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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?

 

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. 

This is the first post.