Reflections on New Media (3)

Jan Visser responds to Jonathan and to the New Media Series

Jonathan Tyrell raises the question: "...if we were to study 'everyday' face-to-face conversations, would we discover less or more idle chatter?" I think the question is relevant, and I would immediately raise the related question: "If, overall, whether in face-to-face situations or in conversations via diverse media, idle chatter is on the increase, what role is played in this development by how we use our media?" The latter question assumes that there is not a one-on-one relationship between the ways in which we communicate and the means through which we communicate. In other words, there may be a spill-over from, say, idle chatter in Internet chat rooms to everyday face-to-face conversation and vice versa.

Ron's point about the customizability of technologies is well taken in that regard. How much freedom do we really have in using today’s technological tools? Yes, they evolve, thanks to market research, with the assumed needs and expressed desires of the user. At the same time, people’s needs and desires evolve with changes in the technological landscape that may well be determined by other motives, such as profit making. Compared with the technology of the past, customizability has changed quite dramatically. For the majority of today’s users, technological tools have become black boxes that at best offer them a limited menu of choices for alternative configurations. With the exception of the hacker community and open source software (typically not marketed on commercial products) most people will not be able to take their iPod or cell phone apart (either physically or in terms of its software) and rebuild it THEIR way. This limit to customizability - not so different from the culinary culture of fast-food restaurants and other instances of commoditization in our society - may well be a factor of influence on how we evolve increasingly to being satisfied with choosing from limited menus rather than feeling inspired to cook our own meals. Instead, if we want it different, we have to send someone back to the kitchen in Cupertino to do it for us.

Part Four…

Reflections on New Media (2)

Jonathan Tyrrell comments on the discussion

I am following this discussion with tremendous interest, though I think that we ought to be careful about assumptions and value judgements regarding the legitimacy of certain forms of communication and knowledge - a retrofit of the high/low culture debate. For example, if we were to study "everyday" face-to-face conversations, would we discover less or more idle chatter?

One of the things I find interesting about these technologies is they way they seem to evolve and respond to the cultures they inhabit, as they simultaneously shape and influence the ways we communicate.

Thumbs take over for text generation (25 March, 2002)

Ron Burnett responds

Your points are important. I think that the evolution of new technologies works in a number of different ways. An apparatus or tool is invented and then marketed. In general, most new inventions fail. Those that do succeed evolve with the marketplace. The iPod is a good example. The core cencepts that produced the iPod have not changed, but its evolution into a mini iPod and then the Shuffle, suggests that users are more interested in portability than storage. Portability and style, look and feel have all made the iPod a success. Ultimately, whether the iPod represents a shift from one mode of music listening to another will depend on whether users will be able to customize it to fit their own and sometimes quite individual needs.

Contrast this with the evolving nature of video games. As video games morph into mass entertainment, they become less and less customizable. Their plots and storylines, their look and feel have already become relatively stale. The key to unlocking the evolution of this process will be games that can be rewritten or developed from the ground up by amateurs. Cultural innovation in any medium is only possible when people can take control of the core elements and recreate that core to fit their needs and outlook.

Seth responds

Being the recent recipient of an iPod shuffle (an early Father's Day present), I'd like to add one thought:

I've divided the 1GB, half for songs, half to carry the files I'm working on. In other words, I have a memory stick that sings to me. I can see this as an incentive to not just save music and other multi-media but to integrate it more closely into the work I save and transport on my memory stick. To make this work better will require more bridges across the iTunes/other data divide (definitely a social challenge). It will inevitably require more memory as well,

Second observation: iTunes is now expanding into a podcasting resource (free and not so free). I've actually talked to some Apple people about using it as an educational resource, i.e. assembling multi-media course kits that could be bought the same way my hard copy course kits are bought at the bookstore.

The advantage from my end is copyright clearance - which, or so my friends at the course kit dept. of the bookstore warn me, is about to jack up the prices of course kits and make much material unavailable. Perhaps we need corporate clout to fight corporate clout. But from Apple's end, the prospect might be attractive not simply from the point of view of course kit sales (with free assembly labour provided by the world's academics) but also in encouraging the sales of reading devices, i.e. the iPods and iMacs of the future. They've gone off (one of them to Cupertino) to mull it over.

Part Three…

Reflections on New Media (1)

This is a NINE part series.

A discussion on the term "new media" may indeed seem pedantic. I should note, though, that the term has been in use at least since 1967 when UNESCO published “The New Media: Memo to Educational Planners." The book was a companion volume to an extensive and in-depth study of the potential impact of the media of the day on education world-wide. Considering that also the media of our day will look obsolete in, say, another twenty years, I rather avoid using the term altogether and instead refer to digital media.

A study like the one you describe should, in my view, seriously look at what goes on between individual human beings. However ubiquitous the use of cell phones, chat platforms and the like, for all kinds of purposes has become, how does, what happens as a consequence, impact the humanity of who we are? Surely, in the best of cases "new kinds of relationships are established within and among communities" but what else happens when much of the use of such media results in "idle talk" rather than “inspirational interaction," (see Meira Van der Spa: Cyber-communities: Idle talk or inspirational interaction? or, in edited version, in Educational Technology Research and Development, 52(2), 97-105)? More important perhaps: What does not happen while we pretend to communicate? Yes, there is a couple of hidden assumptions in my questions, but I’m sure you’ll unravel them.

by Jan Visser

Ron Burnett responds

The term New Media actually appears in a variety of of different ways throughout the history of new techologies. One of the most striking examples of this is in 1929 when "New Film" appeared as a term in many journals of the time. When the telegraph appeared in the 19th century it was described as a "new medium" with a distinct play on the meaning of the term "medium."

The issue seems to be one of emphasis and historical placement. I do agree that the fundamental question centres on the quality of the communications processes put in place by new technologies as they come on stream. It must be remembered that when telephones were invented, most people said that they would destroy communications between people. We now know of course that the opposite is true.

Digital tools such as peer-to-peer communications seem to enhance both the quality and quantity of connections that individuals have with each other. On the other hand, computers may also be contributors to an increasingly lonely and isolated way of living where the sense of community that grows out of a virtual connection is never realised in everyday life.

Part Two…

Reflections on New Media (1)

I am writing a chapter for a book that will come out next year on New Media, edited by Oliver Grau whose most recent book was Virtual Art . The book will examine the historical origins of New Media and the links between digital culture and previous forms of expression, representation and performance. It will be published by MIT Press.

I have been researching this area for the last ten years. I put my first web site together in 1994. I remain unconvinced that New Media is a workable term and provides any added value to discussions of media in general. Nevertheless, the term has taken hold in the popular imaginary and given its presence and use in our culture, the question then becomes what do we actually mean when we use it?

There seems to be no point in engaging in a pedantic discussion of the meaning of the term. Rather, it would be useful to examine the inexorable manner in which digital activities are becoming increasingly woven into every medium that modern cultures use. The ecology of this communications system is best symbolized by the cell phone which has changed notions of mobility, but also resulted in a major shift in how people communicate with each other. As cell phones morph into cameras, video machines and PDA's, new kinds of relationships are established within and among communities. The convergence of cell phones and games means that peer-to-peer communications will become the norm as informal networks are set up to process the multi-faceted strategies that people use to communicate with each other. (More tomorrow)

Can machines dream?

This series is in FIVE parts.

Ronny Siebes is a researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam. He and I met recently in The Hague and the ensuing email exchange represents only a small facet of the longer discussion that we had.

Ronny Siebes
I thought about the question you asked "Can machines dream" and have the following answer:

First, I would like to give my definition of what human dreaming is. Most humans know that they sometimes dream and may remember what they have dreamt, like the images, sounds or other impressions. Obviously, these things like pictures are not really there in the head because we don't have eyes in our head to look at them and if we had, it is too dark to see it (Dennet:). I'm not an expert on neuroscience but I guess that the brain works like this: images (encoded in a parallel bundle of light beams) that our eyes receive trigger a set of neurons that are responsible for interpretating visual input and these interpretations are stored in our memory. When we dream, parts of our memory become active and are manipulated by a script generated by fears, angers or other chemical impulses.

For this information to be remembered, the outcomes of these manipultion processes which are generated by the scripts are stored back again into our memory. Our consciousness (whatever that may be) walks through our memory and recognises that there is new information, namely the new stuff that was added by the dream process.

Computers are also able to receive, store and manipulate information from the outside world. For example, take a computer that has a web-cam connected to it and stores the bitstream on a hard disk or other kind of memory. It is easy to build a program that reads out the bits that represent the movie and to manipulate it. This manipulation would currently be very rude (for example just change some colors, or cut/copy- and paste some shots), but also very advanced like algorithms that detect scenarios and are able to replace objects by other objects. These manipulated movies can be stored again and after a while be 'played' (my free definition of becoming conscious) in a macromeda or windows media player.

Thus to summarize my point: if we describe human dreaming by its functional properties, we can apply it to its artificial counterpart.

Response by Ron Burnett

Imaging of the brain can provides pictures of the connections between different parts, but imaging cannot provide details of what Gregory Bateson has so aptly described as the set of differences that make relations between the parts of the mind possible. “The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a non-substantial phenomenon not located in space or time… (Bateson, 1972: 92)

Difference is not the product of processes in the brain. Thought cannot be located in one specific location; in fact difference means that the notion of location is all but impossible other than in the most general of senses. Bateson goes on to ask how parts interact to make mental processes possible. This is also a central concern in the work of Gerald Edelman, particularly in the book he co-authored with Giulio Tononi (2000) where they point out how the neurosciences have begun to seriously investigate consciousness as a scientific ‘subject.’ (3) Edelman and Tononi summarize the challenge in this way:

What we are trying to do is not just to understand how the behaviour or cognitive operations of another human being can be explained in terms of the working of his or her brain, however daunting that task may be. We are not just trying to connect a description of something out there with a more scientific description. Instead, we are trying to connect a description of something out there — the brain — with something in here — an experience, our own individual experience that is occurring to us as conscious observers. (11)

The disparities between the brain and conscious observation, between a sense of self and biological operations cannot be reduced to something objective, rather, the many layers of difference among all of the elements that make up thought can only be judged through the various strategies that we use to understand subjectivity. Edelman and Bateson try and disengage a series of cultural metaphors that cover up the complexity of consciousness.

One of these metaphors is that the brain is like a computer and that human memory stores information much like a hard disk. There is simply not enough evidence to suggest that the metaphor works. So, machines cannot dream because among many other things, we don't have an adequate definition of what the mind does when it dreams. All we have is the language of metaphor and description, a semantically rich space that cannot be reduced to any single or singular process.

Part Two…