Month: February 2018

I have this recurring dinner party fantasy, like my own private symposium, where I invite cool folks to my house to eat spaghetti. Near the top of my guest list, just under Martha Nussbaum, but before Kim Deal (bass player of the pixies) is American academic and game designer  Ian Bogost. We could hang. We’d be buds.

At a Game Developers conference in 2011 Bogost gave a brilliant lecture entitled “Shit Crayons“. Bogost’s metaphor, as iconoclastic as it is beautiful, speaks to the poetry created by Nigerian political detainee, Wole Soyinka while in solitary confinement. Restricted and oppressed, yet driven to write and create with any medium available, sometimes faeces, Soyinka wrote touching poetry.  And this is us, Bogost says, resilient creatures of amazing potential, wit and creativity, trapped in the narrow constrained world of social gaming, “spinning shit into gold”. Bogost, as a new hero in a new world of digital ideas, is the perfect addition to my tri-partite party.

I imagine that over spaghetti that Ian tells us about how gamification can instil empathy through modelling, role playing, and world-building, that game play affords new opportunities to connect and create experience – to educate and enlighten. Kim will nod – she grooves on Bogost because he is a culture-jammer who lives to disrupt and doesn’t mind if she smokes at the table. But Martha Nussbaum won’t swallow the typical platitudes, “empathy created through imagination, cultural representation, and its relation to social justice, is not a new idea – not a ‘digital’ product of secondary orality – but an old enlightenment idea presented by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and by me in Poetic Justice. Aren’t we taking literate ideas into a more limiting digital space. You sure you are not championing another ‘shit crayon’?”, she jibes, “Or worse a modern version of bread and circuses?”.

“Sounds like the ancient battle between the Poet and Philosopher all over again” interjects Stacey, eager to impress Martha, “Plato banned the poets from his Republic because they led us farther from the truth – with attractive lies and trickery. Perhaps games are something similar – a nouveaux form of unbridled sophistry and rhetoric?

“Nope, but yes”, says Bogost leaning back from the table with an ironical grin, “I’m saying that Video gaming is a new kind of rhetoric – procedural rhetoric. Bogost quotes his text: “Video games do not simply distract or entertain with empty, meaningless content. Rather, video games can make claims about the world. But when they do, they do it not with oral speech, nor in writing, nor even with images. Rather, video games make argument with processes. Procedural rhetoric is the practice of effective persuasion and expression using processes”, (p. 125). “Like the technologies of the literate age – and the poets Plato was so suspicious of – we make of it what we will”.

Stacey sits back, dim lights slowly coming on, “sooo  – we are exposing procedures through the creation of algorithms – of breaking our world, our actions, into tiny fundamental steps – and communicating and representing our lives – painting/writing with this medium. Digital gaming, is in fact, something new – a new form of expression then ..” She  starts to put the pieces together. “We are just having the same ancient arguments about a new technology – commodification, ethics,  and social responsibility …”

“We’re out of beer” says Kim, as she puts the Ramones on the stereo.

Stacey leans back in her chair, listening to Ian present his intriguing notions of Play and Fun, describing possibilities for the elevation of human interaction through gaming and on-line technologies. Martha verbally thrusts and parries, pointing to the increased brutality of discourse on-line.  She bristles at Bogost’s easy deflections, pointing to sexual objectification and outright pornography, making him pause to consider her notions of the fragility of goodness and the true nature of pleasure.

Ultimately, in the heat of the discussion and the smash of opinion, Stacey realizes that these unlikely houseguests have much in common – they both focus deliberate critique on ideas and cultural conceptions, in hopes that, as Bogost says “they blush and give up their secrets”.

As everyone knows. A good party is about inviting the right people.

The Cumberland Community Forest is the most profound personal example I have of civil society in action. ‘On the ground’ activism, on-line engagement, the strong ties of community, the weak ties of visitors and tourists, and the long tail of social media came together to create change. Without all of these layers of engagement, the forest would not still stand.

Jonah Lehrer states in his article Weak Ties Twitter and Revolutions the internet cannot provide the “discipline and strategy” necessary to politically engage civil society – this must come from social actors working directly on the ground. However, he also argues that innovation created by the interaction of diverse parties via the internet is an important aspect of civil engagement. “Our acquaintances — not our friends — are our greatest source of new ideas and information” he argues, and I can see how this concept at play in the growing ‘friends’ and connections of the Cumberland Forest; the voice and reach of the project was broadened and emboldened by the ‘clickers’ of the digital sphere.

 The Cumberland Forest is the story of a community who reimagined its prosperity through forest preservation. Primarily championed by residents attempting to strike a new economic path out of the end of old growth logging, the spin off created by digital technologies/social media have been strikingly effective. The forest has become a symbol of a mountain biking  brand or social positioning. Powerful twitter hashtags build narratives that feature community’s shared identity: Political – #restore the commons – relating to the reemergence of the private versus public ethic in reclaiming crown land; Consumer – #buyabeersaveaforest – launched by the local brewery which donates a dollar from each beer; and Historical – #whatwouldgingerdo – in reference to labour hero “Ginger Goodwin”, who led the town through the Great Coal Mining Strike of 1912.

A possey of German and Australian mountain bikers rode the perseverance trail wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the face of Ginger Goodwin and slogans declaring the Republic of Cumberland; how incredibly heart-warming. There is a whole linkage of weak ties fostering the forest preservation project of this tiny rural village of 3000. We are truly connected to the Global village.

 Some argue that clicking on a social cause can be more of an escape, a mirage of political engagement, which creates a placebo effect that inoculates us from further activism. They call it slacktivism. However, I think the Cumberland Forest shows that we can be more hopeful for the clickers. Others have argued that abstracted on-line engagement can stimulate more meaningful action. Clay Shirky’s notion of cognitive surplus is just one example; Shirky expounds that “while we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world”. The internet relies on a certain amount of human generosity to motivate change. Moreover, I think the Cumberland Forest exemplifies the kind of hope we can have in the long tail of social connection and the interaction of diverse social ties. Without the momentum created by social media and the growing number of tweets or on-line media presence, the Cumberland Forest would not have gained enough momentum to sustain fundraising efforts, reach granting bodies, and stir its array of social engagement.

I think we can find our physical feet in our digital universe; we just need to get our mitts in there.

John Durham Peter’s writing on the historical transition of the post office sent me pin-balling through what it means to have private communications. Dead letters describes the switch from the open dissemination of interpersonal communications to the private sealed envelope. This transformation in conceptions of privacy, of the loss of these intimate communications to the public realm, are curiously marked with a certain sadness. He describes dead letters as not simply noetic/of the mind, but erotic/of the body, not a missed communication in the sense of a misinterpretation, but in physically missing the connection. Moreover, his association of dead letters with mortality are powerfully intriguing -“Communication cannot escape embodiment” Peters opines, and his writing elicits the possibility that language and communication have actual breath.

Peters writing reminded me of scenes from Jane Austen novels. Letters are news channels in her stories, read aloud to every visitor, the turn of phrase discussed, the eloquence of the handwriting commented on. Social information was communicated in a public forum – only in the guise of a private address. Current understandings might view this as breach of trust. However, we do seem to be moving towards this older, more open, notion of communication in the digital age – what Walter Ong call Secondary orality.

Facebook and Twitter have this same kind of open dissemination, the sense of a secure channel, communication amongst ‘friends’ – without being any of those things. We share some information publicly about our private sphere, but we want to retain the right to curate who might hear our news, what is shared and to what extent. Do we still imagine that some communication will remain “tightly coupled” with its intended recipient? What does ‘public’ mean to us in contrast to the “private”. Do we still think about these things in the same way – as opposed opposites?

My ideas of the private versus the public self have become so complicated and full of twists and turns. My limited study of the effects of digital communication on culture has unearthed a lot of these tricky false dichotomies. What meaning does a term like “real” versus “on-line” identity actually have?  How do we reconcile the bleeding together of intimate communications and public expressions? What does it mean for our communications to have a ‘corps’ or even ‘corpse’ as Peters would have it. And what effect do these ‘real’ public and private communications, relationships have on the body politic – our democracy?

Writer and academic David Taras outlines some serious problems with  citizenship, philanthropy, and political engagement in his text Digital Mosaic . Post what he calls “media shock“, Taras describes young voters as  “digital natives” who do not want to involve themselves in long reading and devoted political concern, and only want to “snack” (p.59). Taras talks about “peek a boo citizens” who approach life with a “continuous partial attention” and describes digital natives as “shallow thinkers” (p, 118). Moreover, he points to the way we curate social media and our on-line presences, which creates ghettoization and polarization in political views. He describes a public sphere that is a far cry from Habermas’s ideal. Is technology changing us? Are we not who we once were – as individuals and as a society?

If Marshall McLuhan is right and media “penetrate(s) deeply into the human psyche” then we need to address dichotomies like Real versus Fake; Public versus Private;Noetic and Erotic. Lines have been redrawn in our conceptual understandings and meanings have become very blurry. These distinctions are less apparent, or perhaps even less meaningful for us. And as they are being redrawn – who is doing the meaning making? Us or the algorithm? How can we understand how we should live together, or politically organize our communities, when we have so little understanding of who we are and where we are going?