A number of extracts in this book offer their own histories of the digital networks via their own particular concerns and genealogies Nelson, Lovink, Taylor and Terranova for example. There are a number of clear and accessible histories of the techniques, protocols and, to a lesser extent, the culture attendant on the development from the decentralised military communication network ARPANET to academic computer networks to the software innovations that led to the World Wide Web and later to Web 2.
Wiener was a key figure in the foundation of a new scientific paradigm that he called cybernetics. Cybernetics stressed the role of both human beings and new computers developed during the War as processors of information. The cybernetic project was to forge a theory of communication and control, applying to systems that might include humans, animals and machines.
The first occurred in the early 19th century and centred upon the steam engine, and the second, one whose early stages Wiener lived through and participated in, centred upon the early forms of the electronic mainframe digital computer.
Terms and technologies key to cybernetics are outlined in this extract, including feedback, regulation, amplification, and machine to machine communication. Their political implications are addressed by Donna Haraway. In the pragmatic pursuit of this predictive system, it made little sense to Wiener to consider the enemy pilot and bomber as separate entities. The target was both: the combination of the cognitive and motor skills of one and the mechanical capabilities and responses of the other.
There are parallels here with the discussions of nonhuman agency elsewhere in this book e. In cybernetics is it often unnecessary to dwell on the material makeup or construction of a particular organism or system — these are judged according to their output, behaviour or effects. In this extract from a substantially longer chapter, Carolyn Marvin uncovers the nineteenth century fascination with the then new technology of electric light and the spectacular ways in which this fascination was displayed.
Before it wired and illuminated private homes, she points out, electric lighting was a public spectacle, transforming city spaces and monuments. She concludes with a warning against predictions of technological futures that simply extrapolate from current dominant forms: the nineteenth century assumed that twentieth century media would be dominated by electric light spectacle but on an even grander scale.
This medium was instead, largely superceded and forgotten. Norman Klein, in Part Four, traces a baroque genealogy for contemporary cinematic spectacle.
The first is that it is in itself a historical document, a snapshot of an emerging computer culture. It documents the new smaller and faster computer technologies, their design, politics and cultural significance, all written by a man who was at the centre of these developments. The form of the book itself, its cut and paste aesthetic, evokes the computer culture Nelson espouses.
It is of the moment, concerned more with making an accessible, vivid and intelligent point, and connections to other thoughts, than with developing a scholarly argument. It offers technical advice and makes ambitious predictions.
It is playfully serious, including jokes and cartoons, satire and, occasionally, vitriol against the unimaginative and the bureaucratic. In it, Erkki Huhtamo offers a model and approach for studying the development of media technoculture. Rejecting the widely evident impulse to chart the history of technical innovation in a straightforward chronological account of inventions, he proposes instead what he calls an archaeological method.
On the one hand his media archaeology simply recognises broader trends in historical research in recent decades, trends that insist on the social and cultural contexts of historical events and developments.
In this sense, his approach is similar to that of Carolyn Marvin whom he quotes here. The emphasis here is on the ephemera that attend these new media experiences: cartoons, promotional literature, newspaper reports, not the actual technologies nor the responses of audiences at the time.
This is partly due to the difficulties of recovering these events, events which could not of course be recorded on video or audiotape. This article was written at the height of excited speculation and anxious misgivings about VR, but younger readers may have only the faintest sense of that excitement. How might, say, the players of massively multiplayer online games or denizens of virtual worlds such as Second Life be understood in relation to the cybernerd of the VR dream machine, or the kaleidoscomaniac?
Yet, De Landa adopts a strategy that asks us to view the history of technology from a new position. He speculates that such an intelligent species might well wish to consider their own historical origins and technological lineage. In writing such a history, these robot historians would find a different role for the human than we human beings have given ourselves in our own narratives. Across the twentieth century media studies had become extremely wary of granting technology a determining role in explanations of media and communications processes.
Technology, it was argued, determines nothing. Technologies are mere tools or mute machines that we humans put to use and they are conceived and used by societies. All the extracts collected here explicitly or implicitly articulate a model of the relations of determination between technology, human bodies and consciousness, media and culture.
So, these issues run through the whole collection, but the entries in this part elucidate and exemplify models and approaches that we consider particularly significant. For most of them technology and society cannot be so easier divided into separate categories, with some going further, insisting that divisions between culture, bodies, technologies and nature must be interrogated.
This is as true of media and communication processes as key elements of modern culture as it is of activities like banking and finance, medicine, or warfare the list could be very extensive. Some are specifically concerned with what this means for media and communications, others consider the state of culture more widely.
This nightmarish image resonates with later visions of technological domination from Metropolis to The Matrix. It is important to note that Marx was not primarily concerned with technology as such.
The new social relationships and working practices experienced by factory workers were not, for Marx, generated simply by the invention of new machines. Rather he saw it as generative of new freedoms, if the workers could sieze control of it rather than continue to be enslaved by it.
Even the spoken word, with its origins at the very beginnings of the human race, is for McLuhan a medium, a technological extension that allowed humans to grasp their environment in new ways, beyond the immediate reach of their hands. For instance, contemporary peer to peer communication using the Internet and a broadcast television advert might both carry a similar content but they are radically different in the way that they configure relationships between the participants. If a set of light bulbs spells out an advertising message, this message is still secondary to the electric bulbs, it is another, earlier, medium written text for instance.
Via new media technologies the senses of the body have been externalized and distributed. Unlike the tool we hold in our hand, these technologies surround us. Any of these would offer an insight into his approaches and their implications. There are comparisons that could be made too with the contemporary keyboards of PCs and laptops, and their users see Poster. Even though he may rarely be cited in current writing, his arguments and approaches are foundational and there is evidence of a resurgence of interest in his work in new media studies.
Williams argues that whatever form any particular developing media technology or more accurately, set of technologies may take, there is for him 'nothing in the technology to make this inevitable'. Though the focus in this extract is television and media technologies in particular, Williams develops his argument through a consideration of the social shaping of technology in general. The key points he makes are firstly that technology is not autonomous, nor is it 'symptomatic'.
Secondly the role of intention in research and development is crucial: technological devices or systems are not the inevitable result of either clear consumer demand or their own inherent logic. For Williams, McLuhan's ideas are idealist and ideological: substituting the technological products of social and economic forces for those forces themselves as the motor of historical change see our introduction to McLuhan above.
His account of the social shaping of television is predicated on a rich model of interactions and effects between technology, cultural form, economics, and aesthetics. As communication technologies become part of wider circuits of determinations and effects though Williams does not spell this out , the technologies themselves play an active role in these processes. A useful example is his discussion of the effect of a technical development colour television on programme content.
On the one hand of course the simple fact of colour technology did not inevitably cause or create new programmes or subject matter, and the operations of economic factors, and consideration of audience expectations, are clear.
But, on the other hand, in a significant way this technology did have an effect in its facilitation, suggestion even, of new programme content, aesthetics and modes of presentation. Latour illustrates this through reading a daily newspaper. The pages of a newspaper bring together a tremendously heterogeneous range of entities, events, forces and agencies, phenomena that are at best kept separate in the social sciences, but more often ignored altogether.
At the very least, he says, it mixes together political and chemical reactions. The analogy with academic versions of cultural criticism is left implicit.
Adopting these approaches to the study of media technologies and cultures would entail find ways of studying new media technoculture that do not dwell only on what people say in chat rooms, social networking sites, MMORPGs, but also on what they do, on what other actors are in play from computer hardware, software and networks outwards — and how all these come together as hybrids to constitute any particular activity or event.
This is a theme that runs across many of the extracts in this book. See Part three for a longer essay by Latour that explores these issues in more detail.
Even those who profess to profoundly disagree with his diagnoses of contemporary reality are often seduced by his evocative and provocative writing. Indeed it is often his aphoristic style and ostensibly bleak vision of hyperreality that is evident, rather than any sustained engagement with his ideas and influences.
His assertions that along with the rise of mass media reality as it is commonly understood has disappeared to be fully replaced by a simulacral world should not be taken to mean that lived reality in an anthropological sense has disappeared, but rather that it is of a very different order to earlier realities. When we use the term media we are generally talking about communication or information media not least in the term ICT, or information and communication technology.
He overthrows the commonsense assumption that since the evolution of language, humans have always communicated. Speech and other social practices in ancient, tribal or village life, he argues, were not communication as we understand it today.
A message assumes a distance between the sender and the receiver, indeed it assumes a sender and a receiver in the first place, separate in time and space. It also assumes a direction, the reciprocity of communion and symbolic exchange is lost in the circulation and circularity of communication. If for Baudrillard communication was born at the beginning of the modern age, then it seems to have stepped up a gear with computer media and networks.
Today, however, we are too thoroughly integrated into communication technologies to even see them as distinct. Like the player of a videogame for example the virtual world responds to human input, but all the player can do is explore the world as a programmed system.
For Baudrillard, both freedom and alienation have withered. However his analysis resonates with contemporary celebrations of, and anxieties about, Web 2. Her cyborg is at once an allegory of life in late capitalism and cyberculture, and a set of actually existing or soon to be realised technosocial entities and relationships. This creature is 'a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism' Haraway It is a deliberately ambiguous figure, though Haraway is careful to insist that her cyborg is at once an ironic fiction and a way of thinking about actually existing phenomena.
Thus is encompasses fictional cyborgs such as Robocop, the increasing material intimacy between human bodies and machines in medicine, warfare, or in miniaturised consumer electronics , and a conception of networks as complex systems in which categories of biology and machines blur. The cyborg then is a contemporary monster, one to be celebrated. It is also a challenge to feminist discourses that romanticise Nature as a realm separate from oppressive masculinist technocracy.
Irreducible to either the natural or the cultural, it is therefore neither entirely male nor female. Haraway cites Blade Runner's heroine, the replicant Rachel, as an image of the fundamental confusion the cyborg generates around distinctions between the technical and the natural, and questions of origins, of mind and body Haraway The cyborg comes into being through 'replication' rather than organic reproduction, so it lends itself to the 'utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender' Haraway This then is an attempt to think beyond difference, beyond the dualisms that structure the modern subject, an attempt in which science and technology, and particularly information technology, are central.
The extracts we have chosen highlight important ideas within the manifesto that focus on the actual political, social and economic implications of the cyborg, rather than on its fictional components. Like the books this article is a challenging read, but is full of energy, ideas, and examples from the history of technology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art and films. Deleuze and Guattari define a machine as 1 a systematic functional interrelation of parts, i.
So, any entity contained in the machinic phylum is always part of a larger machine, and composed of smaller ones. Thus the animal kingdom is made up of phyla such as the arthropods, which includes spiders, scorpions, crustacea and insects. These are creatures that share a form or a set of characteristics they are invertebrate, with segmented exoskeletons but not the hereditary links or genotype of individual species. The machinic phylum, then, groups together organisms that share machinic characteristics.
This soundscape indicates a technological environment functioning more or less autonomously, an emergent phenomenon not intended by human design and that goes well beyond any notion of technologies as tools or extensions of individual humans or even social groups. Against psychoanalysis, therefore, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that desire is capable of constructing many more kinds of machines, not only Oedipal ones.
However, the details of, and motivations for, this assault on psychoanalysis and psychiatry fall outside the scope of this Reader and so we have cut out some of the larger sections of this material. The concept has influenced the work of Manuel de Landa and is discussed in his extract in Part one.
This computational model for conceiving of the nature of life moves in two directions. The concept of the cyborg epitomises this augmentation and extension of the human body and mind. In this part we concentrate on some of the main theories of technocultural agency and offer some vivid examples of it in action. In this essay he takes an everyday and banal occurrence as the launching pad for an entertaining and playful enquiry into what he calls the 'missing masses'.
He argues that the idea that society is made up only of human agents is as bizarre as the idea that technology is determined only by technological relations.
For the purposes of his argument Latour takes at face value the wry anthropomorphism of a notice on a faulty door. He asks the reader to think about the hinged door as an invention, inviting them to compare the effort of getting through a wall with and without a door.
So, the human effort of getting through the wall presumably of knocking a hole in a wall and then bricking it up again is delegated to the hinged door. Latour points out that this particular delegation is characteristic of reciprocal delegations in the configuring of users by technologies. It sets out in general terms what we see as the significance of her work and its centrality to new media and technocultural studies see also another Haraway extract and introduction in Part five below.
We have placed these interviews in Part three because they highlight specific questions about the objects and subjects of study in new media and technocultural studies. In New Media:A critical introduction we refer to this phenomenon as cybercultural studies. This essay by David Tomas is of particular interest in its tracing of the scientific origins and technological reality of the terms cyborg and cybernetics as well as their fictional and theoretical appearance.
That is, organisms organize themselves and others through communication and feedback whilst the overall trajectory of the universe is towards heat death. In her chapter, Kember raises some of the ethical, political and economic dimensions of these developments. Historically, theoretical analogies, later to become operative research programmes, between biology and computation emerged within the work of early cybernetics and related science.
This, in turn, gave rise to the ambition to create intelligent machines by literally programming intelligence into computers.
Based upon the premise that the human brain might be understood as a kind of machine then it might be analysed as such and the resulting understanding of the brains cognitive and processual operations transferred, via programming, to a computer. These Creatures however are not denizens of virtual worlds in computer science labs, but in the popular media form of the computer game. Kember is careful to insist that this game is not a representation of ALife as we might see in a science fiction film but is constructed from actual ALife evolutionary algorithms.
Networked playful popular culture provides an unexpectedly productive new environment for these artificial creatures.
Unexpected activities emerged though. On online forums players tended to discuss the practicalities of engineering their creatures rather than ethics. Players certainly modified the software, but in ways that surprised the game producers: splicing virtual genes and creating mutants or hybrids from distinct species for example.
For further discussion of online gameplay see Kennedy in this part, and Taylor in Part five. As well as drawing attention to these new entities with which we now increasingly share our everyday lives, Wise is concerned to think through the theoretical and critical implications of living with nonhuman agents.
Agents are a vivid example of how values, ideologies and effects are conveyed by technological systems as well as by language and cultural meaning.
At the same time he criticises discourses prevalent at the time, and still evident today that celebrated cyberspace as the beginnings of a new world in which material realities including the human body are dwindling in the new decorporealised virtual realm. He concludes with a model of the contemporary world in which material and immaterial bodies, virtual and actual, together constitute everyday technocultural existence.
For Kennedy, influenced by Haraway, videogames such as the Quake series not only present images of cyborgs, gameplay sessions themselves are cyborgian, cybernetic loops of response and feedback between eyes, software, fingers, keyboards, screens and nervous systems.
These circuits are not closed off from the world around them however. Internet forums, fan websites, game element production e. Rather, they must develop technical competence in learning the game controls, connecting computers to LANs or the Internet, developing software skills in image manipulation for skinning or setting up fan websites.
Gravitation towards particular generic imagery and action, and affinities with screen characters are just one aspect of this technicity. See also Kember this part for another example of online game play and production culture, and Sudnow Part 4 for what could be seen as a detailed diary of the construction and training of videogame technicity. The cultural implications of cybernetics are introduced and explored in Wiener, Galison, and Tomas. The first of these modes, audiences and the contexts of new media consumption, is addressed in Part 6, the second, political economy and media production, is touched on in this part Consentino, Klein, and see also Part 3 of New Media: A critical introduction.
The concern of Part 2 is the challenges new media make to this third mode of enquiry, the study of new media texts. Each of the extracts in this part is in some way concerned with the aesthetic, textual or formalist characteristics of the media they are analysing.
These media include film, computer games, digital music and photography. For Mark Katz, the experience of listening to recorded music is transformed by its digitization, portability and the networked culture of sharing and download. If media studies has historically been primarily concerned with what images and sounds mean, how they mediate political information, represent or challenge dominant cultural worldviews and ideologies, then the media analyses in this part, it could be argued, are more concerned with what these images and sound do, and how they do it.
So, conceptual frameworks and modes of analysis need to be adapted and developed. We could go further and argue that the emphasis within the dominant discourses of cultural and media studies on a linguistic or textual model of culture and communication is key to the shortcomings of their attention to new media and technoculture.
It was a vivid and intense example of a technological imaginary, shaping ideas about new media and promising radical transformations of media and everyday life. Millions of people play online games such as World of Warcraft, exploring 3D immersive worlds and constructing virtual communities with geographically remote players and NPCs see Kember and Kennedy.
The notion of the virtual, as that which is nearly but not quite real or as a reality that is distinct from, but thoroughly entwined with, a reality that is physical or actual, is crucial to understand the synthetic and everyday worlds of new media use and play. Though dismissed by some critics precisely because of this analytical vagueness and commercial taint, it could be argued that it persists because it, however loosely, points to a significant characteristic distinguishing key digital media from earlier popular or communication forms.
Whilst his table does not exhaust the possible configurations of interactive processes and its assumption of the higher value of human over nonhuman participants could be questioned , it allows us to think about the differences and continuities between analogue and digital communication media. For example, mail, the telephone and virtual worlds are all situated on the axis of dialogue and reciprocity but differ according the temporal organisation of, and possibilities for material involvement in, their respective communication systems.
The table also opens up the concept of interactivity according to its actual uses and operations rather than ideological assumptions of new modes of activity or passivity.
Rather the cybertext has a mechanical nature that must be engaged with. The implications for digital media are significant. Traditional models of literary or media communication assume the transmission of meaning from an author or sender via a message or text, to a receiver or reader. Whilst this transmission may not be straightforward, and subject to ideological shaping and contestational reading, it does not ascribe any particular significance or influence to the technology of the medium or text itself.
A cybertext differs, Aarseth argues, in that it shifts this linear relationship to a set of cybernetic circuits between a variety of participants, both human and mechanical, none of whom is clearly identifiable as the originator or ultimate receiver of a message. Secondly, they force our attention to the newness and difference of cybernetic communicational media. He compares this with traditional techniques of manipulating and editing film stock.
Rather, it is exploitative and deathly. Whereas Marx expected a sudden revolutionary overthrowing of capitalism, Bey and Marks see, for the time being, the possibility for only momentary guerrilla disruptions. See Marx in Part 1, and for other approaches to the radical politics of new technologies see Haraway, Kidd, and Terranova and Lovink in Part 5. The extract from Lovink in this part also addresses new media art.
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