Month: January 2018

Digital communication technologies have changed the nature of the “audience” from a static viewer to an engaged participant who is able to both consume and produce on-line content. The possibilities for counter publics, as places for black twitter, feminist art, or transvestite communities are inteiguing. Marginalized voices are able to engage on the web, reach each other, and claim space. However, these changing tools and levels of engagement have not eradicated hegemonic discourse or built a more liberating public sphere. Campbell (2015) speaks of the way these counter publics and hashtag communities become co-opted when over shared and popularized; lingo and nomenclature are often altered and debased. He demonstrates this by describing the concept of “realness” and the way it loses its original referent or import when it moves into the manistream through the popularity of the television show Rupaul’s Drag Race. Campbell (2015) tells us “#realness, [is] a term that has become so ubiquitous as to be only tenuously connected to its source” (p. 164). But these concerns of homogenization and watered down appropriations have to be viewed in context of what we stand to gain as well as what is lost. Santoro’s (2015) description of the #RaiderNation hashtag public as “arguably the most expansive and accommodating canopy under which superdiverse groups can come together in mutual recognition and on equal footing” ( p.191). Santoro (2015) points to how these digital tools and publics have the ability to self-realize, resist hegemonic values, and “neo-liberal regimes” , but he also points to the fact that these “discrete spaces” have been “created and marked out for us” (p. 199). I am still left with this overarching question about power and the limits of our ability to take these digital spaces.

The actual structure of the net – the algorithms and search engines, issues of net neutrality, the platforms that enable these communications, are not completely free from manipulation and control. Moreover, the proliferation of ‘fake news’ and ‘click bait’ may be the irritating consequences of unvetted and free sources, but I feel the solution may be worse than the problem. Shirky (2010) proposes some interesting ideas around cognitive surplus and out ability to use human generosity for public good, and I think  many of us want to be more active forces for  a more liberating net.

In reaction to recent Facebook algorithm changes, many of my friends have been advocating a new way of collecting and documenting information sources. This recent post from the Tyee –Better Facebook-Smart Friends – is a prime example. Rupp advocates getting “around the latest algorithm tyranny simply by choosing to pay more attention to people who post high-quality articles”. She feels that although communicative capitalism, the way it panders to dominant socio-political opinions in order to sell advertising, has destroyed “ol’timey newspapers” which provided a variety of opinion and championed notions of objective reporting, we have the opportunity to capitalize on something very surprisingly like Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus. Shirkey argues we can use our human generosity to share information and contribute to a more rational public sphere. However is this enough to rescue rational public debate? Is it possible that the ability to communicate on-line, is actively being censored and controlled?

A recent article on Global research, Thought police for the 21st century is much darker in tone and calls for us to stiffen our spines and mobilize – to reclaim, our personal and private spaces and chart new directions for the public sphere. Chris Hedges (2018) argues that Facebook’s new policies are more active and dangerous then we realize. He posits that the new Facebook security team composed of  “10,000 [people] —7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content”. He argues that social media companies are “intertwined with and often work for U.S. intelligence agencies” and that this “army of censors is our Thought Police”. He is very concerned with how this mediation of our access to information will become another form of state sponsored censorship “designed to prevent a distressed public from accessing the language and ideas needed to understand corporate oppression, imperialism and socialism”.

Although Hashtag Publics and Shirky point to much of the good digital communications offers and the benefits and possibilities of a highly communicative global village. Are we naive in thinking we are really able to tap human generosity and talent to benefit humanity? Or are we too lost in a system beyond out control? Have we, as Hedges (2015) states begun the “ominous march to an Orwellian world of Thought Police, “Newspeak” and “thought-crime” or, as Facebook likes to call it, “de-ranking” and “counterspeech.”

 

Campbell, A. (2015). Chapter 11. Rambukkana, N.(Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 155 – 167). New York: Peter Lang.

Santoro, A. (2015). Chapter 14. Rambukkana, N.(Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 189 – 201). New York: Peter Lang.

 

The notion of a ‘counter public’ or a competing or alternate public sphere recognizes that hegemonic discourses devalue some communications and make some expressions of self dangerous and or risky (Cantey. N. and Robinson,C. (2015) p. 220). Taking and inhabiting space is a political act; the digital space we inhabit, the way we are given voice or made visible, allows participants to create a sense of self and form communities or tribes in these counter publics. Cantey and Robinson (2015) explain how Twitter conversations “help reinforce the use of on-line space as an alternative sphere for the sharing and creation of identities” (p. 222). Magdelena Olszanowski (2015) describes the use of Instagram hashtags in a similar manner but stresses the vulnerability in such exchanges stating “intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces” (p.233). Panayiota Tsatsou (2009) opines “space becomes place when it acquires symbolic meaning and a concrete definition marking the whole spectrum of identity and sense of belonging” (p. 12). Digital communication technologies  alter “the spatial and temporal boundaries of human interaction (Carey (2009), p. 157), but in these socially expanding communicative acts of identity creation, sharing, intimacy, vulnerability, symbolic communities and networked individualism, do we have control and possession of our creations and interactions?  Are we leaving ourselves open to manipulation by corporate structures and others who would invade our privacy? What does it mean to exist and create identity in this ephemeral world? Especially as vulnerable and intimate selves.

Privacy and security are serious issues in navigating the rapidly changing world of digital communications. Industry professionals meet to discuss these concerns each year; organizations like Reboot Communications host annual summits drawing in “1,000 delegates with an interest in cutting edge policy, programs, law, research and technologies aimed at the protection of privacy and security”.   https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/privsec2018/

Conversations about how to protect ourselves proliferate across the internet.  https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/66-ways-to-protect-your-privacy-right-now/. How do we make sense of this so very public extension of our identities, of these risky, intimate and vulnerable communications in a space we understand so very little and have so little actual control over? Julia Angwin (2016) warns that “we implicitly agree to have our movements followed both virtually, as we browse the web, and physically, as our phones transmit our locations. We agree to have our interests cataloged and analyzed. We agree to have the content of our emails scanned. We agree to have our friends identified and analyzed in ‘‘social graphs.’’ We agree to have our images stored, shared, and tagged and our faces analyzed to help companies perfect their facial recognition tools. We agree to have our voices analyzed, our fingerprints scanned, and soon enough, the iris patterns of our eyes stored in vast, remote databases”.

If these digital spaces are indeed sites of vulnerable expression, risky places of identity construction, counter culture, and intimate communications … shouldn’t we have more control over our outputs and greater understanding of the limits of our self-expression? Is the commodification of our interests and spaces, described so agilely by Angwin (2016) a necessity? As Carey (2009) expresses in his text, we have only just begun to unpack the import and cultural ramifications of the Telegraph 178 years ago. Can these current articles, summits and symposiums do any better?

 

References

Cantey. N. and Robinson,C. (2015). Chapter 16. Rambukkana, N.(Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 221 – 228). New York: Peter Lang.

Carey, J. (2009). Chapter 8: Technology and Ideology. In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, Revised Edition , pp. 155–177.

Olszanowski, M. (2015). Chapter 17. Rambukkana, N.(Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 229 – 242). New York: Peter Lang.

Tsatsou, P. (2009) ‘Reconceptualising ‘Time’ and ‘Space’ in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications’, PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication, 1: 11-32.

Angwin, J. (2016). Protecting your privacy is not as hard as you think. Consumer Reports. retrieved from https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/protecting-your-digital-privacy-is-not-as-hard-as-you-might-think/

 

I was intrigued to read recent reports of the coming changes to our Facebook feeds. Facebook will change its algorithm to prioritize posts from families and friends and decrease advertising, news, and other branded content. Facebook has experienced some fairly serious criticism over “clickbait”, the proliferation of ads, and misleading or deceptive information. I see many articles and concerns across the net, struggling with ideas of “true” – we see ‘catfish’ and social posturing but we also see political lies and manipulations – people desire something ‘real’. I think these concerns speak to our increasing uncomfortability with how information is vetted and communicated in digital spaces. I feel like the veil of on-line simulacra is wearing thin.

However, the big takeaway for me is a sudden awareness how much our digital spaces are mediated and curated. My engagement with Facebook is enabled and directed by an algorithm that was constructed specifically to direct my gaze, to record my interests and mine me for consumer data, and fill my feed accordingly. And it is not merely Facebook. In the text Hashtag Publics Bruhns and Burgess (2015) point out that in twitter when users click on a tweet they assume they are getting all of the associated tweets for this hashtag, but are instead receiving “a constructed, partial, and curated view” (p. 25). If our relationship with technology are as, McLuhan says, technological extensions of the self, they are limbs over which we have very little control and understanding.

Can an actual Public Sphere be constituted in the context of “communicative capitalism” (Dean, 2003, p. 104). Dean cogently argues that “technologies, the concentrations of corporate power, the demands of financial markets, the seductions of the society of the spectacle that rule in and as the name of the public have created conditions anathema to democratic governance”(2003, p. 104). How can we have free speech and contribute to a public debate in the context of a mediated format and content  manipulation? Does the architecture of the net allow us to achieve the “equality, transparency, inclusivity, [and] rationality” that Habermas requires as norms for his concept of the Pubic Sphere?

References

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-12/murdoch-s-news-corp-warns-facebook-to-avoid-political-changes

Dean, J. (2003). Why the Net is not a Public Sphere. Constellations, 10(1), 95-112

Rambukkana, N. (2015). Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks: New York: Peter Lang

 

Virtually touring  Chauvet Caves  raised some interesting questions for me about the purpose and role of communication as it pertains to the artist. Art does not to fit into the framework of Ong’s “divided line” – this intellected difference between how we think between oral and literate communication technologies. Art seems to me to be a communication that transcends those noetic boundaries.

I attended an exhibition of Inuit Art recently. The artists/curator spoke of the long winter months, of how creating art and song were ways of relieving tension, and alleviating social difficulties in confined spaces. Whittling became a kind of meditative process where the artist would sing the song of a profitable hunt, perhaps will it into being by creating the piece, sing the songs of ancestor exploits while carving, or imagine/relate the stories of sacred beings, or merely to busy the hands and minds in long boring stretches of confinement. I imagine the Cro-Magnon people of the Chauvet Caves would have created with similar experiences as we  currently do in these geographies and landscapes.

However, it is interesting that the Chauvet caves were never inhabited – there was no midden, no sign of regular use, and can be interpreted as a sacred site :Paintings.  We can debate, trade archaeological facts and argue what the Chauvet caves might have meant, we can never actually “know”its particular import, these people and their culture are lost to us. But, we can agree that it is “Art”, that it was not mere decoration in a living space, it is not directions to a hunting ground or a shopping list, and we can recognize that “Art” is a particular kind of communication. There is something sublime or non-instrumental about our need to produce it.

I think it is a mistake to view the Chauvet caves through the lens of contemporary digital communications – of secondary orality. I argue that those cave drawings were not created to be specific communications but more open interpretive expressions. Visual Representation in the digital age is used as ways of shortening communication, of summing up and immediately conveying information: as visual stimulus designed to be enticing, or as symbolic representation of value – logo’s, certificates etc.; used to improve our personal brand or be quantified by likes; attached to, and validated by, the consumption of products.Visual art – in the context of fine art – is a complex “ask” – you have to examine, deconstruct, interpret meaning, it is a slow and difficult process, whose end goal does not provide immediate or definable satisfaction. Whose meaning and import lie in the aura and aesthetic moment in relation to the work of Art, in the connection and interior reflection of the beholder. I think the Chauvet caves need to be understood in this context – a context that transcends  a noetic change arising from Gutenberg’s press or Mcluhans Global Village in the digital age.

 In reading Havelock and Ong, I’d be tempted to argue that “Art” is an anachronism of a literate society – that fostered the analytical deconstruction of meaning – that the aesthetic value of Art has become increasingly hard for us to understand and quantify in the digital age. Yet I think the Chauvet caves, as an example of expressive Art in a primary oral culture, indicate that the value of this communication is deeper and more ancient than that – and that it points to something inherent and important in cultural expression – of what Art means to who and what we are. Technological determinism is not a useful construct in defining and interpreting the Chauvet Caves.