Comment on New Media Conference

Chris has submitted the following comment on the New Media conference that was held in Banff in late September.

This was one of the most prescient presentations at the conference. The comments on disciplinarity and the forces that can influence the emergence of a field like New Media are very timely.

To ‘zoom out’ a bit - it strikes me that what is operating here is not altogether dissimilar from weightier macro-issues such as nationality and race. Bear with me a moment. A person’s citizenship and skin colour can appear factual and definitive, but it is important to remember that these designations are based on abstract concepts that extend from amorphous ideals. Nations have physical boundaries and citizens, yes, but it is not possible to represent the sum total of the ideas about what it means to be of that nation; these ideas are always in flux. Simlarly, there is no such thing as 'White' or 'Black', really. (If one finds it in the mind it has been arbitrarily assigned and can only be temporary).

The reason I bring up these topics in relation to the (perhaps) seemingly unrelated question of whether there is a discipline called New Media is that I suspect there is a similar ethic to all boundary-making. To suggest that “disciplines close their doors both as a defensive measure, but also to preserve the history of the struggle to come into being is to remind us that inscribing a circle defines both an inside and an outside. I believe some of the reticence to accept the newness of New Media is in part a reaction to this ethical question.

At the moment it does appear that New Media has manifestly coalesced around a critical mass of praxis and theory. This is perhaps best evidenced by the simple fact that a large group of people will attend an international conference under the rubric of a printed catalogue at the door, like a flag. But it is important to keep in mind that the designation functions best as a malleable framework for discussions about the stuff that is supposedly 'inside' the circle - the goings-on, the art, the evolution.

This stuff will outlive any discipline, anyway.

A question from a reader

If Wikipedia were an art school, what would it look like?

This question was posed by Ian Wojtowicz who has been very active in contributing to this Blog. It is a brilliant thought. For those of you who haven't explored Wikipedia it is one of the largest open source collaborations in the world, an encyclopedia that has been put together by contributors from all over the world.

I will respond to Ian in greater detail over the next few days.

Reader responses

There have been a number of responses to my recents posts and here are some samples:

Fanya

I found it very interesting - There was an interview
with the actress Rene Zellweger in today's
paper and something she said caught my attention. When
asked about privacy, fame and harassment - she said
that while walking down the street people with
cellphones will photograph her - without asking her
permission - but, worst of all - without saying
hello!!This relatively new technology exists but maybe
at the expense of manners, freedom, privacy, etc. This
could be the downside. It really has nothing to do
with teaching and recognizing the new media - but it's
an interesting issue touching on a paparazzi-like
behaviour - whereby BEFORE this technology existed
people would have stopped and maybe said hello (or
asked for an autograph - how old-fashioned).

The use today of people in far-away places where
labour is cheap, or the technology exists - is
something relatively new and fascinating. I know that
when you call Montreal INFORMATION the person
answering you is no longer sitting in Montreal but in
INDIA.. Where once material and goods
were outsourced - new technologies have now created a
situation whereby customer service, telemarketing,and
information services are outsourced. The changes may
look subtle but they shift the power of the work force
from place to place and create jobs for people in
less-developped or poorer countries (and deprive jobs
for those in the wealthier countries - such as
Canada!)

All this has nothing to do with teaching new media and
persuading higher learning institutions to extend
their budgets for it - but it helps to prove how much
there is to learn and what potentials are out there
for people with good ideas who want to turn them into
money-making ventures. We need to understand New Media from this perspective as well.

Jan

Actually, every time I saw the phrase 'New Media' so far I have always had
a tendency to immediately challenge the author. So far there has never been
anyone who could successfully convince me that there was anything
specifically newer - i.e. newer in a different sense - in the New Media now
than in the New Media of the past.

Your current contribution to thinking about this issue is the first one
that forces me to recognize that, even though the media themselves (i.e.
the technological tools) are as such not dramatically different, the
complex environment of which both humans and the media are part has perhaps
started to take on different properties. Neither the media nor the humans
may any longer be what they used to be before that happened.

Sara

Can the study of "boundaries" between disciplines become a field in itself, is this theory, or critical theory? How does theory (from arts and humanities) create tangible connections with the sciences?
Curatorial disciplines can play an important role in helping us redefine the boundaries.

Reflections on New Media (9)

This is the second part of my presentation at the [Refresh Conference in New Media](http://www.mediaarthistory.org) at the Banff Centre

So, the resistance to the appearance of different media forms may explain why media were renamed as new media. It may explain why someone like Lev Manovich relies on the trope of the cinema to explain the many complex levels that make up media landscapes and imageworlds. New in this instance is not only an escape from history, but also suggests that history is not important.

There is another important question here. What makes a medium specific discipline a discipline in any case? Is it the practice of the creators? Is it the fact that a heritage of production and circulation has built up enough to warrant analysis? I think not. Disciplines are produced through negotiation among a variety of players crossing the boundaries of industry, academia and the state. The term New Media has been built upon this detritus, and is a convenient way in which to develop a nomenclature that designates in a part for whole kind of way, that an entire field has been created. But, what is that field? Is it the sum total of the creative work within its rather fluid boundaries? Is it the sum total of the scholarly work that has been published? Is it the existence of a major journal that both celebrates and promotes not only its own existence but also the discipline itself?

These issues of boundary making are generally driven by political as well as cultural considerations. They are often governed by curatorial priorities developed through institutions that have very specific stakes in what they are promoting. None of these activities per se may define or even explain the rise, fall and development of various disciplines. But, as a whole, once in place, disciplines close their doors both as a defensive measure, but also to preserve the history of the struggle to come into being.

I am not suggesting by any means that things have not changed. I am not saying that digital media are simply extensions of existing forms of expression. I am saying that the struggle to define the field or discipline of media studies has always been an ongoing characteristic of both artistic and scholarly work in media. The permanence of this quasi existential crisis interests me. For the most part, for example, media studies ran into a wall when cultural studies appeared as an extension of English Departments, and when Communication Studies grew into an important discipline in its own right in the late 1950’s. Why? Suddenly, everyone was studying the media, commenting about popular culture, appropriating (mushing and mixing) intellectual traditions in a variety of different and often anarchic ways. But, somehow, the discipline as such grew into further and further levels of crisis. Which intellectual model works best? Does one use structural or post-structural modes of analysis? How can we factor in the linguistic, semiotic and ethnographic elements, and also bring in the contextual, political components? So, this is where I return to vantage point.

Juxtapose the following: The film, The Polar Express by Robert Zemeckis, which bridges the gap between digital worlds and the human body and tries to humanize an entirely artificial world; The American election of 2004 which relied on the Internet both for information and misinformation; the spectacular growth of web sites, like Friendster.com, which extend the way humans interact, communicate and develop relationships; the growth of Blogs, which have pushed publishing from the corporate world to the individual; the growing importance of search engines and popular discussions of how to engage with a sea of information; and finally, the spectacular growth of games, game consoles and on-line gaming.

Together, these and many other elements constitute image-worlds, which like a sheath cover the planet, allowing and encouraging workers in India to become office employees of large companies in the West and Chinese workers to produce goods and manage inventories on an unimaginable scale. These image-worlds operate at micro and macro levels. They are all encompassing, a bath of sounds and pictures immersing users in the manipulation of information both for exchange and as tools of power.

Picture these image-worlds as millions of intersecting concentric circles built in pyramidal style, shaped into forms that turn metal into messages and machines into devices that operate at the nano-level. Then imagine using a cell phone/PDA to call up some information that locates humans on a particular street as was done during the crisis in Louisiana and you have processes that are difficult to understand let alone see without a clear and specific choice of vantage point.

Can I stand, so to speak above the fray? How do I escape from this process long enough to be able to look back or ahead? Does Google represent the vantage point? Since historical analysis is by its very nature retrospective and since time is at best an arbitrary metaphor for continua, am I left with a series of fragments, most of which splay off in different directions? It is an irony that the thrust of this conference has been so archeological, trying to pick up the pieces, show what has been missed, connections that have not been made, as if retrospection is suddenly adequate irrespective of politics, conflict and ethics. Most interesting from my point of view is the use of the cognitive and neurosciences, dominated as they are by positivism and empiricism. Even more to the point, and to give you a sense of how important vantage points are, take the best example of all, the computer sciences which until very recently had transformed subjectivity into that insidious term user and for whom the cybernetic dream of linking input and output has determined the shape and form of most computer programs.

The digital age or perhaps better put, the algorithmic age, makes these issues all the more urgent because if the fundamental tropes for human subjectivity can so easily be reduced to terms like user, then not to understand the origins of the research in engineering that went into the trope pose many dangers. Tor Norretranders brilliant book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1998) investigates this problem in great depth and it is clear to me that richer paradigms of computer/human interaction are needed if we are to move beyond the limitations of mechanical modes of thinking about digital technologies and their impact on human consciousness. Yet, “ user is also an outgrowth of devalued models of subjectivity within media studies itself, a confluence of the media’s own evaluation of its viewers (ie the couch potato metaphor) as well as the challenge of studying viewing itself. This is perhaps the greatest irony of the ebb and flow of analysis in media studies. At times, particularly in the early to mid-seventies with the advent and growth of feminism, subjectivity became a site of contestation with a variety of methods from psychoanalysis to sociology to linguistics used as avenues into analysis, criticism and interpretation. All of that heterogeneity is now built into the analysis of new media with varying degrees of success and often with no reference to the historical origins of the intellectual models in use. Subjectivity remains a site of contestation as a concept, explanation and framework for understanding what humans do with the technologies and objects they use.

The conflation of user with experience, the reduction of subjectivity to action and reaction, is only possible if theory and analysis put to the side the far more complex side of human thought and that is the imagination. Digital experiences are highly mediated by technology but imagination, fantasy and daydreams increase the levels of complexity and add many more levels of mediation to the rich interrelationships that humans have with their cultures. All of these levels need to be disentangled if a variety of vantage points are to be constructed. Perhaps then, media studies can begin to make some claims about a paradigm shift of enough strength to warrant the use of the term new…..

Reflections on New Media (8)

This is the first part of my presentation at the recent Refresh Conference in New Media at the Banff Centre . For those of you who have read my book, there is a wonderful discussion taking place in Professor Dene Grigar's graduate class at the Texas Woman's University

Moments in time — is that what remains of each event that the media covers? There is no giant archive in the sky or database on earth that could possibly record, organize and present the extraordinary wealth of information that now processes itself through every day, every instant, in tandem with every breath that humans take (with all due respect to Google). The flow of information is both circular and endless. To me this flow is an inherent part of what I call imagescapes and imageworlds. The challenge is how to find one or many vantage points that will facilitate analysis, interpretation and description and that will permit imageworlds and imagescapes to be understood beyond a simple phenomenological scrutiny of their surface characteristics. What methods of analysis will work best here and which methods have become less relevant? I would suggest that method (the many ways in which the analysis of phenomena is approached, analyzed and synthesized) is largely dependent on vantage point, which is a concept that is closely related to perspective and attitude. This means that not only is the phenomenon important, but also position, placement, who one is and why one has chosen one form of analysis over another (ideological, philosophical or personal) needs to be transparently visible.

The continuum that links real events with their transformation into images and media forms knows few limits. This is largely because of the power of digital media and digital mediation and is something that has been commented upon in this meeting. It is perhaps not an accident that terrorists, governments and corporations all make use of the same mediated space. We call this the Internet, but that now seems a rather quaint way of describing the multi-leveled network that connects individuals and societies with often-unpredictable outcomes. Networks, to varying degrees, have always been a characteristic of most social contexts. But, the activity of networking as an everyday experience and pursuit has never been as intense as what we have now, nor have the number of mediated experiences been so great. This may well be one of the cornerstones of the new media environment. However, new media as a term, name, or metaphor is too vague to be that useful. There are many different ways of characterizing the creative process, many different methods available to talk about the evolution of networks and technologies and the ways in which creative work is distributed, and the extraordinarily intense way in which communities and individuals look for and create connections to each other. The activities that are encapsulated by the term media are broad and extend across so many areas, that the danger is that no process of categorization may work. Typologies (of which we have been shown many at this conference) become encyclopedic so that what we end up with are lists that describe an evolving field but no vantage points to question the methodological choices being made. What distinguishes one list from another?

To understand why New Media may have been convenient for both scholars and artists one need only look at the evolution of media studies. Although humans have always used a variety of media forms to express themselves and although these forms have been an integral part of culture, and in some instances the foundation upon which certain economies have been built, the study of media only developed into a discipline in the 20th century. There are many reasons for this including and perhaps most importantly, the growth of printing from a text-based activity to the mass reproduction of images (something that has been commented on by many different theorists and practitioners). The convergence of technology and reproduction has been the subject of intense artistic scrutiny for 150 years. Yet, aside from Museums like MOMA the disciplines that we now take for granted, like film, photography, television and so on, came into being in universities only after an intense fight and the quarrel continues to this day. The arguments were not only around the value of works in these areas, (photography for example, was not bought by serious art collectors until the latter half of the 20th century which may or may not be a validation of photography’s importance), but around the legitimacy of studying various media forms given their designation as the antithesis of high culture. Film was studied in English Departments. Photography was often a part of Art History Departments. Twenty years after television started to broadcast to mass audiences in the early 1950’s there were only a handful of texts that had been written, and aside from extremely critical assertions about the negative effects of TV on an unsuspecting populace (the Postman-Chomsky phenomenon), most of the discourse was descriptive. The irony is that even Critical Theory in the 1930’s which was very concerned with media didn’t really break the scholarly iceberg that had been built around various media forms. It took the convergence of structuralism, semiotics and linguistics in the late 1960’s, a resurgence of phenomenology and a reconceptualization of the social and political role of the state to provoke a new era of media study. In Canada, this was felt most fully through the work of McLuhan and Edmond Carpenter and was brought to a head by the powerful convergence of experimentation in cinema and video combined with the work of artists in Intermedia, performance and music. Another way of thinking about this is to ask how many people were studying rock and roll in 1971? After all, rock and roll was disseminated through radio, another medium that was not studied seriously until well after its invention (sound based media have always been the step-children of visual media).

Part Nine…