spela

being distant, being digital

A few major differences can be identified with extended use of Internet.
Overcoming spatial distance is one of the first: where not only access to distant ideas and information is gained but also access to people as such. People became physically present through projection and extension of their intellect (Sherry Turkle, 1995 v Life on the Screen:Identity in the Age of the Internet). People are thus accessible as information deriving from their specialisation. Specialisation became a standard platform of knowledge architecture. It merges data into modular knowledge structures from which information and communication flows derive.
Secondly, with this kind of mediation or remediation we lost physical contact (some consequences were mentioned in previous post). By loosing this contact our relationships became digital instead of traditionally analogous, sensible and continuous. In the case of digitalization, mediation is always in between and code is always a means of representation.
When everyone and everything relevant is reduced to 0 and 1s and is mediated in a digital way, everything became a data, ready for knowledge supplementation into a mental hologram or simulation.

Thirdly, these holograms are instantiated - instantly accessible, naturalised and logical in its strange fragmented and merging way. They became immediate means of personal orientation, navigation and operation. The shift from orientation to operation is crucial. It brings forth the automata, intuition as an instinct.

Further they are standardly encoded and decoded. Standardization of the code is guaranteed by limited possibilities for the use of technologies. Limitations of technologies seems to be the final goal of media monopolies: of course you can leave this virtual community and voluntarily join another one, but what does this unexpected generosity hide from us? where can you escape and what possible alternatives are available to me? this are the questions that should be asked when talking about infocom-technological development and media monopolies.

When everything is digital, everything is traceable ... and if undesired can also be silenced or erased. By being erased means being excluded with no voice... no interest... no interaction... no existence. Ironically nobody should leave the desired pattern but use it and foster it with new ideas about power relations by using given services, tools called new media or new info-com technologies. Is our communication standardized to a degree that we are intuitively following the pattern? And as follows - are we becoming mute?

Who controls us from a distance? How are we becoming determined by standard digital code, as we are by genetic and memetic one?

posted by spela @ 6/06/2006 02:24:00 PM 0 comments

Loss of contact and its hyper-consequences

By the loss of contact and by emerging digitalisation, our supplementation of knowledge has changed. Contact meant certain linearity, at least some certainty into consecutivness and causal relations. A sequential organisation of knowledge as linear causal consistnecy was possible because of this time and cause related contact.

In CMC contact is hypermediated (hyperlink), REpresented and artificial. Contacts are instant and ephemeral, more like tryings and experiments than substantiated and lasting relations. Some get stabilized and legitimized because of the large publicity and use, regardless to its causal embeddedness. Such discontinuity of data, unsequential and nonconsecutive nature of uses emerged that is not only marginalising time and causal linearity but favoring a new way of creative merging of contents - a modularity:

Modularity is a different kind of supplementation and knowledge organisation. Modular structures are not linear or time related but are in contrary conceptual, building a matrix of logically consistent relations (S. Papson, R. Goldman, and N. Kersey,2004.Web Site Design: Hypertext Aesthetics and Visual Sociology) based on content and foreknowledge.
Such "educational constructivism" produces hyper structures that are knowledge simulations and a new way of controlling perception, which is personal ability to perceive and supplement the knowledge and thus control our mental environment (simulation controls someone's control).

Modularity (or even hypertextuality) is based on the tenet that everything can be fragmented, broken into pieces, atomized and then merged together according to preferences, according to desired pattern under certain agenda.

Possibilities in this way are easier to control, user's (public, experts', ...) specialisation is more intuitive and narrower and the number of alternatives can be marginalized and silenced.

posted by spela @ 6/06/2006 12:14:00 PM 0 comments