Learning ubiquity

Over the course of this paper, I have found that when faced with arguments such as Heidegger's notion of readiness-to-hand (98) and its implications for the ways we (don't) think about the technology we live with, and perhaps especially Luhman's posthuman insistence that society is no longer a "human" one (5), I find it the most natural thing in the world to struggle with these concepts for a few hours, maybe a couple of days, and then at the end of it suddenly retcon my own knowledge from a snide "what is this heresy?" to an equally superior "well obviously".

Growing up between the '90s and early 2000s, I was involved in the social revolutions of email, instant messaging programs, social network websites and downloadable music and movies. I have lived through one of the largest cultural paradigm-changes in history, have been on both sides of what we now know as the digital divide, and as ubiquity continues to colonise and settle in all regions of our cultural database, I have to wonder if my attitude is simply a coping mechanism, the result of some overlooked repository of internalised technophobia breaking the surface of my unconscious, goaded out by data that threatens to rewrite my cognitive map.

Have I learnt effectively? And am I the only one whose values are pre-ubiquity in a post-ubiquity world? The warnings of police to online daters following a woman's gang-rape after agreeing to meet somebody she met on Tinder directly regurgitate rape culture's victim-blaming rhetoric, which far precedes the concept of ubiquitous media. Is media too ready-to-hand (Heidegger, 98) for us to responsibly use without juggling a job and dense philosophical study, even if "we" are the police, the government - the people who design this media?

Who is learning, and learning what?

Bottles and bus stops

09/11/2014, 2:50pm. Bus stop. Sun-induced heat. Bus is due but has not arrived. Lack of water bottle.

 

Tension builds.

09/11/2014, 3:05 pm. Bus arrives - on the other side of the road, completing its route from the city. I suppose this means it will soon come around again to this stop and finally "arrive".

Really wishing I'd brought my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:15 pm. Bus still has yet to "arrive", despite the fact that I saw it across the road ten minutes ago, and it only comes once an hour, said hour supposedly beginning and ending every ten minutes to the hour. Why is it late? Did I miss an automated text? I do not possess this information. 

The information that I do possess is that this bus should have arrived at 2:50pm, as it clearly states on the timetable. We don't even have a digital timetable here; we only have one of the plastic ones skewered on a pole. That is also information I have ready-to-hand. 

I have decided that, at this point, the next bus is due in half an hour anyway ("due"), so I may as well risk going back to the house and getting my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:22 pm. It has been four minutes since I returned with my water bottle, and the bus has now finally arrived, after standing for half an hour in anticipation of said arrival. 

As I board, I wonder if this crisis might have been averted if my facebook profile was public rather than private, if I allowed Google to track my location, if I had made myself more accessible, allowed myself to be fully encapsulated by the various arcane algorithms and unexplained profit margins that enclose my position within the traffic of the social network. If only I had embraced ubiquity more fully.

Wherever ubiquity is, it's not on my bus route.

Lametti vs World of Warcraft

Lametti points out that "Apple has built its highly successful business model around incompatibility" (216). Hinting towards an era where the Cloud replaces the Internet - or perhaps more accurately, towards an era where Clouds replaced the Internet - as the primary site of public discourse and private data storage, the future according to Lametti will most likely be one full of gatekeepers, paywalls and segregation, propping up a system of neoliberal privatisation that will be as ubiquitous as the media that facilitate its effects.

Lametti also notes that the deregulated Internet allowed for "file sharing and mash-ups" (203) to emerge as dominant, definitive and most importantly collaborative forms of self-expression online - Lametti predicts that this will all disappear with the dominance of the Cloud.

However, taking the example of "machinima" content created by World of Warcraft players, we can see contemporary parallels that seem somewhat less bleak. Celebrated by the community and actively encouraged by Activision Blizzard, "machinimation" involves using a program to extract models from WoW as files and then manipulate them, along with other video editing techniques, to create an original piece of art.

Generally humorous and inherently subversive, machinimation seems to actively undermine Activision Blizzard's monopoly over its own content, politically, economically and legally. And yet, Activision Blizzard encourages this practice, as it provides a source of free advertising, strengthens bonds within the community, and makes them look like benevolent overlords.

It is also a source of free labour, much like the numerous and popular "let's play" YouTube channels. Even Jane McGonigal, champion of gamification, insists that people not be paid for their efforts, because then people would only ever do things for money (232). 

While the example of WoW's paratextual environment provides an alternative version of the future to Lametti's privatised nightmare, perhaps the prospect of glorified unpaid labour is not that much better.

Rationally paranoid

According to Harper, certain paranoid behaviours can be rationalised in certain contexts. For example: people who belong to minority groups may express "paranoid" beliefs about society, but given the systematic persecution that minority groups face on a daily basis, these beliefs are perhaps less paranoid and more reasonable conclusions drawn from personal experience. Even websites that use surveillance methods for their users' supposed benefit, such as dating sites, do not necessarily store their users' personal information responsibly, as with this case in Texas.

Modern media such as facebook and instagram ensure that it is not only minorities and disgruntled online dating folk who have reason to believe they are being monitored and watched in ways that make them uncomfortable; Andrejevic's example of "Room Raiders" suggests that anybody could be targeted by surveilling forces at work in society - and that we are the ones targeting ourselves. It seems that we not only enjoy watching other people being exposed (often with humiliating results and an end-goal of public shaming for humorous effect), but we actually enjoy being exposed as well.



It may be tempting to conclude that the modern media-savvy netizen is not so much paranoid as exhibitionist, one who bares their soul openly with no thought to the consequences. But this ignores the fact that our online personas are carefully constructed. This is something that Andrejevic suggests we are very savvy about, the constructedness of virtual self, and that we are constantly aware of this norm of image-control when online. Rather than a case of paranoia or exhibitionism, I would say it is having a sense of control: we enjoy it when we feel able to mediate ourselves online, and feel upset when the information we want control over is in somebody else's hands.

Toys Are Us

After reading Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal, in which a broad plan for “saving the world” is outlined through the deployment and cultural up-taking of ubiquitous gaming (my phrasing), the readings for this week took on an interesting slant, because Tamagotchis and Furbies are not simply robots; they are specifically toys. If we identify a toy as “a tool that is used for playing games with, both Tamagotchis and Furbies make a lot more sense than if they are simply "sociable robots", which could conceivably be autonomous in their actions and responses, geared towards a very broad, general concept of what is “sociable”; a toy robot's actions responses will always be designed to both respond to and constitute the rules of the game that is to be played. And the game one plays with these toys is a game of caring for a living being, or a being that is “alive enough”.

What makes it a game, according to Jane McGonigal’s line of thinking, is the arbitrary and voluntary basis of this undertaking on behalf of the “player”: we do not need to care for a Furby, but we do so anyway because caring is what Furbies exist to have done to them by us. By this logic, it seems as though all toys and games are systems that use "players" to perform themselves, rather than the players performing the game.

But factoring into this Clark’s suggestion that, rather than the human brain preceding the technology it invented, the two are and have always been caught up in a reciprocal, ongoing developmental cycle without which neither could exist, it is not so much a question of whether we are playing the game or the game is playing us; rather, it is the question of whether there has ever been any other state of affairs, and if this is not precisely how we human beings have become what we currently are.

Utopiastarter

Kickstarter, Pledgeme, Indiegogo - if cyberlibertarians ever wanted a poster-child for the new millennium, surely this is it: direct interaction between producers and consumers of goods with no government interference, all done online. When the myth of the free internet is invoked, it is crowd-funding models like these that are often paraded out as examples of how we're already there, the house of tomorrow, today.

Whether the infamous potato salad Kickstarter is a stealthy satirical social experiment or simply somebody seeing an opportunity and taking it, it may point to some kind of chronic illness within our society that this Kickstarter project could even exist. But we can still interrogate the idea of "freedom" using it as an example. Yes, we are indeed free to fund the creation of a potato salad (the goal was $10; the amount raised at the time of posting is $55,492), but what kind of freedom is that? It is a distinctly libertarian freedom, because supposedly this is the kind of thing that a (decent) government would prohibit people from funding, and perhaps even from offering up as a good to begin with, because it is, as the old expression goes, daylight robbery.

If this is the kind of freedom we can look forward to in the coming media-made utopia, it is also important to note that these crowdfunding platforms are not self-sufficient, which is to say that without our particular economic system (capitalism) and market as conditions, they could not work. They work because they fill an operational niche, not because they necessarily represent a new paradigm that can stand on its own. In this sense, it is perhaps comforting to think that potato salad Kickstarters will not become the new normal, although at least in cyberlibertarian terms, this may also mean that utopia is something the likes of which we will never truly know.

Society does not contain human beings. In other news, Facebook owns your soul.

Today, while engaging in an act of hyper-reading while finishing the 10 pages of Moeller I had left over from yesterday, I came across a petition to stop facebook's messenger app from doing ... something. Accessing photos and making calls on your behalf or something insidious like that. I signed the petition like a good little sheep, and was immediately challenged by someone on facebook.



After a refreshingly rational mini-debate, I reflected upon my decision and reasoned that, since I'm still using facebook and have been for the past five-ish years, and have known about privacy issues all that time, it's a bit rich of me in some ways to be protesting the very functionality that I am happy enough to be complicit in the legitimising process of.



The idea that "only communication can communicate", paired with the concept of society no longer containing human beings, goes hand-in-hand with this sort of tension over ubiquity. Yes, we know that our apps and email accounts don't technically belong to us and that by their very design they infiltrate as much of our "private lives" as possible, that even if in practice the majority of people who use said media are not having their private lives constantly ravaged by the NSA, Illuminati or church of Scientology, the potential for it is very much real. We also know that we have very little insight as to the mechanics of Facebook or Gmail, unless we're involved in the field of web design or can write code. We know that we, humans, are not a part of this communication. And knowing that, we use it anyway.

Systems theory may bring a gut reaction of "begone vile misanthrope" at first glance, but perhaps the concept of a society without human beings is one that we accepted quite some time ago, and are (happily or not) content to see the continued autopoiesis of indefinitely.