Re: [-empyre-] [-empyre-} Consumer Technology as Revolutionary Technology?
I am very interested in the way that people make do. Certainly, guerrilla actions what the weak use, out of necessity. Apart from mortal conflicts, I think this tends to be where people live their lives. On the other hand, I am troubled by how quickly institutional powers have latched on to this idea as a paradigm of control. While it does satisfy people to make do, implicit in this satisfaction is a measure of antagonism and inequality that arises when access to rights and dignity are denied. A great portion of the pleasure comes with the fact that we have gotten away with something when we weren't supposed to. This poses a couple problems for much contemporary thinking on the topic: 1) The foundational anxiety the precedes making do, while it can be productive, ought not be romanticized. 2) Institutional partners, while their support for humanistic concerns is to be encouraged, should be engaged in producing overt processes of legitimation, not for the practices of resistance, but for the aims of resistance (ie. human rights). I have been in Norway for the past year, and the contrasts between political consciousness in the US and Norway is staggering. As a wealthy country, Norway is also saturated with consumer goods and broad access to high technology, but the general tendency towards a critical awareness of these things is much keener here than it is back home. At home, even at the highest levels, the attitude towards consumer electronics tends to privilege early adoption, and relies on the embedded assumption that technology is progressive. What is lost, I think, is the larger sense that, increasingly, the devices and software are not the objects, we are the objects. We are no longer human beings with human rights, we are human resources with inputs and outputs that are technically managed. Contrast this to Norway, which has a robust discourse of human rights and a broad based institutional support for those rights, yoked to a theory of social democracy, and you see a population that is actively engaged with technology, but more prone to critique it (another interesting thing is that Norwegian schools emphasize outdoor activity... kids learn to hike, build fires, knit, etc.) We need to recognize the 21st century innovations in warfare and rethink the metaphor against the backdrop of low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. So, to answer the question, I think a good place to look for human survivors of the post-human phase-shift they are probably people in prison, the homeless, the elderly, homeschoolers, anthroposophists, children (before they get plugged in), and, generally, people who are removed, not from technology, but from its popular uses. I think, when we are looking for revolutions, we are trying to identify an individual human impulse so grand that it resonates within a community. The life or death of the one becomes abstracted and universalized into a broad conception of rights and duties for all. We don't need to be scholars to see that this idea is under seige from people in gated communities to anti-equality activists, from arguments over access to education to health care, from the rights of enemy combatants to basic notions of democracy, from prescription complacency to the controlled demolition of our social safety net. Contrast the impulse to shared liberty to the impulse for property and domination and you can see why one side draws its support wherever human beings really live and the other side uses mercenaries and machines. When we juxtapose this to much current thinking, the contrasts are sharp: We are attracted to the outcome of producing distributed effects, but our theory of knowledge tends to be skeptical of a notion of human consciousness capable of producing these effects (we prefer to think it is done by discourse, networks, chemicals, conspiracies, machine processes anything but human compassion, thought, and will). But the upheaval is meaningless without its underlying motivations. If we want a Hacker culture and DIY ethic we probably need to go right to the economic and political roots of the problem. If we want liberating technologies it's probably best that we, as many as possible, form a collective discourse of human rights and start agitating for it. Occupy is a good start. When you want to be free and when you have companions in the struggle, you tend to use every tool at your disposal to make it happen in whatever way possible, small or large. It's the motives that have been eliminated, and that is entirely consistent with counterinsurgency tactics. Peace! Davin On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:43 PM, Anne Balsamo annebals...@gmail.com wrote: To push the topic thread in a slightly different direction, I'd like to go back to a point that Margaret raised about consumer technologies becoming revolutionary technology. Directs attention away from the level of innovation that we've been commenting on,
Re: [-empyre-] yes, but, well, and...
Jon - The citation you don't make is http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1Sect2=HITOFFd=PALLp=1u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htmr=1f=Gl=50s1=6,243,740.PN.OS=PN/6,243,740RS=PN/6,243,740 If I assume the assignee (Xerox, though it could be PARC, Inc at this point) is paying attention, then so far there isn't enough money being exchanged in these joinings of experience to warrant attempts of enforcement. Will there ever be? Andrew - One of the things I think the work Jon, Margaret, Scott and I did as well as the work Anne, Mark, Scott, and I did were moves in the direction Matt Jones called From introverted to Extravagant Computing in Journeying Toward extravagant, expressive, Place-based Computing, interactions Volume 18 Issue 1, January + February 2011 (paywallled, unfortunately) where he laments, So, perhaps, the job is done. The infrastructure and interaction ideas are in place for a world that will be fully indexed, where every curb and every tree in every park will be mapped, documented, and accessible at the stroke of a seductively sleek smartphone. We will never be lost; we will be guided away from wandering or wondering and will no longer need to guess or take a risk. While these services are undoubtedly useful and used by increasing numbers of people, as I gaze onto a “streetview,” I am left a little cold. Where is the “streetlife”? I am left pondering the dangers these innovations pose to the joys, surprises, and even discomforts of exploring our cities, hills, or beaches. ... systems that are “always beside us, to guard and guide us…all around us, all the time, not too obvious, a quiet supporter.” Hymn-style, this presenter invokes a world that is made safe, calm, and solid by pervasive intelligence. Look through the lens-life: reality augmented to guide, guard, and provide for your every need. Our use of mobile devices was very much to enhance the discovery of a place and to some extent the place's discovery of you. Dale MacDonald Technology Manager Annenberg Innovation Lab University of Southern California http://annenberglab.com On May 10, 2012, at 5:19 AM, Jon Winet wrote: Andrew = On the fly - great comments. I think the mobilization and often miniaturization of networked devices | communications bring into sharp focus, as it were, the continuing power of large electronic displays in public spaces - [Tokyo's Shibuya - http://crab.rutgers.edu/~seduffy/Japan2007/shibuya.JPG | New York's Times Square - http://dguides.com/images/newyorkcity/attractions/times-square.jpg ] and the roles still waiting to be played out as the two are joined to create collective and individually electronically-mediated experiences. The joining up operation of the mobile device and the Big Screen is taking a lot longer than we expected - see link to antique 1997 website documenting Sunset, a project Scott | Dale | Margaret and I produced on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood during that year's edition of SIGGRAPH [ http://www.concentric.net/~jonwinet/documentation/9.html + http://www.concentric.net/~jonwinet/documentation/10.html ]. The occasional experiment or cell-phone triggered polling in a stadium aside, large scale public displays remain read-only for the most part. Greater interactivity and the challenges and opportunities afforded await us in the near future, and the work Scott | Anne | Dale | Onomy Labs undertook suggest some of the most humane, and surprisingly intimate possibilities. [http://www.onomy.com/blue/gallery/interactive-09.html +} I'd love to see a list of your top picks for books | readings on mobile devices and public. On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Andrew Schrock aschr...@usc.edu wrote: I've been greatly enjoying the discussion thus far, and hope I'm jumping in at an appropriate time. [super quick intro: I'm a USC Annenberg Ph.D student working with Anne at the public interactives research team/PIRT, where we're working on a digital book on tinkering called Ways of the Hand. My perspective comes out of mass communication, micro-sociology, and media studies, which have many resonances with Anne's work] I would be curious, following from the mention of Arab Spring, to hear responses from the group about the role of interfaces as they shift towards mobile devices. Scott raised the question about mobilities and mixed-reality interfaces. When I hear public interactive I think of public layers that can be punctuated with everyday devices and afford new visibility. Mobile devices are increasingly adopted in developing countries and present a primary mode of going online. So it seems that many concerns raised under the guise of public interactives shift towards different types of devices, even though they are so visibly and functionally different. And even though it is (as Dale reinforces to me) mobile devices are a fundamentally different experience than large screens and other forms of
