Category Archives: Research

Interview with Sher Doruff — a different view of new media fragmentation

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Or discontinuities, or whatever term captures the idea that a field that previously seemed really fluid and border-less no longer is so. Coalescence? Coagulation? Choosing the right metaphor seems much more important these days.

I spoke to Sher Doruff a few days ago and really wish I’d by then acquired a recorder–still working on that in fact–because it was a brilliant interview. She has been working on new media for a long time, much longer than most of the others with whom I am speaking. In fact since the mid 70s, before any one was even talking about new media the way we do now, Sher was working with electronic music. She was part of a band in this genre before moving more into computer work and even more experimental audio stuff –we didn’t go too far into this part of her story though. I really started with the points at which she moved into new media, and at which she came to the Netherlands. It seems she feels she started with new media pretty early, as I said, and mainly because of the freedom she believed it would offer both because the technologies were so new, no one had any pre-conceived idea of technical limitations, they just tried anything and everything. Further, in those early days, there were no stereotypes about computers being only for men, or that men were more inclined or more skilled at them–no one really felt very skilled.

This was sort of a revelation to me because the other women I’ve spoken with are younger–between 25-45–so they entered the larger story much later. Most of the other women mention the lack of perceived limits when it comes to what the tech can do, or at least the feeling that it offered more freedom to them in some way, but most of them did not have such an experience of thinking they would be able to completely shed gender stereotypes related to careers or activities. –I can see this will be a point I need to look at in all the ineterviews since so many people have mentioned it.

Anyway, Sher had a pretty good career developing in New York but then her apartment burnt down and she decided to go to France, ended up doing a residency there, and they went up to Amsterdam where she started doing some stuff for Steim, and just stayed there for awhile. Most recently she was at De Waag, where I spoke to her last year, but now she is teaching at the Theater School (part of the Hogeschool in Amsterdam). She has had other more immediate reasons for leaving one path for another whenever she made a change, but she also seems to reach a point in any medium where she feels she has figured out what she wanted to know and then turns to something else. Sometimes she later goes back, and of course, she doesn’t abandon any of them really, but rather shifts the focus of her inquiry (from what I can tell).

Sher had a mixed view of the New Media scene in general. On the one hand, she feels that new media artists, especially people working online, are paralyzed precisely because the tools are now so easy to use. I know what she means; it’s similar to what happens with course management systems at the university. Those CMSs make it pretty easy to put stuff online for a class, but maybe not in exactly in the way you want to try. But it’s so much easier than doing it all from scratch, and seeing how it works in the CMS can make thinking of alternatives even harder.

But my own experience has been that while the majority of people don’t go beyond the limits built into most plug ‘n play type software, usually there are some number who hit the limits, get frustrated, and switch to learning how to really do it themselves. Maybe artists who can do that ought to rethink their whole practice (or even career choice) anyway. So that’s one of the more negative things she said. But she thinks there will eventually be a crisis, and then a renewal, or a new approach.

On the other hand, she was not so worried about the coagulation of the new media field. She feels that the separation into different subfields will create difference, which she generally regards as a good thing, and that these different groups will come up with different ideas, questions, and answers, and different ways of thinking about the shared ideas, questions, and answers. –And so these groups when they do interact, would have much more fruitful exchanges. I asked Sher if she thought the groups actually would interact and share, because so far I find that they don’t seem to communicate so much lately, and William felt this as well. But Sher thinks that they still cooperate far more than most other disciplines. I wonder though if it’s really that the new media organizations Sher works with are cooperative, but that other types, like universities, are not so much. I mean, maybe it’s over-generalized. Another point to compare across interviews.

We also talked about the creative industries, some of the specific Dutch institutions, and her current work with Brian Massumi, but I’ll put that in the next post.

New Media with Dutch Characteristics. Or Female. Or?

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Right now I’m reading a book for which I will be writing a review any day now… Anyway, it’s called Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights, anthology that looks at how women use computer technology and ICTs in Scandinavian countries. The editors, Jenny Sunden (no website I could find?!) and Malin Sveningsson Elm argue that most books on ICTs, new media, etc, have been American/Anglo-centric in presenting the experiences and practices of users in the US and UK as universal, rather than framing those experiences and practices in a national context.

I absolutely agree with this, and in fact this belief is a reason for my own decision to focus on just one country for my own projects. And, now that this book has been published, I can now just refer to the very convincing argument they make about the need for research that considers national context, rather than assuming what is true in one Western country will be true in others. Thank you Drs. Sunden and Sveningsson Elm for so effectively constructing a step in the rhetorical ladder! 🙂

Talk at University of Twente

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Now it’s official; I will give a talk at University of Twente on June 25th. Here’s the blurb:

A preliminary report on how scholars perceive their social network/audience on Facebook, and what effect the risk of and real border-crossing or transgressive behavior has for them personally and professionally with their colleagues. –So in other words shifting the focus the what students are doing or how they perceive us to what we scholars are doing and how we perceive each other. I make a rhetorical analysis of gestures that are exchanged between users, and in particular discuss how these gestures may help create a feeling of presence.

My own experience suggests that while perhaps there is some risk to the behavior encouraged by Facebook, there is also considerable personal and professional benefit to engaging in the prescribed playful actions of Facebook applications. They seem to encourage connections that are emotionally more intimate and stronger, which offers both personal and professional advantages. People with whom we have multi-valent relationships online may also become people with whom we might collaborate on research, or organize conference panels, or at least go to for advice when visiting their home countries/cities.

Thus I ultimately argue that along with the playful air pervading Facebook, there can also be a feeling of risk, and that users sharing experiences that give rise to this tension actually strengthen their social and professional bonds. In academic circles there aren’t many venues where play and risk are valued or even possible, which may explain why Facebook has been so attractive to many of us who by rights (as trained critical thinkers) ought to be the most resistant to its charms.

So basically people get a sneak preview of the talk I will give the following week in Germany at IFIP WG 9.5 and preliminary thoughts on the paper I’m preparing for IR 9.0

Fun with NEH online submission forms

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Submission is the right word for it, that’s for sure! You must fill in these pdfs exactly the right way, with attachments in exactly the right order, without going over the unspecified-but-definitely-there character count in the text boxes, you must get lucky while uploading to grants.gov, and of course you must save everything every 2 minutes because Adobe will crash over and over and lose the unsaved form contents.

But in the end I got it in…would you believe the total time estimate for preparing the application was 15 hours? Who are they kidding.

Anyway, this is most of the narrative:

Institutionalization of New Media: Analysis of the Dutch Context

Research and Contribution

With the introduction of the Internet and WWW in the 1990s, scholars, artists and activists began a critical engagement with technology. These early adopters were a loose collection of individuals that came out of more traditional fields including philosophy, literature, film studies, sociology, computer science. Some also came from outside of the academy; journalists, politicians, artists, activists and business people and have participated in the evolving discourse community as well. This diverse group was united by their shared observation of and concern with the effects of technology on their respective fields and their work has shaped the field we now know as new media. Now what began as a very open area of study is becoming institutionalized; a canon of critical theory is being established, and gate-keeping mechanisms are beginning to appear, along with the other apparatus typical of an academic discipline such as journals, conferences, degree programs and so on. Increasingly, questions are being raised about this institutionalization process and how it will affect our understanding of new media and its impact on our culture (Lovink, Rossiter, Zielinski).

While early scholarship on new media came from the aforementioned traditional disciplines, recently institutionalization has been driven by former members of the early adopter networks entering academia. This is to say that rather than only following a traditional scholarly route through the academy before becoming professors themselves, many people who first work and create with new media are now entering the academy, with or without formal credentials, and are shaping the discourse about the cultural effects of new media. What began as almost a folk practice now has been recognized by the academy. The line between creator and scholar/critic has been in some ways blurred and in others sharpened, but the process of these changes remains unexamined.

Through this project I expect to answer the following questions: 1) What is the relation between institutionalization and the people, physical things, and symbols in the networks that gave rise to new media? 2) How are institutions constructed that critically reflect on emerging technologies? 3) How are the social networks of participants reflected in and shaping institutional networks? 4) How is the fluid knowledge shared between participants becoming crystallized, being canonized, such that some groups are included or excluded? 5) And finally, what do we gain and lose in knowledge production through this process? I propose exploring the human archive embodied in the actor-network of individuals and groups currently working on new media.

The Netherlands is the best starting point as it is where some of the first university programs in new media began, and thanks to early and extensive government funding, a wide array of other cultural institutions have developed simultaneously. The Dutch context was originally characterized by heterogonous networks of people, things and symbols that were ad hoc and informal, but now all of these disparate elements contribute to the establishment of formal knowledge, specialization, and the construction of a canon. These activities are a clear sign of institutionalization, which also inevitably involves the development of gate-keeping processes. However, while institutionalization is taking place, the Dutch cooperative polder model still shapes socio-economic relations and allows for the continued emergence of new voices and new groups. Thus the whole spectrum of development is available for study.

Preliminary insight into the institutionalization of new media have been studied in isolation by pioneers such as Geert Lovink (Dark Fiber, Zero Comments), but no comprehensive studies have yet appeared. I intend a rhetorical analysis of the cultural discourse on new media in Europe which I will approach as a dispositif. While Foucault applied this concept to historical archives, I will engage with current participants through interviews and observations.
Methods and Work Plan

I am requesting support to complete the necessary observations and interviews which I aim to carry out during 2009-2010, making visits each year during the summer and winter. During a sabbatical I expect to begin in 2011, I will complete the compilation, authoring a book and website.

Methods and Work Plan

For this study I have already begun observing a variety of groups and interviewing their staff, including:

De Waag Society for Old and New Media
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
Worm Rotterdam
De Geuzen Foundation for Multi-visual Research
The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts

Further visits to these institutions have been arranged for the award period, along with observations I have arranged at other cultural institutions and at numerous Dutch MA and PhD programs in New Media. Based on a survey of which programs have been actively publishing, seeking PhD candidates, participating in and holding conferences, I have established a list of schools hosting well-regarded programs studying and educating about new media, including:

Delft University of Technology Eindhoven University of Technology
Leiden University Piet Zwart Institute Radboud University Nijmegen
University of Amsterdam University of Maastricht
University of Twente University of Utrecht

This project will combine analysis of institutional documents with interviews and observations. At cultural institutions I will interview curators, project managers, directors and when possible artists/authors. At academic institutions I will interview faculty, administrators, and students. In particular, I will examine the basic degree structures, course content, reading lists, and assignments. When possible, sample student work will be studied as well. These interviews and observations will reveal informants’ history in the field and the interconnections between various factors such as experience, age, gender, ethnicity, location, education and so forth. At both cultural and academic institutions, I will observe events organized around new media which often reveal places where institutional and social networks are parallel and where they are unaligned.

That is all–at least all the plugged in activities. Except finishing a Sequential Tart interview with Paweł and the teaching assignments for next Fall and Spring. And just about finishing an article. I have one more to write by the end of June!

More about Facebook

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Since I am speaking at two different conferences about the way people participate in Facebook, I have been (believe it or not) reading about Facebook, about relationships online, about what motivates participation, and so on.

here are a few things I’ve noticed:

  1. Though it was noted at least 5 months ago that many faculty are now using social networks and that 25-34 year-olds is the fastest growing segment of users, no one seems to be looking at how or why they use FB. Some articles have been written about faculty disclosing too much online, but so far I have found nothing else.
  2. Almost every academic study (and there are many) concentrates on either how kids/teens use FB, class, racial or ethnic differences in who uses FB, how to use FB to teach, or how to use it to make money.
  3. There are lots of non-academic slideshows and articles comparing FB and MySpace about how to make money or seduce women with FB. –I mention this because my search efforts are hampered by these kinds of documents cluttering the web.

But I have found some very interesting stuff about online relationships from Jonathan Marshall who has published about a concept he calls ‘asence’ including this one in Fibreculture. In brief, he argues that particpants in online communities experience asence, which he explains:

In offline societies, it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Presence and status are acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person’s direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. Identity is reinforced by reaction. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and of their reactions to each other. Online this is usually not the case. It is possible for a person to be present without others being aware of them: there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself. “Asence” is the term I have coined to express this almost ontological uncertainty, or suspension of being between presence and absence.

Marshall goes on to argue that in an effort to overcome asence, participants will exaggerate gender characteristics and may also use romance and even netsex to reinforce intimacy. He developed these ideas from studying the Cybermind mailing list, but I think asence could explain certain behaviors I’ve noticed on Facebook. –more details on that soon.

Two other useful possibilities involved Fluxus and the theory that humans have evolved to be ‘infovores’ –love that term! But I’ll save those for the next entries…

And by the way, apparently Twitter addicts are 61.3% more likely to visit Barcamp.org than the average internet user. –Not directly related to anything, but it caught my eye. 😉

Internet or Digital Culture?

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After attending a number of panels and the “birds-of-a-feather” meeting for people interested in Internet and Digital Culture, I was puzzled to see what difference there was between either category, apart from merely organizational. For this year’s PCA/ACA conference, the call for the Digital Culture Area was focused on the “mainstreams/undercurrents”, and so on, while the Internet Culture Area was open to anything. And both areas were plagued by incoherence in panels, though the Digital Culture Area seemed to have better luck on this. During the B0F meeting we talked about how more coherence might be achieved, but people seemed reluctant to ask authors to choose keywords, but some were willing to support panel calls. Privately I heard many people (not just in this area) agree that the real trouble was that paper quality is often so spotty at the PCA/ACA. I’m afraid I have to agree; it’s a fun conference, but it does feel like almost anyone can get in.

I say this in part because I’ve heard so many presenters reveal it’s their first conference ever, and the presentations lean heavily toward “hey, I found this, isn’t it cool?” Theory is rarely mentioned, nor is most work contextualized in terms of other scholarship. I noticed this especially when I went to a panel in the Composition/Rhetoric Area that was all about New Media in the classroom. (Or so the panel title claimed). What I found was a number of papers rehashing concern about computers in the writing classroom, but without taking up specifics or referencing recent work about blogs or wikis, or about the easy ways to bring media in–cell-phone cameras, for example, or using del.icio.us to help students learn about researching online.

So seeing all this led me to submit an abstract to next year’s MLA convention for a roundtable organized by Henry Turner called “What in the World is New Media.” I feel scholarship on this continues to be ridiculously fragmented and this is caused in part by the continued segregation of New Media studies to specialized departments and curricula. So I’ll post my abstract in a few days.

Fun at the PCA

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Well, a quick update on the conference and I’ll write more later. Before attending anything I met up with David Silver who runs the RCCS and we share coffee and what turned out to be my nearest thing to lunch.

David’s even nicer (and much taller 🙂 )in person than online and it was a very pleasant chat out in the sun, in a little park near the Moscone Center. We talked a little about our projects and about the state of research on new media/ICT/Internet and Digital culture–how ever you want to call it. We agreed that work in the US is more fragmented than in Europe, and the lack of much public funding has given it a very different tone. More on that later.

Then I went to the conference where of course I trawled through the book exhibit, went to few panels than planned, drank too much coffee, and met some interesting people. As I said, details to come, but now once more into the breach!

More on the trip

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After my talk at De Geuzen, I wandered around downtown a bit and then had dinner with Florian at a cheap but good Roti place near Piet Zwart’s new location in the Kareldormanhoff. We are still trying to think about how to do a joint MA, but it’s proving much tougher than I originally expected. I think we (the CSUStan group) will have to get our MA going, and maybe first try some simple exchanges for course credit. Also, the the CSU is under threat of major budget cuts, and so any new projects will be harder if we are all tightening our belts.

I was still really jet-lagged, so after dinner I went back to the flat and tried to answer email or read, or something, but while I had trouble sleeping I also couldn’t think very well. So annoying. I should have drunk more at dinner. 😉

Wednesday I had another interview scheduled with Hajo Doorn, director at Worm, and thanks to my jet-lag I woke up barely in time to dress and race over there. This time we talked less about Worm itself and more about how Hajo sees the Dutch new media scene and his own role in it. I was impressed at how ambivalent he felt. I say impressed because Worm seems to be doing very well and Hajo himself has gained some influence, including serving on some kind of committee or board that awards grant money for projects. I’m not sure how many people in this position would question what it meant, whether it was right, so I am impressed that Hajo does.

He made several striking comments in this vein. First, and this seems to be a shift since last summer, he thinks Worm is in a way forced to be too big now that they are successful and receive funding themselves. They have to employ a lot of people in order to comply with the requirement of receiving funding, and maybe its good that all these people have jobs, but a lot of money is now not spent directly on projects. Also, he’s not even sure that their projects are always the most deserving or successful–that goes back to our earlier discussion of how success is measured. Also, based on his comments on certain other groups, I think Hajo worries that he will become disconnected from real innovative work, because he’s so wrapped up in administrivia. Finally, he’s not sure the project he is involved in evaluating are always so great, but who knows, maybe that’s not so important either, maybe the experiment is worthwhile. I haven’t met anyone else willing to be this forthright and I admire that like hell, because of course it’s a risk, both personally and professionally.

We also talked about what kinds of work is most interesting right now, and what is overrated. Hajo is completely fed up with what passes for interactivity, and I agree with his critique. He gave the example of an art piece in which people step onto a platform with sensors that measure their feet and if their feet are one size, a light this color glows, and if they are that size, a different color light appears. So what? Unfortunately a lot of interactive pieces do seem to remain at this really basic level and so they very quickly become really boring. I further agree that for real, interesting interaction we would probably do better with artificial intelligence.

When I think about, for example, the web sites that are interesting, they are those that facilitate interaction with others–whether we speak of something like FaceBook, World of Warcraft, old-school MOOs, or what have you. And compare this to static texts like novels, paintings, movies. Though these don’t change, they represent (I think) a density of the creator’s/s’ thoughts that readers or viewers can interact with over time. So, interactive new media, to succeed, has to either connect us to other people, or in someway recreate the experience of a conversation with another intelligence.

I’ll have more on the conversation with Hajo later on, but I have to to catch up on other stuff–I am so behind on my entries!

Catching up a bit

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So, last term got completely crazy toward the end. In addition to the stuff I usually might have to do–teach, direct the comp. program, do a little research and writing–I also have been trying to write some grant proposals, organize a conference, and chair a search committee. Oh yeah, and I had to do a job review for myself…and the computer was stolen…so yeah, totally crazy.

But, I did the job review, kept the search under control and the conference, and the grant proposals are ok, for now at least. And, I may buy a Macbook Air in a week or two… But the main thing is that I got things wrapped enough to make another trip to Rotterdam in January. The trip went really well, but I now know that 6 days on the ground is really not enough when you have 6 hour jet-lag to get over before you can function at all.

So, what did I do this time around? Well, since you ask… I spoke at De Geuzen as part of their Living Room Lecture program, about Sequential Tart and super-heroines. That was fun; there was a live audience of six people, with more online, though I think only a few were formally signed into the chat. Anyway, the video archive of the first part is online already, and also some pictures. I was pleased that I could speak comfortably in front of people who I know and whose work I respect a lot! I mean, it’s one thing to address strangers, or students, but I actually care about my friends’ opinions. 😉 So this was the first official event for me.

Embodied experience and the post-conference buzz

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I’m not sure if it’s true for everyone, but I notice that starting by the end of my first day at a conference and lasting for weeks after, I often have so much more energy for writing than usual, even though I’ve keeping long hours and maybe having drinks as well. So what accounts for that?

On one of the now numerous email lists of which I’m member, someone posted about how interacting face to face always creates some energy that flows around between people. I’m not sure if that’s always true; sometimes socializing can be a bit of a strain, if for some reason it feels awkward. But on the whole, I think that’s right. Whenever I go to conferences and meet even one person I really connect with, I’m energized. Once I’ve made these connections, I can usually solidify and sustain them through a combination of email and skype, facebook messaging (and playing) and so on. I even find these virtual contacts energizing, if I have real conversations. And lately I’ve experienced something of that energy even with people I’ve never met in person, but in those cases I also feel an even more urgent wish to meet in person.

But I think there is something about physical presence that so far can’t be replicated or replaced by any virtual modes of contact. In a way it’s like falling for someone in that there’s a a similar feeling of immediate connection, of excitement, except it’s over a different kind of prospect; an intellectual potential, rather than romantic. –Or maybe romantic too, for some people. 😉 Or maybe only I feel this way. Most academics would hesitate to admit this, even if they felt it, I think, because though even porn is starting to be accepted as a subject for study, it’s still not really ok to talk about being motivated in our own work by pleasure, other than the most intellectual and abstract. I think that so many academics are suddenly not only joining Facebook but also getting really involved in it is that it allows expression of some of that same kind of pleasure that we experience when meeting in person.