye held at selfie stick length away. That user decided to purchase a smartphone, make small, fidgety kinds of choices to use this phone all the time, and lose most other abilities to decide that the smartphone's search query could not provide through a search 'hit.' At the other end of search is a Valhalla, a wish fulfilled, a behavior-enforcing reward, and through these termite trails of search and return we create a user-customized experience. To the extent that we never turn this experience off we cede to its reality, and in doing so we become a more predictable, and predictably controlled smartphone user. The processing power of our smartphones, in the long run, is going to facilitate greater control over our choices and by dint the activities that characterize our existence. Our prison becomes the protean datascape, which encapsulates our interaction with practically acquired information for understanding and living our lives.
Monday, June 8, 2015
College
In college two paths are available. You can choose a degree that requires self-expression, or you can choose a degree that requires you to effectively solve many small problems.
Algorithms are a buzzword these days. Algorithms are rules for solving problems. And the more that we continue to use software to translate problems into computer-accessible code and to address them as outputs of computer programs the more and more lopsided our access to understanding of problems and solutions becomes.
A dumb but effective example would be solving the problem of 'finding a mate' by reducing desirable traits into categorical information that others seeking mates must feed into a computer to allow the computer to sort through the data that others submit in order to match people. This kind of dating has a 1 copulating with a 0.
Just think of this. Think long and hard about just how different it is to date those who are physically accessible to you, are part of a network of friends, and with whom you come into contact over the course of a week or month. Now compare that against a person who has been reduced to sets of relationship attributes scored and cross-referenced against yours in order to turn the 'dialectics of relating' into an algorithmic expression of a successful dating partner.
Now, dating and college aren't really analogues to one another, but the quest for knowledge requires a modicum of self-feedback, which is itself an outcome of some type of 'expression.' Granted, at some grainy level of human activity everything can be reduced to expression, be it the use of form or numeracy. The difference is that the self-expressive 'arts' that people can pursue in college have as only a sociopolitical analogue--genre--to compare to the resident knowledge of, say, engineering. The difference is that the knowledge of how to conduct engineering and how to compose a song follow different paths. One path is determined almost solely by the available formulas and 'algorithms' for solving problems. The other is run on self-defined heuristics for how to best pursue song composition. One is impersonal, the other is highly personal. One outcome is objectively defined as successful. The other is highly subjective, highly politicized, and fraught with interpersonal conflicts and idiosyncrasies. We can only imagine, which one offers a more ready access to self-understanding. I'd put that on song composition over doing engineering.
I have one more point to make. The differences I am claiming between the expressive arts and engineering are, at a certain level, meaningless. Yes, we can reduce all human behavior to a set of algorithms, which can be followed in order to compose a song or to design a better plane wing. And yes, the defining criterion for success behind a 'hit' song and a wing that 'flies' demonstrates just how different the two are. Algorithms can lead us to find some subjective success or they can lead us to find objective success. Now, which one is more probable, and controllable? The objective one, obviously. Now we begin to see why engineering knowledge is coveted. It is objective. It requires defined inputs and has discretely defined criteria for judging successful outputs. Art, well hell, art is just something that people do to which other people respond.
But in forcing analogues between art and this engineering science only opens up the ways in which the political is highly personal and very much human in the art world, whereas the inherent conflicts in engineering hierarchy are displaced into the abstract and uncontested vocabulary of mathematical formulas for conducting successful engineering calculations. Engineering is a solution looking for problems. Art is a problem or a solution finding expression. The contours of the work or the expression reflect the sociopolitical dynamics, the artists' personal limitations, the genre boundaries to which interpretation and artistic input conform, and the taste of the artist and the audience. The contours of a successful engineering solution may, perhaps reflect upon the sociopolitical climate surrounding the engineering firm where the solution is discovered. I could imagine that the engineering problems surrounding making a supersonic spy plane occurring at a skunk works in Nevada does speak to the larger context of superpowers trying to see what each other are doing without being shot out of the sky. That being said, this context supports some kinds of engineering solutions over other kinds. For example, developing fuel that can be fed into an engine capable of Mach-plus flight is more likely to be solved at this skunk works in Nevada than, say, designing solar panels capable of translating 50% of the sun's energy into a form readily available for consumption in some consumer or industrial power application.
I used to care about these distinctions: art and science. I am beginning to ramble on like a C.P. Snow at the moment. Nothing changes. People continue to find interesting intersections between art and science, art and computing, ad and nauseum. I got an early start only because I treated college as a smorgasbord from which I could and should sample. What it left me was a Renaissance man with no employable skill in a bee-hive world of job specialization requiring all potential candidates for those positions to use computer-searchable keywords in order to be known to exist to those firms seeking the few and amazingly clever and intelligent to fill those positions.
I digress into that seething pool of bloody hatred. I have a fat lip because I was pulling on some wire at work today and it snapped and the pliers flung back and hit me in the mouth. Yes, I'm an uncoordinated buffoon. Sure, I'm a Ferdinand, preferring to hang out alone, enjoying my five senses over interfacing as a tool user in the larger world-apparatus of participating in "scientific delta" for the sake of the "socioeconomic alpha." If I am going to worship a God. I'd rather that it be the universe creator than the job creator. If I am going to submit my knowledge to a hierarchy of meaning, interpretation, and self-interest I'd rather reproduce those sociopolitical contours in order that I don't go through my life blinded by power, muted by algorithms, obsolesced by automation, and approvingly selling that expressive part of my soul for a modicum of pecuniary worth.
Algorithms are a buzzword these days. Algorithms are rules for solving problems. And the more that we continue to use software to translate problems into computer-accessible code and to address them as outputs of computer programs the more and more lopsided our access to understanding of problems and solutions becomes.
A dumb but effective example would be solving the problem of 'finding a mate' by reducing desirable traits into categorical information that others seeking mates must feed into a computer to allow the computer to sort through the data that others submit in order to match people. This kind of dating has a 1 copulating with a 0.
Just think of this. Think long and hard about just how different it is to date those who are physically accessible to you, are part of a network of friends, and with whom you come into contact over the course of a week or month. Now compare that against a person who has been reduced to sets of relationship attributes scored and cross-referenced against yours in order to turn the 'dialectics of relating' into an algorithmic expression of a successful dating partner.
Now, dating and college aren't really analogues to one another, but the quest for knowledge requires a modicum of self-feedback, which is itself an outcome of some type of 'expression.' Granted, at some grainy level of human activity everything can be reduced to expression, be it the use of form or numeracy. The difference is that the self-expressive 'arts' that people can pursue in college have as only a sociopolitical analogue--genre--to compare to the resident knowledge of, say, engineering. The difference is that the knowledge of how to conduct engineering and how to compose a song follow different paths. One path is determined almost solely by the available formulas and 'algorithms' for solving problems. The other is run on self-defined heuristics for how to best pursue song composition. One is impersonal, the other is highly personal. One outcome is objectively defined as successful. The other is highly subjective, highly politicized, and fraught with interpersonal conflicts and idiosyncrasies. We can only imagine, which one offers a more ready access to self-understanding. I'd put that on song composition over doing engineering.
I have one more point to make. The differences I am claiming between the expressive arts and engineering are, at a certain level, meaningless. Yes, we can reduce all human behavior to a set of algorithms, which can be followed in order to compose a song or to design a better plane wing. And yes, the defining criterion for success behind a 'hit' song and a wing that 'flies' demonstrates just how different the two are. Algorithms can lead us to find some subjective success or they can lead us to find objective success. Now, which one is more probable, and controllable? The objective one, obviously. Now we begin to see why engineering knowledge is coveted. It is objective. It requires defined inputs and has discretely defined criteria for judging successful outputs. Art, well hell, art is just something that people do to which other people respond.
But in forcing analogues between art and this engineering science only opens up the ways in which the political is highly personal and very much human in the art world, whereas the inherent conflicts in engineering hierarchy are displaced into the abstract and uncontested vocabulary of mathematical formulas for conducting successful engineering calculations. Engineering is a solution looking for problems. Art is a problem or a solution finding expression. The contours of the work or the expression reflect the sociopolitical dynamics, the artists' personal limitations, the genre boundaries to which interpretation and artistic input conform, and the taste of the artist and the audience. The contours of a successful engineering solution may, perhaps reflect upon the sociopolitical climate surrounding the engineering firm where the solution is discovered. I could imagine that the engineering problems surrounding making a supersonic spy plane occurring at a skunk works in Nevada does speak to the larger context of superpowers trying to see what each other are doing without being shot out of the sky. That being said, this context supports some kinds of engineering solutions over other kinds. For example, developing fuel that can be fed into an engine capable of Mach-plus flight is more likely to be solved at this skunk works in Nevada than, say, designing solar panels capable of translating 50% of the sun's energy into a form readily available for consumption in some consumer or industrial power application.
I used to care about these distinctions: art and science. I am beginning to ramble on like a C.P. Snow at the moment. Nothing changes. People continue to find interesting intersections between art and science, art and computing, ad and nauseum. I got an early start only because I treated college as a smorgasbord from which I could and should sample. What it left me was a Renaissance man with no employable skill in a bee-hive world of job specialization requiring all potential candidates for those positions to use computer-searchable keywords in order to be known to exist to those firms seeking the few and amazingly clever and intelligent to fill those positions.
I digress into that seething pool of bloody hatred. I have a fat lip because I was pulling on some wire at work today and it snapped and the pliers flung back and hit me in the mouth. Yes, I'm an uncoordinated buffoon. Sure, I'm a Ferdinand, preferring to hang out alone, enjoying my five senses over interfacing as a tool user in the larger world-apparatus of participating in "scientific delta" for the sake of the "socioeconomic alpha." If I am going to worship a God. I'd rather that it be the universe creator than the job creator. If I am going to submit my knowledge to a hierarchy of meaning, interpretation, and self-interest I'd rather reproduce those sociopolitical contours in order that I don't go through my life blinded by power, muted by algorithms, obsolesced by automation, and approvingly selling that expressive part of my soul for a modicum of pecuniary worth.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Means Available
To paraphrase Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of finding the available means for persuasion.
First, it is an art, suggesting that the practice and preparation of rhetoric cannot be reduced to scientific calculation and reproducibility.
Second, rhetoric concerns itself with seeking out 'available means' for persuasion, suggesting that, akin to kairos, persuasion is contingent upon the speaker, the audience, and the context.
All of these are moving targets, and the one that challenges maintaining a tidy framework for 'occasioning' rhetorical acts would be context.
To shorten and simplify the discussion, our current technologically mediated context provides routes to attain the means available for persuasion. Putting it simply, we live in a smart phone connected society. People spend a lot of their time in this society swiping at screens, checking feeds, and killing all of their interstitial time by perusing a scrolling display. This setting provides opportunities for clever and quick presentations of information, much of which is reduced to an image and maybe a caption.
Entering this context we have the display of state power, via police, through the dissemination of mugshots that are deemed by police and others' tastes to be remarkable and quite often laughable.
I offer these two pieces of evidence :
Characterizations of these men aside, they got themselves in enough trouble to get arrested, booked, and have their likeness transformed into the legal evidence of a mugshot. Both men, to put it bluntly, have rather remarkable tattoos on their faces. Both men, without their consent, had their mugshots disseminated by online news agencies for entertainment purposes.
The purpose of this is twofold. First, it is entertaining. The more outrageous the person looks, the more interest and clicks it will generate. Second, as mugshots, the two men are representative of petty criminality. It is hard to take these two men seriously with their poorly chosen and executed tattoos. But also, and by comparison, having these men processed by the police offers up the cops as the adjudicators of judgment. In this case it is better judgment. It also offers a quiet and effective demonstration of police power. Policing is newsworthy; it always has been. This mundane procedural aspect of policing, the mugshot, provides an opportunity to publicly shame criminals and criminality. It creates an easy foil against which we can compare police conduct because what the police do is surely above the bar suggestively set by these two men and their facial tattoo decisions.
To conclude briefly, the ability of the police to disseminate mugshots for entertainment is made available by web technology and the native digital media production capabilities that most carry around at all times. As entertainment, these mugshots function as positive PR for the police. It also serves as a warning to us that we too can become the object of someone's entertainment while they're at lunch scrolling through headlines. In the world of smart phones it is all too easy to be snared by its media production apparatus to be offered up, in edited format, as objects of entertainment, curios of our modern world. And as long as the more remarkable mugshots get produced the dimmer view many of us will have of the people around us, and the stronger our allegiance with police power will be. Police power is offered as a ward against criminality, even the lighthearted variety such as this.
But just who are the police? They're mostly men, mostly white, and by and large, they represent majority interests. Perhaps, it is "majority" interest because we all know that the powerful are few, while the powerless are many. The powerless simply see the world as the few do because they have a privileged level of access to the means of reality production. If, for example, a few private banking interests at the Federal Reserve can print money and loan it to the United States at interest then we get a little sample of how our realities are administered through the decisions of a few powerful people.
The police are us or at least a subset. Most importantly, the self-selecting who become police have, among other things, a sense of justice and duty, and then some have an inflated sense of their power and responsibility. And somewhere between handing a man a gun and then giving him a badge of immunity we create organizational cultures like this:
According to the website that showed this picture, the man posing as 'game' that has been hunted is currently being detained at the jail. That he's black and the other men white demonstrates the uneven distribution of power. That he's playing along for the photo-op suggests that this black man has gotten accustomed to doing things like this, little acts of indignity for the entertainment of the powerful in order to get better treatment, hopefully.
Unlike the mugshots above, hunting photos like these are to be disseminated internally only. Shots like this harken back to the abuses at Abu Ghraib because shots like this are abuse. Mugshots are abuse. They force those of us who commit legal infractions to become incriminating public data. Mugshots erase the life of the person, and turn them into an artifact for the sake of the pose and the shot. Mugshots are data that the police hold to maintain a visual catalog of criminals, which can then be cross referenced with the memory of victims and witnesses for possible matches. The police know that criminals often repeat. When you're captured and processed by the police you begin to witness what lowly opinion they have of you. Do as they say, shut up, go here, hold this, sit here. You are a victim of their will because you have none. Our man posing as a deer, knows this better than me. Black men are 'practice dummies' for police procedures. The police learn how to stop, take down, cuff, and kill by practicing on black men. Where we draw the line between those who are deserving of police protocol and those who aren't happened well before a man has his likeness posted in an unfavorable way for the public or for other officers' entertainment. Dignity is so quickly crushed by the police. Citizenship is hemmed in by threats of violence and a semiotics of power administered upon the body and the mind through shaming, fear, and killing.
The means available for persuasion are many. In our time, in our place, the threat of shameful artifacts of one's self traveling around the web are but one. Enter the camera, the phone, the mobile web.
Welcome to the machine.
First, it is an art, suggesting that the practice and preparation of rhetoric cannot be reduced to scientific calculation and reproducibility.
Second, rhetoric concerns itself with seeking out 'available means' for persuasion, suggesting that, akin to kairos, persuasion is contingent upon the speaker, the audience, and the context.
All of these are moving targets, and the one that challenges maintaining a tidy framework for 'occasioning' rhetorical acts would be context.
To shorten and simplify the discussion, our current technologically mediated context provides routes to attain the means available for persuasion. Putting it simply, we live in a smart phone connected society. People spend a lot of their time in this society swiping at screens, checking feeds, and killing all of their interstitial time by perusing a scrolling display. This setting provides opportunities for clever and quick presentations of information, much of which is reduced to an image and maybe a caption.
Entering this context we have the display of state power, via police, through the dissemination of mugshots that are deemed by police and others' tastes to be remarkable and quite often laughable.
I offer these two pieces of evidence :
Characterizations of these men aside, they got themselves in enough trouble to get arrested, booked, and have their likeness transformed into the legal evidence of a mugshot. Both men, to put it bluntly, have rather remarkable tattoos on their faces. Both men, without their consent, had their mugshots disseminated by online news agencies for entertainment purposes.
The purpose of this is twofold. First, it is entertaining. The more outrageous the person looks, the more interest and clicks it will generate. Second, as mugshots, the two men are representative of petty criminality. It is hard to take these two men seriously with their poorly chosen and executed tattoos. But also, and by comparison, having these men processed by the police offers up the cops as the adjudicators of judgment. In this case it is better judgment. It also offers a quiet and effective demonstration of police power. Policing is newsworthy; it always has been. This mundane procedural aspect of policing, the mugshot, provides an opportunity to publicly shame criminals and criminality. It creates an easy foil against which we can compare police conduct because what the police do is surely above the bar suggestively set by these two men and their facial tattoo decisions.
To conclude briefly, the ability of the police to disseminate mugshots for entertainment is made available by web technology and the native digital media production capabilities that most carry around at all times. As entertainment, these mugshots function as positive PR for the police. It also serves as a warning to us that we too can become the object of someone's entertainment while they're at lunch scrolling through headlines. In the world of smart phones it is all too easy to be snared by its media production apparatus to be offered up, in edited format, as objects of entertainment, curios of our modern world. And as long as the more remarkable mugshots get produced the dimmer view many of us will have of the people around us, and the stronger our allegiance with police power will be. Police power is offered as a ward against criminality, even the lighthearted variety such as this.
But just who are the police? They're mostly men, mostly white, and by and large, they represent majority interests. Perhaps, it is "majority" interest because we all know that the powerful are few, while the powerless are many. The powerless simply see the world as the few do because they have a privileged level of access to the means of reality production. If, for example, a few private banking interests at the Federal Reserve can print money and loan it to the United States at interest then we get a little sample of how our realities are administered through the decisions of a few powerful people.
The police are us or at least a subset. Most importantly, the self-selecting who become police have, among other things, a sense of justice and duty, and then some have an inflated sense of their power and responsibility. And somewhere between handing a man a gun and then giving him a badge of immunity we create organizational cultures like this:
Unlike the mugshots above, hunting photos like these are to be disseminated internally only. Shots like this harken back to the abuses at Abu Ghraib because shots like this are abuse. Mugshots are abuse. They force those of us who commit legal infractions to become incriminating public data. Mugshots erase the life of the person, and turn them into an artifact for the sake of the pose and the shot. Mugshots are data that the police hold to maintain a visual catalog of criminals, which can then be cross referenced with the memory of victims and witnesses for possible matches. The police know that criminals often repeat. When you're captured and processed by the police you begin to witness what lowly opinion they have of you. Do as they say, shut up, go here, hold this, sit here. You are a victim of their will because you have none. Our man posing as a deer, knows this better than me. Black men are 'practice dummies' for police procedures. The police learn how to stop, take down, cuff, and kill by practicing on black men. Where we draw the line between those who are deserving of police protocol and those who aren't happened well before a man has his likeness posted in an unfavorable way for the public or for other officers' entertainment. Dignity is so quickly crushed by the police. Citizenship is hemmed in by threats of violence and a semiotics of power administered upon the body and the mind through shaming, fear, and killing.
The means available for persuasion are many. In our time, in our place, the threat of shameful artifacts of one's self traveling around the web are but one. Enter the camera, the phone, the mobile web.
Welcome to the machine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)