When someone sends a text to my phone, are they any less responsible for their comments than if they had said the same thing face-to-face? If someone says a photo I post is "unflattering" or "unprofessional," do I feel like this says something about me as a person? Why has it become so common to equate the unauthorized use of someone else's Facebook account to the violation experienced during rape, that the term "fraping"* has come into popular usage? These are some of the questions I think that digital dualism prevents us from answering satisfactorily. In framing an alternative to dualist thinking, I argue that it is important to account for people's changing sense of self (hinted at in the examples above). To do this, we must examine the material conditions of subjectivity, or, put simply, how what we are affects who we are.

Interestingly, my argument that we ought to take serious account of people's changing sense of self closely aligns me with with Nick Carr's recent counter to the digital dualism critique. In fact, in re-reading his post, I realize that he is arguing for almost exactly the kind of theoretical frame work that I am working to develop. Carr argues:

there is a tension between online experience and offline experience, and people are smart enough to understand, to feel, that the tension does not evaporate as the online intrudes ever further into the offline. In fact, the growing interpenetration between the two modes of experience—the two states of being—actually ratchets up the tension... There’s no reason to believe that grappling with the online and the offline, and their effects on lived experience and the formation of the self, won’t also produce important thinking and art.

The second, and more substantive issue, is that, though Carr forcefully argues that we cannot ignore our subjective experience of digital media, he paradoxically argues that our physical environment has an immutable essence that seems to transcend the contingency of experience:

Nature existed before technology gave us the idea of nature. Wilderness existed before society gave us the idea of wilderness. Offline existed before online gave us the idea of offline. Grappling with the idea of nature and the idea of wilderness, as well as their contrary states, has been the source of much of the greatest philosophy and art for at least the last two hundred years. We should celebrate the fact that nature and wilderness have continued to exist, in our minds and in actuality, even as they have been overrun by technology and society.

I contend that experience is even more important than Carr suggests--that, while there is, of course, a material nature to things, we can never know reality beyond our experience of it. If we accept my premise (which is commonly held in mainstream Western philosophy), then the fetishization of wilderness is not a fetishization of the thing itself, but a fetishization of an experience produced in part by nature but also, in part, by all the cultural baggage we carry with us as humans socialized by 21st Century institutions. (David Banks made a similar critique Carr's piece, saying "we are always already augmented.")

Of course, in the same vein that Plato argued the advent of writing produced inferior forms of human consciousness, we can, theoretically, argue that digital mediation has corrupted human consciousness. But, the example from Plato demonstrates that even the digital mediation of human consciousness is historically contingent. In short, there is no natural state for human consciousness. And, as such, there is no primitive or essential experience of nature. Wilderness may have existed before society, but we never experienced it as such. Offline may have existed before online, but we can no longer experience it as such.

***

I'd like to argue (like Katherine Hayles, Jason Farman, and others) that subjectivity is "medium specific." That is to say, how we experience ourselves and how we come to know the world is shaped in meaningful ways by the materials that embody us. Materiality--whether physical or digital--shapes subjectivity. (Increasingly, our subjectivity is simultaneously embodied by both.) As John T. Sanders explains a "theory of embodied agency... is designed to offer a language that can be used to talk about how things are without commitment to a rigid subject/object dichotomy."

It has always been a mistake to view social interaction and expressions of agency that are enacted through the body as natural or "unmediated" (for this reason, it is also problematic to talk about "unmediated publics"). It is more accurate to think of a face-to-face conversation, for example, as physically-mediated interaction. Similarly, we can think about how men and women have different physically-mediated experiences of walking down a city street at night.

In contrast to our tendency to normalize and naturalize physicality, we are accustomed to distinguishing actions and interactions that are facilitated by bits as digitally-mediated. In this case, I think common sense has it right. Being and interacting through Twitter, Facebook, or SMS is different than being and interacting through physical media. The properties of bits (such as those described by danah boyd--persistence, searchability, replicability, and in/visibility) matter.

The problem arises when we moralize and hierachicalize these ontological differences--when we say that digital mediation is inferior to physical mediation and, as such, diminishes the realness of a thing or experience. While this sort of moralizing about the the "virtual" and the "real" currently has great currency in our culture (in fact, one might argue that, we, as a culture, have embraced the most fantastical conceptualization of "cyberspace" possible so that we could most satisfyingly reject it), it is not a necessary outcome of recognizing the ontological separation between and unique properties of atoms and bits.

However, maintaining the material distinction between bits and atoms, physical and digital, isn't as easy as just asserting that they are separate but equal. That would dismiss the ways that physical and digital media interrelate (and combine to embody our subjectivity), and it means falling back onto the very (digital) dualism we are trying to escape. What we need is a theory that can account for the objective differences in the physics of atoms and bits and subjective distinctiveness we experience when interacting through physical or digital media, while also accounting for the fact that we experience them as being enmeshed in very practical ways. This is no small order and is, no doubt, why the digital dualism debate persists.

Developing such a theory, I believe, is two-step process that requires us to collapse the rigid boundaries between two binary pairs: the subjective/objective and the physical/digital. However, as Jenny Davis cautions, this collapse should avoid the total erasure of difference.

To handle the fact that digital dualism makes interrelated claims about the objective (bits are different than atoms) and subjective (digital media is inferior to/less real than physical media) we need an approach that examines the relation between objective and subjective: namely, phenomenology.***

Let me avoid getting too lost in "the ontological weeds" and just say that a fundamental assumption of phenomenology is that objective and subjective reality are dialectically linked, so that, while the two cannot be fully collapsed into each other, neither exists for-us in isolation from the other. We can never directly experience an objective reality outside our subjective experience, yet our subjectivity, and our very consciousness, only comes into being through our interactions with that which objectively exists in the world. (For a more detailed explanation, read Hegel.)

Lucky for us, the sociology of technology already has a well-established phenomenological framework called the theory of affordances. As broadly defined by Donald Norman:

Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used... A chair affords ("is for") support and, therefore, affords sitting.

Atoms and bits can and do have unique affordances, even as they remain within the same reality. But what's important for us is that the theory of affordances assumed that what we percieve to exist as objects in the world is shaped by our subjective understanding of how things can be used. For example, I perceive a chair as a discrete object because I recognize it as something that can be sat in. However, if I need to build a fire, the wooden pieces may become salient as pieces separate from the whole of the chair. So, my subjective state conditions what the mass of matter previously associated with the chair is for-me. Sanders explains that

Understanding ontology in terms of affordances thus bridges gaps that would otherwise leave room for questions of relative priority between epistemology and metaphysics. One cannot talk about affordances without talking about both metaphysics and epistemology at the same time (or alternately, at least).

But wait, haven't I just used affordances to make the case for digital dualism? Yes, the argument as it stands is very dualist in that it fails to account for how we also experience the physical and digital as enmeshed in practical and quite meaningful ways. Thus, we need to take a second step in this argument and erode the digital/physical binary. To do this effectively, I believe we need a new concept, which I will call co-affordances.****

Co-affordances describes situations where the affordances of two objects or two classes of object are mutually dependent. That is to say, how I experience the properties of one thing is determined, in part, by how I process and experience the other thing. We all assume atoms and bits interact on an objective level (capacitors and wires comprised of atoms are require to store and transmit bits) but the concept of co-affordance allows us to talk about how physical and digital media co-produce our experience and knowledge of each. Applied to the physical/digital binary, co-affordances allows us to describe how I both experience each medium as distinct but yet am conscious of the fact that they are interrelated. So, for example, I perceive using Facebook to plan events as useful, in part, because I am conscious of the relatively low transmission speed of paper invitations. At the same time, I perceive handwritten invitations as more meaningful precisely because I am aware of the greater efficiency of electronic messaging. In characterizing these examples, I can say electronic and handwritten messaging co-afford one another. The significance and utility of each is partially derivative or the other.

More broadly, we can say that physical media co-affords digital media. I do not have to use both to experience them as co-afforded. In fact, the decision to use one in lieu of the other will be meaningful precisely because of what media I am--willingly or unwillingly--forgoing. Paper books, for example, become a fetish object because of their more efficient (and less temporally-confined) alternative.

Importantly, this means that, even if reject the argument that human subjectivity is now embodied by two media simultaneously--that we are what Allucquére Rosanne Stone calls "split subjects"--we still have to acknowledge that our physical bodies are now co-afforded by digital media and, thus, may shape human subjectivity in new ways.

The concept of co-affordances allow us to talk about both the enmeshment and distinctiveness of physical and digital media without having to bracket or dismiss important issue of material embodiment. In fact, we now have a language to distinguish contemporary subjectivity from past epochs in history: Contemporary subjects are embodied by both atoms and bits--and necessarily so. Though it may be possible to avoid digitally-mediated interaction in the direct sense, physical media are inextricably co-afforded by digital media, making the influence of digital media on human subjectivity inescapable.

Tweet me @pjrey.

---------------

* This term is both telling and deeply problematic. It merits a separate post (in progress).

** Though the two are certainly not mutually exclusive in a "cyborg ontology" à la Haraway.

*** Whitney Erin Boesel (in troubling the objective/subjective divide), Jenny Davis (in applying the work phenomenologist Judith Butler to the digital dualism debate), and Sarah Wanenchak (in discussing the "feels" of digital media) adopt a phenomenological approach without labeling it as such.

**** All my attempts to name this idea were lousy. Whitney Erin Boesel deserves much credit for coming up with this most eloquent term. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/materiality-matters-confronting-digital-dualism-with-a-theory-of-co-affordances/feed/ 0 pj.rey 500px-Blue-punch-card-front-horiz http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/tech-isnt-neutral-guns-cause-tragedies/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/tech-isnt-neutral-guns-cause-tragedies/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:14:14 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=873

In light of the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, the debate over access to firearms has again been thrust to the fore of our national consciousness. With the resurgence of this debate, the classic "guns don't kill people" line of argument will inevitably feature prominently in radio conversations, TV interviews, Facebook posts, and tweets. The "guns don't kill people" trope is part of a larger pattern in how our society frames the relationship between technology and (lack of) collective responsibility.

"Guns don't kill people" is a spin on the broader "technology is neutral" trope--still widely-embraced by Silicon Valley--whose function is to absolve the creators of technology from any responsibility for the consequences of what they have designed. The "technology is neutral" trope has long be subject to criticism. From Frankenstein's monster turning on its creator to Robert Oppenheimer's own reflections on creating the bomb, Western civilization has wrestled with the question of where responsibility resides in atrocities facilitated by technology, and we, on occasion, are reminded that the choice of what to research and create (or to not research and not create) is an expression of both individual and cultural values. As the great sociologist Max Weber once said, only through "naive self-deception" does a technician ignore "the evaluative ideas with which he unconsciously approaches his subject matter... that he has selected from an absolute infinity a tiny portion with the study of which he concerns himself." Technology is never neutral because its birth--its very existence--is the product of both political forces and values-oriented decision making.

Both the "technology is neutral" and the "guns don't kill people" tropes attempt to deflect moral, legal, and political accountability by obscuring our understanding of the causes behind technologically-facilitated tragedies (or triumphs). However, recent global events have made the concept of technological neutrality appear increasingly untenable. For example, social media seemed to play such an important role in the Middle East that many commentators began speaking of Facebook and Twitter revolutions. While social media was not the direct cause of the Arab Spring, it certainly shaped its character and, possibly, its outcome (as Zeynep Tufekci explained in a very astute essay on the causes behind the Arab Spring).

Drawing on Aristotle, Tufekci reminds us that there are four different ways that we can understand how one thing caused another thing to happen:

So what to make of all of this? I say, let’s bring in Aristotle! Aristotle distinguished between four types of causation: material, formal, efficient and final. I want to specifically bring the notions of material, efficient and final causation into this debate. Here’s Aristotle...

“Cause” means: (a) in one sense, that as the result of whose presence something comes into being—e.g. the bronze of a statue and the silver of a cup, and the classes which contain these [i.e., the material cause]; … (c) The source of the first beginning of change or rest; e.g. the man who plans is a cause, and the father is the cause of the child, and in general that which produces is the cause of that which is produced, and that which changes of that which is changed [i.e., the efficient cause]. (d) The same as “end”; i.e. the final cause; e.g., as the “end” of walking is health. For why does a man walk? “To be healthy,” we say, and by saying this we consider that we have supplied the cause [the final cause]. (Full text is here )

In this schema, material causes are the substrate of things. Does metal cause cars? In some sense, cars as we know them wouldn’t exist without metals so it meets a “but for” definition of causality. So, in some sense cars are caused by metals in that no metals, no cars–at least in their current form. However, in everyday usage, most of us tend to use the other two definitions, the efficient cause, i.e. cars are there because someone manufactured them; or the final cause, i.e. cars are there to take us from place A to place B in a speedy (but polluting!) manner.

So, I think most of the people using the term “social media revolution” are using it in the sense of a material cause. As I asked on Twitter during the debate, would we call the French Revolution a printing press revolution? Surely, the invention of the press is a strong antecedent of that revolution. But also surely, that revolution was made by people, through political action. So, the printing press just defines the milieu in which the revolution took place; it is an inseparable part of the French revolution even though it is not the efficient (political uprising) or the final (establishing a republic) cause of the French revolution. But you cannot really imagine a French Revolution, of the kind that happened, without the printing press.

Without access to an assault rifle (or similar weapon) the quality or character of the killings would have been fundamentally different. If say, Lanza had access only to a manually-operated rifle or a standard revolver, the rampage likely would have been less deadly. This fact is only further highlighted by a similar attack that took place at a school in China on the very same day, but, in this case, the attacker was armed with only a knife. While none of the 22 people slashed and stabbed in China died, all of the victims targeted in Connecticut perished. Intent may have been a factor here, but clearly the two weapons have very different "affordances," which give the two events each a completely different character and degree of tragicness. [This is, in many ways, an extension of Evan Selinger's critique of the "instrumental" view of technology, but I think drawing on Aristotle (via Tufekci) provides a simple framework for understanding why the cause of a murder is more than just the the murder's decision to discharge a weapon.]

We must ask ourselves: Who benefits from the systematic denial of material causality when it comes to firearms and other technologies? Certainly not the children of Newtown. More broadly, however, we are all directly or indirectly affected by the technologies that industry creates and government allows to circulate. The acknowledgement of causality inevitably leads to the assignment of responsibility. If assault weapons are a cause of this massacre, then surely those who caused the assault weapons to exist bear a share of the responsibility. However, this accountability is something that manufacturers, policy makers, and investors alike are keen to avoid, so they will continue to try and confuse the conversation by reducing all causality to the simple pull of a trigger.

Note: Zeynep and I both skip over Aristotle's notion of formal causation. A formal cause is "the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the classes which contain it—e.g. the ratio 2:1 and number in general is the cause of the octave—and the parts of the formula." Formal causation, in the cases discussed, would imply an essentialist ontology that most contemporary sociologists would reject.

Follow PJ Rey on Twitter: @pjrey. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/tech-isnt-neutral-guns-cause-tragedies/feed/ 0 pj.rey bushmaster223_0 http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/theater-review-r-u-x-rockwell-universal-sexbots/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/theater-review-r-u-x-rockwell-universal-sexbots/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:53:26 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=868

R.U.X. (Rockwell Universal Sexbots), written by Maurice Martin and directed by Sun King Davis, was first written and performed as a charity effort to raise money for HIPS (Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive); it ran as a five-part serial in Arlington’s October 2011 Hope Operas. It was rewritten as a full play for DC’s 2012 Fringe Festival, where it took the award for best comedy. The show just finished up a brief encore at Fall Fringe. While this comedy has already been widely and positively reviewed by DC theater critics, it deserves a piece that engages its rather weighty themes.

The story takes place in near-future America (similar in setting to the spate of early twenty aughts robot films such as Bicentennial Man, A.I., and I, Robot), where anthropomorphic robots have become a common consumer product. Louis Rockwell Jr. (John Tweel) has just been made acting CEO of the Rockwell Universal Carebots company, after his father (Frank Mancino) fell into a coma. Louis Jr. has a new vision that would transition the company away from producing robots designed for childcare and, instead, move it into designing robots for—you guessed it—sex. After rebranding the company “Rockwell Universal Sexbots,” he hires Dr. Callie Veru (Aubri O’Connor), a young and romantically inexperienced software expert to program the robots with the capacity to fulfill human desire. To program robots to respond to human desire, however, the characters must first understand it, and this interrogation of human desire becomes the axis on which the entire plot rotates.

Initially, Dr. Veru, with the help of Gary Stator (Adam R. Adkins), R.U.X.’s chief hardware engineer, attempts to program the robots using romantic tropes from movies and magazines. However, it is quickly decided that, rather than having robots play out Twilight-esque fantasies of unconsummatable love, customers will prefer robots that simulate real humans. Here, of course, is where it gets tricky. What defines humans as human? And, why would we pay for the company of a robot if robots were indistinguishable from the humans that are already around us?

The designers realize for robots to be more desirable than humans, they have do something that most humans can’t or won’t do: They have to both interpret and reflect our own desires. By giving robots this sort of adaptability, they are made “universal”—they can evolve into the perfect love object for anyone. It’s not enough for a sexbots to want what their users want; they must want what their users want them to want. Desire is dynamic and so too must be its embodiment. These robots become a mirror whose images is tweaked and inverted so that we see, in it, the personification of our own desire. In essence, we don’t want robots to be real; we want them to be what Baudrillard called “hyper-real” (more real than real)—a human that exists solely for us. It would be impossible to ever find such a human; instead, this human must be simulated.

The scenario that most poignantly captures the contradictory nature of human desire comes when X-1 (Amie Cazel), a robot designed to fulfill the all of Louis Jr.’s desires, murders Louis Jr.’s father after his father awakes from a coma and intends to reclaim control of the company. Louis is plunged into a state of seemingly-insurmountable regret because his desire to be a successful businessman has so deeply conflicted with his desire to be a good person. He projects blame and anger on to X-1 (who he is ultimately responsible for creating in the first place). X-1, in turn, is left wrestling with the paradox that Louis now desires only for her to be miserable. Because the only thing that makes her happy is to fulfill Louis’ desires, she must make herself miserable in order to be happy.

Despite the deftness with which Martin parses out these complex philosophical issues pertaining to the nature of human desire, the play often walks (and sometimes crosses) a very thin line between satirizing and reinforcing offensive stereotypes, including the portrayal of women as emotionally needy and of Japanese culture as perverse and erratic. In some cases, the play turned a critical eye to such stereotypes, reminding us that indulging in these stereotypes is often indicative of some flaw in the character of the beholder; in other cases, however, the play itself seems to indulge in offensive stereotypes.

I found one character particularly distracting: Happy Hoshi (Momo Nakamura) is a Japanese sexbot acquired by R.U.X. for market research. She runs on stage yelling about how she excretes rainbows and uses her sexual organs to play musical instruments. The character capitalizes on the kinds of mistranslations that provided endless amusement in early Nintendo games, but this is embodied by an over-sexed young woman in a way that makes virtually everything the character says and does seem sexist. Were this fact explicitly addressed, it might have played differently; instead, the audience is asked to laugh along with the sexism (and, predictably, they did). From my perspective, however, Happy Hoshi undermines the otherwise thoughtful narrative like a culturally-insensitive Jar Jar Binks.

The play also suffered from a bit of schizophrenia. The first half was mostly a light comedy (with occasional slapstick elements), but this comedy, at some point, starts to transition into a contemplative drama. One can only assume this disjuncture is a vestige of its origins as a serial production. The problem is that we are asked to believe that a crude, flat character like Louis Jr. suddenly transforms into an afflicted, dynamic antihero. It just wasn’t terribly convincing (despite Tweel’s admirable effort). It’s as if The Office’s Michael Scott made a guest appearance on Mad Men.

The plays themes may have been better served by tragedy than comedy. I would have preferred to see Louis Jr. seek atonement by killing himself and X-2. Or, perhaps, X-2 would kill Louis Jr. because that was his deepest desire in a state of chronic depression. Louis Jr. was just not an easily redeemable character and his survival left the plot unresolved.

Interestingly, the play was slightly rewritten for Fall Fringe. In the earlier version, the theme of the death was more prominent. X-2 (Ben Gibson/Ricardo Frederick Evans), the sexbot designed for Dr. Veru, constantly (and humorously) crashes every time he realizes that Dr. Veru will one day die.

Apart from X-1 (who is marvelously performed by Cazel), the most dynamic and believable characters are Gary and his robot girlfriend Gal (Amy Kellett). Gary allows Gal to edit her own source code so she becomes self-directed (though instead of using this power to incite a BSG-style robot apocalypse, she simply marries Gary and they live happily together until his death). In fact, robots have no need to kill off humans because sexbots so fully satisfy human sexual desire that they are no longer interested in having sex with other humans. No human sex means no human reproduction, and, 153 years later, the human race slips contently into oblivion. (I’m pretty sure the desire to have sex and the desire to have children aren’t quite so tightly bound, but it’s an amusing scenario.) Upon the death of the last human, Gal discovers that, in a final act of love, Gary has surreptitiously programmed her with admin rights to all other robots, and she becomes the matriarch of a new robot civilization.

The cast’s original performance at Fringe was significantly tighter than the short Fall Fringe run, where several of the actors seemed to stumble on their lines. Also, Ricardo Fredrick Evans (who delivered a compelling performance) replaced Ben Gibson (who was, nevertheless, a more convincing idiot).

Despite my many misgivings, R.U.X. is an extraordinarily thought-provoking piece of writing that transcends the standard tropes which land most robot stories in sci-fi purgatory—enough so that I saw it twice.

Photo credits from top to bottom: Christos Liacouras, Todd Gardner, Todd Gardner, and Jason Horowitz.

Tweet me: @pjrey. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/theater-review-r-u-x-rockwell-universal-sexbots/feed/ 0 pj.rey RUX-1 RUX-3 RUX-4 RUX-2 http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/gamification-playbor-exploitation/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/gamification-playbor-exploitation/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:56:42 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=865 I'm posting to get some feedback on my initial thoughts in preparation for my chapter in a forthcoming gamification reader. I'd appreciated your thoughts and comments here or @pjrey.

My former prof Patricia Hill Collins taught me to begin inquiry into any new phenomenon with a simple question: Who benefits? And this, I am suggesting, is the approach we must take to the Silicon Valley buzzword du jure: “gamification.” Why does this idea now command so much attention that we feel compelled to write a book on it? Does a typical person really find aspects of his or her life becoming more gamelike? And, who is promoting all this talk of gamification, anyway?

It’s telling that conferences like “For the Win: Serious Gamification” or “The Gamification of Everything - convergence conversation” are taking place in business (and not, say, sociology) departments or being run by CEOs and investment consultants. The Gamification Summit invites attendees to “tap into the latest and hottest business trend.” Searching Forbes turns up far more articles (156) discussing gamification than the New York Times (34) or even Wired (45). All this makes TIME contributor Gary Belsky seems a bit behind the time when he predicts “gamification with soon rule the business world.” In short, gamification is promoted and championed—not by game designers, those interested in game studies, sociologists of labor/play, or even computer-human interaction researchers—but by business folks. And, given that the market for videogames is already worth greater than $25 billion, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that business folk are looking for new growth areas in gaming.

Thus, Ian Bogost appears to be on the mark when he declares that gamification is nothing more than “marketing bullshit,” suggesting “‘exploitationware’ as a more accurate name for gamification's true purpose.” (Bogost has a way with words that eludes the Marxist thinkers that generally tackle the concept of exploitation.) In one piece, he argues (interestingly, his audience is a business crowd) that gamification is about replacing real incentives for customer loyalty with “counterfeit incentives that neither provide value nor require investment.” That is to say, “points” or whatever other incentive consumers can earn in the game are not translatable into real world benefits. He concludes that this amounts to a sham, because consumers are being offered something that is really nothing.

I generally agree with Bogost’s argument here, but I think his is only a partial critique. Bogost focuses exclusively on how gamification relates to consumption, but I believe gamification has more to do with production. More to the point, I want to argue that gamification is primarily about companies duping people into doing free labor. Before I proceed with contextualizing and supporting this claim, I want to acknowledge upfront that gamification is a means not and ends. As danah boyd (in recent Pew report) observed, gamification is

a modern-day form of manipulation. And like all cognitive manipulation, it can help people and it can hurt people. And we will see both.

Gamification and the Production of Playbor

Gamification, broadly defined, is the introduction of play elements into other kinds of activity. However, this definitions gets muddied pretty quickly once we acknowledge that there is no consensus as to how we should define play. Rather than getting bogged down in a debate about the nature of play, I will simply borrow from Johan Huizinga‘s Homo Ludens (1938), which is the most widely-cited work on the concept of play, and perhaps, the first to offer a precise, if rather complex, definition of play. For our purposes, the most import aspect of Huizinga's definition is that it is separate from material gain or profit—in short, (capitalist) production. (I do not claim that this is the “correct” definition of play (perhaps play is a concept that resist definition), just that it is useful in making my argument about gamification.)

Between Marx and Huizinga, our Modernist heritage is an understanding that labor is activity that creates value and play is activity that never creates value—and never the two shall meet. Of course, there is no reason to uncritically accept this quasi-binary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WjorEAIExs&t=1h3m41s

(to watch Julian Kücklich discuss "playbour," start at 1:03:41)

I find this example of modding relatively unsatisfying because, in this case, it doesn’t seem that we’re using the concept of playbor to talk about anything new. I suppose, modding is playbor in the sense that someone must set up a hoop and inflate a ball before a basketball game can commence. Sure, in this case, play presupposes a certain degree of work, and it is not insignificant that the players also do some of the work necessary to make play happen. But, in these examples, play and labor remain relatively distinct activities that happen to have a degree of mutually dependency. Mutually dependency, however, is a far cry from the indistinguishability that playbor seems to imply. Marx himself recognized that work and play were mutually dependent. Work provides the basic economics resources necessary for play, while play restores that productive energies that are sapped each day in the workplace. If playbor is nothing more than mutual dependency, then it is a deep-rooted and long-recognized part facet of capitalist production. However, I don’t think we’re attracted to the concept of playbor through observations of mutual dependency between work and play. Instead, I want to argue that playbor, in its ideal-typical form, would implode work and play into the very same act.

This brings us back, full circle, to gamification. If gamification is about inserting elements of games or play into other processes, then it would seem that gamification is a process of producing playbor; it is about converting ordinary work into playbor. Of course, gamification cannot be reduced to the production of playbor because it can be applied to processes other than labor—most notably, social interaction. Many institutions, for example, use “icebreakers” to organize and direct socializing by transforming it into a game. Foursquare might be the quintessential example of gamification, because it simultaneously makes both social and interaction and the work of recording data about one’s own movements into a game. Nevertheless, I do not think it unreasonable to say that our infatuation with gamification stems, primarily, from its capacity to produce playbor. Thus, the initial question I posed about who benefits is equally a question about who benefits from playbor.

It is clear that the business "gurus" who are driving the discourse on gamification, are primarily concerned with gamification as a mechanism for the production of new forms of value. At best, social interaction is a secondary concern that matters only insofar as it too facilitates further value creation. As we all well know, the ultimate goal of capitalism and the purpose of any mechanism it employs is the accumulation of wealth. Gamification cannot be understood apart from the mode of capitalist production and all the power relations and inequalities that implies. Like tools, tactics/techniques are never neutral. Thus, we must define gamification here in terms of its de facto function of producing (surplus) value and not just through its formal characteristic of introducing play into other activities. That is to say, we must consider not only what gamification does, but how and why it does.

Turning to these latter questions now, I want to suggest that gamification is effective because it is a mechanism for de-coupling alienation from capitalist production. This is, actually, a rather extraordinary feat. Marx and generations of his intellectual successors viewed the factory as the archetype of capitalist production and, as such, have assumed that people only do such work because their economic conditions make it necessary for survival. It is nearly impossible to imagine a factory that is not alienating (at least, prior to robotics). Marx observed of the factory: “Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.” Importantly, workers’ have always reacted more strongly capitalism’s alienating character than to its exploitative character—no surprise, considering that the latter is often so well-concealed.

Yet, the contemporary realities of capitalism have shattered the assumption alienation is a necessary accompaniment to capitalist production, and nowhere is this more evident than in playbor. Playbor makes productive activity an end in-itself (namely, fun). Far from being shunned, playbor is sought out and done voluntarily. The object of production is no longer to create value; instead, value becomes a mere byproduct of play. Because playborers are not motivated by the value creation, they are apt to simply ignore it, leaving the capitalist to swoop in and take possession of as much of this surplus value as possible.

How is this bad? Playborer are having fun, so what’s the problem? Here, I must invoke Marx’s observation that “surplus value ... for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing.” For the capitalist, the productive aspects of play are just latent value waiting to be “leveraged.” But this leveraging of surplus value is the precise moment that exploitation occurs.

Exploitation

The term “exploitation” is generally employed very loosely. In common parlance, “exploitation” means simply to use or to take advantage of someone. In (post-)Marxian labor analysis, however, exploitation has very specific meaning. Before we dive, momentarily, into the swamp of Marxian technical language, it’s important to make to aspects of exploitation clear upfront: 1.) In a Marxian context, exploitation meant only to describe relationship of exchange, and 2.) exploitation is a structurally necessary part of capitalism; it is the mechanism by which the capitalist comes to accumulate a disproportionately large share of the wealth.

Marx observes that a typical worker’s wages is equivalent to only a fraction of the total value of what the worker produces. As such, only a fraction of the worker’s day is spent producing value for himself or herself. The rest of the day is spent producing “surplus” value that goes directly into the capitalist’s pocket. Exploitation is a ratio between how much of his or her own work returned in the form of wages and how much is kept as “surplus” by the capitalist. This is how we should interpret Marx when he concludes: “The rate of surplus value is… an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the labourer by the capitalist.” Thus, as compensation approaches nothing, the rate of exploitation would seem to approach infinity; however such claims are probably a bit hyperbolic.

It’s too simple to say that playborers are uncompensated. The experience of play, of course, has intrinsic value. Moreover, playborers often accumulate some sort of symbolic capital. Pew researchers recently noted that these “rewards” can take a variety of forms, including “virtual… points, payments, badges, discounts, and “free” gifts; and status indicators such as friend counts, retweets, leader boards, achievement data, progress bars, and the ability to ‘level up.’” Symbolic capital accumulated through playbor may translate into monetary or cultural capital. In fact, this has always been true of play. For example, having a “grandmaster” chess ranking (which is calculated using a sophisticated point system) almost guarantees a player a certain degree of fame and material comfort. However, none of this negates the fact that playbor is exploitative. Like the paradigmatic factory workers, playborers only come to possess a small fraction of the value they create. Often, playborers obtain none of the monetary value they have created. And, of course, this is exactly how the playbor’s capitalist promoters want it.

Perhaps an even more insidious aspect of gamification is that it has the potential to expand capitalist production into new contexts. By masking work as play, capitalist production moves exploitation out of the work places and infiltrates our leisure time. Play loses its innocence. It is no longer an escape from the system, it is just another branch of it—a thing to be administered and controlled like everything else. Herbert Marcuse predicted and warned against this appropriation of play a half-century ago. Like Huizinga, Marcuse viewed play as a space apart from our workaday reality, and it that way, it had a certain liberatory—even revolutionary—potential. Marcuse explained "the play impulse does not aim at playing 'with' something; rather it is the play of life itself, beyond want and external compulsion—the manifestation of an existence without fear and anxiety, and thus the manifestation of freedom itself." However, this is precisely because Marcuse subscribed to the Modernist assumption that work and play are distinction by their very nature.

For Marcuse, play is freedom because the system of capitalist production simply writes it off as useless—as something that cannot be put in use toward the ends of profit-making. He explains, "play is unproductive and useless because it cancels the repressive and exploitive traits of labor and [administered] leisure; it "just plays" with reality." Thus, Marcuse, see capitalism as antagonistic to play. (Many businesses support this assumption by labeling as “time theft” any sort of play on the job.) In order to increase productivity, capitalists will attempt to eliminate play and divert that time and energy elsewhere.

Contrary to Marcuse’s assertions, playbor demonstrates that capitalism is capable of having a more sophisticated approach to play than simply re-directing it (or subjecting it to what Freudian thinkers might call “forced sublimation”). Playbor (and the process of gamification that produce it) demonstrate that capitalism can appropriate play into the process of production.

As I mentioned above, one reason that thinkers from Marx to Macuse argued that play persisted in capitalist economies is because it refreshed workers and restored their capacity to work effectively. In this sense, play was tolerated as necessary waste—time that was necessarily non-productive. The seduction of playbor is that it promises to make use of this necessary waste. It recycles that waste back into the structures of capitalist production. Waste is no longer wasted. Playbor is part of capitalism’s effort to colonize ever last moment in the waking day. (Perhaps, one day, we’ll figure out how to make sleep productive as well… dare I say it… sleepbor^[TM]).

The introduction of play into labor only really gets at one aspect of playbor. Gamification still implies a certain sort of displacement: non-productive play activities are to be supplanted by productive play activities. But, there is an alternative means of creating playbor: We can find ways to make traditional, non-productive play activities productive. In contrast to gamification, we might use the term “workification” to describe this introduction of work elements (chiefly, productivity) into play (or other activities). So for example, Words with Friends and the official Scrabble app have turned a traditional game into a new way of collecting valuable data about people. Facebook has workified social interaction in the same way.

Caveats, Equivocations, etc.

Gamification is just another installment in a long history of ideological constructs put forth by capitalists to advance their agenda of further wealth accumulation. The discourse around gamification has overwhelming positive and almost universally uncritical. A few positive achievements (e.g., when Foldit players helped deduce the structure of the an enzyme used by the AIDS virus to reproduce) brought about through gamification have been used to mask the nefarious intent of those who promote gamification most vehemently: namely, to dupe us all into making even more money for them. This piece aims at producing what Judith Butler called “theoretical hyperboles… meant to advance a strategically aggressive counter-reading.” My hope is to change the conversation so that it is no longer acceptable for tech and business commentators to uncritically sing the praises of gamification.

Even for those who promote gamification for purposes other than self-enrichment, it is still important to adopt a critical perspective that looks for exploitation in all exchange relationships. The popularity of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in recruiting “volunteers” for university research is a perfect example of how exploitation thrives when fields lack critical inquiry.

Finally, the focus of this piece has been on how play is being made productive. Implicit in this essay is the notion that the gamification (and playbor) are phenomena that have gained increased salience because of the Web. While I believe that gamification is one of many important trends that have emerged in light of the Web (else I wouldn’t be writing about it), I think that, thus far, it has received attention that is disproportionate to its significance. Far more important, is the trend of making social interaction productive (call it “weisure” or whatever you like). Productive social interaction is the bread and butter of every social networking site and, I think, is primary mechanism through which the Web is transformed into an engine of exploitation. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/gamification-playbor-exploitation/feed/ 0 pj.rey pixel Marx II phonestory CastleSmurfenstein LaborDayStamp-1 child labor Superstar-foursquare-badge-300x300 recycling http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/theorizing-the-web-2012/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/theorizing-the-web-2012/#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:39:31 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=858

Co-authored with Nathan Jurgenson for the UMD Sociology Department Newsletter.

The crowd is gone, the banners rolled back up, the rooms cleaned, and now we have a chance to sleep–and reflect on Theorizing the Web 2012. After two successful years, the conference—born as a fun idea and with humble expectations—has morphed into an institution in that sociological sense of the term. We’re proud of Theorizing the Web and those who made it a success: our committee and the attendees.

For those who don’t know, this conference is a grad-student-production through and through. We had a terrific committee again this year, which included sociology grad students Tyler Crabb, Rachel Guo, Zach Richer, Jillet Sam, David Strohecker, Matthias Wasser, Sarah Wanenchak, and William Yagatich. Dan Greene from American Studies also joined the team this year. Additionally, we’d also like to recognize Ned Drummond (our designer), Rob Wanenchak (our photographer), and DJ Sean Gray, who you might remember as a former sociology undergrad. Also, we had terrific sponsors, especially the sociology department, who has supported this event in any and every way that we’ve asked. We’re very lucky to be here.

We created the conference for the simple reason of wanting something we were not getting at other conferences. First, there is the substantive focus of the event: theory sessions at disciplinary conference seldom feature presentations that focus on the radically transformative nature of the Web, while tech sessions and tech conferences tend to focus solely on description rather than on making theoretical arguments. Without an apparent space to theorize the Web it became clear that we needed Theorizing the Web.

But if we’re going to make a conference, we’re going to make one we want to attend. The cost? Pay-what-you-want. Grad students could attend for $1, and those who could afford it donated generously. The program should be filled with smart, clearly presented theories from a range of perspectives. Viewpoints often neglected at tech conferences, be they critical, queer, feminist, etc, undergird the entire event, rather than being ignored or placed in token sessions. More than interdisciplinary, this conference is also non-disciplinary, taking very seriously the importance of non-academic knowledges to gain insights about the social world. An art gallery, film screening, and other ways of knowing/communicating augment the paper presentations.

Theorizing the Web 2012 featured roughly 40 paper presentations. Rooms were packed (over 200 people registered to attend in-person). All presentations were also livestreamed (we had over 70 people simultaneously watching live at various points in the day). There was also an extraordinary conversation taking place on Twitter throughout the event. Indeed, the Twitter backchannel itself became a topic of discussion throughout the day. Traffic was heavy, with 4,750 tweets from over 650 people to the official conference account and to the #TtW12 hashtag. And, we made an attempt to innovate in bringing together online and offline interactions at the conference by creating the role of “backchannel moderator” for each session. These folks drew questions from the Twitter stream, giving voice to many people who could not travel but were watching the event remotely.

Following 2011’s talks by Saskia Sassen, George Ritzer and danah boyd, the keynote for 2012 was a conversation between Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Twitter journalist Andy Carvin of NPR. During the keynote, Tufekci sat across from Carvin and acted as interviewer, while, simultaneously, using her laptop to lead the backchannel discussion by taking questions, posting articles and letting what was happening both on and offline drive the session. The audience, following what was happening on stage and the fast-moving backchannel on their devices were inundated with smart ideas and information and left with much to think about regarding social media, social movements, and journalism.

This is just too much fun to not do this again next year.

Thanks to all those who helped make this happen, thanks to everyone who attended, thanks to everyone who encouraged and congratulated us, and thanks for reading]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/theorizing-the-web-2012/feed/ 0 pj.rey TtW2 TtW4 TtW3 http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/why-do-we-use-spatial-metaphors-to-talk-about-the-web/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/why-do-we-use-spatial-metaphors-to-talk-about-the-web/#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:46:50 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=852

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately. I even wrote an essay awhile back for The New Inquiry. But, honestly, none of the answers I come up seem complete. I’m posting this as a means of seeking help developing an explanation and to see if anyone knows of people who are taking on this question.

I think question is important because it relates to our "digital dualist" tendency to view the Web as separate from "real life."

So far, I see three, potentially compatible, explanations:

1. Capitalism’s infinite need for expansion. Couching digital information in a language of space and territory, makes it easily integrated into the existing systems of property ownership and commodification. Digital information is equated to something we already know how to buy and sell: land. It provides a new target for imperialistic ambitions.

2. Simplification, comprehensibility, and individualism. Our current moment in history is defined by the overwhelming need to define oneself as a unique individual and thus free from social or other constraints that would undermine claims of distinctiveness. Nathan Jurgenson recently labeled this “The Urban Outfitters Contradiction: be unique just like everybody else!”’ In such a world, we tend to over-simplify the environment around us in order to exaggerate our own claims agency. Spatial metaphors make the Web seem like something we can (and are even destined to) master. The World Wide Web became the new Wild Wild West—the new home for rugged individualism (in the form of hackers and cyberpunks) and a new site of manifest destiny. This is reflected in early cyber-Utopian rhetoric which was all about self-empowerment.

3. Vestigial ideologies. The collective imagination was decades ahead of the empirical reality of the Web. The vocabulary we use—“cyberspace,” "virtual reality," and “hackers” who get “sucked-in” to the computer—originated in our fantasies of what the Web might one day look like rather than as analytical terms oriented toward actually describing the world we live in. Increasingly, that reality diverges from the fantasies and ideologies that spawned this vocabulary, and we have been slow to adapt and evolve.

Thoughts?

Reach me with a comment here or @pjrey on Twitter.

]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/why-do-we-use-spatial-metaphors-to-talk-about-the-web/feed/ 0 pj.rey Tron Bike Grid Tron Mixed-Up Mazes 05 http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/hipsters-and-low-tech/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/hipsters-and-low-tech/#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:36:07 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=850

Hipsters have been much discussed on the Cyborgology blog (see: here, here, here, and here). Cyborgology authors have also talked about the fetishization of low-tech/analog media and devices (see: here and here). As David Paul Strohecker pointed out, these two issue interrelated: "hipsters are at the forefront of movements of nostalgic revivalism." I want to pick up these threads and add a small observation.

Nathan Jurgenson and I were discussing why low-tech devices have a seductive quality. Consider the popularity of, for example, fixed-gear bicycles or vintage cameras (such as the Kodak Brownie or the Polaroid PX-70). Though I think this phenomenon is probably overdetermined (in the Freudian sense of having multiple sufficient causes), I came up with a theory that seems worth further consideration: namely, that hipsters' obsession with antique devices reflects a desire to escape the complex and highly-interdependent socio-technical systems that characterize contemporary society and return to time in which technology appeared to be something that humans could master and, thus, use to affirm their individual agency. In short, the fetishization of low-tech is about the illusion of agency; it provides affirmation for the hipster whose identity is defined by the post-Modern imperative to be an individual, to be unique.

Žižek is often cited as the philosopher of the hipster or the hipster philosopher, but, here, I argue that Simmel and Deleuze were the true Oracles of Hipsterdom. Simmel observed that the individual was a Modern phenomenon--that the desire to "be different" is historically contingent. Delueze identified this desire to be unique as something rather insidious, when he described that the mechanisms of social control are being decentralized away from institutions such as prisons, schools, and hospitals and are now situated within the mass population itself. We, each and all of us, are now the primary mechanisms of social control. We are built to desire what society needs from us and to demand the same from others. Delueze observes with transparent contempt that "young people strangely boast of being 'motivated;'" they require no institutional coercion.

This shift in the nature of social control is of monumental importance (as Virno, Negri, and others have described) because top-down institutions promote conformity and homogeneity (at least, within various social classes), which is appropriate for assembly line workers or retail clerks; however, in a new economic paradigm defined by the activity of software engineers, graphic designers, and the like, conformity is anathema to the goal of mass innovation. That is to say, institutional control is counter-productive to a (post-Fordist) economy of ideas and innovation and, thus, must be replaced with a new system of self-regulation reinforced by mass surveillance. As institutions weaken, individuality and uniqueness are no longer stifled but, instead, are promoted as the chief values of hipster culture. Innovation is the result of constant surveillance of and comparison to other individuals.

How does this relate to technology then? As, I have argued in the past, citing Anthony Giddens' "bargain of modernity," the complexity of modern technology and the expert system required to produce and operate it threaten our sense of individual agency by continually reinforcing our dependency on others (this experience of being just another component of a technologic system and not the master of a tool or device is similarly captured in Jacques Ellul's notion on"technological autonomy" and actor-network theory as derived from Bruno Latour). The structural reality of Modernity's complex socio-technicals systems is at odds with the individualistic ideology uniqueness.

Thus, nostalgia for the low-tech/lo-fi/analog is really nostalgia for a time when technology could be mastered--a time when you could fix your own car or bike, a time when you pop open the back of a camera and intuitively understand how it works, a time when you knew where your food came from and how it was prepared, a time when the circuits in electronic were large enough to be visible and an average person could figure out how to repair, replace, hack, and even build them, a time when a device was yours to open and when warranties end-user agreement didn't micro-manage how used your own property. In short, the appeal of low-tech is it affirms our sense of independence and individuality.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism.

The hipster low-tech fantasy--"the dream of the 1890s"--is one of escape from the complex socio-technical systems that we are highly dependent on but have little control over. It is a fantasy of achieving the most radical expression of individual agency: the opt-out.

Follow @pjrey on Twitter.

Clarification: I don't think we are driven, directly, by a desire to master technology so much as the desire to individuate and to be unique. We desire technological simplicity, whether real or illusory (as in the case of Apple), because we feel like we have greater control and agency with respect to simple technology than we do with respect to complex, highly-interdependent technical systems, so that simple technologies better serve this kind of identity work. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/hipsters-and-low-tech/feed/ 0 pj.rey Evolution_y08_v3_single_72dpi PX-70 air-bicycle-early-plane-designs1 Spectators at the iPhone Display http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/pittsburghs-hostage-crisis-the-police-and-the-politics-of-social-media/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/pittsburghs-hostage-crisis-the-police-and-the-politics-of-social-media/#comments Sat, 22 Sep 2012 02:26:51 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=846

Just as I arrived in Pittsburgh this morning, the city was virtually shut down by a hostage-taking crisis. A man claiming to have a gun and explosives entered a law office with weapons and held a lawyer hostage for several hours. Eventually, the hostage-taker (named Klein Michael Thaxton) surrendered and no one was physically harmed.

This sort of story might not have been of much interest (beyond serving as a local news spectacle) except for one small detail: The perpetrator was using Facebook to provide live updates of the situation.

At first the police allowed this continue hoping to gain valuable information about the nature of the situation, but, eventually, they leaned on Facebook to have his account blocked. These decisions about how to handle the perpetrator's online communications became as important as any decisions about how the police should act offline (e.g., should they raid the building or send in a negotiator?) because the police knew instinctively, what social media researcher so often have to argue: Our online interactions have real, and often direct, offline consequences.

While it is interesting is that the hostage-taker was acting as his own journalist, documenting the event for the world, media analysis has glossed over a more important issue: The fact that this communication was two-way. This event is one of the first instances where a hostage-taker's lines of communication to the outside world weren't exclusively channeled through the police. Traditional negotiations have relied, in part, on the fact that the perpetor is dependent on police to be in touch with the outside world. This gives police leverage in the form of something to offer/deny the perpetor. Mobile access to social media short circuits this relationship, leaving the police with far less control over the situation. Following the standard logic of traditional bureaucratic organization, the police shutoff communication and re-instituted a definitive hierarchical order, noting it is positve "that people are concerned about his well-being [but that] it is a distraction for negotiating."

Was this really a smart move? The question strikes at the heart a major debate surrounding social media: Whether social media a legitimate and effective source of social support. Most social science reaearch from the last decade (Sherry Turkle notwithstanding) argues that it does, and that this social support tends to flow back and forth between online and offline interactions. This case seems to provide even further evidence.

What's fascinating is that the perpetrator's friends immediately rushed to his Facebook page urging him to cooperate with police and offering support. It is quite plausible that such messages factored into his decision to surrender and made the situation feel less hopeless.

Of course, we can't yet know for sure what he was thinking. More details will surely emerge. But regardless of how social media actually influenced this particular situation, the tradeoff between diminished control an increased social support will likely be important for how police and governments think about social media in the future.

Reposted from Cyborgology. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/pittsburghs-hostage-crisis-the-police-and-the-politics-of-social-media/feed/ 0 pj.rey gateway-center2 picture-5 http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/lev-manovich-on-the-poetics-of-augmented-space/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/lev-manovich-on-the-poetics-of-augmented-space/#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:41:23 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=840

I've recently been auditing a course with Jason Farman on "Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age" and he assigned a piece that was so profoundly relevant to this blog that I had to post about it immediately.

Lev Manovich's 2006 article "The poetics of augmented space" published in Visual Communication (which he had apparently been working on since 2002) is the earliest that I am aware of anyone using the term "augmented reality" in the broader sociological context of social interaction that flows between digital and physical (as opposed to the more limited computer science definition that describes it as merely the overlaying of digital information on the physical environment).

Manovich used the concept in much the same way we have developed it here on the blog. Arguably, augmented reality has been the defining topic of conversation. Here are a few sample posts:

" The Hole in Our Thinking about Augmented Reality" by Whitney Erin Boesel (this has the best summary of the discussion)

"Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality" by Nathan Jurgenson (this is the most cited and most important because it coined "digital dualism as the opposite of augmented reality)

"Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality" by PJ Rey

"Breaking Bread, Breaking Digital Dualism" by Zeynep Tufekci (on her own blog)

"Towards theorizing an augmented reality" by Nathan Jugenson (written prior to the start of Cyborgology)

"Defending and Clarifying the Term Augmented Reality" by Nathan Jugenson

"Cyborgs and the Augmented Reality they Inhabit" by PJ Rey

"Augmented Reality: Cyborgology" by Bruce Sterling (for Wired)

"Facebook – Homepage for a Cyborg Planet" by Nathan Jurgenson & PJ Rey (the Cyborgology Blog's kickoff post)

As far as I can tell, none of us were aware of Manovich's article. So, I'll summarize his main theoretical points. He's engaging in a phenomenology of augmented reality and, thus, exploring how we experience it. Seeing the implosion of physical and digital, Manovich asks:

do we end up with a new experience in which the spatial and information layers are equally important? In this case, do these layers add up to a single phenomenological gestalt or are they processed as separate layers?

overlaying the physical space with the dynamic data. I will use the term ‘augmented space’ to refer to this new kind of physical space. As I have already mentioned, this overlaying is often made possible by the tracking and monitoring of users. In other words, the delivery of information to users in space and the extraction of information about those users are closely connected.

Thus, augmented space is also monitored space.

This is where I find Manovich's framework to be flawed: Manovich sees augmented reality as something external to us--as something we just sort of stumble into. For Manovich, the subject is prior to augmented reality. In Haraway's language, Manovich sees us as goddesses, not cyborgs. We are not of augmented reality, it is just a space we enter. This is all wrong. My Facebook profile doesn't disappear when I go off the grid. It waits patiently for my return. The way I conceive of and interact with the world is shaped by the existence of Facebook and the entire environment of digital documentation and digitally-mediated communication, regardless of whether I am on the grid at a given moment. As Pierre Bordieu might say, I have developed a pattern of habits, behaviors, and beliefs (a habitus) that are appropriate to augmented reality. Whether or not my environment is inconsistent, my cyborg subjectivity stays intact throughout.

Manovich is too wedded Foucault, who saw disciplinary power confined to institutions--to the "carceral archipelago" and it's "theaters of punishment." Yet, we know that even when we leave school, work, or prison, these institutions leave an indelible mark upon us (why else would we need re-integration programs for prisoners?). We internalize these institutions--the contours of their spaces--and carry them with us. As Nathan Jurgenson put it, we come to view the world through "the Facebook eye."

Moreover, the Panopticon is no longer the proper metaphor for surveillance. One does not simply escape augmented reality by going off the grid, because everyone else we meet will still be carrying the Facebook eye with them. Our interactions will always be viewed as potential future posts for Facebook no matter the space. Being out of cell range does not make us forget social media exists nor does it make us forget our previous interactions with it. Surveillance is not top-down; it is between the many. Even when we are outside the space that an institution occupies, we are still surrounded by the subjects it creates.

As I have said previously, "you can log off but you can't opt out." ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/lev-manovich-on-the-poetics-of-augmented-space/feed/ 0 pj.rey walk out http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-president-as-a-brand/ http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-president-as-a-brand/#comments Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:11:00 +0000 PJ Rey http://pjrey.wordpress.com/?p=833

The New York Times recently published a piece titled "At Times, Obama and His Cyberself Differ on Tactics" that opens with the passage:

For a moment on Friday, the cyber-Barack Obama was perfectly at odds with the flesh-and-blood version... Speaking to 1,400 supporters at a high school... President Obama voiced his familiar lament that “there is so much negativity and so much cynicism” in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election. Minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, “Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,” linking to a blog post about the tempest over his Republican challenger’s departure from Bain Capital.

The article doesn't really offer any deeper analysis of the topic raised in its headline, but the notion of this sort of technologically-mediated, or even, post-human, presidency is so provocative that it's worth additional reflection. I can't begin such a reflection, however, without first critiquing some of the vocabulary used in the article. The article contrasts "cyber-Barack Obama" (or Barack Obama's "cyberself") with "the flesh-and-blood version." This problematically implies that there are two Barack Obamas: the real Obama and the Obama out there in cyberspace (cue creepy space music). Of course, once we even state such a claim, it becomes immediately apparent that it has zero face validity. Arguing that the Barack Obama who signs the messages he personally posts to Twitter with the initials "bo" is different than the Barack Obama out there giving the speeches makes about as much sense as arguing that when I call my mom on telephone, I'm talking to a different person than when I drive over for a visit.

In fact, this whole digital dualist discussion of cyber-Obama actually obscures the much bigger distinction that this example highlights: Obama the person versus Obama the brand. Contrary to what this article suggests, the distinction between the person of the president and the presidential brand is not a novelty of the Internet (though it may be manifesting in new ways). Since our nation's founding, the presidency has embodied more than just the convictions and creative capacities of a single individual. Surely, even Washington endorsed words and images that were not wholly of his design. Certainly by the time Washington made his 1796 farewell address (in which he famously warned against the negative influence of political parties on democracy), the prospect of a party-administered campaign was already on the horizon. The contemporary party apparatus has grown so enormous that it is impossible for a candidate to even meet all his/her surrogates (e.g., all the staffers and interns who customize region mailings, the phone bank operators, the door-to-door solicitors, etc.)

Political parties are significant in that they extend and amplify the message of the candidate. In the case of a presidential system (where individual persons are on the ballot, and not the parties themselves [as with parliamentary systems]), the president is supposed to represent, and even embody, the goals and aspirations of the party. In this way, collective interests are manifest in an individual. However, the merging of the collective and the individual is not unidirectional. The goals of the party are not merely manifest in the president, but the president also cedes a degree of autonomy, allowing the party to speak on his (or, hopefully, one day soon, her) behalf. In short, the image of the president is mediated through the party apparatus.

The presidential brand is an example of what Guy Debord called “spectacle,” where what “was once directly lived has moved into a representation.” Representations of the president are far easier to circulate as a sort of cultural commodity than the president’s own personal performances of self. In order to “sell” the president, a campaign (and its supporters) must first create images of him that are highly fluid—even viral (consider the circulation of Shepard Fairy’s iconic “hope” imagery, which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery).

This anecdote about the @BarackObama Twitter account (“run by #Obama2012 campaign staff… Tweets from the president signed -bo”) saying things that seem to contrast what Obama is saying simultaneously in his speeches is interesting, not because it demonstrates the existence of a virtual president, but because it highlights just how heavily-mediated our image of the president is. It makes us aware that the president we know is more a brand than a person. Moreover, the jarring aspect of the anecdote is not that it calls into question whether the Obama who communicates with using the Internet is less real than the Obama who uses analog communication (e.g., pamphlets, print ads, phone messages, etc.) but that it challenges the authenticity of the Obama brand, which appears contrived when inconsistencies emerge—precisely why “flip-flopper” has become the most powerful invective in contemporary politics. ]]> http://pjrey.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-president-as-a-brand/feed/ 0 pj.rey Obama_Twitter_small Obama Phone Bank Obama_hope