Reflections on New Media/Cyberculture studies

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During the first conference and in many of my conversations with people connected to Piet Zwart, the question keeps coming up about what exactly we are all doing in this field. Should we be studying the technology? The creative practices? The sociology? Thank God I’m in rhetoric–there’s nothing like a meta-field to happily encompass interests (like mine) that might generously be described as broad…maybe fragmented is more accurate…

But back to the question, why do we study these things? I think that’s the big question, and while we don’t have to have the same answer, I don’t see many people talking about the question at all. There seems to be an idea that we all have already agreed that computer tech, the internet, the web, are worth studying by definition. –Well, you could argue that anything produced by people is worth studying, certainly that’s a long-standing view of cultural studies. But I think we have to make the case a bit more clearly than that. Maybe I will make this a central question in my interviews.

Erasmusbrug

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Erasmusbrug
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Another oft photographed view. The nicest part (I think) is that the bridge has a walkway, so you can stroll across and enjoy nice views of the city.

I had been at the graduation show for the Willem de Kooning Academy, which is connected to Piet Zwart and houses the BA programs. It was an interesting show with very high qualities of craftsmanship, especially in the graphic design section. What most struck me though was that though several students in different sections were doing web design, their approaches were often very conventional. They didn’t seem to be experimenting in the same way as even the first year MA students in Media Design are doing. That surprised me since only one year of work separates them, in many cases.

The students all had business cards and most had websites, which struck me as very useful and created a very professional image. I’ll have to remember that for later.

Kijk Kubus

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Kijk Kubus
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Ok, first Rotterdam picture, possibly the most photographed buildings in Rotterdam, the Cube Houses on the Overblaak. I think they deserve the attention just for looks, but I’ve been told by someone who lived in one that they are pretty inconvenient living spaces. Now the collection of business that occupy that space is a bit weird; a massage parlor, a hair salon, a nail salon, and until just a few months ago, Piet Zwart Media Design. Now that space will become a backpacker’s hostel, so I guess more people can now see what it’s like to live in a cube house. Personally I think it’s a silly idea and likely to leave that space pretty well trashed, I’m afraid.

Later last Friday

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So those first parallel sessions ran so late–well, the whole schedule was already running behind–that when we got down to lunch there was almost none left, and by the time it was refilled, I had about 5 minutes to eat before I had to find the session where I was speaking. But I did find it. I did have a nice if brief chat with Mirko Schäfer before/during that abbreviated lunch. He says he’ll be at the Piet Zwart graduation show; I hope we meet up there and can talk further. Anyway. My panel was ok; the other talks were interesting, and mine went fine, but we each only had 15 minutes, which is a nuisance, and our moderator didn’t cut people off, so we lost most of the time we could have used for Q & A. We still had some, but a couple of people took all of it up…

Anyway, then I had to dash in order to catch the 5:26 train back to Rotterdam, so I could be in time for the opening of the Piet Zwart MDMA first-year show at V2. Except that there was some big accident on the line right outside Rotterdam Centraal, so no trains could go through Rotterdam… Well, after scrambling around trying to figure out another route, finally it’s announced that anyone bound for Rotterdam should go to this other track…so I get that train and get to R’dam at 7:15 instead of 6:30. The show was scheduled to start at 7, so I run through the station and grab a taxi, and get there at 7:30. Luckily (for me) they are running late too, so I didn’t miss anything. –But it was strange because I thought the Dutch were so punctual!

The show was really good, an impressive demonstration of hardware hacking and in some cases reflection on the web/internet, or on our relationships with “new” media. I had the chance to speak at length with a student about to graduate, which was really informative and gave me a very good impression of the program. –Also good to see that graduating students would come to the first-year show. I will post pictures or links to others’ pictures later.

At the show I got to meet Jaromil, which was an unexpected treat. He’s a hacker/artist/activist from Amsterdam who has released a lot of free software specifically designed for media artists and also has been a teacher at Piet Zwart. We had a really good conversation about teaching; what students need or don’t. So I ended up staying until about 10 or 11, and then I was starving because I never really got any dinner during my mad dash back to R’dam. Luckily some people, including Jaromil and Florian, were going for Roti around the corner, so I went along. It was yummy, and we all talked more about US politics and political activism (or lack thereof). A bunch of the students wandered in and it was like the show was spilling into the neighborhood. Good thing I could sleep in on Saturday.

More on Saturday later. Now I need food.

And even more plenary…

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Interesting start; Katy Borner is talking about how the amount of knowledge out there has grown enormously and yet our brains are not getting any bigger, and there’s not a good way to extract it automatically. How can we create infrastructures to help us? Google is good, but doesn’t show patterns and trends and outliers.

One approach is to create maps. Example of Co-Authorship of IEEE papers from 2004 shows different patterns between say colleagues in a lab or a professor at a university, and also shows that these are all local networks–most connections are to people physically close.

She and her colleagues developed maps of science which they use to educate kids about how science works. They develop them by searching different databases. But now onto her main topic (!).

  • We need software glue to interlink datasets and algorithms written in different language using different data formats.
  • The smaller the glue or ‘CI Shell’ the more likely it can be maintained.
  • Dataset and algorithm ‘plugins’ are provided by application holders/community users
  • Applications resemble custom ‘fillings.’

Cyberinfrastructure Shell (CIShell) is an empty shell that support many functions. She then goes into detail about some tools like Network Work Bench and one she didn’t mention but I found online.

NNT, Day 2 plenary

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Ok, back to the present, and more catch up later. Today we start with Nosh Contractor talking about the motives that drive people to participate in social networks–there are lots of possible reasons, some economic, some social, mixed, etc. He is doing research to collect lots of data on motives with the aim of creating a “contextual ‘meta-theory’ of social drivers for creating and sustaining communities.”

He identifies different kinds of theories and their claims, and different kinds of motives these theories focus on.

Collecting data and testing different theories has been difficult until now, because of the web/internet, being able to see the connections and also the behavior and motives as made visible not just in links but also in posts, tags, etc. “It’s all about ‘Relational Metadata'” –ref Katy Borner.

Some tools available now for text-mining, web-crawling, web of science citation data that can let us develop multi-dimensional network models. –I need to check one he’s demonstrating called Crawdad; sounds really interesting. Next he shows several examples of how his research group analysed several networks and helped them be better connected, and wraps up reiterating how a multidimensional model that includes many kinds of connections and nodes helps us better understand networks. Cool.

NNT, Day 2

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Here I am again and this time I’ve snagged a seat near one of the few electrical outlets in this lecture hall. I’ll try to catch up some of my earlier notes before the morning plenary starts–we’re already 15 minutes late though…

Yesterday I also saw Tiziania Terranova and she had interesting things to say about immaterial labor, capturing customers and harnessing collective intelligence. She compared Yochai Benkler’s ideas with Maurizio Lazzarato and Gabriel Tarde. Mainly she was arguing that social networks and even more online communities are about relationships, not economics, even though they have real economic consequences. One of many instances when it was unclear whether a speaker really meant to talk about networks or communities–this is a problem in my paper as well. Also some trouble just with the microphones hampered her talk, which was too bad, because I think she was getting at an important idea.

Next was Wendy Chun talking about imagined networks. This was the best of the first three presentations. She started with some questions: what needs to happen so that we think of interactions as networked; how do social and technical abstractions coincide, interact, etc; and a third question I missed because my jet-lag made me fuzz out for a minute… Maybe it was the most basic: are networks communities?

An important point to note before she gets started: public/private has shifted to all private that are open/closed. Her primary example (which unfortunately is not so well known in Europe) was Facebook which she argued is a profoundly nostalgic in its drive to create a feeling of intimacy. And, people join networks when they feel excluded. –probably true, but I think almost everyone feels that to some degree, or in some arenas, so is it a useful distinction? She went on to describe Facebook and how it works and eventually got to the idea that these networks are enduring though ephemeral. But, they aren’t memory, they are just data storage. Memory requires “diligent regeneration.” I’m sorry to say that by this point I was really getting unfocused, so I hope her paper will be available online–it seems that hardly anyone turned one in on time for the proceedings CD.

Back to live blogging

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OK, I charged the battery a bit, so now back to live reporting on the first day, just in time for the very last talk by Florian Cramer. I’ll go back and post my notes from the others later. A nice intro by Matthew Fuller who mentions that among other things, Florian has won in a new category for Prix Ars Electronica for best contribution to media theory. He seems embarrassed by it being mentioned. Unlike most of the other speakers, Florian is (as usual) eschewing slick presentation styles and just giving us white on black screens that look like (and in fact I think are) what you get in a terminal window.

I had the chance to see Florian’s original presentation notes and of course he’s not following them, which means now I have trouble identifying what I really need to note down. So what is he saying…he starts with talk of an “elegant paradox” between the syntactic, linear aspects of language and the paradigmatic, that is associative meanings of words. so there has always been a sort of weblike character to texts and in fact textus actually means web.

Then we are on to Barthe turning everything into a text, from beefsteaks, to striptease, to well, anything. At the same time, traditional philologists think of text as only about paper. Computer tech though has allowed us to see what really texts are or aren’t. Ok, now I know where we are.

Syntax –> what is computable
Semantics –> what is computable only if turned into syntax

so text is just an amount of (in most cases alphanumeric) symbols

You can’t really get this from a beefsteak or striptease.

So webs and networks have comparable limitations.

You can describe any network in a flat linear way, the complexity can be boiled down. But he is not proposing this as reduction, but as analysis. So maybe networks are not so different from anything else. (such as texts).

Just as texts were initially defined as anything, and we were in linguistic trap, now everything is networks and we seem to be falling into a technological trap. Despite the humanist agenda, since the 40s, the sciences were mapped onto culture, which leads to a variety of problems.

(big jump here, because I had to stop and really listen. Damn him for saying something interesting and dense)

With the assumption that the media is the message, media theory became sort of a rehash of cybernetics. The network is another cybernetic metaphor that conflates things should be differentiated. But cybernetics also takes these things literally, so interdisciplinary work always teeters on the edge of falling into the trap of mistaking a metaphor for a model.

Critical theory should be wary of taking these metaphors too far. Cultural studies and media studies have too often bought into techno-hype, and used technological terms too sloppily. He gives an example of how “signal-to-noise-ratio” is a concrete mathematical concept, but also is used in discussion lists, first as a metaphor, but then applied in the creation of semantic filters, which is questionable.

So remember:
Storage is not memory, feedback is not interaction, data is not knowledge, computation is not cognition.

A new network theory would have to consider the networks of metaphors spun and the conflations in a critical way even as it uses them. (that’s rather provocative since he’s basically implying that up to now we haven’t been doing this…in fact could be read as a criitique of this conference’s themes…) Oops low battery again, questions are interesting and so are Florian’s answers, but I have to stop. More later.

New Network Theory, day 1, session 1

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Here I am in the opening plenary, listening to a talk by Siva Vaidhyanathan about Google and its philosophy, and about how talk about Google is characterized by a strongly theological tone. Interesting discussion of how it’s philosophy and technology are entangled and don’t always work well together. For example, level of user interest strongly influences pagerank, so just based on Google’s search algorithms, terms like “holocaust” would bring up pages of holocaust denial sites. Google engineers had to really mess with their own code in oder to get around this.

Then on to Google booksearch, which apparently sucks–well, I think it hardly compares to their regular search, but is it really that terrible? Maybe I just got lucky.

Google video–well, we all know the issues there, I think. Google tells you not to infringe, but they’re not responsible if you do and they aren’t going to police it (unless threatened with a lawsuit by Viacom).

Interesting influence of pragmatic and technical issues on copyright law enforcement. Search engines couldn’t function if those companies couldn’t copy the pages into their indexes without asking every time.

And then there are the privacy issues with Google Earth… Issues with the Chinese government over making dissident material available…

Clearly drifting from the “do no evil” position.

Google is seriously understudied. It’s not neutral ….not a lot of other stuff–he’s speeding up to finish….we need the synoptic rather than panoptic…

We need critical information studies–but the description is what we’d like to say about any field. While I agree with this critique of Google, I don’t know that his larger calls are actually anything new or different. Ok, we’ll see what the next speakers say.

Boston Logan…

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Ok Terminal E, the international terminal, was under construction forever and now it’s done. Sadly, I’m not impressed. It’s ok looking, but the design is just stupid, and makes jam ups inevitable whenever more than 50 people are trying to check in at any one airline, or more than 100 are trying to get through security. Which is pretty much always. Considering Boston’s pretensions as an international hub of trade, I’m amazed they thought this was biig enough even when they started (10 years ago?).

And wifi is $7.95 for a day pass, but since most people are only here for about 3 hours (barring some awful delay) it’s pretty steep, esp. since many airports have it for free. I think internet access should be free, period.

But enough of that. In addition to the conferences I’m attending, I’m interviewing people at several institutions connected with the study of new/digital media. So far these include The Waag Society, V2_, Worm, and the Piet Zwart Institute Media Design Program, and maybe other places too. So it will be quite a visit! I’m hoping to learn something about how the different ways these places are organized shaped the relationships they have with theiir local and national communities, and with each other. Also I want to learn all I can about what has worked for them and what hasn’t, so hopefully it will help me and my colleagues at CSU Stan. as we work on our new center.

I should be boarding in 20 minutes, so I’ll post this and get myself organized. I’ve read that the food on IcelandAir sucks, and I don’t even know how much they would feed us on the overnight flight, so I think I’ll grab something. Tot zien!