Filed under: media, technology | Tags: digital indexing, facebook, memory, new york times, photography
My father sent me this article this morning, from the New York Times Magazine about those who grow up not knowing a time before facebook. The author, Peggy Orenstein, seems to place a fundamental divide between those who didn’t grow up with it and those who have–she seems to think that those under the age of 25 have no past (no pre-facebook past, that is) to look back on, that facebook will fundamentally change the way that young people grow up.
Yes, I think to a certain extent, this is true. At least that many don’t really have a truly pre-facebook past to look back on. Yes, we are probably growing up differently than her generation. The pitfalls of being a child, of growing into an adult are different: as Liz Lemon notes, there are way more things for a guy not to call you on now. However, this is not better or worse, only different. The landscape Orenstein lays out is from the perspective of someone who does not accept the technology as a matter of fact, but as a generational quirk, something for the kids, the way many generations seem to view the new:
Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?
Fear of technology, of change, is endemic to all gaps between generations–she seems to want to question whether or not the new changes in technology are positive or negative, as if it were possible to simply return to a time before facebook or myspace when no one had any of their photos or information published on the internet. But it’s just the way it is. Since my life straddles the pre- and post-facebook landscape, I can say that it is true, it can be remarkably messy to drag an internet trail behind you, messier than simply being able to leave. A physical absence no longer means true absence, every person who has an iphone in their pocket can be triangulated and tacked-down.
- From Jay Leek and Karin Higgins (no relation) in UC Davis Magazine
It might be harder to escape your past, but this fact might present an opportunity for the consideration of a basic lesson: physically escaping the evidence or location of your past in person does not mean escaping your past. As Orenstein ably observes, Faulkner would love facebook, the haunting evidence of our undead pasts. It reminds us that simply because the past was once hidden, does not mean it was gone. I think my generation and the next will likely have to be more comfortable with their pasts, with seeing records of the radical breaks and cuts that one must make in growing up. We will learn, maybe more than the past generations, that a person is not identical to itself across time. We will learn, maybe, that one doesn’t need to leave their past to make a radical break, to grow up, to continue becoming different.
And to the idea of the entireties of our lives being encoded, digitized and indexed by facebook, google, etc. I think this idea, implicit in the article as a sort of neo-luddite critique rather than an ethical or political one, is reactionary. It reminds me of the articles people wrote when the cassette tape first became a viable commercial medium–terrified that it would kill the radio. If people could record songs whenever they wanted to, what’s to keep them listening to the radio? Or buying records for that matter? To fear or criticize the digitization of lives is a pointless and impossible task. Energy could be better spent fostering a greater critical engagement with the effects, ethics and politics of this digitization, rather than simply raging against change we fear.
The anatomy of a polaroid pack
Digitization cannot replace our memories. To take a picture is not to record a moment, to post on facebook is not to archive that moment. A photograph is not a memory. It is a suspension, a willful suspension. Our lives, in a very real way, exceed our attempts to record them, a photograph or a video is framed, our lives are not. Our sensory, spatial, and temporal experience exceeds any attempt to encode or capture it. This is all to say: our lives, even though they appear to be recorded, are still much richer and noisier, more complex and variegated than any recording would or could ever indicate. And furthermore, there is still a great deal of life lived off the internet, and that can never be put on the internet no matter how much we attempt to record. Our lives will always exceed our recordings of it. A recording is no more than a trace.
The important thing is to examine the ways that this recording affects our memories of real experience. It doesn’t kill or replace our memories, it interacts with them, it operates as a new item introduced into an already complex and dynamic system of remembering. Our memories still work in ways that supplant and alter physical evidence. To remember something is to recreate it. Insofar as memories are never strictly factual, the recording of facts or visual evidence is rather irrelevant to the process of real memory. I agree we should be critical of the system, we should pay attention to it. But people talk about this technology as if it were something that could be changed–this is not the case. They worry, their children live it is as if it were the way it had always been. It will be the same for us and our children, too.
It’s not simply better or worse, necessarily, just different. Not a thing to worry about, though certainly something we should be paying attention to.
Filed under: media, music, thesis | Tags: consonance, consonants, dissonance, language, music, waveform, wildstyle
I am going to start posting some things from my thesis as I attempt to work them out. Sometimes these ideas will be more complete than others. This one, for instance, is the beginning of an idea but could possibly be interesting to others. I have the aim of taking this further and using consonance and dissonance as organizing principles for other sorts of realms: linguistic, political, social, etc. etc. I’m just trying to bang out some relations here, as it stands.
[[[Consonan(ts/ce)]]]
While a vowel sound is formed in the larynx, and only receives its special quality by the conformation of the oral cavity through which it is sounded, a consonant sound is wholly or mainly produced in the mouth, or the mouth and nose. Vowels thus consist of pure voice or musical sound; consonants are either simple noises or noises combined in various degrees with voice. But a noise may itself be of a continuous and rhythmical character, as a Continue reading
Filed under: music | Tags: color me badd, jonas brothers, slant, the auteurs
Though Slant Magazine (read: not Slate) can be frustrating at best, somehow managing to balance a sense of critical and cultural superiority with a love of safe MOR music, every once in a while, one of their album picks reveals itself to be a surprisingly gutsy pick. However, looking at their year-end lists always makes me uncomfortable for a reason I can’t quite comprehend–maybe it’s that the two sides of the music-review persona don’t quite jibe with one another. Their movie reviews tend to be quite good, however, and are well worth examining for anyone interested in keeping up with independent film (a task much more difficult than keeping up with independent music.) Another great site for this is The Auteurs, with some pretty lively forum discussion and a surprisingly insightful blog, to boot. Unfortunately, you need to pay to watch the movies now, but for those of us who don’t have or want a netflix account, this site is an incredibly useful index.
The Jonas Brothers have defied all expectations and released a movie proving that they are, in fact, 3-D. The fourth dimension remains doubtful, as I think time will likely prove that the Jonas Brothers will go the way of the dodo and Color Me Badd, though without either a hilarious name or a hilariously terrible song (I wanna sex you up) about sleep-sexing. The Slant article reviewing the movie is one of the more incredulous pieces of writing I’ve seen in some time, obviously the work of a reviewer who would have been nowhere near that particular theater had it not been his job. He writes about the Jonas Brothers the same way someone would write about an oncoming zombie apocalypse:
Still, no amount of artist enthusiasm can change the eeriness of seeing young female fans weeping and hyperventilating over these focus-tested moppets, who at film’s beginning are seen getting awakened from seemingly normal human sleep, but whose every word, smile, gesture, and Mick Jagger-ish strut belies their actual pod-people natures.
Pop music has its good and bad points, it can be used to smuggle in revolutionary politics over a dance beat, to funnel experimental tendencies through a melody, or for other subversive results. The pop machine is one that, paradoxically, rewards safety and adventure. It seems, considering the Jonas Brothers are a saccharine version of music that was outsider maybe a decade ago, that safety tends to be pop music on its way out. The Jonas Brothers are sounding the death knell of an idea, the smuggling of safety and commerce into a medium more ideally suited for tricks and experiments, hoodwinks.
Or maybe I’m just bitter because, while working at a sandwich shop, I was once told by a woman that I looked like “A Jonas Brother.” She didn’t specify which, and that’s all fine and good–who can tell the difference anyhow?
JONAS BROTHER OMG
Filed under: human, media, politics, technology | Tags: ethics, facial recognition, google, memex, memory, mylifebits, politics, radiolab, slate, technology review
The MIT technology review has posted this article about the new wave of facial recognition software, which, as they succinctly state, is cool but creepy.
In their attempt to make index all information and make it universally available, Google has made another jump: they can now recognize your face in pictures. This brings up a whole new debate regarding the ethics of photography: it is not only the famous who will have to deal with their likeness being used without their explicit permission. Google, while you are tagging photos using their Picassa software, asks you for the real names and email addresses of those in your photographs. This database, as the article points out, is not stored on your computer, but on Google’s servers. Read–this is the same place they store your search history, your documents, which news stories you read, etc… Google may, in fact, someday soon have a nearly comprehensive database of each of us who use Google with photos, email addresses, addresses, pictures of your house (their map software’s “street level” option).
Now, I do not mean to be alarmist, but in light of the serious discussion that attended the birth of the camera and the ongoing discussion of the ethics of photography, should there not be more attention paid to this company that is not-so-quietly indexing our lives? This is no new idea, the indexing of our lives, but whereas it was originally posited as an option by people such as Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project (which creates a searchable database of everything he has ever seen, read, heard, etc…), this indexing is being placed on us from the outside, by our friends who may not be aware that they are indexing our faces, names, and addresses for Google. We all use Google and find it incredibly helpful, but this just seems ridiculous that this is passing over in a relatively uncontested manner.
As for the relationship of this tagging and indexing to human memory: I remember a radiolab (fantastic radio show, by the way) episode in which they discuss the scientific discovery of the physical mechanism used by the brain to store memories. The first step after this was to figure out how to erase them. So, they discuss erasing the memories of soldiers with PTSD–an encouraging idea. It also includes a discussion of the way that a memory is a recreation of your brain-state during the original event. When will we start using free Google software to index our memories? As opposed to Gordon Bell’s project, in which everything is stored on one’s own computer, we will be storing it on Google’s servers. The novelty of it will probably convince us to use it, and likely with little caution: we will use it to remember what we were supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but it will also remember things we may not want it to, like time spent privately with a loved one. Or maybe we do want it to remember that.
In a less ethical and more personal domain: do we really want everything remembered for us this way? Though the nuances of memory can often be frustrating, it is important to remember that to recall a memory is, in a way, to recreate the event. The recalling of a memory actually changes the memory each time it is recalled. I honestly wonder if the undiscriminating indexing of the events of our lives would be detrimental to the processes and mechanisms of our memories, of our own self-creation, of the fictionalizing of the self, for better or worse. Call it the literature of the memory: without it we would have no Proust, Nabokov, etc. etc. etc. etc. Though, it could be argued that there is a part of this mechanism that would escape indexing, I think the remainder in this equation is hardly enough to justify the subtraction of the powers and poetry of our own memories. Maybe I’m a neo-luddite, but I doubt it.
As a result of all these issues, and following the debacle exceedingly well laid out in this Slate Magazine discussion blog regarding Facebook’s “Terms of Use,” (which are not really terms of use), the not-so-distant discussion of the near-impossibility of deleting a Facebook account and your information from its server, and recent controversy surrounding internet-announced (and sometimes carried out) suicides, I think that these are ethical issues that deserve quite a bit more legal, philosophical, and political attention.
I wonder what happens when not only does The Memex nearly become a reality in terms of a consumer product, but also our likenesses and information are stored by a giant American Corporation (we already see just how little accountability American corporations have). What is to stop Google from selling this information without our knowledge? This is quite a bit of political and social power they are storing on their servers, and it seems their ability to index will only grow.
What part of our lives do we want to keep for ourselves? It will only get easier from here on in to index everything about ourselves. Will it someday be seen as daring and/or backwards to refuse the assistance of the internet and computer databases in indexing our lives? Is it daring or backwards to keep yourself to yourself?
Where is our sense of caution? Has it been overwhelmed by our magpie-like fascination with shiny objects and new technologies? Who do we want to be in relation to this new technology? I would like to call for a more stringent system of ethics in response to these developments. The prospects are too terrifying if we fail to act.
Again, the Onion is strangely prescient on this point.
Filed under: politics
At Ghost Island, we are engaging in an argument regarding gay marriage (strictly speaking, we are engaging with some other guy’s blog, but we are doing it together!) Check it out? I think it’s pretty good.
Weigh in, if you are so inclined.
This is a truly fascinating bit of music: Angil and Hiddntracks, during a post-gig discussion, thought about writing a bunch of songs for almost only woodwinds for want of focusing on that woodwind sound, also stipulating that all songs should avoid a grouping of chords particularly difficult for alto saxophonists to play. Angil runs with this–going two jumps out (changing (for this album only?) to “Angil,” and his supporting band to “Hiddn Tracks”), and shying from (mostly, ignoring his (frankly, sad) slipping on six or so grammatically-hard-to-avoid words) lyrics in violation of his organizing standards. So, this fun, this passing thought, quickly turns into a spry OuLiPo constraint, involving gaming both musical and linguistic. Lastly, as if this wouldn’t satisfy his compulsion to play, Angil bought a piano from a closing clothing shop (a liquidation) and, thinking that tuning it would probably ruin his fun, built all his songs on and around this bizarro-carnival thing (though his piano is commonly (and annoyingly) said to ring out with a “Tim Burton” sound), his band following suit, strictly and assiduously avoiding all violations.
So, in summary: a skillful dodging of constraint violations both musically and lyrically. Additional constraint and difficulty coming with his thrift shop bizarro-piano. A fascinating album, AND, might I add, a joy to own. Dazzling. A charming work of art with a sound of its own. Music for sad birds, an aviary symphony.
Worth looking into, I would say.
Angil and Hiddntracks – Oulipo Saliva
Filed under: biology, human, technology | Tags: dawkins, mcluhan, slate, technology
Slate Magazine has done what maybe some of us wished we could have done – tracked down some real information about that “25 Random Things About Me” meme. It makes for an interesting study in the nature of internet memes, since this one is slightly more trackable than most by nature of the way that the Facebook notes. What interests me the most is the framework used to examine this meme: biology. Important side note from the article: the term “meme” was evidently coined by the world’s favorite petulant child, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who is infinitely more tolerable when he is focusing on evolutionary biology than throwing a hissy fit about religion.
Slate funneled the data gathered through a system meant to model infectious diseases, attempting to discover the “patient zero” of this “epidemic.” They treat the “25 random things” phenomenon as both an organism and as a virus.
This is not new, exactly. Memes have been described as “viral” for about as long as I can remember memes. The important issue at play here is the meme as an evolving organism, not the meme as a thing that spreads. Now, we begin to discuss the robustness of the meme, the ways in which a meme mutates in order to fall on the happy side of the long odds of their survival. This discussion of Facebook memes is an examination of a techno-biological microsystem.
Which reminds me of another thing (I won’t call it a “meme”) you begin to see a lot: articles about technology and biology. This is actually why I started to study new media: the discussion of technology and biology (or, to put it simplistically, nature) seems to suffuse a great number of publications. We see this evidenced in articles about designer drugs, designer babies, biopolitics, bioethics, social networking, etc. We’ve been on this track for a while, since we really started to consider media post-printing-press. After all, McCluhan famously titled a book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and cybernetics, quantum physics, and poststructuralism have all but fully broken down the barrier between who we are and what we create by implicating the observer in every system.
Technology, you could say, has always been in the process of getting out of hand.
It each day seems less and less like something we have created and more like just another part of an open, dynamic system (call that system “nature” if you’d like). We attempt to leverage the system, but then our lever also needs to mutate and evolve to survive the long odds of retaining its usefulness as such a lever. It seems that what we create to help us get away from nature starts to show emergent properties, to get away from us, to show organic, emergent, dynamic, unpredictable behaviors. It simply refuses to stay put, and so we finally, belatedly, learn that our lever, technology, isn’t quite a lever separating man from his world but really just another part of that world we pretended to separate ourselves from.
Technology, assumed once to be the absolute opposite of nature and the apotheosis of “culture,” is really just a part of nature again, though admittedly an interesting and multifaceted one. It is tempting, but it would possibly be a mistake to say that technology is becoming a new nature as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and our ability to manufacture becomes more and more complicated, that being surrounded and “infiltrated” by technology will usher in a new state of nature. Technology always was nature, just as everything is. It’s not going to change, really, but it just might become more and more obvious to us.
Proposal: Indie-rock musicians, the new rockstars, are being paid for putting their music into commercials not only monetarily, but also in units of irony. Following “The New Slang” being used in a McD’s commercial (graciously pointed out to me by Ben Segal), we now have m83 in a car commercial.
m83 – Don’t Save Us from the Flames (Pontiac Commercial?)
This leads me to believe that the ad agency handling Pontiac’s ads have a better sense of humor than one could have expected. Or, Pontiac themselves have a better sense of humor. Either way, someone has a sense of humor, and m83 is most certainly in on the joke: “Yes, I’m selling my music for a commercial, but I’m also subtly undermining the commercial. Or making cars seem cooler by allowing a song about melting wheels and brains in your hair into a car commercial. Either way, I am being quite clever.”
There is some sort of subtle and only partially apparent machine at work here.
Lastly: the video for the m83 song is incredibly charming. In a noteworthy turn, it features a bicycle.
Filed under: politics
To those of us who once considered themselves to be apolitical, it is a slow and often surprising process to find yourself interested in the lives and politics of that vast unknown population of your own country, nevermind the lives and struggles of those who live halfway around the world. Which brings me to my topic, a topic that I am finding myself surprisingly more and more concerned with, nearly against my natural inclinations toward political apathy: the […] in Gaza.
Granted, my concern with it is still not exactly the concern of an activist. However, I suppose any concern is a start. Reading Naomi Klein’s article in the latest issue of The Nation, I was actually very shocked to find such a well-considered and convincing piece of journalism. Furthermore, I find her approach to be, if not revolutionary, then just the sort of tough-love, lets-do-what-we-can-with-what-we-have-to-do-it-with solution that people seem to avoid. It reminds me of what the irresponsible some day learn about their own finances: you have to trick yourself in order to save money. Set up direct deposit into a savings account and then stop counting the money. Once we accept that we have flaws, ie, that we are not quite capable of living up to the ideals that we set for ourselves, we can start putting safeguards in place that allow us to move closer to that ideal.
This is the ideal as the propulsive fiction, eg, democracy as that which may not necessarily be achieved, but the ideal that makes us better simply because we are attempting to reach it. Peace seems to, or should, operate under a similar logic. True peace, full agreement, the infinite grace of love and understanding, these things useful to us as goals that will improve us in the striving for them, but are also goals that are fundamentally unreachable. Perfection, in other words, is useful when used as a carrot. Appropriately, if you remember the source of this aphorism, the carrot hangs, tantalizingly, just out of reach.
Accepting that we live in a largely capitalist society (for better and worse) and that businesses and economy are thus the strongest political sticks we have available, it seems infinitely wise to me to boycott, divest, sanction. Regardless of where one stands on the larger issue behind the curtain, it is important to realize that trade should be used as a tool. We are not perfect, we have flaws, this system may not be the most ideal, but the waiting for an ideal system often delays action. This is not to say that action should not be considered, but to say that we’ve had plenty of time to consider. I stand firmly in the corner of Klein on this one: like it or not, the economic stick is simply the most pragmatic way to get a little bit closer to the carrot.
Filed under: literature, media, technology | Tags: human skull, phonograph, rilke, synesthesia
In his 1919 essay “Primal Sound,” Rainer Maria Rilke details his fascination with the human skull en route to a discussion of the phonograph. “The coronal structure of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus.” Ignoring all the implications to the connections between the unconscious and media, it is fascinating to see what Rilke suggest we do with this, to run a phonograph needle across these ridges on the skull, producing “a series of sounds, music…” This is his Primal Sound.
Not long after, and in partial reference to his earlier idea, he speaks of the experience of Arabic poems, “which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five sense…” as nothing short of “presence of mind and grace of love.”
What strikes me most about this essay are his consistent nods in the direction of synesthesia. Media, it seems, is both synaesthesia and metaphor. Whereas a metaphor draws it’s power from the traversal of linguistic boundaries, media draws its power from the traversal of sensual boundaries, or to grossly oversimplify a neurological phenomenon, synesthesia. The phonograph takes something we can touch and turns it into something we can hear, or vice versa using the very same needle. Media is a synesthetic metaphor, translating the stuff of one sense into another.
Digital media is the logical conclusion of this synesthetic trajectory, placing all mediated sensory experience on the same plane in that they are all derived from and reduced to ones and zeroes. Now we have programs that will make music from a picture, or programs that will create a visual from a song. You can take an essay you wrote and put it in to a program and come out with a sound, or a video. The possibilities are endless. With a little bit of imagination, we can all be now synaesthetes. We can, as Rilke wanted to do with the phonograph needle and the human skull, “experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.”
Media, as always, shows both the capacity to equalize (now Nabokov isn’t the only one that can see alphabets in color), but also the capacity to rob us of our own natural imaginative and cognitive abilities through overdependence.
Lucky Cloud, Your Sky 