Niles Eldredge is good at collecting things, particularly fossils. He is Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology at the City University of New York, and has been a palaeontologist for nearly forty years. His personal specialty is trilobites – a group of extinct arthropods that lived roughly 540-245 million years ago. Eldredge examines the fossil record of trilobites to determine their evolutionary history, demarcating lineages based on the way their form has changed over time. His ultimate goal is to develop a better understanding of how the biological evolutionary process works to produce the patterns of history he sees in his trilobites. Collecting fossils is a passion.

In 1972, Eldredge developed the theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’ with Stephen Jay Gould. This is a revision of Darwinian theory that debunked a reigning assumption in paleontology at the time; that fossil records should show smooth, gradual change over any timescale. Eldredge and Gould showed that the creation of new species occurs in rapid bursts over short periods, followed by long periods of stability where organisms undergo little change (1972). According to Ernst Mayr, whether one accepts this theory or rejects it, ‘there can be no doubt that it had a major impact on paleontology and evolutionary biology’ (1992). Since that time, Eldredge has written 20 books and more than 100 scientific articles on evolutionary theory. Some of his books include The Pattern of Evolution (1999), Life in the Balance (1998) and Re-Inventing Darwin (1995). His most recent book is called Why We Do It (2004). It puts forward a convincing critique of gene-centred theories of evolution.

When he is not writing books or collecting fossils, Eldredge has another passion: cornets, a type of musical instrument. He has over 500 cornet specimens at his house in New Jersey, arranged into taxonomic groups of shape and style, manufacturer and date. There are silver and gold ones, polished and matte, ancient and modern. Late in 2002, Eldredge’s curiosity got the better of him: he started to wonder if these instruments had an evolutionary dynamic of their own, and what this might look like. Could there be a pattern, a general structure to the way that cultural artefacts evolve? He decided to put the instruments through their evolutionary paces, to apply the ‘scientific method’ to cultural artefacts for the first time.

Eldredge and Cornet Collection © Eldredge 2003

But before he could do this, he had to work out exactly what characteristics he was tracing. Biologists deduce lineages for organisms based on characteristics like shell shape or genetic similarity. Eldredge chose a representative sample of 36 cornets from his collection, and nominated 17 characteristics (or features of cornet “anatomy”) to trace over time, like how the bell is positioned on the instrument. He then fed this data through the phylogenetic computer program he uses for his trilobites.

The results were astounding. Compared to phylogenetic diagrams for biological organisms, the lines in the cornet evolutionary tree were thoroughly confused. Instead of a neat set of diagonal V-shaped branches, a ‘cone of increasing diversity’, you would see flat lines from which multiple machines appeared. Flat lines do not usually characterise biological phylogenetic diagrams; when they occur, they imply explosive radiation. In material cultural systems flat lines are abundant, and this may tell us something about the dynamic at work behind cultural evolution. This means that the cornet’s relationship to time and inheritance is different to that of biological organisms. The question is exactly how it is different, and if this difference might be translated into a general theory of material cultural evolution. That is the topic under discussion here.

Image © Greg Miller, from New Scientist 07/03

Eldredge has now assembled a database of nearly 200 makers, 123 distinct ‘models’ and 525-550 entries, spanning 1825 to the present. This database and the phylogenetic information it contains is perhaps the first detailed study into the lineage of a material cultural artefact. Eldredge is cautious about using Darwinian metaphors haphazardly, however; this evolutionary ‘dynamic’, if it exists, is radically different to what is found in the natural world. Unlike nature, cultural artefacts are subject to intelligent design.

The following discussion took place in March 2004.
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BB: Although biologists usually think about evolution in strictly physical terms, you think about it in terms of information; evolution is the ‘fate of heritable information in an economic context’. In the biological realm this makes complete sense – at a cursory level, information about an organism and its family history is inscribed in DNA, and this information is passed on to offspring if the organism is successful. On another level, organisms ‘compete’ for scarce energy resources in order to live, and this has implications for the survival of genes into the next generation. But in terms of material cultural evolution this gets more complicated.

Cultural artefacts like computers or cornets don’t have their histories neatly inscribed in DNA to pass on to the next generation; they don’t have ‘agency’ or a will to compete for resources in this economic sense. Yet we think we see a ‘history’ in some cultural artefacts, they demonstrate change over time and stability of some core characteristics (for example, your collection of cornets). This makes me wonder what the mode of transmission might be between cultural objects, if it is human beings who pass ‘characteristics’ between artefacts, or if this information is contained in the objects themselves.

How do you think historical information is passed between cultural artefacts? Do you think that the history or ‘lineage’ of an object – like a technical machine – is inscribed in the object itself?

NE: In both biology and material cultural systems, history is indeed staring you in the face when you look at a wombat or a cornet. But there is no way to divine that history unless you compare a series of objects that you assume a priori are related-more wombats; other marsupials; other mammals, other vertebrates, or a series of cornets. This is the so-called “comparative method”-and owes its beginnings to the nominal father of comparative anatomy, Baron Georges Cuvier.

In the biological realm, you find that while not all wombats are exactly alike, they share a lot of features-more than they do with any other mammalian species. You find they share with other species like koalas and wallabies a reproductive system different than other otherwise putative relatives (like platypuses): there are subgroupings here defined on the basis of shared possession (i.e. within the group) of features not seen in the other subgroups; but the pouched animals share with the placental ones (e.g. rabbits) the presence of three bones in the middle ear-unlike the egg-laying platypus, with one bone there. Yet all three groups have hair.

So you think: hair is more widely distributed in nature than three-bones-in-the middle ear; hair is in animals (platypus) that otherwise lay eggs and have a single middle-ear bone-features that are also found in still other animals lacking hair (reptiles). So we think we see history here: hair evolved before non-egg-laying modes of reproduction; hair defines “mammalia”, while the placenta defines, well, placental mammals. Hypotheses such as these are further tested by addition of new data (for example, gene sequences)-which may or may not agree with notions of history previously derived from comparative anatomy.

For the most part, simple trees of what-is-more-closely-related to-what fall out of this sort of exercise-trees which, as Darwin pointed out-must exist if all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor. This search for history among a series of objects is a mapping exercise of the distribution of characteristics.

The same must be true, in general, in any system that has a history-i.e. some features of a focal object (a cornet, say) expectedly were invented before others-every instrument type is a melange of design ideas of varying age. The circular pattern of three turns in the windway between mouthpiece and valves-the pattern most commonly seen in cornets-was in place before a third valve was added to the original two, and before the modern valve was invented and incorporated onto these instruments. We happen to know this through patents and dated specimens-but it is also apparent simply because two valved cornets with the older valve type, and three-valved cornets with that valve type have this “circular wrap”-indistinguishable from the wrap of modern cornets with modern valves. Same principle.

But right away there are problems: what do you call a 4 ½’ long coil of lip-blown brass tubing furnished with a slide (like a trombone) rather than valves (like a piston valved trumpet, or cornet)? Is it a soprano trombone, or a slide trumpet/cornet? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” Depending upon context, such instruments have been built and called all of these names-both before and after the invention of valves.

The key difference is that biological systems predominantly have “vertical” transmission of genetically-ensconced information (meaning parents to offspring). To be sure, there are some groups where hybridization (lateral blending of two species) occurs; remotely related bacteria are also famous for being able to exchange genetic information. But the neatness of evolutionary trees in general in biological systems stems from the compartmentalisation of information within historical lineages.

Not so in material cultural systems-where horizontal transfer is rife-and arguably the more important dynamic. Makers copy each other, and patents affording only fleeting protection. Thus, instead of neatly bifurcating trees, you would predict to find what is best described as “networks”-consisting of an historical signal of what came before what, obscured often to the point of undetectability by this lateral transfer of subsequent ideas.

But unlike nature (including the fossil record), material cultural systems of the modern era characteristically leave a paper trail-patents, advertising, sometimes even serial numbers and records of the dates they represent that allow an independent assessment of history-one against which the results of a comparative study can be compared. Unsurprisingly, it is VERY good to have this extra information!

So, yes, the information is in the object-even if no single specimen (of an organism, or a machine) can tell you what that history is. The information also resides in plans, drawings, photographs, shop models-accurate representations of the objects. But the information just sits there. It takes people to replicate, further modify-or go laterally around, by coming up with alternative designs-that information. There are, inevitably, constraints limiting directions of change to the system (you cannot lengthen or shorten a 4 ½’ tube without changing the pitch; you need cylindrical tubing for adjustable slides for tuning, etc.); there may also be latent possibilities for change in the system itself, but this is harder to define and grasp. This needs further exploration.

BB: I’d like to talk about the relationship between human beings and material cultural artefacts a bit more; particularly the idea that information in artefacts just ‘sits’ there, that it requires humans to modify and transfer itself. So the inventor of a technical machine, for example, would transfer information between generations of machines. Do you think that this creative genius, ideas and designs, are themselves inherited?

NE: Knowledge is inherited through the wider cultural context-minimally two humans-the teacher and the learner. One of the craftsman I have used to restore my old cornets started out as an apprentice in the German company Alexander Gebr. For the first year, he got there before dawn, lit the fire, swept up and, I guess, made the coffee. He wasn’t allowed to touch anything for that entire first year-and then was given the simplest of tasks. By degrees he was taught all the intricacies of how to make a trumpet from sheets of brass-and by the end of his five year apprenticeship, he was a master trumpet builder.

Put another way, the best cornetist who ever lived never heard of a cornet, much less saw or played one. You have to live in a place where cornets have already been dreamt up and manufactured, and music conceived for cornetists to play; the odds are great that the (potentially) greatest cornet player so far did not live in a time or place where there were cornets. That is the role of the ambient knowledge of culture.

BB: So the ability to play or manufacture cornets – the techniques associated with the instrument – are inherited through this wider cultural context. Humans are not born with the ability to fashion trumpets from sheets of brass, nor to read music and play cornets; they must be born into a culture where these things already exist so they can acquire them. The same applies to language – we are born ‘into’ language, it existed before us and will continue after us, and it has its own history, larger than ourselves (Stiegler, 1998).

Techniques in particular can achieve ‘stability’ through time, they can be handed down from teacher to learner for generations. There is variation in these techniques, there is change, but also stability of some core characteristics. This can occur with the design of cultural artefacts as well (we can see it with computers, for example, which come in ‘generations’ – each design is slightly different, but we perceive a history in those designs). What is interesting is how this might be different from biological evolution; selection must work differently, for example.

What would you say are the dynamics of change in material cultural systems compared to biological systems?

NE: Consider stability through time of a particular design as a prelude to understanding the dynamics of change when it does occur. Comparison with biological systems is instructive-and stability in biological systems is perhaps my signature area of evolutionary theory (“stasis” is the dominant signal of most species’ histories-and a cornerstone empirical element of the notion of “punctuated equilibria” that I developed with Steve Gould back in the 1970s).

In biological systems, species have natural boundaries-the limits determined by the ability of component organisms to mate successfully. Component organisms of a species ordinarily cannot and do not mate with components of other species organised in the same way; they have different “Mate Recognition Systems” that define the species and keep them distinct from other species. Thus species are discrete packages of genetic information. Stability of such systems for the most part hinges on the fact that species tend to be widespread, with subunits living in a variety of somewhat different environments (different temperatures, water resources, food items, predators, diseases, etc.)-so the probability that natural selection will push such a heterogeneous melange in any one particular direction is always very low.

In material cultural systems, where lateral exchange among designs (such as my cornets) is rife, and where human inventiveness always lurks to change the system, we also find astonishing stability/conservatism-more than one might have predicted. But here there are no genetic constraints, no boundaries to the system, responsible for stasis in design. And while it may be true that there is simply no other better way to design something (a simple tool like a hammer, perhaps-or a more complex object like a trumpet), hence the design in place remains forever fundamentally the same, this is seldom the entire story.

I think there are two forms of “selection” which account for most of design stability: manufacturers of cornets were in general always aware of design variation in the marketplace at large. Manufacturers “selected” a few of the possible models to focus on-based, presumably, on their perception of what would sell, and also constrained by the exigencies of manufacture: tooling to make a design is usually expensive and takes up space.

The “type-token” relationship is critical here: in industrial design, there is a concept, a design (the “type”), and individual exemplars (the “tokens”) are the more-or-less faithfully rendered versions of the type. These types may sort of drift through time. But basically they remain the same-if the design is successful in the marketplace. In another context, once uniformity in design and production techniques was achieved in Palaeolithic stone tool cultures, a fantastic level of fidelity of product was achieved-with some tools lasting many tens of thousands of years essentially unchanged

So those are the two main constraints-a form of “selection” mediated by the exigencies of manufacturing in a type/token framework, and the demands of the public for (1) models that their friends or famous musicians have adopted, and (2) uniformity/consistency in manufacturing quality.

But change, of course does come in the history of designed systems-and that change can only come through the actions of individuals. In this context, consider yet another crucial distinction between biological and material cultural systems: in biology, we speak of “mutations”-which for the most part are copying errors when DNA is replicated. They are mistakes-and bear no relation to the needs of the organism. If a mutation is harmful, selection weeds it out; if it is neutral, mutations can accumulate as background genetic variation; and if, of course, a mutation proves beneficial, it will immediately be selected for.

BB: What is the equivalent of mutation in industrial design?

NE: Accidental copying mistakes that lead to something useful have no doubt occurred (I cannot with confidence point to any such examples in the history of cornet design-but products of a chemical nature might very well provide examples). And (as my colleague T. Ryan Gregory points out) all sorts of ideas undoubtedly pop up, often unbidden, and perhaps not all at the conscious level, in the creative mind-many to be instantly discarded, but perhaps some to be kept and eventually incorporated into new designs: a more compelling analogy to biological mutation.

But much more prevalent is “directed variation”-the deliberate production of variant designs. This is a huge difference between biological and material cultural systems-as the two-step biological process of generation of random variation and the process of selecting for or against that variation is fused in designed systems: variation is dreamt up for a purpose-so a variant of a type is imagined and selected simultaneously.

The individual human is indeed very important here, when it comes to design innovation. Often there is an element of play (as when a French maker, I believe Gautrot, supposedly fashioned a cornet tube out of cheese-to demonstrate that the resonating tube’s function did not depend upon the material from which it was constructed). Sometimes it is an honest attempt to improve pre-existing designs. Often (probably most often) it is an attempt to outstrip competition in the marketplace.

Consider patents again; patents are designed to protect product designs that are deemed sufficiently different from other similar products-a property rights protection. But a case can easily be made that patents actually spur on invention-as, prevented for a number of years from making a particular design, a rival manufacturer often comes up with a variant version-one that is different enough to avoid patent infringement law suits.

So patents often spur on end-runs-i.e. ways of going around protected designs by coming up with something yet different again. The history of the Perinet valve in cornets is in large part a story of patents, alternatives-and finally a winnowing process and ultimate selection of one-of-many designs, after the patents have long-since expired.

And this simple consideration leads to yet another deeply profound difference between biological and material cultural systems. In biology, because of the mode of genetic inheritance, and because, too, of the packaging of that genetic information into discrete species, what evolutionary change occurs is predicated/controlled to an enormous extent on the previous state of the system. The length of a mammal’s tail can be changed in evolution-but only given the pre-existence of a tail, the requisite genetic variation that allows such modification-and of course the environmental component of selection that will utilise that variation to lengthen or shorten the tail.

This “memory-in-the-system” that constrains, informs and possibly in a sense guides the further evolution of the system, is also to be found in material cultural systems-but, at least insofar as my cornet data show, to a far lesser degree than in biological systems. For example, there is a sort of progressive (if step-wise) modification in the length and depth of the instrument through time-as cornets became rather more like trumpets as the ages rolled by.

But by far the most striking feature of design history is the occurrence of alternative versions that cannot be said to emanate from any one pre-existing state. Thus, in the ten or so basic versions of the Perinet valve, the second design to appear was radically different from the valve that first appeared (that itself emulated the standard Stolzel valve it was eventually to replace). And so on with later designs-as originally pointed out by Mme. Florentine Besson in her 1874 patent of what I call Perinet valve # 5. Indeed, Mme. Besson stated in her patent of the “#5″ valve that it combined elements of the “#2″ and “#4″ earlier designs (both of which she claimed to have been prior inventions of her firm-though the # 2 valve was almost certainly the invention of Adolphe Sax).

Such connections are a far-cry from the situation in biological evolution-where change through time in structures always takes the form of “transformation series”-a sequence of primitive structures later modified into derived forms that themselves become primitive with respect to later, even more derived, conditions. That, indeed, is why there is a “heterobathmy of synapomorphy” in biological systems-i.e. those nested sets of resemblance that link up all of life.

In industrial design, such transformation systems are rare. The transistor replaces the vacuum tube-an alternative (and, in some contexts, not necessarily superior) way of performing the same function. But no way did the transistor “evolve from” the vacuum tube-the way the eyes on one side of a flatfish’s head are derived from the original bilaterally symmetrical conformation of the ancestral fish.

Lack of transformation series (for the most part) in the change in types in the design history of material cultural entities is the second major reason (along with lateral transmission of ideas across lineages) why the geometry of evolutionary trees of biological history will be expectedly different from trees depicting the history of designed objects.

That further implies, as a practical matter, that most of the algorithms developed to reconstruct biological history are inappropriate for the reconstruction of material cultural systems.

BB: So you have highlighted some major differences between biological and material cultural systems; firstly, in material cultural systems, the mechanism of lateral exchange among designs is rife. Secondly, evolutionary change in material cultural systems is not always predicated, controlled or limited by previous states of the same system as it is in biology; alternative versions occur which cannot be said to emanate from one pre-existing state. Material cultural systems also demonstrate ‘directed variation’; the deliberate production of variant designs.

Could these differences be creating a pattern, a pattern to the way that material cultural artefacts evolve?

NE: There are two general sorts of patterns lurking in the term as used so far in this dialogue: (1) the diagram that depicts the historical flow and fate of information (evolutionary trees or “cladograms” in biology)-perhaps better thought of as historical networks in material cultural systems. Because, in material cultural systems, lateral exchange of information is indeed rife, and because very often a change in state is not a smooth or linear derivation from the pre-existing state, the networks/trees are expectedly very different in the two systems. It would of course be interesting to work on this further-to derive the circumstances in design history which might mimic more closely the patterns of evolutionary trees.

But (2) there are other sorts of patterns-best thought of as the degree of stability/change of individual bits of information (valve design type, for example), and details of rates and modes of whatever change occurs in the system. There is stasis, gradual change, and abrupt change in both biological and material cultural systems-as perhaps first pointed out in any great detail by the historian F. J. Teggart in his Theory and Processes of History (1925/1977). In a sense, that these three sorts of patterns can be found in both systems is hardly surprising. After all, what can happen to information but to remain the same, be modified in some sort of gradual, progressive manner, change abruptly, or be replaced by an alternative)?

The dynamic processes underlying the stasis, gradual and abrupt change in both systems, however, cannot be the same-simply because of the differences in how the information is stored and transmitted. We have already touched on further differences-such as the degree to which mutation, selection, and drift in biological evolution finds valid counterparts in the design realm. Directed variation, for example, is all but unknown in biology-but lies at the heart of conscious design. So it is fascinating to me that similar patterns of fates of information (like stasis, gradual change, and abrupt change) are to be found in both systems, but for very different reasons.

“Stasis” in evolutionary biology is said to characterise entire species-and not just the isolated bits of anatomy of its component organisms. What this means, of course, is that most of the anatomical parts of organisms within a species remain for the most part stable (always allowing for variation and some drifting around-but never very far from the original condition). And this is true, too, of my cornet models-despite periods of rampant experimentation, for the most part, for most of the time, there were two or three basic models that dominated the marketplace. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, makers who supplied generally cheaper, less-well-made copies of the leading designs called them by the inventor’s/makers names who came up with the successful designs originally-e.g. the “Besson model” and the “Courtois model”.

"Wilderwall" © Eldredge 2003.

So, if one ignores the profusion of different valve types applied to each of these basic designs, a marked consistency/stability of design falls readily out of my cornet data.

Which leads me to the final pattern-one that has arrested my attention the most over the last decade or so: so-called “turnovers.” In biological evolution, these are disruptions of economic systems that affect the genetic composition of many different species at the same time. Small-scale disturbance leads to ecological succession-and the eventual resumption of pretty much the status quo state of the pre-disturbed system. On the other extreme end of the spectrum, there is global mass extinction-where entire groups of organisms are wiped out; evolution is based on the genetic information that survives (perhaps as little as 4%, it has been estimated, after the most devastating event 245 million years ago)-thus entirely new groups eventually arise, and the complexion of life is forever radically altered. There is, perhaps most interestingly, a mid-scale version of these turnovers-where regional environmental disturbance crosses a threshold and entire species begin to disappear. In such events, we find a complex pattern of speciation (evolution of new species), survival of some old species, and migration in and out of the region of still others. Thus the complexion of life in that region changes-far more than in local ecological succession, but far less than in wholesale, global mass extinction/evolutionary rebound situations.

BB: Are there comparable turnovers, or “revolutions” in material cultural history?

NE: Clearly there are-though I should note at the outset that extinction seems to be far more rare, and difficult to effect in the material cultural realm than in biological history. (Indeed, Kevin Kelly has recently suggested to me that true extinction simply does not occur in human-designed systems). Only when all artefacts of a system are lost is the underlying information completely lost (archaeologists had to experiment for years before they were confident that they had rediscovered certain Palaeolithic stone tool making techniques).

Another, related factor that expectedly “smears out” sharp turnovers within designed systems is simply the continued preference, the will to keep older designs around-at least in some regions. A design, or set of designs might disappear nearly completely in some places-but linger longer in others. Such was the case in perhaps the most conspicuous turnover in cornet design history-occurring right around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. In the early to mid-1890s, Conn in the United States, and the AGOR firm in Paris added a stop rod to the second slide of an otherwise conventional cornet model so that the pitch of the instrument could be adjusted precisely instantaneously. Portentously, AGOR called their design the “Fin-de-Siecle” (end of the century). Both firms kept the removable shank system as well-the older, slower method of changing pitch. But all that changed very fast, and by the early years of the twentieth century, many makers, especially in the United States, dropped the removable shanks in favour of what has long since become the modern “fixed lead pipe.”

Concurrently-i.e. right at the start of the 19th century–a wild proliferation of cornet design broke out among competing firms in the United States-longer, more trumpet-like cornets with an amazing variety of valve types/air flow design appeared at a very fast rate right up to the outbreak of World War I. Most disappeared as quickly as they arose-true extinction in the sense that they-at least so far-have never been manufactured subsequently. (In biology, specialized species, often with highly modified anatomies or behaviours, are also prone to faster rates of both evolution and extinction).

At the same time, the stalwart designs dominating the latter half of the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States all but became extinct (the double waterkey Courtois designs) or modified into fixed lead pipe, longer versions (the Besson single waterkey designs)-particularly in the United States. Courtois, in Paris, ceased producing its most classic cornets early in the century-copying instead their long-time rival Besson’s cornet designs. Yet in Great Britain and France, a preference for the older designs with shanks persisted well into the twentieth century (not disappearing until the 1950s).

So the turnover pattern is sloppy, and not identical between regions. But cornet design history was forever changed by events at the turn of the century-begging, of course, the question: What events were these? There being no evidence of worldwide economic slumps, social unrest such as warfare, or any leap forward in manufacturing materiel or techniques-the answer seems to lie in aesthetics: the turn of the century seemed to require new, “modern” designs-as indeed some of the surviving American advertising copy suggests. If this is indeed the case, a corollary prediction would of course be that a similar drive towards innovation for the new century should be evident in many other categories of product-a prediction that could be put to the test by careful examination of Sears Roebuck catalogues spanning the century’s turn.

Another example: The advent of radio pretty much killed the town band (over 80,000 thought to be active in the 1880s in the USA alone)-and manufacturers scurried to reinvent their market (the school band movement was the brainchild of Carl Greenleaf, who took C.G. Conn over in 1915). But radio and the recording industry-in ways as yet not completely understood, seem to underlie the great switch from cornets to trumpets-in the USA, in the early-mid 1920s (famously, Louis Armstrong made the switch in the mid-1920s, in so doing supposedly inspiring many other musicians in jazz as well as commercial and even classical contexts to do the same). Piston-valved trumpets were not manufactured in any great numbers until the 1920s.

Thus, economic “environmental factors” extraneous to the design, production and use of cornets appear to have had rare, but major, effects on the history of cornet design. The pattern mirrors the turnovers we seen in biological evolutionary history-but again, the details of the dynamic processes underlying the similar patterns in both systems differ substantially in detail.

Authors’ Biographies

Niles Eldredge is Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology at the City University of New York, and Curator-in-Chief of the permanent exhibition “Hall of Biodiversity” at the American Museum of Natural History. He has been a paleontologist for over forty years, and is the author of over 160 books and scientific articles on evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology. Why We Do It is his most recent book.

Belinda Barnet is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Her work has appeared both online and in print, in journals such as Continuum, Convergence, The American Book Review, Media/Culture, Fibreculture, Trace and CTheory. [bbarnet@swin.edu.au]

References

Mayr, Ernst. ‘Speciational Evolution or Punctuated Equilibria,’ in Albert Somit and Steven Peterson (ed.s), The Dynamics of Evolution (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 21-48.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Further Reading

Barnet, Belinda. ‘Technical Machines and Evolution’, CTheory Article A319 (2004) http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=414

Eldredge, Niles. ‘Evolution in the marketplace’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 8 (1997):385-398.

_____. ‘Biological and material cultural evolution: Are there any true parallels?’, Perspectives in Ethology 13 (2000): 113-153.

_____. ‘An Overview of Piston-Valved Cornet History’, Historic Brass Sociey Journal 14 (2002): 337-390.

_____. Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995).

_____. Dominion (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1995; paperback edition: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

_____. Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

_____. The Pattern of Evolution (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1999).

_____. The Triumph of Evolution..And the Failure of Creationism (New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 2000).

[1] Representations of the online body seem constantly involved with issues of imprecise, crossed or broken boundaries. Online boundaries, both personal and group, appear especially fluid when contrasted with moves towards establishing impermeable boundaries offline. This contributes to perceptions of disembodiment or potential unity with machines. Online bodies are thus described in terms reminiscent of other constructs such as ghosts – partly because experiences of materiality can be described in terms of boundary issues, and partly because it is difficult to bring offline bodies to bear. From another angle, gender, when constructed as a polarity, also serves to “ghost” experience. However, online bodies are also connected to constructions and feelings of offline bodies to reduce ambiguities and to establish authenticity online. For example, mood, as sustained by the offline body, acts as a framing for communication in netsex, mourning and flame.

Another popular body metaphor in this context involves the description of people as cyborgs. It is sometimes claimed that cyborgs form radical “hybrid” entities. Yet cyborgs also get caught in boundary issues. The cyborg is, for example, caught in narratives that further capitalist technopower, whatever our intentions.

The situation becomes even more complex when we consider that both the ghostly body and the cyborg body are often contrasted with a virile and active offline body. This provides a further set of paradoxes if we consider the possibility of online action affecting the offline world. There are no easy answers.

1.1 Boundaries and Offline Bodies

As online and offline blur, and are intimately involved, it is useful to begin by looking at some offline issues around bodies, in particular those around boundaries. [2]

A common offline narrative indicating boundary anxiety holds that Western [3] bodies are precariously porous and under attack from outside by “germs”. These germs or viruses are ubiquitous evils associated with matter out of place, or untoward contact. They come from other people and overpower us when our personal or social boundaries are not maintained (Douglas, 1969). This narrative has expanded to include other boundary violators, such as carcinogens, radiation, chemical food additives, and genetic modification.

One of the best descriptions of this anxiety complex is given by Martin in her study of ideas about the immune system. However her thesis of change, from the maintenance of external barriers to the maintenance of personal immune systems, over the last 40 years, seems exaggerated. She gives plenty of contemporary examples of boundary anxiety towards foreign substances (1994: 37-9, 53-4, 67, 230ff.), reflected also in recent advertising campaigns promoting wars on bacteria in the household. The latter focus on children ingesting germs if bacteria are not “wiped out”. This indicates that barrier models of defence are still strong, despite reports of such anti-bacterial agents helping the evolution of resistant bacteria and impeding the development of the immune system.

Similarly in the “Western” world, boundaries between groups and methods of maintaining boundaries seem insecure and focuses of anxiety. People often feel unable to control either their own, or their group’s, destiny or security. Forces around them (political, economic, cultural, criminal, ecological etc.), seem beyond control and likely to overwhelm at any moment, often fortifying conspiracy theories and what Timothy Melly calls ‘agency panic’ (2000: 7-16).

Boundaries between work and home are threatened as portable electronics bring us forever in range of work. In politics the global is said to threaten the local and so on. States attempt to deal with anxieties around vagueness and disruption in their boundaries brought by technology, migration and corporate motility (Everard, 2000). In response, some try to construct boundaries which are impermeable to the outside. In Australia our government successfully appealed to an electorate through panic about being overwhelmed by refugees. The “fortress” enclave, equipped with private security guards, is widely represented as a response by the wealthier middle class to disorder around them (Hills, 1998). Evan McKenzie, writing in 1993, claimed that over 30 million Americans (one eighth of the population) lived in these enclaves (q. Boyer, 1996: 151). There is no reason to suppose this number has diminished.

As Cecil Helman points out, the terms of sickness (and hence boundary violation) are commonly used in describing society and its boundary problems – we live in a “sick society” suffering “epidemics”, or “plagues” of social problems (1992: 53-4, 67, 230ff.).

1.2 Online Boundaries

Such pressures and panics can intensify online as online groups rarely have formal boundaries, and almost never have boundaries observable by all members. People wander in and out, and the majority of members don’t participate, or participate so infrequently they are invisible. Fear of disruption from viruses, from spam, from outsiders, or trolls, who might wish to disturb the group is large (Marshall, 2000: Chp 5, Herring et al, 2003).

This vagueness of group boundaries extends to the personal in a blurring between presence and absence. In offline societies, it is generally possible to tell whether a person is present or not. Presence and status are acknowledged by others making, at the least, eye contact or grunts in a person’s direction, or by their pointedly ignoring that person. Identity is reinforced by reaction. People are generally aware of who is listening to the conversation and of their reactions to each other. Online this is usually not the case. It is possible for a person to be present without others being aware of them: there is no marker of existence beyond the act of communication itself. “Asence” is the term I have coined to express this almost ontological uncertainty, or suspension of being between presence and absence.

Even in email “conversation”, this suspension of being occurs in the lack of closure of exchange. In offline conversation, reception of a message and the ending of communication is marked by a negotiation of grunts and/or formal phrases – however, email conversation usually ends abruptly in suspension. There is no certainty whether you have been received, or read, or of the nature of your reader’s reaction. The only way to know that you exist to others is by their response, and yet only a relatively few mails to Lists receive acknowledgment, even if people liked the post. The writer receives little reinforcement or feedback to most of their communication presences. Their presence is always drifting away. Status has to be continually re-earned before a shifting audience. People might be able to express themselves without inhibition, thus giving a feel of intimacy, but there may be no response, thus giving the feel of absence and isolation. Attempting to resolve this asence is important for many online behaviours (Marshall, 2000; 2004).

2. Online Bodies

Initial explorations of what people report about online bodies focuses on the Mailing List Cybermind, the group with which I have most ethnographic experience. Cybermind was founded by Alan Sondheim and Michael Current in mid 1994 to discuss the ‘philosophical and psychological implications of subjectivity in cyberspace’. It has always been a List that has combined this discussion with a large amount of reportage, art, social activity and politics. I have been on List since December 1994. [4]

In May 1997 Alan Sondheim wrote questions to Cybermind which were relevant to these issues. The first question was: ‘When you are on-line, do you feel that your body has a specific beginning and ending? Are you aware of your body?’

Several people left the first part of this question unanswered, which may imply body beginning and ending are not normally within the awareness of “Western” people, or are taken for granted. However some implied they felt their bodies extend on line. For example Enok wrote: ‘I am a secret tiger, walking restless along the fence, stretching my paws out between the bars, – to touch and scratch the freedom’. Alan added: ‘it’s as if I’m extended into another space, boundariless’. Rose wrote that her body ‘flows into the space created for it. Always!’. Jerry: ‘my fingers reach out into the wires…’. These statements carry the implication that online life is free from restriction or the “resistance of the Real”, and hence from “materiality”.

Other people implied that they lost awareness of their body. Kerry wrote:

[After logging in], body awareness subsides against the intense linguisticity, the concentration on/of what is being _said_ even as the digits and the pixels conceal and obscure.

FOP2 wrote: ‘If there is ever a time when my body is simply carrying my eyes, this is it’. KNS suggested that body awareness varies with activity:

Different activities involve different physical sensations: reading on the web, my body is relaxed and I sprawl in the chair; posting I am more attentive, all my awareness focused on my fingers and I “feel” my mind more; with my online lover, I am aware of intense erotic sensations very different from RL sex

Paula wrote of disruption to this lack of awareness:

As in RL I am most often unaware of my body. But on occasion, as when the smell of the breeze (or person) causes a physical response in me, online I may suddenly become aware of the silky keys under my fingers.

Rose alone suggested that ‘Body awareness *increases*….. (‘Course, it might depend on the identity of the sender…. ;)’, implying this is related to sexual attraction. She answered the question about lack of boundaries with: ‘Only when a particular name appears. Love’.

Extension, and loss of body awareness was not my experience. This may be related to discomfort. I first proposed this when faced with increasing hand pain and in discussing downloading consciousness:

Pain inhibits typing, so there is less presence of me.[...] Would i exchange this body for a life in wires?

such a being would no longer be me, but i suspect there would be a lack in the wires- even more marked than the lack in life, and maybe- though pain free- I’d have even less to say.

Orlando, who did not mention extension, was also aware of physical discomfort: ‘Perpetual bloody headaches. I’m aware of my fingers and my head and my cramped legs, crossed and uncomfortable’. Similarly G mentioned their awareness of boundaries, and wrote: ‘Yes, the small muscles in my eyelids flutter like VoltaFrogsLegs. My butt aches, I need Coffee’.

Another question Alan phrased in terms of boundaries was: ‘Do you have immersion-feelings when on-line, lack of boundaries? If so, to what do you ascribe these?’

Immersion seems to have been interpreted by respondents to refer to their level of involvement in online activities, and was frequently linked with lack of awareness of time passing. For example zoogirl writes:

On-line (or whilst at the pc reading and writing) I feel immersed in what I’m doing to the extent that time telescopes and dissappears. I forget to eat (useful when dieting) and can usually carry on regardless of how tired I feel. This is unlike other activities. Sometimes, the tiredness evaporates when on-line in a way which worries me. It seems that the body is producing some chemical to override normal patterns in response to the CMC. I can’t work out why it should do this.

Rose comments ‘I’ll grant you this: the awareness of “time elapsed” is suspended in this medium. Remarkably so’. Kerry discussing the decline of his body awareness when online writes: ‘For evidence, it’s enough to look at the clock and see that 2 or 3 hours have evaporated’.

Perhaps this lack of time-awareness renders the experience of online life as occurring in a different type of time to “normal” time, and helps reinforce historical vagueness (lack of group history) or “mythic” time in which succession is not fixed.

Alan suggests “immersion feelings” are modality dependent:

I ascribe them to an identification with the site or domain I’m reading/writing. It happens more often when working on, say, javascript or exploring sendmail, than when reading/writing email. It happens totally with Netsex, the strongest often in cuseeme.

KNS thought immersion was compensatory for life problems, suggesting some moral ambiguities:

At times I do get completely immersed in being online and have difficulty focusing on my “real” life. I ascribe it to my fascination with the medium, but even more to difficulties in my real life.

Jerry locates the degree of immersion in intimacy and boundary fluidity:

yes there are always immersion feelings – same as when I write or read – the boundaries get fluid. I ascribe these to the question of the locus of subjectivitiy – how close one is to the Other – personal space is always variable depending on who one is talking to.

FOP2 agrees to the lack of boundaries:

Yes, have immersion-feelings when on-line, lack of boundaries?… Writing to a list is like being in Shaw’s heaven, where people are coming and going in a mist, meeting, fading away, so yes, no boundaries.

Which implies that to be conceived of as “boundaries” by “Western” people such boundaries have to be sharp or observable.

These responses imply that people’s experience of personal boundaries online are more fluid, weak or indefinite than in offline life (perhaps leading to a larger sense of self), unless inhibited by pain or discomfort. To become present online, the body becomes asent, which may be its condition in much offline involvement as well, but it seems more noticeable online. Vagueness of group and personal boundaries may reinforce each other.

One method of dealing with these boundary problems is to rigidly enforce the boundaries, or polarities, between the net persona and the person themselves. This argument usually proposes that all behavioural rules can be discarded because no behaviour on the net (which does not interfere with a user’s computer) can actually hurt another person. In this view only the “body,” as separated from the “mind”, can actually suffer pain. Two List members took this position at the Cybermind Conference but nearly all List members who commented disagreed, which might be expected given the positive valuation of empathy in the group (Marshall 2000, Chapters 10-12). Perhaps this rigid separation is also held by those who propose that netsex is safe sex with no ill consequences or that it is easy to separate public and private spaces on the net, with those who cannot being declared weak or naïve.

3. Sustaining Mood: Emotion, Framing and Intimacy

What people say about their online bodies does not exhaust the way they use their bodies online.

On an email List, a variety of moods is common, as many threads and responses appear simultaneously to the reader. Sustained mood (often construed as a bodily response), which can then become a stable framing for the interpretation of messages, is rare and most commonly occurs in flame wars, although it also occurs with death and netsex.

3.1 Flame War

It only takes a few people to create a flame war. Although many people may comment indirectly on a dispute the number of people directly involved can be small. In one memorable war, most mail came from five people, and not more than twelve commented directly, yet perceptions were that the dispute overwhelmed the List. Mail of one consistent mood (in this case hostile) dominated over the more fragmented moods of other mails. This derives from asence; only the visible or the responding exist to affect others. [5]

In an environment where it is next to impossible to exclude people (particularly in newsgroups), public condemnation and humiliation is the only obvious way to exert social control. Thus flames are often used to establish boundaries, to point out those unfamiliar with group conventions and get them to learn or leave. However, the List may become almost unreadably voluminous in a flame war, which drives away those with less commitment to it. So the way of establishing boundaries can also disrupt them. Further, if the body is the ultimate locus of power, then the frustration involved in trying to bring the body directly into acts of social control renders that body “immaterial” or at least asent; it cannot act directly upon the bodies of others.

3.2 Death

Sustained mood may partly explain people’s surprise at their intense emotional responses to Michael Current’s death in the first month of Cybermind’s existence. For example, Debra writes two years later:

The most powerful event of my online life (so far) was the death of Michael Current [...] I still don’t understand why, as right now when I think of him I find tears in my eyes.

Argyle, lurking at the time, reports in an article that she wondered:

What was going on with me? Why was I so upset? Why did I have to read all these messages. Why do I still think about it now? (1996: 136).

At the time of death, many other List members wrote as if surprised at the extent of their grief, and found they had to justify their ties to Michael – usually by describing offlist contact – thus establishing the personal ties necessary to legitimate grief.

Reiteration of grief from a relatively large number of people produced a radically different experience from the normal mode of reading, and for some this crossed Lists. Fido wrote:

For me the ritual has already begun in the cycling of messages repeated and repeated from list to list as I leaf through five, six seven copies of the same awkward anguish, one copy for each place we haunted together.

In these messages of grief, not only was the mood sustained, but the mood was known by everyone, and possessed a momentum of its own. We all have griefs, and these can all resonate (even if they were not initially griefs for Michael). [6] There was also no feeling that the surviving family needed to be protected from the grief of those distant from the deceased.

However there were few ritual usages to maintain mood, and no markers to remind people of the appropriate mood. Ritual gestures such as silence and quiet, common at “Western” funerals, would have simply implied the List was not present or was uninterested. Thus even with the intensity of feeling involved, the List could only maintain the mood for several days, and soon returned to normal.

3.3 Netsex and Framing

Netsex on Cybermind is covered in Marshall (2003) so the arguments are only briefly recapped here. Demands for authenticity and the conflation of gender relations with intimacy make gender exceedingly important in offlist or personal communication. Netsex is part of the hidden life of Cybermind, and occurs between members in other online environments. Following Foucault (1979: 6-7), discourse about sex in “Western” society tends to be considered a revelation of “truth”, and hence a form of declaring authenticity. This links with signs of the body acting as signs of authenticity, and suggests that sex is used to establish the “truth” needed to make intimacy.

Without normal persevering presence, sex and bonding become more marked, especially on MOOs, to reduce asence and give a sense of physical presence, anchored in a sustained, mutually referenced and common, offline body response.

On MOOs boundary problems and forms of asence are emphasised. On a MOO a person can be excluded; or an intimate conversation can have participants which another participant is not aware of; or a person can give attention to multiple subjects at the same time. [7] I have heard of people leaving the computer to smoke or go to the toilet without informing the person they were supposedly being intimate with. Any kind of special relationship in this circumstance needs something which renders a claim possible, yet conventions of authenticity clash with uses of ritual to maintain, or mark, these states or claims. Commonly people use sex to sustain the mutuality of mood.

Within this high asence environment with weak boundaries and little elaborated ritual code, people might need to “fall in love” to prove a relationship actually exists. Love is the prime justification in “Western” society for closeness and intimacy, particularly between the sexes. A person can then maintain the presence of the other before them via narration and body feeling. Netsex can also, as one person wrote to me, restore contact if the dialogue slides out of areas of mutual interest.

Concerns with asence and authenticity can clash and lead to deletion – especially given widespread fears of gender appropriateness around intimacy which translate into fears about the identity of the offline body. Even if the gender of the person online may not match their gender offline, the gender they choose usually exaggerates the conventions of gender construction. On MOOs, most women and men are adorned with an excess of the symbolisms of the gender and sexual discourse they participate within. As Springer writes, when discussing cyberpunk novels and films ‘cyberbodies, in fact, tend to appear masculine or feminine to an exaggerated degree’ (1996: 64).

This use of gender symbols to enable the performance may appear to simultaneously delete the presence of “real gender”, or a real self, which might be expressed in uncertainties and hesitations. As a consequence most people I have discussed online romance with fear they could fall for fantasy (inauthentic) images, and hence need to bring the relationship into the offline “real” to check it or render it “true”.

Thus, although online romance may be perceived as intense, it may also be perceived as “unreal” (the offline body being real). The person becomes caught in a contradiction between an intimacy which can only be confirmed offline, and an equally supposed ability to only be “who they are” while online.

In this context, one List member asked:

on the net we can (start to) efface the connections between the body and the signs of discipline or the inhabitor of the body and the enactor of discipline. Once that happens then what is the body, or the person, that *isn’t* those things?

Perhaps we can suggest that they become spectral or even more elusive.

4. The Haunted Computer

“Western” cultures already have a set of “virtual body” constructions, which are complementary to our constructions of the “physical body”; those of the “soul”, the “mind”, and the “ghost”, all of which blend together due to their status of being “not-physical” bodies. The polarity between mind/body, generates the parallel of “virtual” or online for “spiritual”, and offline for physical.

Such a material/immaterial split is not essential, and many Western traditions have proposed more elaborate divisions of the mind, including the sources of mainstream religion. The Hebrew Scriptures distinguish nephesh from ruach, and the Greek Testament distinguishes psyche from pneuma. Both of these divisions are often translated as “soul” and “spirit”. Lullian alchemy makes the distinction between spirit and matter one of degree; matter could be etherealised and spirit concentrated. Mid Seventeenth Century philosophers such as Joseph Glanville and Henry More used examples of ghosts and witches to make arguments about the complexity of the multi-part soul’s interaction with the world. Such arguments seem to have become incomprehensible in the Eighteenth Century and later. [8]

Other cultures can become more elaborate. The people of Zinancantan in Mexico have a 13 part soul (Helman, 1992: 109). According to Ruel (1970) the Banyang claimed that humans are individually connected to animals or other natural phenomenon (babu) into which they can transform, or send out as an extension of themselves. The babu moves in a parallel ‘shadow’ world, the ‘forest of babu’, with effects in this world – making humans sick or destroying crops for example.

The point of this reference is not just exoticism but to illustrate a schema which could easily be applied to online experience, but which seems unavailable to Westerners. There are separate but parallel worlds, one is a ‘shadow’ of the other, part of oneself goes into the other world and behaves differently (perhaps more socially “irresponsibly”), yet we are connected to this other self. Tensions in one world spill into the other.

Despite such traditions, we tend to polarise body and mind, often while criticising other people for doing so.

A recent tendency is to represent minds as software, with the result that the distinction between computers and minds blurs. Computers become host to the realm of spirits. There are “true stories” of ghosts of 17th Century Englishmen typing messages onto computers (Wester, 1989), and there was, at one time, ‘a clearing house for information about possessed PCs’ (Watson, 1990: 208). Research shows that many people approach computers as if the computers were conscious social actors (Weizenbaum,1993: 6-7; Frude, 1982: 62, 75, 77, 83; and Reeves and Nass, 1996). There are many science fiction novels in which computers become intelligent, in which human minds wander through computer networks, or in which Artificial Intelligences assume an independent and powerful net life of their own. [9]

Software can be seen as analogous to independent mind and hardware to body, even though software would be meaningless without the hardware it can run on. One result is that people can be reduced to nodes in networks of information, without thought of the metaphor’s implications.

In his book Mind Children (1988), Hans Moravec, director of the Mobile Robot Lab at Carnegie-Mellon University, describes four imagined procedures for transferring a person’s mind to a machine to gain spiritual immortality – most of which assume that replication is equivalent to identity. [10] Ed Regis quotes Moravec as saying:

The idea that your essence is software seems a very small step from the view that your essence is spirit… This is not some way of tricking you into being less than you are; you’re going to be more than you are… It really is a sort of Christian fantasy: this is how to become pure spirit (Regis, 1990: 6, 176).

Academic Iain Chambers casually invokes a similar complex of ideas:

in the zone of “bodiless exultation” in cyberspace, we also confront the alchemy of anthropological mutation… Here in the infinity of the memory chips the body of homo telematicus is finally superseded, dematerialized. Projected into the fourth and eternal dimension of cyberspace, anatomy is replaced by the electric impulses of “pure” intelligence (Chambers, 1994: 54, 60).

4.2: Online Bodies as Ghosts

“Disembodied” is a term frequently used in academic analysis of online life. For example Dery writes of ‘disembodied… combatants’ (1993: 559), Marcus of a ‘disembodied medium’ (1996a: 23), McLagan of ‘disembodied communication’ (1996: 161), Danet et al of ‘disembodied “virtual play”’ (1998: 41), while Wertheim ambiguously oscillates between arguing that people perceive Cyberspace as immaterial or that it is an ‘immaterial space of mind’ (1999: 41, 228-9, 231-2).

Email is also sometimes stated to be like “disembodied” or, “mind to mind communication”. This model, and attacks on this model, were moderately common on Cybermind. For example John writes:

It took a while, but I learned to type and Zen-program in my sleep and suddenly I wasn’t in my chair in a computer lab, I had left it and was in an astral plane. Programs were spells, and I was a magi of unlimited mana.

In reply to KK, who wrote ‘a soul is nothing but a neuro chemical process’, Paula wrote:

Oh PLEEEEEEASEE. Always and forever the soul is an electric force that shivers and shimmers and reflects the essence of a human being. Don’t you know that’s why we take so natually to cyberspace? It’s a lovely marriage of electrons, human and machine.

Another List member argued the Internet confirmed the mind/body split, paving the way for a new Cartesianism. T-Bone, being critical, remarked: ‘It particularly irks me when people with online access [...] imagine they have somehow now purchased an astral body for “moving through” cyberspace’. Another writer, more positively, wrote ‘cybersex does not need a body’, Kara claimed that in ‘virtual relationships [...] there is no physical reality and no desire for it’, and Bernadette wrote of her and her netlover that ‘We desire to merge but our body gets in the way’. Perhaps the “lack” of a body feeds into Western visions of the perfect love as loss of self, where ‘united souls represent the purest form of romance’ (Springer, 1996: 61 emphasis added). [11]

As argued previously boundaries on MOOs are particularly uncertain. People on MOOs resemble modern ghosts and are treated that way. They merge with the spiritual realm of the program. Unknown in a person’s normal life, they contrast with this normality as an independent force which touches it. They can appear out of nowhere and be exorcised by formulae. Actions of figures in a MOO are symbolic actions. Most of their external life actions are deleted, only those redolent with meaning remain and they are repeated, just as a ghost’s actions have some specific meaning and are repeated. The number of bodies that may be squeezed into a room is not influenced by the described size of the room and it is also usually impossible to interact with most of the features of a location or room, another reminder of immateriality. People in electronic communication also resemble ghosts in that they function on one sense band only; for modern Western ghosts this can vary being visual, auditory or kinetic, but MOO, or List, ghosts are texts.

There is also a marked class/power division on MOOs. If Wizards are like ghosts, they are like the holy ghost. They can cross most barriers, they can observe whatever happens in a room without being present to the occupiers, they can disconnect less powerful characters, and some are reputed to record the conversations of others for their own use. A MOO is a society under surveillance by invisible spirits. This problem, though frequently resented, is usually ignored.

Given the emphasis on gender in net behaviour, uses of etherealisation and the ghostly nature of net presences might also connect with the gendered history of the net. A common point made in feminist critiques of Western philosophy and ideologies (e.g. Goldenberg, 1990: 78ff.) has been the tendency of male theorists to denigrate the body and to either praise some etheric transcendence or to derive the world from some disembodied set of categories or processes, while simultaneously constructing the female as an inferior, passive, and physical, body.

A fairly common narrative is that this opposition developed in the 17th century through a successful strategy employed by an “intellectual” administrative class to distinguish realms controlled by the church from realms which were open to its own investigation, theorisation and control. This became institutionalised in divisions between the governors, or managers, who undertook mind work, and the governed who performed body work and who, ideally, do not question.

The ghost becomes more ethereal as this process becomes more pronounced. The upheavals of the last century loosened this boundary and the ghost became more solid. [12] Nowadays some constructions of the “mind” appear to be etherealising again online. This might be linked in mutual feedback with the constant attempts to characterise the new elites supposedly dealing with immaterial information, as “knowledge” or “creative” workers opposed to “physical” service workers, or the valueless unemployed.

If some such position is accepted, then, as the Internet has primarily been colonised by Western males who seek dominance via the supposed excellence of their mental, administrative, or creative abilities, it might be expected that they have used the Internet to emphasise etherealisation as part of the construction of their male identity. Taylor and Saarinen write that their female students using email were:

much more uneasy about the “out-of-body” experience they are having than the men. Cynthia and Kaisu are obsessed with email and yet are deeply disturbed by the evaporation of the material and the absence of face-to-face. The men in the class are much less bothered by all of this (1994: “Body Snatching 7”).

Hall likewise argues that:

Bodyless communication, then, for many men at least is characterised not by a genderless exchange but rather by an exaggeration of cultural conceptions of masculinity – one realised through the textual construction of conversational dominance, sexual harassment, heterosexism, and physical hierarchies (1996: 158).

However, this simple division does not seem dominant on Cybermind, as might be expected if gender no longer marks “knowledge workers”.

Boundaries seem important to materiality. Judith Butler proposes that we ‘return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary fixity and surface we call matter’ (1993: 9). If so, then we can suggest that materiality is linked with a rigid boundary, and that non rigid boundaries constitute the immaterial. Materiality becomes related to the process of making categories firm and exclusive. The lack of boundary fixity in people’s experience online, particularly when not interrupted by pain, creates a sense of personal immateriality, which is perhaps furthered by the loss of time sense as an organiser of experience, and the apparent diminishment of restraint or resistance. [13] This leads not only to boundary vagueness but to problems of polarity deletion.

4.3 Polarity, Gender and Spectres

All polarity categories, such as male and female, may delete “the other pole”. Suppose, for instance, there are two groups A and B, and members of A define a polarity such that A is positive and B is negative. By default B becomes defined as not-A. However as “events/things” are rarely logical opposites (i.e. women are not logical opposites of men, or vice versa), B becomes “illusory” or “spectral” to A. [14] But as A becomes set off, or defined, by being not-B (ie not-not-A) A becomes a negation of an illusion. The situation is further confused if B refuses to accept completely the attributions of what is considered by A as not-A, and then constructs A as not-B. Thus although Luce Irigaray argues that Plato, in the Timaeus, makes the masculine occupy both halves of a binary opposition and, as a result, deletes the feminine (Butler, 1993: 35ff), it might seem that by occupying both halves of the binary the “masculine” is distorted or spectralised as well, even if representationally dominant.

Further, if, as Germaine Greer argues (1997), in modern society women are deleted and primarily conceived of as voids, without power or potency, endlessly available (almost as prostheses) to be penetrated, then such a construct might be unsatisfactory not just for women but for men as well, as it puts a vacuum at the heart of all relationships. “Existential emptiness”, opens its void in the midst of the only intimacy allowed “Western” men. This boundless void can never be filled, and there can be no co-operation. The penetrator can never surrender, never be “soft” without risking becoming the void. These might only be metaphors, but that is the point.

Within this complex of polarity and absence of boundary, the “two bodies” become one body, and its lack. Qualities of the male and female body which limit or influence gendered experience are deleted, or turned into the default image of the ideal male or female; which is itself a deletion.

The resultant tendency is to magnify the possibility of asencing and spectralising the body – which can only be grounded by an excess of symbolic gender, belonging to either sex, effectively asencing the body even further. There is no pause in which to explore the “underlying” “feelings” or kinaesthetics which might be held to render us present.

The asent body, the asent self, as neither present nor absent becomes a virtual body like a ghost. Sometimes the virtuality is taken as real (as in the narrative of how the virtual world allows true expression of authentic being), and sometimes it is the offline world which is taken as real (as in the narrative of how computer use is an escape from, or abandonment of, real life). However, the overwhelming of one category pole by “the other” might not tend to solidify the dominant pole but unsettle it. The Ghost becomes not pure spirit or matter but an uneasy oscillation.

As Alan writes (20 Oct.97), the Ghost is a ‘disturbance of material and semiotic processes, something peripheral – on the (dis)order of the uncanny’. Likewise Derrida suggests that what happens between “twos” (polarities) ‘Can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost’, even if this spectral ‘is never present as such’ (1994: xviii). He later suggests that ‘[O]ne must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic between actual, effective presence and its other’ (ibid: 40). The answer is perhaps not so clear.

5.Cyborgs

One body model which is supposed to undo oppositions is the cyborg, a melding of human and machine. However, it may not escape the problems of another haunting – that of power.

Many visions of the net were shaped by a literary movement – cyberpunk [15] – in particular by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), in which the hero plugs directly from his brain into the machine. For these cyborgs, wires and weapons course through their bodies and they run the risk that the burden of their hardware will destroy their humanity – a much reiterated theme in the narratives of science fiction. Somehow, in narrative, becoming machines leaves humans with no option but conquest. Long before the overwhelming presence of computers the Cybermen in Dr. Who (1966+) replaced all their body parts with prostheses and became “rational” killing machines. [16]

In a well known and oft quoted section of Neuromancer, written before the Internet became popular, the hero, Case, has his connection to cyberspace destroyed and Gibson writes; ‘For Case who’d lived in the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall… The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh’ (1994: 6). In this case the cyborg is Christian Cartesian.

Unlike many societies where the landscape is seen as a human body, in cyberspace it is common for the human to be perceived as permeated with wires and becoming cyborg. The machinic is transferred to life and becomes alive itself. In this invasion the screen flashes, circuits or programmes move imaged electrons. We give “input”, not participation. The body is immobile and the imagined movement of the machine becomes our movement – ‘our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway, 1989: 152).

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr writes

Historically, the cyborg has stood for the radical anxiety of human consciousness about its own embodiment at the moment that embodiment appears almost fully contingent. Cyborg anxiety has stood for a panic oscillation between the “human” element (associated with affections, eros, error, innovation, projects begun in the face of mortality) and the “machine” element (the desire for long life, health, physical impermeability, self-contained control processes, dependability).

Use of the term cyborg is often phased in reassuring terms of us already being cyborgs (because we use tools or even language) and in terms of alarm that if we do not become cyborg we will be superseded and computers or robots will take over the world.

There also seems a mythic relationship between the machinisation of the human and the loss of human emotions, suggesting, in “Western” terms, that cyborgisation exaggerates of ideas of masculinity and its transcendence of the (gendered) flesh.

In this theory, it can be alleged that disruptions to ego development are sheltered behind ideas of armour, and people attempt to attain invulnerability by allying with the “hard” machine. Springer argues that the filmic image of the Cyborg makes use of the overt power and strength of the “passing” industrial technology, while powered by the diffuse, concealed power of computers; it is a “hypermasculine” resistance (1996: 111-2). Or as Bukatman phrases it: ‘The techno-organic fusion of these cinematic cyborgs thus represents only an exaggerated defensive formation, another panic subject frantically hiding its obsolescence behind a suit of armour’ (1993: 310). Whatever their intent, these motifs of “obsolescence” imply another triumphal narrative of machine over human, this time of “soft-tech”.

Under a dominant system of technological control where boundaries and command are drawn and imposed from outside people can identify with the machine, and release their fear of dissolution in aggression against outsiders. Reference is made here (by Bukatman, Springer, Foder and Dery) to Theweleit’s study of the Freikcorps who particularly feared the “bloody mass” of the feminine (reminiscent of Reynolds’ claims that females are associated, in the ‘technical world view’, with the unformed or the protoplasmic (1991: chapter 3)). In this case the flow of the unformed threatens the hyper-form of the male machinic ego (Bukatman, 1993: 303-4, Robins & Levidow, 1995).

Despite his claims about cyborgs and defense mechanisms Bukatman will eventually conclude:

The body must become a cyborg to retain its presence in the world, resituated in technological space and reconfigured in technological terms. Whether this represents a continuation, a sacrifice, a transcendence, or a surrender of “the subject” is not certain (1993: 247).

This not only assumes some kind of triumphal narrative, even if one not desired, but assumes only cyborgs have a future, perhaps because Bukatman sees all human interaction with and production of technology under the rubric of the cyborg, which has its own narrative direction. Whereas it is perhaps the ambiguities and uncertainties which are important.

Such theories suggest cyborgisation acts as avoidance of the “tender”, or fleshly feminine. This leads to the question of whether more aggressive net users see themselves as cyborgs with greater ease than less aggressive, or whether Cyborgisation primarily functions in net discourse to indicate one is an insider and deeply implicated in cyberspace usually in relation to, or with, others.

Cyborg references seemed rare on Cybermind, and more self conscious despite the opening line of the List Manifesto which proclaims ‘We are all dwelling in cyberspace, coursing through the wires, becoming cyborg and becoming human’. Remarks about cyborgs tended to be in reference to books, academic papers, conferences, performance art, occasional discussions whether human use of technology has rendered us always already cyborg, and to events in the Cybermind Novel (2004). It might be suggested that the prominent reference to cyborgs in the Manifesto was largely influenced by Donna Haraway, who is a prime source for the conception of cyborgs as a radical form of body metaphor.

5.1: Haraway – Cyborg Politics and Borders

Haraway famously argues that Cyborgs are post-gendered, but if gender is vital to “Western” self regulation and framing online as argued previously, then this seems improbable, and thus dubious as a libratory tool. Furthermore, portrayals of cyborgs on the Internet tend to be thoroughly gendered (DeVoss, 2000). Silvio (1999) demonstrates that an apparently radical cyborg anime, also portrays control of female body by male spirit, so the myth is easily gendered by spirit and dominance. Wilkerson goes so far as to write that ‘from the standpoint of feminist bisexual identity… I contend that this [cyborg] myth evades the very issues of race and sexuality which it seems to be addressing’, and suggests that ‘it is vitally important to keep tensions of race and sexuality present rather than to blur the boundaries’ (1997: 164, 172). There is nothing necessarily radical in hybridity, especially if one side subsumes the other. Terms like asence draw more attention to the complexities.

Cyborgs, according to Haraway, are not haunted, yet statements such as:

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile … Cyborgs are ether, quintessence (1989: 153)

suggest that, even for her, cybermachines are already homes for some kind of disembodiment and etherealisation. As others have demonstrated, cyborg theology and transcendence are easily possible (Kull 2001, 2002).

However, if Bartsch and Dipalma (2001) are correct, Haraway’s use of the cyborg body is one in a series of politically motivated rhetorical tropes, and not an attempt at analysing contemporary bodies and their situatedness. It is part of a series of ‘secular technoscientific salvation stories full of promise’ (2001: 131). It is intended as a device for crossing or confounding boundaries and categories; and for linking temporary coalitions.

An exuberant conference announcement posted to Cybermind declares that Haraway’s Manifesto:

interrogates and/or collapses the differences between the sentient and the non-sentient, the human and the non-human; it engages and undoes a wide range of binary oppositions from Cartesian dualism to culturally coded distinctions of gender, class, and race; and it exemplifies the breaching of boundaries and frontiers in social, ethical, legal and technological issues from disability to genetic engineering to computer privacy.

However, it is doubtful whether it quite fulfils these welcome aims. ‘Cyborg’ is not a value neutral term, it already has its ties and complexes, as implied above. Myths, even ‘ironic’ ones, have their own directions. [17] In addition, it is often the case that those oppositions that the cyborg was to overcome re-emerge in the attempt to find a third term combining both or acting as a bridge.

In other words, the “cyborg” ignores what we might call the sandpile problem. One grain of sand is not a ‘heap’ but 100,000 grains might be, and the boundary is never going to be clear. To use a cyborg cliché: imagine you have a human, you keep adding machinery and subtracting flesh, at what point does it stop being human? How many fragmented cells makes a human? This is the nature of many categories. Putting in a hybrid third merely allows the poles to separate while pretending to overcome them. Categories usually have some kind of bounding, and such boundaries become a way of conception. They will always appear somewhere.

Exploring the way these category borders are used (as done in the more ethnographic section of this paper) would seem more interesting than transcending them as hybrids, or by describing the current by models of a posited future. I hope a more modest word like asence which draws attention to the process of boundary uncertainty, of suspension and oscillation; that does not act as a bridging third; and which leaves the categories with the force that they have, is more useful than a hybrid like cyborg which already has its own drives, elisions and politics in place.

It is the way of categories that a category that seems a disrupter of other categories sometimes becomes subservient to them, apparently privileging one side. We might even suggest that such disposals of the body suggest, not that the old forms of authority are disposed of, but that they are intensified.

6 Online back to Offline

If the cyborg, then, sometimes subverts itself as a radical option, what kind of move is the online to the offline often conceived as?

6.1 Virile Bodies

If “physical” body is the ultimate locus, or victim, of power then the frustration involved in social control and action renders that body “immaterial” if online, or, if offline, “ineffective” or “unvirile”. So the offline can be contrasted with the online, as Real, as is indicated by the common use of RL (Real Life), for offline life.

Phil wrote:

As much as the virtual world here enchants me, I still have the feeling of the morning run to keep things in perspective– no email is going to match the feeling of crisp cold air burning my nostrils

Robert muses on the pallid interaction between the embedding world and the net:

Does a major in the Jonathanas Savimbi army shudder at the thought that Cybermind disapproves of their attack on a major import/export center [...] Double Bah, tripple humbug and a loud Hah!

Dorrie feared that without an engagement with “Real Life” people on the List might become, ‘Intellectuals with no muscles in our backs’.

This kind of analysis can be found elaborated by the Krokers (1996) as ‘bunkering in…. being sick of others and trying to shelter the beleaguered self in a techno-bubble’. They also use terms like ‘fantasy’ and ‘infantilization’ to imply the online body is unable to participate in the public realm.

Thus the offline body could be feminine if compared to online “spirit”, but masculine if virile and active when compared to online ineffective. The poles destabilise, but still exist.

6.2: Asence and Sensation

The more speedily and well the body functions, the more it can be ignored. As we have seen, pain interrupts the transfer and sense of presence online. Without this pain, deletion is perhaps possible as computing is pre-dominantly a visual medium. We do not see the body while computing, so we don’t ‘see’ its removal (if we don’t feel its pain). Yet while using this computer, we are restricted in movement: almost immobile, hunched over, eyes flicking between hands and screen (but with little focal change and a lowered blink rate), perhaps fearing that hand pain resulting from repetition may cast us out from this world (which is our only source of decent income). [18]

The sensations of computer usage are basically unpleasant. There is little in the way of tactile, kinaesthetic or olfactory pleasure, and little in the way of aesthetic or visual pleasure other than on the web. It is possible there might be a sensory pleasure gained from the mere presence of other (non-hostile) humans or plants and animals which is missed as well.

Computer use is thus a competition between sensation and interest. While the person is engaged, sexually evoked or intellectually interested then sensual discomfort is overpowered. When topics recycle, the threshold of engagement lowers, and discomfort is more noticeable. The effort to increase the engagement might explain some of the attractions of flaming or netsex, as these diminish registering of background sensory distress. People do not approach the net erotically or angrily, but become erotic or angry to maintain an approach.

6.3 Asence and Politics

“Information” is an ambiguous category often used to terminate narrative myths explaining changes in the economy, as in the expressions “information economy”, “information companies” and so on (e.g Drucker, 1993: 181ff.). As such a category, it has tenuous boundaries, and thus risks becoming ghostly itself – people can insist information is immaterial. Information can even claimed to be a directly productive force, as if it was self-animate or a never-ending alchemy of self-productive signs. Furthermore, information can be abstracted from its specific carriers. Computers allow the reduction of all data (whether mathematical formulae or films) to digital representation, blurring any differences. As Hayles argues this can influence the projected design of machines designed to access data, so that the data becomes even more isolated from its environment (1996: 34-5). Research or policy can be based upon interaction with simulations rather than interaction with “realities”. This may promote the deletion of reference to the social and technological bases which allows the information to exist, which controls its distribution, though leaving “the market” as an abstract determiner of “success” (Grusin, 1996: 46, Henwod, 1995, Castells, 1996: 371ff.).

However, humans cannot live by abstract information alone, it always needs to be legitimated, or converted into something else, usually through some organisation. Only certain kinds of information can be sold. As a result, the nature of the work of “knowledge workers”, and of their place in the world, becomes representationally problematic.

The computer is often supposed to free people from body work, liberating them for this ethereal, intellectual, creative or “knowledge” work. However, for most workers, it renders “creative” skills even less important. Those with superseded skills, or injury, join those without computers, vanishing from the computerised world; becoming represented as unable to “keep up”. We too become ghosts with no impact, or cyborgs striving to remain embedded in the system.

The confined, neglected body haunts us, and this is reinforced by political alienation, in the sense that people cannot act on the world politically, so they tend to experience themselves as “immaterial”. It is possible to allege that an otherwise disempowered person through writing on the net, could produce political change or, at least, reach the numbers of readers previously reserved for mass media. However, such power does not seem currently common, and may never be a common experience.

Further, the web of postmodern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere – in some ways more alive than ourselves. It too has no obvious boundaries and thus becomes represented as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net. We cannot act upon it, and the traditional modes of protest available to all, such as occupying the streets or a building are no longer effective (Critical Art Ensemble, 1994). We might return here to where we began with the uncertain boundaries of the offline world, and the attempts to close them. Yet again, the boundaries are open to the corporate world. Little separates them from your work, your home, your computers, your food, your genes, your geography, your being. As Yaakov Garb asks:

Why is etherealism so popular in a world were matter isn’t? More eerily, how do the fantasies of disengagement from body and nature emerge from the same military/industrial complex which manufactures the technologies for the actual destruction of both (q. Springer,1996: 25).

Yet at the same time people’s action in online society is often an attempt not only to act in the world, but to create a new world, or at least to create a safe place in the world. So here again, in the heart of the absence is presence – we have asence.

7. Conclusions

This paper has discussed some of the complex factors involved in the way that people construct and use bodies, and experience boundaries on the net, from within “Western” Internet cultures. Some of these factors may depend on a history which has valorised a polarity between mind and body as a factor in a male identity, polarised with female identity, and based in administrative competence. The “mind” is single, occasionally hidden, and associated with control over an inferior opposite – the “body”. Before the 18th Century, mainstream philosophers and poets could elaborate a complex set of interactions between several variables, but by the 19th Century, and certainly presently, despite monotonous recognitions of the “falsity” of these distinctions, they have polarised and separated.

This polarisation may be linked to a “Western” tendency to try to construct sharp either/or categories and group boundaries, and impose these on more magical vague categories. With the advent of the computer and the Internet this polarisation has in places increased, while boundary definition of the self appears to have weakened, and conceptual dominance has shifted from categories of “matter” to categories of the “immaterial”. The textual body of net culture becomes associated with the spiritual pole, perhaps reinforced by the feeling that the immaterial is that without precise boundaries or inhibitors, enabling expression of boundary anxieties produced offline.

As with online groups, the sense of online self has asent boundaries unless restricted by pain. This lack of boundaries leads to the cyberbody being categorised as immaterial, in the same way as ghosts and spirits are classified as immaterial in the “Western” world. The cyberghost is validated by comparison with a construction of an offline active and virile body. Construction of the body as cyborg seems far rarer in actual online life, although common in theory, and even so, still has ambiguities that arise from connecting persisting polarities – even though those polarities are supposedly overcome by it.

Cyborgisation and etherealisation are counterpositional narrative myths of body subjectivity that function in different spheres. Cyborgs have undergone their development primarily in action film, comic and theory, whereas etherealisation has flourished more in novel, science and online life. Like ghosts, it has been suggested that the narrative and drives of the image of the cyborg do not make it particularly consequence, or value, free for analysing the interdependence and interinvolvement of the prior categories of culture, nature, biology and technology, with all of their uncertain and changing ambiguities and the ways they both enable and restrict and are permeated by power. These category boundaries cannot be dissolved by fiat, and it is more productive to look how people deal with them, rather than hypothesise a yet to arrive future in which they are gone.

Category matching and framing can be maintained by mood. The mood produced by reiteration reinforces the content of the messages, and usually refers to easily accessed offline moods, as with flames, grief, sex and so on.

It has been argued that the online use of the body occurs in areas of tension that arise because of the lack of formal roles (other than gender), and social unease with permeable boundaries. Some “Western” online relationships tend to become sexual, as a means of maintaining mood and contact – particularly when the polarity of gender (which is associated with intimacy and sex, and with the polarity of body and mind) is able to diminish asence, and the symbolic burden of the lack of roles and prescribed behaviours.

Finally, it was suggested that asencing of the body allows the experience of “immersion” in online worlds. This asencing is caught in a further dialectic between political presence (or the ability to act upon an individual’s social problems through the use of the net), and the narrative myth that Internet users are abandoning both the “real world” and those persons who have been effectively made invisible by their lack of access to either computers, or to the powerful parts of the online world. The appearance of immateriality is further increased by frustrations at the inability to use physical force to control life online – those we try and influence may simply ignore us. The cyberbody is caught between conceptions of impotence and omnipotence.

Author’s Biography

Jonathan Marshall is a ARC Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, who is engaged in a project exploring the construction and use of gender online. His most recent paper was ‘Bachelard and the Alchemy of Ethnography’, presented at the 2004 AAS Conference, and forthcoming in a special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology concerned with material poetics. He is a joint editor of the Fibreculture Dictionary of New Media, a Mailing List centred exploration of theory and practice. [Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au]

Notes

[1] This paper has grown out of my fieldwork on the Cybermind Mailing List between 1994 and 1998. Thanks is given to the List for their encouragement, support and comments.

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[2] Boundaries are not simple and can be of many types. They can blend into one another or be distinct, they can radiate in density from a central point. Boundaries can allow one way or two way flow, can have different thresholds of permeability, they can be abrupt or gradual, or can be in states of extension or exclusion.

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[3] I am using the term “Western”, as a short cut for Western Mainstream Middle Class, English Speaking People. But even here there is less homogeneity than is implied.

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[4] For a more detailed history see Marshall (2000, Chp 1), and a summary of more recent history in Marshall (2004).

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[5] I have discussed the relationship between flaming, asence and structure in Marshall (2004).

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[6] Argyle writes: ‘The pain of the other’s touched the pain held within myself. Personal experiences of loss, memories of funerals and the sorrow of those left behind all flooded me…. I grieved with them, for myself and my losses, and for theirs’ (1996: 140).

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[7] Turkle instances a person acting on four different MOOs at once (1995: 12). See also Odzer (1997: 43), Dudfield (1999: np).

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[8] I am submitting an article on this subject to the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic. For the change in ghosts between the medieval and contemporary periods see Finucane (1982).

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[9] A question to a group of four friends about such stories immediately produced 15 different titles written by 12 different authors.

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[10] To be clearer: the process of replication destroys the original, so essentially you die so that copies of you can “live”. The appeal of this idea is probably connected with the magical mechanisms of “similarity” and “transfer”.

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[11] For example Milton in his description of angels making love; (Paradise Lost, book 8). Note the contrast with the “animal” which is “bodily” and the supposed superiority of the “virtual” angelic.

But if the sense of touch whereby mankind
Is propagated seem such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf’t
To Cattel and each Beast…..

Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask;
Love not the heav’nly Spirits, and how thir Love
Express they, by looks onely, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?
To whom the Angel with a smile that glow’d
Celestial rosie red, Loves proper hue,
Answer’d. Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happie, and without Love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs:
Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.

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[12] It might be worth drawing attention to the contrast between the apparent increase in preoccupation with both body and State boundaries over this period, (as described by Elias 1972), and the growing etherealisation, and detachment, of the ghost.

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[13] It is not necessary to accept any other parts of Butler’s argument for this to be an interesting proposition, and it is not necessary to assume that it works for all kinds of matter – we are only discussing online experience. For a good critique of Butler’s position on matter in general see Kerin (1999).

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[14] For example, the categories A and B may share properties in common. Defining B as not-A, apparently removes those common properties from B. Further, the set of not-A may include B, but it also includes things which are not-B. So the category B may have properties added and subtracted from it, by this operation.

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[15] Lewis Shiner, one of the earliest writers in the genre, writes (1992: 25) that he first heard the term “cyberpunk” in 1983. The first of Gibson’s “sprawl” series came out in 1981.

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[16] By all postmodern uses of the term, the still earlier Daleks are also cyborg, and yet again technically ingenious, with a hard line on their own superiority, driven to conquest, murder and autocracy. Daleks were once humanoid as well.

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[17] My understanding is that Haraway wrote the article as a polemic against mid-80s back to nature goddess feminism, for which it is entirely adequate and to the point. However it has been transported out of that limited context and considered to have far wider, almost universal, implications. It is this that I am objecting to.

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[18] Hayes claims the rate of RSI among the workforce increased by 1,246% between 1982 and 1992. The estimated cost of dealing with this problem in 1992, was US$25 billion per year (1995: 176). In 1999 the cost to UK industry was estimated at between £5 billion and £20 billion annually (RSIA 2000).

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Google. That the noun has rapidly become a verb speaks volumes for the influence of this search engine. Powered by PageRank, the accuracy of its results has done more than make Google the premiere search application – it has moved web search into the realm of ‘killer app’ alongside e-mail. When über.nu columnist Adam Mathes tested his theory of the ‘Google Bomb’, he may have realised the potential of his actions, but he perhaps underestimated the power of the pure idea itself. The fashion in which Google could be manipulated highlighted many questions about the nature of the web and its network of linkages. Deleuze and Guattari would see such activity as not only exemplifying the web as rhizome, but that it also demonstrates their conception of the refrain. Google Bombs demonstrate how web link ecologies, particularly those of blog linkages, influence PageRank – Google’s ranking algorithm that effectively implements the idea of the refrain to invoke a hierarchical list of all pages on the web.

On April 6, 2001, Mathes suggested that those reading his column should include a link on their own websites, using a specific piece of text as the link, to one Andy ‘talentless hack’ Pressman, in order to make his friend look stupid. Many of Mathes’ readers are ‘bloggers’ – people who maintain online diary-style websites, or ‘blogs’ (short for web logs) – so the call for readers to add links to websites could lead to a very large number of linkages. While his example was fairly innocuous, the theory behind the action was groundbreaking. He wanted to generate a distributed set of linkages to a specific page in order to raise that page’s ranking for a particular search term. Dubbed ‘Google Bombing’, Mathes intended to exploit the following fact:

Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don’t have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words. (Mathes, 2001)

In fact, this is exactly what Google does. According to the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Google ‘employs a number of techniques to improve search quality, including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information’ (1998: 12). Google’s ability to return high quality search results is primarily thanks to the PageRank algorithm. This algorithm, as its name implies, ‘is a global ranking of all web pages, regardless of their content, based solely on their location in the Web’s graph structure’ (Page, et al., 1). The ranking algorithm is recursive, with ranks being generated not only by the number of links leading into a page but also the PageRank of the pages that link to the page. The higher the rank of a linking page, the more valuable that link becomes to the page receiving the link. This ranking is then complemented by exactly what Mathes described above; an analysis of not only the text on each web page, but the anchor text used to point to each page is also assigned to that page’s text analysis as well. This was far from a guarded secret, but no one had so openly attempted to manipulate it before.

While it is hard to say how long the ‘bomb’ took to ‘go off’, within days a Google search for the words ‘talentless hack’ delivered Pressman’s website ranked #1. This ranking remained for at least eleven months, such was the power of this first ever Google Bombing. In Mathes’ own words:

In a bizarre surreal bow to the power of perception on the web, what you say about a page becomes just as important as the actual content of the page. The page must be what other people say it is. That Google adheres to this rule and is by far the most effective search engine raises many interesting issues… (Mathes, 2001)

Indeed it does … not the least of which is that more than three years later, a Google search for ‘talentless hack’ now gives the #1 ranking to Mathes’ original article! It seems that over time, as the concept itself has gained coverage, the original search term has folded back onto the article that called for it to be pointed elsewhere. Meanwhile, Pressman’s site is now nowhere to be seen in the ten pages of search results. With connection, multiplicity and temporality all seemingly part of the way the Google Bomb works, this stunt has inadvertently, and thus ever more appropriately, generated a perfect example of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and the territorial markings that form a refrain (1987).

We must remember that through Google’s status as the most precise search engine available on the web, any success in manipulating it must somewhat grant insight into the nature of the World Wide Web itself. As the Google Bomb only works through a highly distributed set of web links (‘simply having tons of the same links with the same phrase on a single page will do nothing’ Mathes notes (2001)) we are shown the distributed, non-hierarchical nature of the web. Of course, with ‘no points or positions in a rhizome… only lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8) we have the same basic nature of the rhizome reflected in the web. This has been well covered elsewhere, notably in Kathleen Burnett’s essay on hypertext as rhizome more than ten years ago (1993).

By moving deeper into the idea of repeated, distributed linkages – Google Bombs or not – we find the web, particularly when analysed by a system such as PageRank, is full of what Deleuze and Guattari have called ‘refrains’ (1987). The refrain is described as ‘any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory’ (323). Importantly, the territorialising marks cause ‘a reorganisation of functions and a regrouping of forces’ (320). To apply these ideas to the web, the links that flow from one site to another form territories for the pages that are linked to. The aggregation of the various links that lead into any particular page or site form a set of territorial markings, and it is these markings that Google has harnessed to achieve its superior search results. In turn, these markings generate a grouping of forces, passing on value to the linked page and enhancing the page’s PageRank.

Through a search on Google, a territory is invoked relating to the search term at hand. This territory is delivered as a ranked list of links, ranked according to a mix of PageRank’s raw analysis of page importance as well as the relevance to the search terms. In essence, Google analyses the refrain of each relevant page and delivers a list of sites ranked according to the relevance and magnitude of the page’s refrain. The relevance relates to the text of the page and most notably the anchor text used to lead to the page. The magnitude relates to the total influence of incoming links and, as mentioned earlier, the influence is adjusted according to the PageRank of the pages from which the links are received.

The fact that the result of such activity changes over time further proves the rhizomatic nature of the web and how PageRank is an efficient, temporal indicator of each page’s refrain on the web. Links move from front pages to archives, in turn reducing the value of such links as they move from pages of higher rank to pages of lower rank. The link may not change but its value to the refrain is reduced as it is no longer on a page with as many incoming links of its own, therefore it possesses less value to pass onto pages it links to. Further, new articles and pages link to different targets with regard to the same phrases, adding further competition to any refrain related to relevant search terms. As the linkages change, so too do the refrains. For these invoked lists of pages to become unchanging would be a sign of stagnation, a sign that the web was no longer dynamic. The chaos of web linkages is what the web – and Google – thrives on.

Since the Google Bomb has become a ‘known exploit’ of PageRank, there are a few examples of its use to perform protest action. By building a page with protest information about a certain organisation or activity, and then coordinating a Google Bomb to attach that page to the name of the organisation itself, the page of anti- information will often appear very close to the organisation’s own page in a Google search. Notable search terms targeted include ‘Verisign’ and ‘Bill Gates’. Of course, this will certainly become more difficult the larger an organisation is. To rank a page alongside ‘Microsoft’, you would need a massively widespread set of linkages, or a smaller number of linkages from some very highly ranked pages. This is further evidence of the nature of the refrain. The larger an organisation, the more important it would appear to PageRank. It would be very likely to have a lot of attention and therefore many incoming links from many other pages, some of which would themselves be important pages – and nearly all of which would be likely to use anchor text related to the company name. Thus their territorial markings, or refrain, would be well established. To challenge their refrain would require a similarly influential set of linkages to grant the page the territory it needs to gain a notable PageRank. The humble site owner or blogger, are less likely to gain attention from important pages, but they can use the blogging community to try to garner support and generate a widely distributed set of incoming linkages to build them a refrain. This new territory on the doorstep of the large company’s own territory hopes to spread an alternative message to anyone searching for the relevant term.

Many commercial enterprises have attempted to influence Google in a similar fashion to the Google Bomb (Sullivan, 2002). Organisations have set up ‘link farms’, in which many servers running many different domains all contain links to try and raise the ranking of target websites relating to certain search terms. But this attempt artificially to extend a site’s territory has been highly ineffective at influencing PageRank. Indeed the PageRank algorithm is known now to account for certain kinds of manipulative link instances, rendering them ineffective.

Is it the case that Google Bombs – and blog-centred link swapping activities in general – are also artificial and should be treated like link farms? There is an important difference. In the former instance, one single entity is attempting to improve/expand a particular refrain across the web. In the latter, we have a distributed group of individuals who, each on their own terms, decide to support a particular refrain. If a Google Bomb attempt does not convince a distributed group of individuals to participate then it simply will not work. Google ‘knows’ the difference between the organised yet genuinely distributed creation of a real territory and an attempt artificially to construct one.

There has been some misuse of the term ‘Google Bomb’ – in one case, relating to the ‘Cannot find Weapons of Mass Destruction’ satire web page (Cox, 2003a). An amusing alteration of the Microsoft Internet Explorer error page, the page recently spread quickly around the Internet through email and blog links. When people realised it had become the number one search term in Google for ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ the joke was extended further. Rather than directly linking the page, people instead suggested searching Google for that term and use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button (which takes you directly to the first page found). This Google relationship got some writers referring to the page as a Google Bomb (Cox, 2003b). But in this case there was no organised, intentional distribution of links – using a specific piece of link text – to give it such a ranking. This was simply a case of a popular page being linked by many people independently – an entirely organic refrain was generated without any intent to capture a particular set of territorial markings.

As touched on above there are some who believe that what the Google Bomb represents is a problem that Google needs to address. Andrew Orlowski, a writer for technology news website The Register, is one such source of concern over the ability of bloggers to influence Google search results. In April 2003 Orlowski wrote about the manipulation (or ‘Googlewashing’, as he called it) of the term ‘Second Superpower’ (2003). Originating in a New York Times article by Patrick Tyler (2003) as a concept referring to ‘world public opinion’, Orlowski claimed that in just 42 days the term had been Googlewashed so that a Google search for ‘Second Superpower’ referred almost exclusively to an article that used the term with reference to Internet users. To Orlowski this was a clear example of a disturbing ability of bloggers to shift meaning on the web – that links from a few ‘”A-list” tech bloggers’ (2003) can quickly lead to such shifts in Google search results. If we return to a Deleuze and Guattari centred reading of such linkages, however, this ability is not so disturbing at all.

Just as a rhizome ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7), so too does the web. Blog linkages are often quite volatile as the automated nature of such publishing means links move from positions of importance on the front page of a blog into the sites archives. As touched on earlier, a page in an archive will have fewer links leading into it resulting in a lower PageRank which in turn results in links leading from that page offering a reduced weight of territorial influence. This volatility changes these influences in Google’s system very quickly (Hiler, 2002a). While Orlowski complains about a small group of bloggers causing this shift, Tom Coates soon noted that ‘all it takes is one Register article (picked up on by other bloggers) for this problem to correct’ (2003). Within days of Orlowski’s The Register article, competing information (most notably his article, which quickly became the second highest ranked ‘Second Superpower’ item) was now available in the first page of search results. As it turns out, the term ‘Second Superpower’ was never used in the original New York Times article. So even though Orlowski’s claim was based on an inaccurate reading of the original story, it was still able to assist in correcting what he saw as an online injustice.

Part of this negativity toward seemingly inaccurate or manipulated results may stem from a desire for Google to be something different to what it is. While Google is an index of the web – and the territories and linkages that exist in that space only – many seem to treat Google as a tool that will search for results not only based on those web territories but within the context of the real world too. But Google is not an index of prevailing conditions in the real world – even if it wanted to be. It can only index what exists on the Internet! That the content of the web reflects what is happening in the real world means it is still only a reflection – with all the subtle distortions and differences that go along with that.

In the ‘Second Superpower’ case above, the term may have been used in high-profile offline spaces a number of times with its original meaning. But it had few online instances to generate a refrain that would create a sufficiently large territory. When the term was used in a new ‘online’ context it quickly gained attention and a territory was shaped around it – a greater online territory than the original.

It cannot be ignored here that the Patrick Tyler’s original New York Times article has no presence in Google. It had, in fact, just disappeared around the time Orlowski wrote his article for The Register. Google cannot include pay content in its archives and therefore cannot include such content in its indexing for search terms – and pay-content systems are what many traditional news provider’s archives are moving to. This exacerbates the difficulty, mentioned above, of reflecting the real world – without authoritative archives of news information from traditionally offline sources Google can only refer to information that is available only in purely online sources. In the words of one pundit ‘the “googlewashing” Orlowski talks about was done by the New York Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers’ (Searl, 2003). If the information is not in Google, then it cannot be indexed.

Conversely, the open nature of Google’s indexing efforts grant the ability to participate in the ‘free market’ of ideas and linkages and this also means search terms are always open to territorial ‘dispute’. If enough people want to participate in the territory that is invoked by a particular search term then they can attempt to do so. No single concept will ever own a territory on the web – as long as multiple search results are returned to the user this will mean many pages can compete for attention within particular invoked spaces. Even on the first page of a set of search results you will often see different concepts, particularly where new or generic terms are the territory in dispute. While they are ranked in an order of relevance, or the strength of their refrain, they exist within the same emergent territory.

Google has come under fire not only for their reluctance to redress the influence of blog linkages on search results; they have also been attacked for their outright refusal to remove highly undesirable pages from their search results. One recent case related to the search term ‘Jew’ and the high ranking achieved by an anti-Semitic site. As undesirable as such sites may be, Google stand firmly by their policy and do not want to become a de facto censor for the web. Recall their definition for PageRank included the statement ‘a global ranking of all web pages, regardless of their content’ (Page, et al., 15) as well as another statement that PageRank rates pages ‘objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them’ (1). Perhaps in some instances this later definition is debatable, but as Google argued in the above situation, the search terms used are possibly the major source of creating such results.

If you use Google to search for ‘Judaism’, ‘Jewish’ or ‘Jewish people’, the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for ‘Jew’ different? One reason is that the word ‘Jew’ is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word ‘Jewish’ when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically… In fact, prior to this incident, the word ‘Jew’ only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it’s likely that the great majority of searches on Google for ‘Jew’ are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves. (Google, 2004)

Which is the path to true objectivity? A measure of all pages on the web, regardless of content? Or a measure of human interest and attention devoted to them? Are they entirely compatible? Clearly the more influence Google’s search holds on people’s use of the web, the more likely it will face increasing pressure to fulfil a role online that should not be the domain of a corporation. As it stands, Google delivers results from the open market of ideas and competing territories that are found on the web and ranked according to PageRank. Perhaps Google’s search engine could be considered the objective arbiter in a no holds barred battle of refrains, ranking the raw power of each page’s territorial markings on the web – and all are welcome to add linkages wherever they choose.

Returning to the idea that ‘a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7) Google Bombs – and blog-centric linkages in general – ensure the potential for dynamism and tension across the World Wide Web. The ability to add new linkages where there were previously none is essential to both the rhizome and the refrain. Google Bombed results can rupture territories or mark out new ones, and they have the potential to raise debate and promote discussion across the web that can only further promote the dynamic, temporal and decentred nature of the web. The Google Bomb supports and promotes the powerful potential of the rhizome and the manner in which ideas compete for territory online through their refrains.

It’s time to stop worrying about bloggers and their influence over Google. By learning to love what they, and their Google Bombs, can do opens us all to the widely accessible power that still exists on the web for those who care to engage with it.

Author’s Biography

Séamus Byrne is Deputy Editor of the Internet culture and lifestyle magazine internet.au, as well as a monthly contributor to Australian MacWorld. When not busy being a tech journalist, he fits in working on a Ph.D. at the UNSW School of Media and Communications. Research interests include online communities, sound design, advertising, activism, and the construction of cool. [shay@milgram.net]

References

Brin, Sergey and Page, Lawrence. ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, (1998), http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm

Burnett, Kathleen. ‘Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design’, Postmodern Culture 3.2 (1993): http://www.infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-burnett-toward.txt

Coates, Tom. ‘plasticbag.org | weblog | Oh self-correcting Blogosphere…’, (2003), http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/04/oh_selfcorrecting_blogosphere.shtml

Cox, Anthony. ‘Cannot find Weapons of Mass Destruction’, (2003a), http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

_____. ‘The war on the web’, (2003b), http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,994676,00.html

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Google, ‘Google Technology’, (2004), http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Google, ‘Google: An explanation of our search results’, (2004), http://www.google.com/explanation.html

‘Google Answers: Google Inc., and the Google Bomb’, (2003), http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=179922

Hiler, John. ‘Google Loves Blogs’, (2002a), http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googleblogs.htm

_____. ‘Google Time Bomb’, (2002b), http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googlebombs.htm

Marks, Kevin. ‘Googlewash? Hogwash’, (2003), http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_epeus_archive.html#200094183

Mathes, Adam. ‘Filler Friday: Google Bombing’, (2001), http://uber.nu/2001/04/06/

Mottram, Jack. ‘Submit Response: Googlewash The Second Superpower’, (2003), http://www.submitresponse.co.uk/archives/googlewash_the_second_superpower.php

Orlowski, Andrew. ‘Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days’ in The Register (2003): http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html

Page, Lawrence, et al. ‘The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web’, (1998), http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/1999-66

Searl, Doc. ‘The Doc Searl Weblog: Friday, May 16, 2003′, (2003), http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/05/18

Sullivan, Danny. ‘Google Bombs Aren’t So Scary’, (2002), http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/03-bomb.html

Tyler, Patrick. ‘A new power in the streets’, New York Times (2003), http://www.submitresponse.co.uk/archives/superpower.html (Mirror of original)

Walker, Jill. ‘Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web’, (2002), http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/linksandpower.html

Introduction

“The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.” Cicero

In the last ten thousand years, our deceased antecedents are thought to number over one hundred billion (see Davies, 1994). Not much has been recorded about them, unless they were famous, rich or fortunate enough to have been catapulted into the memory of others. It was therefore up to the general public to ‘individualise’ the deaths of the rest through mortuary ritual, an accomplishment to which archaeologists and our cemeteries can attest today. Individualisation via memorialisation has become a way for past and current societies to commemorate life on the event of a death. To that end, memorialisation provides one of a group of artefacts used by historians, genealogists and the like to document history and family links.

[The] memorialisation of departed loved ones seems to be an integral part of human nature that can be traced back to the dawn of civilization. Throughout prehistoric times and into recorded history, there is a common thread of honouring the dead … as early as 35,000 BC, Cro-Magnon man practiced ritual funerals. (Tippy, 2002)

In the recent past, memorialisation is largely practised via granite, marble or bronze memorials in cemeteries, requiring physical visits that can be impeded by distance or physical ability. In a society that is increasingly fragmented – where families and friends, often separated by significant distances, cannot actively participate in memorialising their deceased – an alternate space to the physical needs to be provided.

Several authors claim this alternate space is cyberspace. I therefore ask: how and why do memorials exist there? Is there a link between physical and online memorialisation? What kind of memorialisation space is emerging online? To consider these questions, this paper presents findings from an investigation of online memorialisation. Firstly, a unique model was created based on an analysis of the work of several authors, using their definitions of memorialisation and their discussions of the motivations and characteristics of traditional memorial practices. The resulting Memorial Attribute Model was then used to understand how the Web is being used as a memorialisation space. Why memorialisation may have been adopted online is then considered. In addition, I outline possible links between the remembrance of the dead in the physical space and online. Finally, the Web is explored as a collective memorial landscape.

Memorilisation Practice

Memorialisation as a death ritual has been practiced as early as 35,000 BC. An evolutionary analysis of physical memorial form by Hallam and Hockey (2001) suggests that in recent times memorials are increasingly used by the living to maintain a role with the deceased. Before the eleventh century in England, memorials were only erected for those of wealth and means. However the eleventh century was also a turning point for everyday society, in that the graves of the ‘ordinary’ were recovered from anonymity in a desire to commemorate everyday people. Three centuries later, memorials contained items such as name, date of death, words of praise, profession (and indirectly, rank and status), and prayers to God for the soul. Later, text linking family members to the deceased was included and, by the seventeenth century, biographical accounts featured, therefore making the memorial as real as possible to the deceased and the living.

As a form of meaningful and personal communication, memorialisation helps those who experience the death of a loved one to fight through the stages of the grieving process, providing a means to express deeply felt emotion and to honour the deceased. Memorials provide a permanent place for those left behind to connect emotionally and spiritually with their loss. They also provide an opportunity to honour and pay tribute to a person and make a statement about the impact that person had on his or her family, community, or even the world. Moreover, Ruby (1995) explains that mourners are confronted by two very contradictory needs when someone dies: to keep the memory of the deceased alive, and, at the same time, accept the reality of death and loss. Therefore as Salisbury (2002) suggests, the act of erecting some kind of memorial to the deceased is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the grieving process.

So what can cyberspace offer memorialisation? Cyberspace lacks physicality but, as Wertheim (1999) contends, cyberspace can be a spiritual space. Several authors agree this notion extends to memorialisation practice. Hallam & Hockey note the Internet offers the ability to memorialise in a public place, where anyone can visit at any time, without imposition to others, and without interruption to themselves. They continue:

The deceased can always be provided with a here and a now [with the Internet], something which is increasingly evident in the appropriation of public space for private grief, at times of … traumatic loss. (61)

Whilst Wertheim claims therapy is a quintessentially lonely experience, the author also suggests people crave something communal; something that will link their minds to others. As a result, while working ‘on one’s own personal demons, … many people seem to want a collective mental arena, a space they might share[, and I suggest, also grieve,] with other minds’ (233).

Evidence of cyberspace as Wertheim’s ‘collective mental arena’ is certainly well documented in such areas as self-help, e-therapy or cyber-therapy, and psychoanalysis (see Bacon; Condon, and Fernsler, 2000; Derrington, 1999; Hsiung, 2002; Zaleski, 2000). Equally, academics have proven the Web can be specifically used for the practise of memorialisation. Geser’s (1998) early work suggests the Web ‘ may enlarge the scope of cultural expression to new spheres of thoughts and emotions, hitherto hidden in the privacy of individual minds or informal interpersonal relations’, thus providing a more enriched environment in which to memorialise the dead. The impulse to create some form of memorial to the dead seems to be nearly universal across all cultures to Marshall (2000), who indicates he is not surprised Web sites as online memorials ‘have sprung into existence’. Finally, in his proposal for studying the Israeli culture of mourning and memorialisation on the Internet, Sade-Beck (2003: 9) says ‘the Internet is a new tool for the direct expression of emotions’. He continues, ‘the Internet facilitates the expression of emotions through on-site memorialization’ (3).

So as cyberspace seems conducive to memorialising the deceased, how has the practice actually manifested online? This question brings me to the first task of this paper – using a model of memorial motivations and characteristics to investigate how memorials exist in cyberspace. A number of principles were utilised to create a unique method, the Memorial Attribute Model: firstly, an analysis of memorial definitions from several authors (see Davies, 1994; Friedman and James, 2002; Ruby, 1995; Salisbury, 2002); secondly, an analysis of the stages of the grieving processes in foundation works such as Van Gennep (1960) and Kübler-Ross (1969); and finally, the model incorporates a consideration of the aforementioned specific works of Geser, Marshall, and Sade-Beck. As a result, the Memorial Attribute Model consists of a list of memorial motivations and characteristics, creating two hypotheses relating to how memorials exist in cyberspace:

1. Memorials manifest online as a result of one or more of four motivations: grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance.

2. Online Memorials adhere to one or more memorial characteristics: invoking remembrance; a demonstrable array of kinships; and/or as a surrogate for the deceased.

Each motivation and characteristic was applied to random Web sites claiming to be memorials, found through google.com’s Search Engine and using a set of identified search terms. [1] Memorial “gateways” (Web sites providing portal-like access to a number of related Web sites) were also utilised to find memorial content. In exploring each feature of the Memorial Attribute Model, references to memorials in the physical world, the Web’s predecessor in this field, are incorporated for illustrative and comparison purposes.

How Memorialisation Manifests Online

Memorial Motivations

From my brief analysis of the works of Van Gennep and Kübler-Ross, I observe in the first instance that coping with grief and loss is perhaps the main impetus for memorials online. Certainly, memorialisation ‘helps the bereaved to recover from their grief by providing a pleasant ‘memory picture’’ (Metcalf and Huntington, 1991: 54) to reflect on, and can allow others to express their sympathy and consolation through active participation in the grieving process. In comparison, Hallam & Hockey present condolence cards and funerary wreaths as examples of this participation in the physical world, both of which can be kept for future reference as shared moments of intense grieving. Online, memorials created in times of grief and bereavement are found through examples of online memorial text. Just as Kübler-Ross explains the five stages of grief, Web sites found during my investigation adhere to one or more of these stages, supporting their usage as self-help throughout the grieving process.

Expressions of denial are found on many websites, symbolised by phrases such as ‘I still can’t believe you’re gone’ (A. Tracy, n.d.; Woznick, n.d.) or:

It’s so very hard to accept your death; and sometimes I think that you’ll just walk through the door like nothing has happened. (‘Memorial for Lucy Morrison’, 2001)

I still wait for you to call me, I think of something I want to ask you or something I can’t wait to tell you about … then I remember that you’re gone. (C. A. Tracy, 2002)

Anger too is found, as the living articulate resentment for their loved one being taken from them or not being there with them. The word “why” is often an indicator of this stage:

Sometimes I would like to just scream at the top of my lungs until God gets tired of hearing me and sends you back. (‘Memorial for Lucy Morrison’, 2001)

Why did you leave me all alone in this world? What am I going to do now? (‘Memorial for ZAKEY KALID’, 2000)

I think of you everyday. You are such a bastard to deny us. You are such a bastard. God how I miss you. (‘Memorial for Trent James Hayward’, 2002)

Additionally, idioms such as “I would do anything” feature as messages on memorial texts in the bargaining stage of grief and bereavement, and the bereaved also write about how their life cannot go on after the death event. And finally, in the last stage of acceptance, acknowledgements that the deceased is not coming back are typical:

…and now I … understand that you’re not coming back… ever (Johnson, n.d.)

Secondly, Kübler-Ross notes within some communities, those who care about [the deceased] may need help in completing unfinished business. Kuenning (1987) agrees that a sudden death may leave the survivor with many regrets, a sense of unfinished business, and no time for an orderly farewell. Memorialisation can therefore be an outlet for those with unfinished business with the deceased to action toward completing it. Items such as personalised epitaphs, written letters placed grave-side or journals created to work through the unresolved issues, are active and physical displays of this memorialisation motivation. Similarly, in his content categorisation of the Virtual Memorial Garden, Marshall uncovers that most memorials were either light or dark in tone. Light toned memorials were often joyful dialogues about the deceased, whereas dark toned memorials were ‘often apologies, regrets and even confessions’.

The tone of the memorial is especially important when we consider unfinished business as memorial content. Online confessions of unrequited love, last word regrets, and missed opportunities for meeting the deceased are often found, for instance, in the following examples:

Never got to actually say I love you. Well, I love you, Or got to say good-bye, but I will say, see you later! (Esford, n.d.)

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. We said a lot of words, you and I. I would love the opportunity to take a lot of them back. My greatest regret is that the last words I ever said to you was that I never wanted to see you again. (Memorial for DebraAnn, n.d.)

Even in the case of chosen abortions, mothers post their regrets in memoriam to their unborn babies, as an example of which allowing an anonymous cleansing:

Oh God, please help me extinguish the pain and the sorrow of what I have done. (Campo, n.d.)

The tone of the memorial is also important when we consider that memorials have regularly been used as opportunities for conversations with the dead. In their personalised epitaphs and grave-side letters, the living speak to the dead as if they were still alive, as the memorials become a “living” social presence for the deceased. Epitaphs are written as personal, lasting messages, and as I have already mentioned, as an outlet for those with unfinished business with the deceased. Hamilton (1999) cites Sturken’s 1998 example of a conversation with the dead, in the form of a letter at the base of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington D.C.:

Dear Michael: Your name is here but your (sic) are not. I made a rubbing of it, thinking that if I rubbed hard enough, I would rub your name off the wall and you would come back to me. I miss you so.

In this way, the living are conversing with the dead as if they were still alive, in the form of a letter as demonstrated by the “Dear Michael” start to the item. On the Web, the living demonstrate similar behaviour via interactive functionality, such as online diary entries, message boards and guest books. The online memorial created for a young lady who died in 1997 serves as an example (see ‘Amanda Joy Alstatt, March 15, 1981 — June 05, 1997’, n.d.), to which her father and brother often leave messages on her memorial message board. Their messages are conversational in nature, as they “talk” to her about family news and the day to day goings on in their lives:

Amanda. Yea, it is me Daddy.. I know you know about the new and wonderful news. Pretty awesome Huh! That is it for now! …

Hi Amanda its me Matthew, I started highschool (sic) on August 11th. Im (sic) now in 9th grade and im 14 …

It is me!. So much to say, but not enough room or time, right here, right now.

Aside from mourning, grief and bereavement, memorialisation can occur on grounds of historical significance, the model’s final memorialisation motivation. The maintenance of the past as a living memory is of essential importance in the life of a group and individuals. Knowing about origins, past achievements, and mistakes, allows us to understand ourselves as links in the chain of generations (Von Eckartsberg, 1988). In this way, the concept of deliberate memorialisation (see Cosslett, 2002; Searl, 2000) lends itself to historical motives, that is, dedicating a special place to the memory of someone and, in turn, strengthening the fragile bonds of memory that link the generations. This type of memorialisation can occur immediately after a death, though as Cosslett suggests, it often involves ‘deliberate attempts to recapture lost memory’ (252), years beyond when the actual person died.

When we look to the Web for evidence, the use of cyberspace as a method to preserve history and memory is not a new concept. Millard Fillmore, thirteenth president of the United States and a man born over two hundred years ago, is memorialised all over the Web from a historical perspective. Details about his personal life and political accomplishments are chronicled on The Whitehouse Web site [http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/mf13.html], and online reference works such as Encyclopedia America [http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/bios/13pfillm.html] and The Presidents of the United States [http://www.ipl.org/div/potus/mfillmore.html] include biographic information about his family and non-political life experiences. These memorials are not avenues for grief or bereavement. Rather, they are Web sites published for historical significance, as public and social reminders of the achievements and sacrifices of those in public service.

The Web is also used to memorialise everyday people from history. In the case of the historical section of The Officer Down Memorial Page [http://www.odmp.org], memorials serve as reminders of the everyday risks facing law-enforcement officers, by establishing a sense of past in the duties still completed today. Consider Deputy Keeper James B. Lippincott (The Officer Down Memorial Page Inc, 2003), who was killed by gunfire Friday, March 2, 1894. He has been memorialised online since 2003, despite his death occurring nearly 110 years ago.

In summary, and while they are not proven to be exhaustive, online memorialisations are found to be created as a consequence of one or more motivations; grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance. To further investigate how memorialisation exists on the Web, I represent the second hypothesis of the Memorial Attribute Model, in terms of investigating three physical memorial characteristics in cyberspace.

Memorial Characteristics

In the first instance, from my analysis of the work of Van Gennep and Kübler-Ross, a memorial should be a catalyst for invoking memory and remembrance, due to its past or present proximity to the deceased. Property that used to belong to the deceased may invoke memories of them. The very act of visiting a grave places the deceased immediately into the memory of the visitor, due to the proximity of the deceased to the memorial. Though what of the Internet? What of a space that lacks physicality?

Similar to photo albums depicting the life of the deceased at funerals, I find online memorials mitigating their lack of proximity to the deceased by providing a vast array of textual and visual remembrances. A montage of photos, sounds, and video reflects the personal values of the deceased, and hence bring into play perhaps more remembrance than a static physical memorial. Ruby suggests visual remembrances such as picture making can replace human memory, becoming the primary means by which twentieth-century Western humanity remembers.

Every memorial Web site I visited contained at least one picture of the deceased, though many also included photos of family, and images depicting the deceased in a positive light, allowing family and friends to relive their experiences and reflect. MIDI and WAV files play songs favoured by the deceased when memorial pages open in the browser, and visitors are given the opportunity to view home videos of the person, uploaded by family and friends from personal video cameras. Similarly, technology has also enabled an ever-lasting reminder of the exact time the person died, beyond the static death date on most physical memorials. Using time-counters to display the exact time elapsed since the event of their death, a link between the virtual and physical space occurs, complete with second-by-second adjustments as life in the physical space continues. For example:

1653 days, 14 hours, 28 minutes, and 12 seconds have passed since Robbie went to heaven. (‘Robbie Smith Memorial’, n.d.)

Perhaps the most significant memorial characteristic is that memorials are generally surrogates for the dead. Certainly in previous research (Veale, 2003), headstones are found as representations, markers or substitutes for the dead, containing one or more descriptors as information about the deceased. In this way, as Salisbury cites Matthew Berry’s 1992 thesis, ‘the individual grave or memorial … provides a focal point or acts as a substitute for the deceased, allowing the bereaved to maintain a role with the person’ (18). These surrogate descriptors, or inscriptions in the context of general memorialisation, are often crucial in establishing relationships between the memory object and the subject to be remembered. In any case, I suggest surrogate form, content and context has a profound effect upon the ways in which a memorial works as a surrogate.

Equally, on the Web, memorials are being turned to as ever increasing surrogates for all manner of deceased persons; famous or not. MemorialsOnline.com, a commercial provider of online memorial packages, lists several items that should contribute to the content of a memorial, to accurately reflect the deceased. They include: names; dates and places of birth and death; final resting place and cause of death; a biography or eulogy of the deceased; physical characteristics such as height, eye and hair colour; a list of family members; favourite activities; hobbies; occupation; accreditations; education; and organisational affiliations. These items aid in creating an accurate life reflection of the deceased, creating a virtual surrogate for them.

Examples of memorials as surrogates for the deceased abound on the Web, and the presence of this characteristic is perhaps the largest evidence of how memorialisation exists in that space. At a minimum, memorial Web sites contain the name and/or photo of the deceased, along with their birth and death date. However, Web sites are also found to contain biographies; some even chronicling the deceased’s whole life from birth (see ‘Suzie Conaway-Cameron Memorial Website’, 2003), while other memorials (see ‘The Holly Jones Memorial Website’, n.d.), describe specific events that paint the person in a happy light, complete with favourite foods and music.

Continuing the concept of memorial as surrogate, outward displays of kinship are a generally a part of traditional memorials. Horizontal and vertical relationships of lineage, generation and genealogy, allow the living to share some identity or familial connection with the memorial, aiding also in memory creation by describing the close personal networks and bonds of the deceased. In fact, as Davies (1994: 35) describes, ‘memorials spell out the highly particular, familiar and familial relationships with their dead interlocutor, in a way which retains the centrality of the ties between the living or the dead’. Obituaries are often found to implicitly state the relationship of the bereaved and (sometimes those already passed) to the deceased. Additionally, the living may state their relationship to the deceased when erecting memorials such as headstones. And while memorials are generally created by those who are related in some way to the deceased, those that are not related to them still expend intentional effort to display a relationship. For instance, consider memorials created by the leader or citizens of a country, for whom soldiers have fallen in war, or the fan of an entertainer who has since passed.

In a time where privacy laws and identity protection are paramount, I expected this particular memorial characteristic to be invisible on the Web and thus be specifically inferior to physical memorials. demonstrable kinships on online memorials however are similar, if not superior, to traditional memorials in this instance, due the increased space available for memorial text. They are also similar in that they contain a mix of detailed kinships. For example, in terms of specifically named relationships:

He was the fourth child and third son of Samuel L. Diggle and Marie Louise Cobb. (‘Perpetual Memorials Website for Robert Bernard Diggle (1914-1993)’, n.d.)

We mourn the loss of our 16 year-old son, Michael. (‘Michael Swickey, Jr. Memorial Tribute’, n.d.)

… and generalised kinships:

This page is dedicated to the memories of my beautiful granddaughter. (‘Alexis Brianne Stempien’, n.d.)

On February 25, 2001, my beautiful little girl got hurt. (‘Memorial’, 2004)

In the same way, some online memorials (see ‘Edward Herbert Dube’, 2002) contain links to the memorials of other deceased family members on the Web, thereby stating familial relationships in the form of hyperlinks.

To summarise the above findings, websites are found to portray one or more of the Memorial Attribute Model’s three characteristics; remembrance; a demonstrable array of kinships; and/or as a surrogate for the deceased. These findings however, in addition to the aforementioned five memorial motivations, raise additional questions. Why is cyberspace used for memorialisation? Are there links between the physical and virtual space? Does the existence of online memorialisation change traditional memorialisation practice? The following section of this paper attempts to explore these questions.

Why Memorialisation Manifests Online

In a world where physical memorials can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars (see Ryle, 2002), require physical attendance, and are subject to degradation and desecration, the Web can be considered an additional or alternate space to memorialise the dead. To explain, I propose timeliness, cost, accessibility, and creativity as advantages of memorialising online.

Perhaps the most prevailing advantage of cyberspace for memorialisation is that the Internet, as a space, allows quick if not instant content creation, unlimited editing and updating, and a lifespan that is not subject to the degradation of the physical world. [2] Unlike physical memorials, which are erected at one point of time and generally remain unchanged, the interactive and communicative nature of the Internet allows online content be amended and added to, in subsequent periods of memorialisation.

After the initial creation of an online memorial during times of grief and bereavement, additional reflection and content is often added to create an enduring and expanding space for the deceased. For example, a memorial to SIDS infant Jordan Joseph Miller (see Miller, n.d.) contains messages authored on the anniversary of his death, over some four years since he died in 1994. Equally, the online memorial of Gregory Ott (see Ott, 2002), assisted not only in the periods of initial grief and bereavement (as characterised on the main page), several other pages were added to the site in subsequent years, again on the anniversary of his death. In the same way, the mother of “Kenny” continually uses his memorial site (see ‘A Memorial to Kenny’, n.d.) on the anniversary of his birthday, to reflect and ‘speak’ to him as she works through her enduring grief.

Moreover, online memorial websites are also found to be dynamic and continuing works in progress, creating full-featured creative works. Olaf Karthaus (2001) spent the last three years building the memorial website, The Daniel Project for his son Daniel, who died in 2000 from a congenital heart disease. The ‘Daniel’s Story’ section of the website is a number of chapters commemorating his short life, with the first chapter uploaded in November 2000 (three months after his death) and the last in January 2003. All sections and indeed the site are continually being updated, making ‘Daniel’s life, his struggles, and most importantly, the joy he gave [his parents], public’.

Not only are memorials fluctuating and adaptive online, they are also a timely intermediary until a physical memorial is erected. As one bereaved person said in response to the World Trade Centre site becoming inaccessible after the September 11 terrorist attacks: ‘What are we supposed to do between now and when the actual physical memorial is there?’(Frangos, 2004). I contend that cyberspace allows memorial websites to be created more quickly than physical memorials, an assertion supported by the research of the PEW Internet and American Life project. PEW Internet (2002: 21) found in the time after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA:

… more than four in ten Web sites [archived between September 11, 2001 and December 1, 2001] allowed visitors not only to view others’ expression[s about the attacks], but also to post their own reactions and perspectives about the terrorist attacks, [in addition] to communal expressions of grief and mourning.

Thus within three months of the terrorist attacks, a large number of Web sites were erected as online memorials. Thus in times quicker than physical memorials could be erected, the Web was utilised to quickly and easily create memorialisation spaces. Similarly, online memorials do not cost as much as the physical to erect. As Putzel (2002) says:

Unlike real estate or physical memorials that tend to increase in price with inflation, the cost of erecting and preserving online memorials has declined dramatically as technology prices have plunged in recent years.

Furthermore, perhaps in part to the aforesaid time and cost considerations and the increasing number of people accessing to the Internet, the Web as a memorialisation space is also more open and available to a diverse group of people than physical memorials. For instance, the Internet removes the geographic difficulties evident in accessing physical memorials. As Marshall explains, online ‘memorials are often created by people unable to attend funerals [and] who live far away from the burial place’.

As a result, funerary web-casting has become popular online, as a way to participate in memorialisation practice virtually. Made available via Internet technology, funerary web-casting enables a funeral service to be watched live through the use of Webcams, or at a later date from a recording of the service. They are often supplementary material to online memorial Web sites, as downloadable files in an online archive of the memorial service. In fact, Karen Kasel made a funeral Web-cast available for the family of her deceased mother, because:

It cost[s] money to drop everything and come to a funeral. It’s difficult in this day and age of everyone living so far away. I think it’s just wonderful that [the family] were seeing this. You get the feel of the whole service. (Ordonez, 2002)

Seeing that Wertheim (1999: 228) believes the Web is ‘not ontologically rooted in the physical phenomenon [and is] … not subject to the laws of physics’, it is not surprising that the bereaved can view, interact and experience online memorials in their own time, without having to conform to opening dates and times. I also suggest this lack of physicality also allows memorialisation to be practiced in ways more private than at public, physical memorials. Furthermore, the ability to mask identities and remain anonymous on the Web allows those who had inappropriate or secret relationships with the deceased to work through their grief and memorialise those of their choosing.

The Web as a medium for memorialisation facilitates not only writing as a part of the grieving process, but also the immediate sharing of these texts internationally. Marshall certainly agrees, in that the ‘relief that people have found through the simple act of writing a memorial text’ may be multiplied infinitely by the knowledge of the words being disseminated around the world in a matter of seconds. In support of this claim, the following quotation from Frank Yanoti (n.d.) displays how an online memorial addresses the need to share the loss of a person for and with many diverse people:

A memorial website may seem like a strange idea, but there has been nothing normal about the past few weeks. I needed a way to get out this information and I (we all) needed to do something, anything. I put this up quickly to aid those traveling from out of town, but I’d like to offer it to all of Alison and Adam’s many, many family and friends as a small way for us to share our memories of Alison and to try to console each other. I will add a guest book shortly and I ask that anyone who has any pictures, stories, or other things to share please send them my way. It’s a tragedy; there is no other word. We have only our memories and each other.

We must consider however the possibility that physical memorialisation is superior to the online, because of the proximity of the memorial to the deceased. That is, online memorials may not seem “real” to the bereaved, who may believe that their loved one is where the physical remains are located. Though, just as graves and static memorials can evoke memory through limited content and proximity to the deceased, I find the interactive nature of online memorials require less and less memory and imagination of the living. Consequently, photo’s, text, video, and sights and sounds make for an emotion-charging experience for the bereaved and indeed any visitor to an online memorial, allowing the memories to be created for them, and perhaps mitigating the issues surrounding lack of proximity to the deceased.

Timeliness, cost, accessibility and creativity are not the only advantages of online memorialisation however. The Web is also a favourable medium for preserving existing physical memorials from degradation and desecration. Physical cemeteries are fast becoming areas of disrepair, and preservationists are working to transfer the information in these places to electronic repositories – such as databases and virtual cemeteries – thus preserving historical memory. The digitisation of historical books and texts are the subject of many working papers, to ensure these valuable though fragile items are not lost to the damage inflicted by time. Historical memorialisation can also be seen in terms of preservation, as much as it is about safeguarding memory. Online memorials in this regard are found to be largely genealogical in nature, though there is also a large proportion found for historical persons of socially ‘higher-profiles” than everyday people, such as political, entertainment and social arenas. As a hobby, genealogy is a way for the present to search for their roots and memorialise those that walked the earth before them – the people that contributed ancestrally to the person they are today. The increase in genealogical family tree publishing on the Web immortalises the distinct relationships between different branches of one’s ancestry and extended family history.

Finally, although I have been considering the Web as an additional or alternate space to memorialise the dead, are physical and online memorialisation distinct and disparate rituals? Or are they utilised in collaboration to enhance memorialisation practice? In fact, physical space and cyberspace work in symbiosis on many occasions.

At the very least, the Web provides mention or access to memorials located in the physical world. For example, the Millard Fillmore House Web site [http://home.earthlink.net/~pock/home_mf.htm] incorporates a virtual tour of the house in which he lived in Buffalo, New York, in addition to pictures of his grave and statues in New York State. Other Web sites also lessen the physical requirement of travelling to visit memorials, such as the many Web sites covering the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. Online projects such as the Australian War Memorial [http://www.awm.gov.au/] and Thomas Jefferson Memorial [http://www.nps.gov/thje/index.htm] can both be considered online memorials in their own right, taking into consideration the Memorial Attribute Model, though they are actually representations of the physical memorial. Photos of physical memorials such as headstones are featured on Web sites such as the Carol Lambert Memorial [http://carollambert.homestead.com/] and the JC Caffro Memorial [http://jccaffro.com/]. Additionally, The Crazy Horse Memorial Website [http://www.crazyhorse.org/] offers visitors a real-time Webcam of the physical memorial.

Similarly, there is evidence of cyberspace providing an additional dimension to memorials in the physical space. URL’s are found on headstones, linking the monument to an interactive Web site about the deceased, though in some cases they have been considered advertising rather than a way to provide a cohesive memorial for the deceased (see ‘Son ordered to remove web address from mother’s grave’, 2001). In other cases, such as The Virtual Wall [http://www.virtualwall.org/], an online memorial enhances the physical memorial, allowing personal remembrances of letters, photographs, poetry, and citations to be recorded online, honouring those women and men named on the actual physical memorial.

Finally, although not yet connected to the Internet, web technology is fast becoming a part of physical memorial practice. The Charon Touch Screen ‘integrates with Charon Electronic Memorials to display the family’s choice of reflections [in Web technology, at a kiosk at the physical cemetery:] poems, photographs, tributes, memories, and full multimedia presentations related to the deceased’ are available. Similarly, ‘Brent and Tyler Cassity provide visual eulogies via touch screen biographies on a kiosk in their cemeteries. They feel the deceased should be the primary focus of a cemetery visit, not some cold memorial stone’ (Ramsland, 2002).

Concisely, cyberspace, and specifically the Web, provides numerous advantages to traditional (physical) memorialisation practice, in terms of timeliness, cost, accessibility, and a broader spectrum of creativity. There is also evidence to support the use of Web technology within physical memorial practice, and certainly of physical memorials either being represented or enhanced online. Though with the ebb and flow of millions of memorials online, what type of space is emerging there?

The Internet as a Collective Memorial Landscape

I find many people engaging in the participatory construction of memories on the Web, simply by creating their own heterogeneous messages of loss, bereavement and remembrance in online memorials. However, when individual memorials are considered together, possibly as Wertheim’s ‘collective mental arena’, I propose that we can describe the Web as a “collective memorial landscape”. Furthermore, specific navigation aids that spatially link individual memorials on the Web create a further dimension, in the form of online memorialisation sub-landscapes.

Kluitenberg (1999) states the memory of a culture or society is located principally in memory objects that hold traces of the past; a way in which material objects, events, documents and descriptions are linked together into a coherent narration of past and present. The Web, I therefore suggest, derives its significance as a broad and collective memorial landscape through demonstrated and globally accessible acts of cultural memory, in the form of online memorials. To explain, and as Kushner (1999) describes, physical memorial landscapes such as cemeteries intentionally create memory in two ways:

… one as places where individuals could remember their loved ones; the other as sacred national ground in which citizens of nation and city – in either case, members of the public – could see their public identity reflected in the memory of the public from years past.

Thus in considering the evidence in this paper, the Web can be considered a memorial landscape. Web sites and Web pages appear as Kushner’s “places” for people to visit, capable of invoking remembrance for the deceased. And while cyberspace is considered as a distinct “place” or “space” by Wertheim and an extension of our mental space by Anders (2001), the Web reflects public identity and memory through the diverse practice of online memorialisation. Though that is not to say the Web is a singular level landscape. Delving below the memorials found on the Web uncovers sub-landscapes of implicit links between one individual-specific memorial to another, creating a global network or “collective” of memorial content for the deceased. Additionally, the use of Web rings and memorial collation or portal Web sites create memorial sub-landscapes, based on the type of death or grieving object, or even a tragic event.

Hypertextual linking of Web sites could at first glance be considered in Columbs’ (2002: 44) terms, as merely ‘documents … related to each other’. However, within the context of an online memorial for one person being linked to other online memorial content for that same person, I find online cultural memory a central theme, bridged across the perspectives of many authors. For example, the Angel Alex Web site [http://www.sleepingangel.com/sk/alex.htm], a memorial site to a stillborn baby, is in itself an act of online memorialisation, though it also contains hyperlinks to other online memorials about the child, broadening the specific narration and memory invocation about him. Another online memorial simply asks the visitor, ‘for other expressions of love and memories about Kevin, you can visit the following links’ (‘interest.htm’, n.d.). On the other hand, navigation tools such as Web rings create sub-landscapes of online memorialisation, based on commonalities of bereavement.

For instance, thousands of pet-related memorial Web rings exist on the Web, creating a communal grieving sub-landscape for deceased animal companions. The Hoofbeats in Heaven Web ring [http://www.hoofbeats-in-heaven.com/webring/], according to the authors, ‘creates a safe haven of support for members and visitors alike who have, or will be, experiencing the loss of their cherished horse’. Likewise, in times of tragic events and especially the current climate of worldwide terrorist activities, people can go from Web site to Web site within Web rings such as American Tragedy [http://webrings-r.us/americantragedy/index.html], to ‘witness for themselves how Americans are sticking together during … trying days’ of loss. Moreover, the type of death also features as an attribute for the creation of collective memorial sub-landscapes. The Our Angels On Earth, Now Our Angels In Heaven Web ring [http://w.webring.com/hub?ring=ourangelsoneart5] allows people to traverse online memorials about the loss of a child.

Briefly, while Web sites belonging to Web rings are individual memorials representing past or present losses, linking them together based on contextual similarities creates sub-landscapes within a broader online memorial landscape. Equally, individual-focussed sub-landscapes are created by hyperlinks between memorials about the same person. All in all, online memorials are linked together on the Web, either directly through navigation structures, or conceptually when considering their locality in cyberspace, into a coherent narration of past and present, identified as a collective memorial landscape.

Conclusion

Using the Memorial Attribute Model, the paper has presented online memorialisation as practiced by and for family, friends, pets and famous people; for those dying in the present; and for others who may have died some several hundred years ago. I have confirmed online memorials are generally created through one or more of four motivations: grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance. I also found online memorials containing one or more of the model’s memorialisation characteristics; creating remembrance; a demonstrable array of kinships; and/or as a surrogate for the deceased. While there are many links and collaborative efforts between physical and virtual memorials, creating a holistic approach to memorialisation, cyberspace has successfully improved upon memorialisation practices in areas such as timeliness, cost, accessibility, creativity, and enabled the sharing of grief and bereavement on a global scale.

One of the most fascinating aspects of online memorialisation is the number of people utilising it in their day to day activities, as demonstrated by volatility in the collective memorial landscape. Online memorialisation is a highly flexible, adaptive practice, enabling everyday people to keep pace with their subtle changes in thought and feeling toward the deceased, and sometimes with that of their extended friends and families. Thus memorials are being created everyday, while existing ones are removed, remodelled, or enhanced. In the long term, other means of keeping the memory of the deceased alive will become available as the living strive to keep the memories of those they’ve lost alive, perhaps in the form of digital immortality (see ‘From Memex to Digital Immortality’, 2002), or three-dimensional, life-like avatars of the deceased, complete with a downloaded consciousness.

The Web currently allows cultural memory to be created and maintained across the broader Web, and within sub-landscapes of links between memorials for one person, or contextual memorials based on type of death, object of death, or event-based deaths. Thus, whatever the future hold, we use the term collective memorial landscape to describe the current space emerging and evolving from online memorialisation practise.

While this paper commenced stating that millions of people die per year and a majority of those in the past were lost to anonymity, Internet technology is ensuring that every one of them and their descendants roaming the earth today have the opportunity to be immortalised in some form. Their life can be commemorated online, on the event of their death in the physical world, and remembered by the general public via online memorials. In a society that is increasingly fragmented and where families and friends, often separated by significant distances, cannot actively participate in physical memorialisation, cyberspace is an available and effective space for memorialising the deceased.

Author’s Biography

Kylie Veale is a PhD Candidate in Media and Information (Internet Studies) at Curtin University of Technology, Australia. She holds a postgraduate degree in Information Environments and a Master of Internet Studies. She has published in international journals and edited books on subjects such as the Internet gift economy, community-based online communication, and the intersection of genealogy and the Internet. Her current research interests extend the latter, such as environments of use within online communities, and the use of the Internet for leisure pursuits, paying specific attention to the hobbyist genre of online genealogy. Her website and writings are available online: http://www.veale.com.au.
[kylie@veale.com.au]

Notes

[1] Search terms used were: Memorial, memorialisation, memorialising, tribute, ‘In Loving Memory Of’, ‘To The Memory Of”

[back]

[2] This assertion assumes, of course, the management and financial responsibilities of the online resource are covered and continued for the life of the online memorial.

[back]

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There is a crisis in new media arts education. Yet there has been surprisingly little debate about it until recently, despite the widespread emergence of new media arts programs and massive student interest all throughout the North American university landscape. The current crisis is only now starting to get widespread acknowledgment from new media educators in the United States, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and beyond. Fields of conflict range from undergraduate students exclusively demanding vocational training, to the lack of advanced debate about new media artwork, and the media-specific orientation of departments. Once beyond the certainty of technical instruction new media arts educators on many campuses experience a crisis due to the unbearable lightness of their topical orientation. In addition, it is an almost impossible challenge for a single human being to keep up with all technological advances. And last but not least, there is the quest for the education of artists, whether or not their preferred media are digital.

Other pertinent issues are the introduction of open source software in the classroom, the professional future of graduates of new media arts programs, the contestation of the definition of art in a new media context, and the breaking out of the isolation of the university lab to connect students with the real life world. State budget cuts in Europe and the United States have led to the emergence of many “anti-universities,” and teach-yourself-institutions.

A conference at the Department of Media Study, The State University of New York at Buffalo, reflected on educational models in new media arts education (nmae) and the negotiation of the ground rules for collaboration. In April 2004, 150 artists and academics arrived in Buffalo to discuss anti-universities, the notion of free cooperation, radio experiments, collaborative performance projects, distributed authorship, self-organised educational initiatives, collaborations between artists and scientists, peer-to-peer porn, networked virtual reality, collaboration in the open source movement, and participatory networked art. Many of these topics were discussed on a preparatory mailing list and selected postings were included in a free conference publication.

Amsterdam-based media critic Geert Lovink and I organised this international conference. In the context of a report about the “Free Cooperation” conference, this essay examines critical issues in new media arts education and makes proposals to overcome its current crisis. I will present creative models of online collaboration and briefly address the organising of this conference questioning traditional academic formats such as “panelism.” [1]

Networked collaboration

The topic of (online) collaboration may appear marginally academic to some. But from cell phones to email, multiplayer online games, mailing lists, weblogs, and wikis our everyday lives are increasingly enmeshed with technology. [2, 3] Much of the politics of the everyday is connected to issues that are on some level involved with technology. This is true at least for societies benefiting from the globalisation of the information order, which is limited and partial by all means. The necessity to examine the ways in which we collaborate in the technological channels through which we communicate will soon become more apparent.

We invited the Bremen-based media critic Christoph Spehr to the Free Cooperation conference. Spehr coined the term ‘free cooperation’ in his essay ‘Gleicher als andere’ (2003). Most of Spehr’s writings are not yet translated into English and this conference was an opportunity to introduce his ideas into Anglophone media discourses (Spehr, 2004). Spehr’s writings use references to 1960s sci-fi movies to think about contemporary cooperation. They insist on the option of refusal, the right of withdrawal from cooperation, independence, negotiation and re-negotiation with corporate or state ‘monsters.’

We asked: how could these ideas of equality and freedom be made useful for alternative networks of learning and the university?

On collaboration

For media artists, collaboration and consultation are increasingly inevitable, since technology-based artwork requires increasingly deeper levels of specialisation in the process of bringing together technological and conceptual components. In business contexts “groupware” has become more and more important and recent versions of proprietary software such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver focus increasingly on the development of file-sharing and issues of permissions in co-authoring. Networked collaborators are alerted to changes other team members have made to a document and can decide if they choose to overwrite them or merge their contribution with that of others. Permissions here refer to the ability of team members to alter documents created by others. How can Spehr’s notions of ‘free cooperation,’ developed in the context of Social Democratic Germany, become more relevant in countries such as the United States with its iron grip on student loans and credit reports unsupported by safety nets like state grants or unemployment benefits? In the US there are no social nets to fall down into when trying to live the politics of refusal and independence. Yet there are a number of examples of free cooperation already at work within the Northern American context.

In the urban United States, Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets are promising and productive cooperative group models. During the anti-war protests of 2003, hundreds of cyclists in San Francisco, California, blocked major urban intersections and highways as part of a Critical Mass initiative. This began with a leafleting campaign advertising times and dates of such actions, yet the campaign took place without any central leadership. In a similar vein, Reclaim the Streets uses a decentralised model to reclaim the public sphere.

Other examples of decentralised, community-organising efforts include; broadcasting free radio, graffiti, and street parties. The Green Movement exemplifies a type of temporary alliance that chooses no one particular subject position (e.g. class, gender, race) in pursuit of a shared goal (Laclau and Mouffe). Another example is Paper Tiger TV. Founded in 1981, Paper Tiger TV presents a consequential model of collaboration to create and distribute collectively produced activist video works that critique the media. And the New York City-based chamber orchestra, Orpheus, works without a conductor and rotates all of its functions among the musicians. These are examples of horizontal, leaderless social structures.

The ABCs of collaboration

According to the Cambridge Dictionary the term collaboration assumes that two or more people work together to create or achieve the same thing. Participants in the Free Cooperation conference suggested that each collaborator needs to be given authority over her task. Collaborators should get to know each other as people and should find out about each other’s agency and professional needs. Collaboration demands genuine dialogue, and a human encounter. This requires the skills of receptivity and responsiveness. At times, the dedication to the other person can be a bit scary; collaboration does not work for everybody. The ABC’s of collaboration demand that needs are addressed and lines of communication kept open. Collaborations need to constantly change and question their work and goals, or they will get trapped by their own definition. Collective leadership is a critical issue. Leadership needs to rotate. Leaders are defined and designated by commitment of time, energy, resources and intellectual contributions. Commonly, the person who contributes the most to a project has the most say, but this dynamic endangers the cooperation as it marginalises silent or withdrawn group members.

In the context of situations of learning, a wireless tool developed at The University of California San Diego is relevant here: “ActiveClass” employs wireless technology in an attempt to encourage disembodied classroom participation via Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) and laptop computers from students who might otherwise not participate. “ActiveClass” permits students to “silently” ask questions, answer questions, and provide other types of feedback. The results are aggregated and then broadcast to all students and the teacher, facilitating verbal discussion. [4]

What is ‘free cooperation’?

We are always already collaborating on a face-to-face or networked basis. From cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary, to cross-professional exchanges, cooperation is evident. It is nothing new, nor is it something we actively choose. Extending beyond the focus on internal group dynamics (and the relationships of different individuals), we asked at the Free Cooperation conference what really happens when the many collaborate. Conference participants with as much as twenty years of experience said that collaborations should start with the building of trust and testing out the compatibility of values and interests instead of immediately focusing on the project goals. Social resources including trust, mutual respect, tolerance, and shared values make it easier for people to work together on a project. With trust, true communication can take place. In “free cooperation” everyone stands to benefit and anyone can leave at any time. If there are disagreements, the cooperation must remain workable. There is no ideal cooperation; there always are elements of compromise.

Online and off, there is the risk of involuntary altruism caused by the possibility of freeloaders in the collective process. We must ask: whose labor becomes invisible and which type of labor steps to the front stage? Issues of accreditation are more developed in theatre, dance, architecture, music and film, where each person receives credit for her individual contribution. [5] Some members of the Open Source movement suggest a ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy based on exchanges of effort– one gives a bit of code and then receives a bit (Baldwin and Clark). Comparably, jazz musicians and dancers who improvise study the moves of the others and take turns leading. However, as Dave Brubeck suggests, improvisational freedom needs to be guided by discipline. At best, collaborations can playfully spark off one another, with a “third body” resulting from a chorus. [6] The free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all although, commonly, self-sacrifice and the absence of personal gain, rather than freedom, are associated with collaborative work (Marx and Engels).

How do the art market and the idea of free cooperation work together? According to the logic of the art market the artist is produced as exemplary sufferer and genius, not as somebody who is in control of her work. The logic of the art world and that of technology-based art are opposed to each other. The art world focuses on the romanticised idea of an author who creates an art object that can be distributed by many institutions. Technology-based art is variable, often ephemeral, discursive, concept-based, existent in many copies. It is collaboratively authored, and can be distributed online (Manovich). Artists have taken the internet on as a context for their work since its emergence, de-emphasising individual authorship and responding to Bertolt Brecht’s demand for an apparatus that goes beyond distribution and allows communication (Brecht). Early projects aiming at collaborative authorship include Robert Adrian X’s Die Welt in 24 Stunden (1983), Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994) and the project ‘Epreuves d’ecritures’ as part of the exhibition ‘Les Immatrieux’ that was conceived by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1985). Yet art institutions have for the very most part been neither interested in, nor supportive of free cooperation.

Many of these artworks were discussed at the Free Cooperation conference. Before I’ll talk more about new media arts education I’ll now make some comments on the organisation of conferences. People love conferences because they provide new opportunities for collaboration. They are venues where you can reflect, meet future collaborators, debate your ideas and artworks, party intensely, get inspired, provoked, learn, make new friends, and then occasionally carry on the debate in the sauna. Conferences offer an opportunity for people who cannot meet otherwise to spend a few days together away from their obligations, zooming-in on ideas. For practitioners whose geographic location and financial situation makes access to these venues impossible, technologies such as video conferencing and the AccessGrid allow for remote participation. [7]

I have always looked for a conference without lectures and panels. It is challenging not to read from notes, to be brief and to leave ample time for questions, and to focus on the points raised by the chairperson of a particular session. The rigid structure of panels and the non-communicative form of the keynote speaker feed into the celebrity system, reinforcing hegemonic paradigms that get in the way of genuine dialogue and of other voices being heard. In the ideal setting, participants can read each other’s papers or presentations before they arrive at the venue. At the event itself a presenter would only have to give short reminders of their work and the focus could move to discussion. This works best with participants who are open to present what they have to say in a few minutes and are interested in debate. Specific software could make it easier for participants to find each other more easily (ie. recognise the person you wanted to meet in large conference crowds). Technology that enables this is still too expensive to integrate it in media arts conference but business contexts already see similar location aware networks. Here, nametags contain information that makes the person locatable in a close proximity area network. A possible project that could be brought into use for this is WiFi.Bedouin. [8]

The Free Cooperation conference of 2004 took place on a university campus but the atmosphere was theatrical rather than academic. We modeled the scenario of the event after a Brechtian play. For example, there was a talk show in which participants impersonated sci-fi filmmakers, scientists, and “flexible personalities,” accompanied by musical intermezzos on the phonarmonica. Remote guests commented via internet Relay Chat. We also set up a ‘talkathon’ (one room, two speakers, eight people in the audience), a few dialogues, a video conference, a weekend conference game (about games), streamed net radio lectures, brainstorming sessions, film screenings, a small exhibition, several workshops, a turntablist collaboration, and one monologue. There were no keynote speakers and no panels, which worked well because the topic was itself collaboration. We explicitly asked participants not to deliver long lectures aiming for a more dialogical format. The rooms were organised with seating in circular shapes.

Large gatherings such as this one are good opportunities for students to create their own networks – relationships that may become fruitful for them in the future. Encounters with other students, artist friends or cultural critics may in the end even turn out to be more formative than regimented course work. The people who teach may stay in the particular research institution but students will have to leave. It is essential for them to make linkages not only in the city where they study but also (inter)nationally. It is these networks that will give an important context to their work once they have graduated.

These outside arenas are as much places of learning as classes. At the Free Cooperation conference, a session focused on self-organised educational initiatives, free universities, and anti-universities. Massive attendance demonstrated a great deal of urgency. The organisation of this session was inspired by a debate that developed in October 2003 when I posted some thoughts and observations about new media arts education on the mailing list (Scholz, 2003b). There were many responses on the Rhizome mailing list, the collaborative weblog Discordia (Scholz, 2003a), as well as dozens of emails to me. [9] The responses ranged from enthusiastic support to uneasiness. This text was predominantly concerned with the boredom, apathy and anti-intellectualism encountered in American undergraduate new media classrooms, the role of the teacher and some issues to engage with beyond the teaching of “just-in-time-knowledge.”

I studied in Dresden, London, and New York City and have taught undergraduate and graduate students in several research institutions including The Bauhaus University, The University of Arizona in Tucson and currently The State University of New York at Buffalo. Reading many of these list responses I realised that there were big differences between those who have the actual human experience of the here-and-now-ness of teaching in the classroom and others who approach teaching with the there-and-then-ness of ideas that they have not had the chance to test-drive with students. Part of the purpose of writing this essay is to reflect upon this debate.

Universities throughout the United States are increasingly restructured to fit the imperatives of corporate business logic. Bill Readings in The University in Ruins elaborates on the replacement of culture by the discourse of excellence as the University’s response to 1968. Undergraduate students may conceive of themselves as consumers who conveniently make a down payment on education and with next to no effort (like shopping) graduate into the good life. It would, however, be elitist to blame students for the system that socialised them and now puts a tremendous weight on them. Undergraduate students in the US are under tremendous pressure to find a job. This pressure is both self-imposed and created by their peers and parents. It is the task of the faculty to outline clearly what the interests of the department are and where the education provided here will get the students professionally. In addition, In the United States 45 million people are uninsured, and Medicare premiums are the highest they have ever been… (Gore). Amy Alexander, who is a media artist and faculty at the University of California San Diego, points out that: ‘Unemployment payments and food stamps don’t go very far; neither do paychecks from WalMart.’ She adds: ‘…once you work full-time, for a while, you’ll realise how amazingly unfulfilling jobs are, and that you’ll want an engagement with culture outside of your employment.’ [10] In the United States a person can only receive welfare benefits for 5 years in their entire life. Students in new media art programs in the US rarely have the hopes that their counterparts in European universities held – especially during the more prosperous 1980s. There the aspiration was to belong to the 1- 2% that could make a living with their work in the art market (Bauer: 22). In the United States, especially for young technologists, this art market does not exist anyway and sustaining grants are basically unavailable. This is highlighted by a comparison to Nordic countries where artists may manage to go from one grant to the next or be supported by unemployment benefits. [11]

The increase in bureaucratic demands and duties in many universities diminishes the time of artists who are also teachers, and therefore both teach and remain actively engaged with contemporary cultural production and its discourses. In addition, it is an almost impossible challenge for one human being to constantly keep up with the developments in technologies. There has been much written about the turning of the university into a for-profit knowledge factory (Bok; Slaugher and Leslie; Aranowitz; Johnson, Kavanagh and Mattson) but few alternatives or positive counter-examples have been offered. Throughout new media art departments globally there is widespread disagreement, if not disconnection, between undergraduate students and faculty members. Students do not aspire to become artists but are often exclusively focused on gaining vocational skills for their future in the “industry.” They may smirk dismissively at media archeology, and all that theory and political context material that belongs to the unfashionable past. But to which industry do they refer? In reality, there is no such thing as one stable new media industry and the required skill sets are constantly shifting. A fixed identity of the artist as it may have been possible for filmmakers, for example, is no longer possible. In new media job opportunities drift from the VJ turntable, VR lab, and the local non-profit organisation to the theatre stage. Skills that are up to industry-standard may also be better provided by higher training than higher education. In Steal this University Ana Marie Cox talks of the corporate desire for ‘”just-in-time-knowledge”; that is, skills necessary for the job at hand, rather than basic broader skills.’ She continues: ‘…the state of Washington granted a baccalaureate of science in “Real Time Interactive Simulation,” and this new higher education institution is run by the Nintendo Corporation. A journalist points out that in such institutions students take no humanities or social science courses whatsoever. That’s because those things are superfluous for the needs of the Nintendo corporation’ (Cox: 12). It is exactly the focus on the novelty involved that is the most fickle of all companions in an educational context. Young new media artists should not be seduced by the idea of novelty of creation but rather locate their practice in an historical context.

What is in the best long-term interest of the student may not be immediately apparent to her and it takes courage on the part of the instructor to insist on her vision. What will students fall back to if their first job choice does not come through straight away? Most faculty members have a desire to educate students instead of preparing them for cognitive Taylorism in an HTML factory camouflaged as start up office. Independent and difficult courses will provide longer lasting skills, more than the teaching of “just-in-time-knowledge” and run-of-the-mill software applications. In addition, a consumer approach to education often comes with anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in the classroom by not reading assignments, not contributing to class discussions, complaining about high workloads, or by dispassionately condemning intellectual debate as “boring.” Bill Readings describes undergraduate students in North America as having a widespread sense of being “parked” at the University: taking courses, acquiring credits, waiting to graduate. In a sense this is their reaction to the fact that nothing in their education encourages them to think of themselves as the heroes of the story of liberal education… (Readings: 138).

Like public broadcasting, education should not be afraid of low ratings or small profits. But mainly adjunct and untenured faculty’s academic careers rely heavily on student evaluations, which is where the system is itself problematic.

The Future of Critical New Media Arts Education: Suggestions for the Morning After

I am a media artist teaching within the system of a research university and my suggestions come from this difficult place. The rhetoric of resistance to the corporatisation of the university rarely leads to concrete proposals. We do not need more manifestos. They rarely offer concrete suggestions for the morning after. What are ways in which we can escape the business logic of the “university of excellence” (Readings) that is fundamentally at odds with responsible education? What is the professional future of students graduating from new media arts programs in the post-dotbomb era? Today, media arts programs that directly sent their graduates into dotcom companies like Razorfish in the mid and late 1990s have to adjust their focus in a time of dwindling resources. What is the professional future of students graduating from new media arts programs in the post-dotbomb era? What are innovative structures for learning contexts in critical new media arts education? In the context of the post-welfare state, what are examples of self-organised educational projects that respond to the soaring cost of education? Has the time come when we can replace all proprietary software with open source or free software applications? Which tools can we easily use to network student groups, departments, and universities? How can we introduce wireless technologies for teaching? How can theory and production be brought together in a meaningful way? Between technophobia, hyped techno-optimism, and Futurist discourses of progress that make us blind to the clumsy reality of computers, how do we think about and live with technology? What about professors professing their politics in the classroom? Some may argue that there is no room for the personal politics of the professor in the classroom. I disagree. The Greek word “professore” means “to proclaim.” It does not mean to look the way when thousands die in Iraq, when our civil liberties vanish under the Patriot Act, academic freedom of speech is questioned (or when the International Monetary Fund ruins yet another Jamaica). Teaching involves questioning, the development of an educated position on world politics. Participants in class are not necessarily to agree, but they are urged to search out their own position. Which topics are urgent and which readings are relevant and lasting? I want to turn to a number of concrete proposals for a critical new media education, some of which are drawn from models already at work.

Theme-based rather than media-based

Rather than developing traditional media-oriented departments, universities should develop theme-based work groups (departments) around issues such as “Cooperative Technologies,” “Media Art and Politics,” or “The Knowledge Commons.” This theme-based research would enable cross-disciplinarity beyond the set boundaries of even the most progressive media-based departments. As feasible, teams would use and teach Open Source software to facilitate this theme-based research. The theme-based structure is applied in universities such as the Design Academy Eindhoven where each theme-based group works with an organisation or a company. This model is more flexible and requires less administrative effort.

If fewer classes were mandatory we might be able to encourage a more informal, individualised learning process. Learning and teaching could take place in a way in which the transmission of knowledge through authority can be questioned. All involved in the learning and teaching process should follow the logic of educational responsibility and accountability that is at odds with the logic of accounting. Teaching should not be reduced to the training of technocrats without ever questioning the purpose and function of that training. If we would allow for less efficiency, more play, and more experimentation in education we would be undaunted by the prospect of failure. More attention should be paid to the building of friendships, relationships among peers, and interpersonal/ soft skills. Ergonomic chairs and healthy food (rare to find on US campuses) would also contribute to a good learning environment. Participants should be motivated towards self-learning, self-directed time and the use of social software for intellectual exchange. [12] Modeled after the Freie Klasse participants should organise courses in which they teach each other, write their own curriculum and invite speakers of their choice. Within the context of the theme-based department they should have the autonomy to decide what and how they want to learn. Self-reflexivity is encouraged and no grades are given. Exchanges with local tech-businesses are enabled in creative ways. A creative and thoughtful attempt to involve students in local manufacturing facilities is the Howstuffismade project. [13] Here students produce photo essays about the creation of products and get involved with local businesses, which could aid in a more organic movement of artists into non-art contexts. Similar connections are facilitated by the Hypermedia Research Centre at Westminster University, London. [14]

Bell Hooks, in Teaching to Transgress describes her struggle to counter ‘the overwhelming boredom, disinterest, and apathy’ in her classroom (1994, see also 2003). Hooks claims teaching as a site for resistance, a place where the teacher must practice being vulnerable, and fully present. I agree with her that the teacher can become a conflictual site in the classroom encouraging students to develop a similarly genuine expression of their position, free of sarcasm and false irony. This approach is more about learning than teaching. It is a process of productive conflict in which the teacher is also transformed. The teacher should simply be an older student who has devoted more time to a subject. She should be an amateur in the sense that she loves her work and takes risks. She should be a good listener, concise, patient, creative, explain her thinking, ask for feedback, apologise, admit if she does not know the answer, do her homework, teach to distrust authority, teach to break the rules… Get worried if there was no conflict in class. Risk taking involves acknowledging failure as part of the teaching process, self-criticism for both teachers and students, and increasing de-specialisation.

Diversity and alternative histories

Students might begin to learn that the conquistadors of new media art do not only produce in New York, Buffalo, Berlin and London but also in Riga, Singapore and Delhi. International student exchanges facilitated through personal contacts rather than long administrative processes allow for this understanding to be introduced into the context of the Western classroom. Networked international events of like-minded departments and colleagues are useful to achieve this opening of horizons as well. Locally, the university is an agglomeration of people of different ages, classes, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. Yet, the benches of new media arts classrooms in the urban United States are often filled with young Caucasian males. One reason for this is that most teachers are themselves white and male. For the most part, it will take minority teachers who will attract minority students. Focused recruitment in high schools is another possible approach to end this imbalance. The best suited participant in a new media arts program would be self-motivated, would present independence of thought, and an interest in programming and cultural theory. She should have a degree of cultural competence, openness, and curiosity and be at least partially invested in teamwork.

Teach-yourself-education

In the Paris of 1968 a student uprising started that lead to general strike, and the occupation of universities, and libraries. At the same time George Maciunas designed Fluxus charts that argued for an experimental educational laboratory, student-run seminars, and an optional non-degree program for independent study. The United States witnessed massive university dropouts not much later. Today, in the context of state budget cuts self-organised DIY educational projects such as the Commune des Arts, Freie Klasse and School for Missing Studies offer inspiring approaches. The Munich-based art historian, journalist, and artist Stefan Römer describes the Commune des Arts as non-hierarchical, self-organised by participants with a commitment to social engagement, no curriculum or formal instruction, and no emphasis on the production of objects. While the base budget is covered by the German state, participants raise money for projects in collaboration with museums, libraries, universities, and agencies.

In the same trajectory, in Freie Klasse (free class) in Vienna and Berlin, participants are students enrolled in the academy and responsible for the content and collective organisational structures. The curriculum is based on artistic practice, reflection on the ability to act politically, and intensive study in contemporary art history and theory. The self-organisational pattern prepares them for a future that demands them to be self-motivated, discursive media artists and organisers. Participants learn to evaluate their own work and gain self-confidence. An assembly of students of the Freie Klasse decides about admissions. The danger, to which several European critics point, is that student-motivated, self-organised courses are seen by institutions as a way to decrease funding and delegate responsibility.

The School of Missing Studies [SMS] provides a flexible educational platform for international study and exchange on cultural issues related to the urban environment in cities marked by or currently undergoing political, social, and cultural transition. [15] SMS provides productive research and project opportunities for young professionals in architecture and art who are struggling with what is “missing” in their studies with regard to processes of local urban change.

The University of Openess (sic) is a framework in which individuals and organisations can pursue their shared interest in emerging forms of cultural production and critical reflection such as Unix, cartography, physical and collaborative research. [16]

Approaching teachnology

New media arts curriculum should be concept-driven rather than media-defined. In a time when the idea of craft skills is changing away to computer literacy, networking, and organisational skills, we should not focus on teaching technical skills alone. This kind of cybertriumphalism that leads to ‘an exclusive emphasis on software programs is extremely problematic as it leaves out the history of the tools we use, the politics of these very machines and the all permeating social context’ says Amy Alexander who is faculty at the Department of Visual Arts, University of California at San Diego. ‘The pure application of software programs creates the most boring people…’ thinks John Hopkins, University of Colorado at Boulder ‘… It’s like amateur photo-club members comparing the length of their telephoto lenses’ (in Lovink: 169).

I advocate for an educational project that avoids both technophobia and technophilia. New media cultures should be demonstrated as part of our culture that don’t come out of the computational blue. They should be demonstrated in their social context and not as an escape from it. This idea locates itself in the tradition of the Black Mountain College that had at its core the idea that education needs to be consistent inside and outside of the classroom. In My First Recession Lovink points to Simon Penny who argued for a transition from a technical to a cultural agenda. This takes into account that increasingly cultural practices drive technical developments. The Sydney-based media philosopher Anna Munster argues that the notion that art can be defined according to the medium through which it is realised stands firmly within the discourse of modernism. She refers to Clement Greenberg who argued that what was unique to a particular art coincided with what was unique about the medium it deployed. ‘The concentration on technology per se, whether it features as part of the content, the development of a kind of digital style or the emphasis on computational processes, thus draws so much of this “cutting edge” digital artwork back within the discourse of modernism. The machines are not reducible to a set of technical parameters nor can the digital be considered solely in terms of the formal qualities. The content and ideas expressed through digital art should be addressed over and above the technology that supports them.’ [17]

The knowledge commons and tools for cooperative learning

For those teaching in new media departments it seems especially obvious and logical to use available networked communication tools. Over the last few years the term ‘tool’ for these software applications became widely used in academia. Currently, there is an explosive growth of a variety of new web-based tools for collaborative cultural practices. How do contemporary forms of cultural production make use of newly available collaborative applications to subvert corporate models of forced cooperation and foster self-organised, independent modes of cultural production and dissemination? Collaboration means, to work together to achieve the same goal that we could not achieve as individuals, to contribute to something larger than themselves. Cooperation suggests that people assist each other.

While the cost for education is on the increase, independent networks and online environments provide free parallel projects. Students devise situations of learning for themselves that escape rigidities and inadequacies. Over the past number of years, technologies such as web cams (ie. polycom or iSight), iChat, internet Relay Chat (IRC), Instant Messaging (IM) and video streaming became widely used in teaching. According to educators who experiment within this area, video streaming and video conferencing technologies work best when used in between universities in the United States. When working internationally often technical problems occur. I can attest to this from collaborations with student groups in South Africa, Germany, and Israel.

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist, engineer and faculty at the University at California at San Diego, states in an email interview that it is ‘the main challenge to teach the use of web-based resources, not for convenience, but for restructuring of participation, and for engaging students in the primary role of the academy: to produce, underwrite and validate the information commons.’ [18]

The software designer and media theorist Warren Sack of the University of California at Santa Cruz wrote in an email interview that in the last year, since the advent of the Apple’s iSight he began to invite colleagues from the east coast and Europe to ‘attend’ the end-of-the semester critiques. ‘This worked surprisingly well: students get one-on-one, or two-on-one crits with the virtual visitors via two-way web cam.’ For Sack, iSight is the first web cam that ‘works well enough to support this kind of extended, distributed dialogue.’ He thinks it would be interesting to extend this practice so that all of us across the country (and beyond) teaching these kinds of classes might become regular visitors to each others’ studios.

Online businesses such as Friendster or LinkedIn offer many-to-many communications systems (multi-participant virtual worlds) and forums for interaction, which are already used by students outside of the classroom. Such electronic environments are new pedagogical spaces which can further educational goals. In Smart Mobs Howard Rheingold advanced the idea that many-to-many venues are not only a new form of communication but a potential revolution in social organisation based on ‘communities of shared interest’ (Rheingold: 157). Free textbooks, for example, are put online at Wikibooks and many complimentary texts can be found at the Gutenberg Project. MITOpenCourseWare is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. [19] The project Opentheory applies ideas of free software to the development of texts as users of the site improve on each other’s text submissions. [20] Wikiversity facilitates learning through the Wiki-real-time logging format. [21] A Wiki is a type of server application that allows people to create and edit web page content using web browsers. Wiki supports an open editing approach in which users can modify the organisation of contributions in addition to the content itself. The open submission online encyclopedia Wikipedia will eventually become more comprehensive than traditional encyclopedias. Here chunks of content can be searched for in new kinds of micro-content “browsers” enabling new kinds of navigation and browsing. Despite the fact that these tools were welcomed with hyped enthusiasm and are fairly easy to use, many still find it too much of a burden to give these tools a try in their daily life.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned open content formats introduce a new production paradigm, offering editorial opportunities and a potential for broad participation in the knowledge commons- from collection, and re-combination, to the distribution of knowledge. In my opinion, these tools will succeed alongside face-to-face meetings. This necessity is underlined by the research of the University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman who shows that apart from online communication, people maintain their geographically diverse social network through email, as well as telephone, cars, train, air travel, face-to-face meetings and letters.

Education goes Open Source

Computer-based teaching demands introduces an overhead of required upgrades, equipment, and technical and administrative support. New media departments could immediately cut the escalating and (pointless) IT costs by moving away from spiraling license costs and move to Linux and Open Source software. It is no magic pixie dust installed by midnight elves as there are still costs relating to maintenance, services, and training. However, these costs are investments in our own intellectual assets. Linux and the use of Free Software allows schools and universities to become independent from the dominance of global economic players such as Microsoft and Apple. The Open Source technologies that have evolved over the past years now offer Linux, Apache, mysql, python, perl and php– to name just a few. Largely useful applications include Openoffice and Gimp. [22, 23] Open source refers to source code of software that can be read on the internet, modified and re-distributed: it evolves. Free Software are several kinds of software that can be legally copied and given free of charge to other users (you should think of “free speech,” not “free beer”). Linux is a freely distributed operating system for PCs and a number of other processors. The use of Free Software allows for the education of wider groups of people and gives an opportunity for students to install the software that they use in the university also at home, at no charge. To switch to Linux and Open Source software courses is a concrete goal that should be considered by new media departments. Rather than constantly lagging behind industry standards and paying for updates this will give students a set of skills that they can bring to the local business that may employ them. This, of course, is a difficult negotiation with students who may come to the university with expectations to learn proprietary software. In a recent email interview Ralf Homann, artist and professor at Bauhaus University, Weimar stated: ‘We use software to organise group work, to set up collaborations. We try to use Open Source software for all applications but it is not always possible. We can’t ignore the fact that we educate students for their professional future, and if outside the university there is no professional application of Open Source, then we can’t teach it inside the university either’ (in Scholz, 2004). However, there is rapid movement to Linux and Open Source. The French government announced its switch to Open Source and the city of Munich (Germany) did the same. In North America, The University at Buffalo passed a resolution to move to open source. [24]

The uneasy connection between theory and practice

Many in the programming communities are distrustful of the humanities because, in their view, they have little to contribute to their field. Computer Science and Informatics departments may not even be aware of humanities or other technology departments on their own campus. In my experience American undergraduate students find it often challenging to overcome the initial hindrances that are needed to make discourse vivid and engaging. But despite widespread misconceptions knowledge is nothing innate, nothing we are born with or which we inherited. In the United States undergraduate students often find it challenging to overcome the obstacles to make discourse vivid and engaging. The widespread delegitimisation of reading and print culture maybe at the heart of this problem. It also can be traced back to a popular culture that glorifies triviality and mindlessness. On the other hand faculty needs to resonate with students, pick them up from where they are — conditioned, in part, by reality TV, consumer culture, and first person shooter games. This is also the theatre into which theory is introduced. That is why entertainment is a valid part of the performance of theory in the classroom.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a dance piece where in the first half dancers danced, and in the second they would show the audience how to dance? Augusto Boal, from Games for Actors and Non-Actors

Augusto Boal’s exercises for non-actors such as “ideological warm-up” could be used to perform theory in a way, which physically engages student’s bodies. This involves the staged reading of articles.

Once beyond the certainty of technical instruction new media arts educators on many campuses experience a crisis due to the unbearable lightness of their topical orientation. What should be read in a new media context that (luckily) does not have much of an established canon? To the theorists like Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Vannevar Bush and Jacques Derrida, we can add, for example, the rich collection that Noah Wardip-Fruin and Nick Montfort’s New Media Reader offers. Readings should be socially relevant and need to have meaning outside the institution in which they are taught. Once beyond the certainty of technical instruction new media arts educators on many campuses experience a crisis due to the unbearable lightness of their topical orientation. I will give here a few thematic suggestions in the form of keywords, which can, of course, only be spotty hints guiding relevant discourses.

The merging of theory and production is not easily implemented in the classroom. The practice of writing curriculum in this field is quite similar to pursuing an event-based cultural practice. One is prompted to find sources and make connections to other institutions, peers teaching in the same fields, linkages between discourses in emerging media, film, activism, and pedagogy. What do we hope to teach? What are we unable to teach? Can art be taught? What is the relationship between teaching art and student “success?” Anna Harding, former director of the curatorial program at Goldsmiths College in London, points to these questions. First and foremost education in critical new media culture should focus on educating artists. Whether their preferred media are digital or not.

There is a difficulty in finding faculty that is equally discursive and technically advanced, artists who have in-depth knowledge of theory and programming for example. Web-based open content tools, which enable the sharing of resources are one step to finding adequate responses to this. Co-teaching is another possibility. In any case, teachers need to constantly learn, and build on their own technical and theoretical skills.

The Distributed Learning Project

Dedicated new media arts educators have to work harder than many of their colleagues in other departments due to the fast-paced changes in the field. Instructors spend much time looking for relevant texts, art works that use specific technologies, and good technical tutorials. They spend days searching the web for each others syllabi and often re-invent the wheel. For these reasons Tom Leonhardt and I developed The Distributed Learning Project, DLP. [25] It is a situated tool for learning communities to create, find, edit, re-use and share content in new media. The DLP is a web-based, collaborative, educational project that is accessible twenty-four hours seven days a week for anyone with an internet connection. It is an experimental network supporting collective research in new media. It links knowledge from the audio sound lab, the non-profit organisation, the new media art studio, the independent media initiative, the small new media company, cultural new media organisations, the design studio, the club scene and the many departments and disciplines within universities internationally.

This easy to use tool for teaching and research interconnects chunks of knowledge from different departments, disciplines, universities, cultures and professions to aid new media arts education.

The DLP cohesively links blocks of knowledge from fields of inquiry as diverse as conceptual art, film, literature, computer science, political science, social science and cultural theory. We may ask: How did ideas in literature or music relate to or precede notions in programming? Modules about loops in programming may link to others on John Cage, Steve Reich or an entry about expanded cinema. The DLP encourages free distribution of research materials. Sharing research saves time, resources and improves teaching. The DLP offers up-to-date, real-time available resources needed in a fast changing field. The DLP questions the creation of curriculum as lone cowboy in a university lab – it is an alternative to traditional modes of teaching. It challenges the way knowledge is created, developed, and distributed to a public. The project enables inter-authorship. Rather than the single-author-to-one-text relationship here collaborative inter-authorship appears within groups of researchers, industry professionals, students, media critics, VJs, media artists, musicians, and educators.

Cross-connections within the DLP are enabled when the content in two modules is similar. Words within the module link the participant to relevant other modules based on topic maps and connections made through the semantic web. [26, 27] The DLP offers an area in which participants can assemble modules for use in class, focal points for disseminating research such as lectures, annotated presentations and more. Semantic associations enable cross-disciplinarity in the creation of syllabi. Courses, lecture series or research material can be aggregated in the project stage of this web-based application. The project’s approach actively encourages Open Source software and open content. [28]

The DLP is the first project of the Institute for Distributed Creativity that I founded in May 2004. The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts. [29] In the spring of 2005 the iDC will start a series of events and web cam luncheons about issues in new media arts education. [30]

Educational concepts from the Bauhaus to Paulo Freire’s notions of informal, non-hierarchical teaching and proposals for new collaborative models by contemporary media critics like Christoph Spehr should be introduced into the practice of critical new media arts pedagogy. The Free Cooperation conference was one of the venues in which the discussion about education in new media culture started. We should protect the discomfort we feel with our situation. We should insist on the University as a framework for critical activity, production of knowledge, negotiation, experiments, failure, and possibilities of refusal. Many discussions hopefully will follow. How can we invent our own future? We need more independent learning projects that orient themselves towards radically new configurations of communities based on sharing and cooperation.

Author’s Biography

Trebor Scholz is a media artist, writer, and organiser. [trebor@thing.net]

http://molodiez.org

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the Fibreculture editors and Jenny Perlin for their critical feedback. Warm regards to the people on the mailinglist, the collaborative weblog Discordia and Rhizome list for inspiring discussions.

Notes

[1] The networks, art, and collaboration conference, a.k.a. Free Cooperation conference, took place in April 2004 at the Department of Media Study, The State University of New York at Buffalo. The conference was organised by Trebor Scholz (New York/ Buffalo) and Geert Lovink (Brisbane/Amsterdam), assisted (in more-or-less-free-cooperation) by Dorothee Gestrich (now Banff Centre) and Orkan Telhan (Ankara/ Buffalo), Tom Leonhardt (Toronto/ Buffalo) and Arzu Telhan (Ankara/ Buffalo). http://freecooperation.org

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[2] Weblog: a weblog, or simply a blog, is a web application, which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Such a Web site would typically be accessible to any internet user. Part of the reason “blog” was coined and commonly accepted into use is the fact that in saying “blog,” confusion with server log is avoided. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog

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[3] Wiki: A Wiki or wiki (pronounced “wicky” or “weeky” or “viki”) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows any user to add content, as on an internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by any other user. The term can also refer to the collaborative software used to create such a website. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWiki

[4] ActiveCampus: The ActiveCampus project aims to provide location-based services for educational networks and understand how such systems are used. activeclass enables collaboration between students and professors by serving as a visual moderator for classroom interaction. ActiveCampus Explorer uses a person’s context, like location, to help engage them in campus life. ActiveCampus– explorations in community-oriented ubiquitous computing. http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/
Also see: Active Class: http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/info/activeclass/ActiveClassIntroduction.htm

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[5] The film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) uses extremely developed accreditation. In the credits of the film even the most minor contribution is listed, something that was not the case ten years ago.

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[6] The notion of the third body was developed by Charles Green in his book The Third Hand. There the third body emerges out of true collaboration.

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[7] Access Grid: the Access Grid is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to support group-to-group interactions across the Grid. The AccessGrid Project: http://accessgrid.org

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[8] WiFi.Bedouin: WiFi.Bedouin is a wearable, mobile 802.11b node disconnected from the global internet. See TechKwonDo. TechKwonDo__WiFiBedouin. (2004) Available: http://www.techkwondo.com/projects/bedouin/

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[9] For these responses, see: http://www.discordia.us/scoop/story/2003/10/6/0332/15602

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[10] Email interview with Amy Alexander, August 2004.

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[11] The fact that many artists in Nordic countries can make a living off state grants is not statistical but anecdotal knowledge drawn from many conversations with artists from Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.

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[12] Social software is any software that supports group communications. The dynamics of social software are significantly different from traditional interactions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

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[13] HowStuffisMade is an encyclopedia of manufacturing processes and labor conditions involved in the production of contemporary products. This information is often hard to obtain and little of this material exists on the web. The encyclopedia is an independent academic web-based Twiki publication that uses primarily visual documentation. The entries are summative (short) photo essays produced primarily by students guided by faculty who ensure the standards of evidence. The project is set in contrast to the HowStuffisMade.com resource, which excludes any information on manufacturing and labor. For more discussion see: http://xdesign.eng.yale.edu/howstuffismade

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[14] Hypermedia Research Centre at Westminster University: http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/

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[15] School of Missing Studies: http://www.schoolofmissingstudies.net/

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[16] University of Openess: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/AboutUo

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[17] Email interview with Anna Munster, August 2004.

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[18] Email interview with Natalie Jeremijenko, August 2004.

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[19] MitOpenCourseWare: MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

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[20] Opentheory (in German): http://opentheory.org

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[21] Wikiversity: Wikiversity, a free, open learning environment and research community. Online courses are being created as a form of co-operative and interactive exchange of knowledge.http://wikiversity.org

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[22] OpenOffice: OpenOffice’s mission is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. http://OpenOffice.org

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[23] Gimp: Gimp is the open source equivalent of Photoshop: http://gimp.org

[24] ‘France goes open’: http://www.teledyn.com/node/500 … ‘Munich goes with Open Source Software’ ‘The city council of Munich, Germany, announced that they plan to move 14,000 PCs and 16,000 users from Windows to Linux, in a move to make Linux their standard desktop operating system environment’
(http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3199247984.html) … ‘University of Buffalo faculty goes for open source’: http://www.canopener.ca/article.php?story=98

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[25] Distributed Learning Project (Trebor Scholz, Tom Leonhardt): Through topic maps and the semantic web the DLP cohesively links blocks of knowledge from fields of inquiry as diverse as art history (ie. conceptual art), film, literature, political science, social sciences or cultural theory. How did ideas in these areas precede, inspire or parallel developments in programming for the arts or machine culture in general? How do these works relate chronologically to each other? The DLP is a knowledge network aiding research and teaching in the fields of new media art, cultural theory, and programming in their social context.

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[26] Topic Maps: Topic maps address the information overload that we are faced with. Book indexes basically perform a similar function. Topic Maps are the online equivalent of printed indexes– they are made up of multiple links. Knowledge is described and associated in more complex ways. Topics are grouped in classes of topic types. Topics maps are about optimisation of navigation. They are “connection hubs” between the modules. Information is accessed through a semantically associated list terms that offers all entries that semantically relate to the search term (for example “employment” would be associated with “employee” and “employer”. This method is more effective than the alphabetical arrangement of keywords. This is made possible by XML technology. The navigation allows you to visualise connections between concepts, code, theory, and art. Module A module is a self-contained component of a system, which has a well-defined interface to the other components; something is modular if it is constructed so as to facilitate easy assembly, flexible arrangement, and/or repair of the components. We refer to modules here as knowledge chunks.

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[27] Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools: http://www.semanticweb.org/

[28] For an introduction to open content debates see Stalder and Wark.

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[29] Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC): The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts. The iDC, founded by Trebor Scholz in May 2004, is an international network with a participatory and flexible institutional structure that combines advanced creative production, research, events, and documentation. While the iDC makes appropriate use of emerging low-cost and free social software it balances these activities with regular face-to-face meetings: http://distributedcreativity.org

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[30] See http://newmediaeducation.org

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References

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Introduction

A recent cartoon from a Dutch newspaper shows a man and a woman lying in bed, smoking a cigarette apparently after having sex. ‘Do you keep a diary?’ asks the man to his partner, and upon her negation, he comments: ‘Good. I don’t like it when a woman immortalises her intimate experiences with me on paper.’ In the last frame, we see the woman sitting behind a computer screen and typing ‘Dear weblog…’, while the man snores away on the bed behind her. In this short cartoon, we can detect a number of assumptions about diaries and weblogs, but the clue to this joke is the paradox that the weblog is considered a digital equivalent of the diary and yet it is not.

For centuries, the diary has been characterised as a private, handwritten document that chronicles the experiences, observations and reflections of a single person at the moment of inscription. Although the diary as a cultural form is varied and heterogeneous, it is typically thought to represent the record of an ‘I’ who constructs a view on him/herself in connection to the world at large. Diary writing, as a quotidian cultural practice, involves reflection and expression; yet it is also a peculiarly hybrid act of communication, supposedly intended for private use, but often betraying an awareness of its potential to be read by others. Inviting the translation from thoughts into words via the technologies of pen and paper, the old-fashioned diary symbolise a safe haven for a person’s most private thoughts—even if they are published in print later on. Personal notebooks are often treasured as stilled moments of a forlorn past, and kept in safe places to be retrieved many years later—much like photographs—as precious objects of memory.

With digitisation affecting practically every domain of public and private life, the diary seems no exception. ‘Weblogs’ have become a popular genre on the internet, as millions of people (particularly teenagers and young adults) are now heavily engaged in the activity of ‘blogging’. By the end of 2004, a recent survey predicts, there will be about 10 million weblog users in the United States alone. [1] Weblogs or ‘blogs’ is a rather general container for a variety of genres; the so-called lifelog seems to come closest to the traditional diary genre. But can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing? As the cartoon implies, the answer to this question is a paradoxical ‘yes and no.’ Cultural practices or forms never simply adapt to new technological conditions, but always inherently change along with the technologies and the potentialities of their use. In the case of lifelogs, the digital materiality of the internet engenders a new type of reflection and communication. This shows traces of the former analogue genre but functions substantially differently.

Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter (1999) have used the term ‘remediation’ to account for the ways in which new media forms consolidate but also alter existing forms. In a critique of this term,Andreas Kitzmann (2003) argues that ‘remediation’ does not sufficiently account for the intrinsic shaping power of technology, and proposes to focus on the wider phenomenon of ‘material complexification’ to understand the continuities and changes between old and new media, for instance weblogs and webcams. [2] And in their illuminating analysis of the phenomenon, Miller and Shepherd (2004) regard blogging as social action—a‘new rhetorical opportunity’ that needs to be examined in terms of its use. Each of these authors places a different emphasis, respectively on cultural form, technology, and practice. In this article, I suggest to examine these three dimensions of mediated cultural change in conjunction: the diary and lifelog should be studied both as a cultural form or genre, while also taking into account the materiality and technology of (hand) written diaries and lifelogs, as well as the cultural practice of diary writing in comparison to the activities of so-called bloggers. Tracing the transformation of personal records in the face of new digital technologies, I will argue that lifelogs are not outcomes but rather signifiers of cultural change, as they both reflect and construct new epistemologies.

Diaries and weblogs as cultural form

The cartoon cited above displays three recurrent myths or misperceptions about the old-fashioned paper diary, that appear to persist into the digital era. In contrast to weblogs, the paper diary is commonly referred to as a uniform genre, a private kind of reflective writing produced by a single author. Yet if we closely look at how paper diaries were used in the past, the characteristics of uniformity, privacy and single authorship are, to say the least, disputable; it is surprising to find, though, how these accepted notions about diaries still affect today’s theorisation of weblogs.

Over the past centuries, the diary as a cultural form has been anything but homogeneous. The genre has been defined as therapy or self-help, as a means of confession, as a chronicle of adventurous journeys (both spiritual and physical), or as a scrapbook for creative endeavours. Thomas Mallon, author of a standard work in this area, distinguishes at least seven types of diaries and labels the various types according to their author’s profession or character: ‘chroniclers’ ‘travellers’ ‘creators’, ‘confessors’, and so on (1984). Philip Lejeune (1993) inventories various types of autobiographical writing (diary, letters, autobiography) by its ‘morphological’ features, whereas Beatrice Didier, a French literary theorist, articulates a more general classification, based on the content of entries, between the personal or private ‘diary’ (‘le journal intime’) and the more public or factual ‘journal’(1976). Yet another French literary scholar, Eric Marty, classifies diaries by their addressees: are they strictly secret or also written for others? (1985). In general, the taxonomy of the old fashioned paper diary tends to be based either on its contents (personal, intimate self-expressions vis-à-vis daily records of fact) or on its directionality (intended for private reading vis-à-vis public use).

The myth that the diary is a private genre, strictly written for oneself, is as misleading as it is persistent. A binary distinction between the diary as a personal record written for private purposes in contrast to a journal of fact written to show others, is hardly tenable. As Mallon argues, no one ever kept a diary just for himself; pointing out the continuity between the ‘journal’ and the ‘diary’, he concludes that both are directed towards an audience and ‘both [are] rooted in the idea of dailiness, but perhaps because of the journal’s links to the newspaper trade and diary’s to “dear”, the latter seems more intimate than the former’ (1984: xvi). Of all the varieties within the genre, some diaries are written more with a reader in mind than others, but an essential feature of all diaries is their addressee. Whereas some authors directed their diaries to an imagined friend (like Anne Frank’s ‘Kitty’, or André Gide’s mysterious addressee), to God, or to the world at large, the notion of addressing is crucial to the recognition of diary writing as an act of communication (Marty, 1985: 87). Writing, even as a form of self-expression, signals the need to connect, either to someone or something else, or to oneself later in life. William M. Decker, who theorised the evolution of epistolary writing in the United States, observes that letters, much like diaries, carry the aura of a private genre, whereas the genre encodes itself according to public standards: ‘What we identify as the private life is a conventionalised and hence public construction’ (1998: 6). Diary writing is, to a large extent, a cultural form firmly rooted in rhetorical conventions: intimacy and privacy are effects rather than intrinsic features of the genre.

Another misperception we can trace in the genealogy of diaries is the belief that their creation is usually associated with individual voice and authorship, whereas in reality the genre has often been deployed as a communal means of expressing and remembering. To many religious congregations, for instance, the diary was a semi-public record, shared within but never outside a community. In her intriguing account of the Maryknoll Sisters’ archive, Elizabeth Yakel describes how this religious community, between 1912 and 1967, adapted the genre as a collective means of expression to record and exchange spiritual and intellectual journeys to each other. Their record-keeping practices suited various goals, from expressing individual beliefs to communicating information across time and space with like-minded congregations:

The diaries had multiple audiences—they were a means of internal communication within the community and also served as a mechanism for external communication to Catholics and others interested in their mission activities. (Yakel, 2003: 143)

In the history of diary writing, the genre as a communal means of expression has found many practitioners, from South Pole explorers to POWs held in captivity. As Michael Piggott, archivist at the University of Melbourne, found out, Australian archives contain many such collective ego-documents, chronicling important episodes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries through the eyes of transient groups. For groups bound together by an adventurous ordeal, a joint diary was often a means to trust one’s personal emotions to a relatively safe medium and share the experience with mates held captive under the same conditions (2003). Diaries have thus historically been produced by both individuals and groups, regardless of their degree of intimacy or their potential to appear in print. Since its very inception, the genre has been dialogic rather than monologic, hence obliterating the line between private and public.

How persistent is this idea of a uniform genre when it comes to weblogs? And how is the rather paradoxical genre-classification along the axes of self and others, of intimacy and openness, sustained? Upon entering the digital era, the diary as a cultural form appears to have survived in its many varieties and its layered complexity. Weblogs or webdiaries have emerged since 1996, but only in the past four years has their popularity soared (Rodzilla, 2002). Initially, blogs were either personal homepages operated by individuals, mostly people who were interested in sharing technical and personal knowledge, or they were websites consisting of chronological lists of links, interspersed with information, editorialised and personal asides (Cheung, 2000).In practice, lifelogs later became experiments in self-expression, with people reading and cross-linking other lifelogs, thus creating blog-communities. Searching on the internet today, one can find a plethora of digital diaries, everything from travel-blogs chronicling the climbing of the Mount Everest to personal blogs commenting on books or music, from the spiritual journey of a born-again Christian to the intimate exchange of sexual experiences between teenagers, and from outbursts of psychological distress to the quotidian musings of a psychiatrist. Frank Schaap, exploring the Dutch ‘blogosphere’, distinguishes lifelogs from linklogs; linkloggers primarily post links to other websites, whereas lifeloggers primarily post details about their personal life and everyday experiences. Although Schaap comments on the ‘dichotomous nature of the Dutch blogosphere,’ the distinction between lifelogs and linklogs is as tenuous as the taxonomy of the paper diary (2004).

While intimacy and privacy were often thought to be unique features of the diary genre, in practice this characterisation is hardly tenable. This applies to an even greater extent to lifelogs. The digital equivalent of the diary is as polymorphous as its paper precursor, and yet, when researching the new functions and forms of diary writing in the digital era, the old typology of the diary in terms of content and directionality stubbornly informs the epistemology of the lifelog. For instance, a 1998 Japanese study into the formal structures and uses of diaries on the internet, departs from the notion that they can be classified according to their contents as ‘records of fact’ or ‘expression of sentiment,’ or according to their directionality as ‘written for oneself’ or ‘written for others’ (Kawaura, Kawakami, and Yamashita, 1998). In defence of the authors of the Japanese study, the year in which their article was published marked the early beginning of an explosion of blogging, a development no one could have predicted at that time. Yet it is significant that the researchers’ classification along binary axes results in a new typology of diaries on the world wide web as ‘memoirs’, ‘journals’, ‘narrowly defined diaries’ and ‘open diaries.’ Their attenuated conclusion that writing a web diary is primarily a communicative behaviour equally applies to paper diaries. Later studies continue to classify weblogs along axes of self and others, of personal and public (Blood 2000), but there are also theorists who acknowledge the multiple ancestors of the weblog—commonplace books, clipping services, pamphlets, diaries, shiplogs etc—precluding any classification of the lifelog on the basis of content or directionality (Miller and Shepherd, 2004).

In addition, digital cultural forms are often erroneously ascribed ‘unique’ features such as interactivity or community building. Weblogs are defined by some as virtual communities enabled by technologies, particularly the internet (Blanchard, 2004). As I argued above, paper diaries have always shown a peculiar mixture of individual and communal effort, of self-expression and communication. If we look at weblogs in general or so-called lifelogs in particular, we can observe a similar hybrid aptitude. [3] The constitutive function of diaries in terms of community formation is thus by no means an extension of digital technology, but was already common practice in the days of pen and paper. This does not imply, however, that technology plays a minor role in the ‘remediation’ of the diary; on the contrary, as I have argued, changes in cultural form need to be examined in conjunction with the technologies.

The technology and materiality of diaries versus lifelogs

Diaries are commonly valued for their contents rather than for their look or feel. Nevertheless, the materiality of diaries as well as the technology through which these artefacts have come into being is crucial factors in their signification (see also Hayles, 2002). When referring to paper diaries, two typical concepts spring to mind: the empty diary, preformatted for daily use, which we can buy at stationary stores and the handwritten manuscripts of diaries that have later appeared in print and become widely read. The physical appearance of a prefab diary prefigures the functions of its intended use: empty pages, with or without lines, bound or unbound, dated or undated, offer the author stimuli to fill the more or less blank surface with personal inscriptions and thoughts. In some cases, the diary is completed by a lock-and-key — a potent symbol of its private nature. The preformatted diary has always been, to some extent, a product of contemporary fashion, its design and lay-out representing a particular style and catering to a specific age or taste. A diary’s materiality forms an essential part of its content: pages, cover, key, colours, ink and paper (its look, feel, and smell) are all part of the act of keeping a diary. Over the years, diarists often grow fond of the material outlooks of their notebooks—fading colours, youthful handwriting, and ink blobs trigger reminiscences in a way that photographs do. The diary’s contents, when reread at a later stage in life, may either elicit nostalgic yearning or retroactive embarrassment, in some cases even leading to a definitive destruction of the object. A reified memory object of one’s past, the diary is the stilled result of a creative and communicative act.

Arguably, diary writing is not necessarily inspired by prefab formats: on the contrary, many diaries published in print, had first been written in ordinary notebooks or scribbled onto single sheets. The actual manuscript of such a diary, its original form of inscription, becomes a vital sign of authenticity—often stored in special places and only accessible to owners or researchers. In the case of Anne Frank’s diary, which consisted partly of notebooks and partly of separate sheets of paper, the gradual discovery and reconstructionof the various ‘versions’ of the manuscript became part of the Dutch teenager’s legacy. The original manuscript, stored in Amsterdam, appeared to be in such demand that the Anne Frank Foundation had two duplicates made: one to replace the original on display at the museum, the other to satisfy the many requests from film directors, researchers and documentary makers for pictures of the original. The materiality of the manuscript constitutes an intricate part of the diary’s genesis and later its controversial claims to authenticity, (uncensored) originality and completeness.

Pivotal to the materiality of diaries, up to the age of computers, has been the notion of script: the concept of diary is commonly associated with (hand) writing, signifying not just authenticity, but personality. Handwriting has historically been believed to betray the personality of its producer—graphology being the study that yields clues to the writer’s character such as age and even personality traits. Regarded as the first ‘technologising of the word,’ (Ong, 1982) the tools of writing facilitated the need to make oneself legible to the ‘other’ or to the future self. Writing is thus intimately tied to a stage in one’s personal development: a teenager’s scrawls betray his or her inexperience with the prime tool of literacy—the immaturity of body or mind. As Canadian archivist Jane Zhang claims, ‘an individual’s handwriting is habitually viewed as his own personal mark, which distinguishes him not only from others, but also from his own past and future’ (2003: 43). Sonja Neef confirms that handwriting is an embodied practice: moving a pen onto paper involves a direct connection between body and script, an act in which the eye and hand are intimately interwoven with the technology of paper and pen and the techniques of deploying them; the hand—a body part instrumental to the ‘Verkörperung’ (embodiment) of thoughts—fixes the inner self to the outside world (2002).

Since other technologies have gradually replaced handwriting, the tools of a diarist have changed accordingly. When Sigmund Freud wrote his essay ‘A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’,’ in 1925, he regarded writing and technology as external aids or supplements to memory. Freud described memory in terms of writing, comparing it to the surface of a writing pad that allowed the scribbling of endless notes, which could subsequently be erased and yet remain stored in the ‘subconscious’ layers of the pad, below its material surface. Jacques Derrida (1995), commenting upon Freud’s essay, dismisses his notion of writing as an external memory and emphasises instead technology’s instrumental relationship to language and representation. Technologies, including writing utensils, are machines that engender representations while infiltrating agency; pen and paper, therefore, produce different modes of writing than the typewriter or the word processor (Barnet, 2004). Handwriting never simply structures reflections or thoughts, but literally creates them; by the same token, a typewriter constitutes a different relation between author, words and representation. It may not be a coincidence that typewriters never became popular in connection to diary writing; unlike handwriting, the noise of fingers pounding on a machine severed the physical intimacy between body and word (Kittler, 1999). [4] As the technologies for writing change, so does our way of creating self-reflective records. Handwritten diaries are material artefacts that are themselves memorials—traces of a past self. Memory, in other words, is always implicated in the act and technology of writing.

The advent of the stand-alone word processor, as the successor of the (electronic) typewriter, further disembodied the production of written language, as not only the keyboard but also the screen interfered with the continuity between hand and words. Yet two essential features of word processing may have restored some of the intimacy lost with the typewriter. First, the relative silence of word processors refurbished part of the quietude inherent to solitary writing, while speeding up the production of text and maintaining standardised letter output. Even more profound has been the ability of word processors to produce tentative texts, provisional versions of thoughts, forever amenable to changes of mind; the editing of visualised words does not leave a trace in the ultimate print. Words on the screen, stored in digital memory, thus formed a new stage in the trajectory between immaterial thoughts and textual products, allowing for invisible revisionist interferences in one’s memory. On top of that, digital files may never materialise into print, and they can remain stored in the black box of the PC, without ever being erased or retrieved (by the writer or by others). Diaries produced by a word processor, therefore, are fundamentally different from diaries produced by means of handwriting or typewriters: the personal computer provides an intrinsic textual paintbrush with which to edit one’s personal records. The potential of digital editing at a later stage diluted the concept of diary as a material, ‘authentic’ artefact, inscribed in time and on paper.

In the 1990s, when stand-alone word processors gradually gave way to networked computers and the internet became a popular medium for interaction, the physical artefact of the diary seemed incommensurable with the prime demands of instant, ubiquitous connection rooted in digital materiality. The evanescence of the internet appears at odds with the genre’s preference for a fixed material output. Moreover, the time lapse between writing and potential publishing of the diary in print intrinsically conflicts with the immediacy and connectedness of the electronic superhighway. Between body and words on paper are no longer just a piece of paper, but an intricate technological network of connected individuals and communities; and between paper and published print are only a few seconds before the inscriptions enter the virtual realm. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, we still consider the lifelog to be a digital descendant of the paper diary, except that there is no printed output, only a screen-based one. How, then, should we consider the new materiality of the lifelog? Since computers do not smell, and the screen has no particular feel, how can we define the digital matter of lifelogs?

Analogous to the preformatted paper diary and the diarist’s handwriting, we can locate the materiality of weblogs in two different areas: weblog software and the signature of its users. The first weblogs were operated mostly by digerati, but as specially developed software made blogging technically easy, more people without any specific technological skills joined the various kinds of ‘blogging groups.’ Particularly since 2000, a large number of software packages have flooded the market, enabling even the clumsiest person to become a sophisticated blogger. Today, users can choose from a variety of different packages; besides open diaries on the web, such as Opendiary.com and MyDearDiary.com, there are also weblog services for which you need to sign up or even being introduced by a member, like LiveJournal, Blurty, Xanga, DeadJournal, Blogger, and DiaryLand. Although they all basically serve the same purpose, the formats may differ in lay-out and digital possibilities. To some extent, these different designs resemble the preformatted paper-diaries for sale at stationary stores. It seems like the various software formats attract different audiences, catering to heterogeneous tastes and lifestyles, much like brand names of fashion products appeal to a particular style. As Emily Nussbaum points out, their formats only vary slightly (‘A Livejournal is a Blurty is a Xanga is a Diaryland’), but because of certain technical features, users may select a certain software package (2004). For instance, sites like Xanga contain the possibility to give ‘aProps’, a kind of gold stars for particularly good posts, whereas LiveJournal allows for selecting features such as ‘current mood music’ and ‘embedded polls or surveys.’ In a way, blog software is like a pair of jeans: nuances in style and brand name are important to individuals who are seeking to belong to a group.

Software, however, constitutes only the technological condition for its varied individualised use. Digital weblogs may, in terms of their materiality, not even remotely resemble their paper precursor, but there is a distinct continuity in their personal signature. If handwriting betrayed a diary writer’s character and level of maturity, the typewriter and later the word processor had already erased that trademark of personality; and yet, through word choice, style, punctuation, and the use of emoticons it is remarkable how much the entries give away a person’s character. On top of that, the personality of a diarist is even more traceable through her prolific choices of cultural contents. A blogger may attach references to songs, pictures, movies, books, etc.Despite prescriptive software formats, weblogs offer a relatively high degree of creative freedom; users can discover their own taste by cutting, pasting, and commenting, thus exploring the relationship between the self and culture at large. Some weblog software (like OpenDiary.com) allows users to search entries by age group, gender, theme of the week, subject or cultural preferences.

Although the multimedial lifelog looks very different from the preformatted lock-and-key paper diary, each materiality gives away distinctive clues to an author’s personality. Just as paper diaries reflect someone’s age, taste, and preference at a particular moment in their life, the software and signature of blogs seem to accommodate the needs of especially contemporary teens and young adults to express and sort out their identity in an increasingly wired, mediated world. Digital technologies are imperative to the creation of blogs, as Mortensen (2004) rightly assumes, but technology does not tell the whole story. In conjunction to changing technologies, materialities and cultural forms, we need to pay closer attention to the practices of diary writing and blogging, to see how they change along with evolving notions of intimacy, privacy and memory.

Diary writing and blogging as cultural practices

The internet is not simply an amplification of the stand-alone word processor, but it enters a new mediating apparatus that significantly impacts the use or function of familiar forms. In our focus on technology, we often tend to underemphasise how social and cultural conditions change along with the machinery. Both diary writing and blogging are interesting cultural practices—quotidian habits or daily rituals which gradually receive a place in a person’s life. Cultural practices, in the past century, have become increasingly mediated: watching television, talking on the phone, taking pictures or writing e-mails are only few of many potential communicative acts through which a person articulates herself. With the introduction of the internet, some of these daily rituals are gradually changing, often fusing old practices with new conventions. For instance, e-mails can be regarded ‘remediations’ of handwritten letters, but more profoundly, the emergence of e-mail also substantially transformed someone’s daily ritual of communication and interaction, along with one’s sense of physical or psychological presence—just as the telephone changed communicative patterns along with notions of proximity and presence a hundred years earlier. It is important to note that these changes always involve both technology and practice, the mutual shaping of which is firmly embedded in culture.

Writing a diary, of course, never happened in a social vacuum; the ritual occupied its own niche alongside other acts of communication, such as talking, listening, reading, etc. As a quotidian habit, diary keeping gives meaning and structure to someone’s life. In the case of Anne Frank, writing a journal created a zone of silence and refuge in a small space, densely crowded and heavily trafficked by human interaction. Her daily ritual was an act of self-protection as much as self-expression. By carving out a discursive space, she was able to articulate her private thoughts and define her position in relation to others and the world at large. Diary writers fashion a habit by choosing a medium; the creation of that mediated habit is always inspired by ultural conventions and prevailing fashions. As David Chaney observes, everyday life is a creative project ‘because although it has the predictability of mundane expectations, it is simultaneously being worked at both in the doing and in retrospective reconsideration’ (2002: 52). Quotidian acts such as diary writing should thus not only be regarded as stilled reflections of life, but as ways of constructing life. They always coexist amidst a number of other communicative habits and culturally determined practices.

For the contemporary blogger, the internet is just one of a host of media through which to express agency, and blogging is one of many competing practices, such as speaking (both face-to-face and phone conversations), writing (letters, sms, e-mail), watching (television, film, photos) and listening (music, talk). The coexisting practices that fill the mediated lives of today’s youngsters both complement and compete with each other; the weblog offers several amenities that other media lack, such as the ability to combine extensive written comments with pictures, tunes, links and clips, as well as the possibility to post something online to a large anonymous readership. Blogging may be a combination of both oral and literate practices, such as diary writing, letter writing, the exchange of cultural objects, printed publications, and even conversation. Jan Fernback has remarked that

as mediated human communication becomes more and more non-linear, decentralised, and rooted in multimedia, the distinction between orality and literacy becomes less evident and less important. (2002: 29)

New hybrid rituals always emerge in dialogue (and also in competition) with already existing practices, as they gradually create a new balance in the ecosystem of quotidian cultural practices, both oral and literal.

The networked computer is instrumental to the way in which a blogger simultaneously fashions her identity and creates a sense of community. Blogging both complements and interferes with everyday ‘live’ communication: weblog entries are part of a person’s web of community circles through which they move and shape their lives. Some of these circles overlap some do not. The by and large reflexive nature of the lifelog has its place in the contact zones of everyday life that each individual constructs, and which are usually a mixture of real-life and virtual experiences. Through their LiveJournals or Xangas, teenagers not only express themselves, but create a communal sense of values and thoughts deemed worthy of being shared. In a lifelog, one may blurt out confessions of loneliness and insecurity—behaviour inhibited in face-to-face encounters—despite the fact that everyone in a peer group can potentially read these outbursts. In her sharp journalistic ethnography, Nussbaum (2004) observes that bloggers usually don’t talk about what they say online, even though in real life they may speak to each other on a daily basis. Online posts can be read and responded to by immediate friends and relatives, while they may also invoke reciprocity from complete strangers, adding another dimension to the small world of immediate peers. The choice of audience is a typical example of how technology and cultural practice interlock—the digital version of the lock-and-key-diary.For example, the distribution features of LiveJournal, allows the user to decide with each posting to whom they make this content available—from ‘just myself’ to ‘friends only’ to ‘anyone.’ Defining one’s readership is bound to define one’s sense of inclusion in and exclusion from a community, whatever shape that community may take—actual or virtual, intellectually formative or emotionally supportive. In contrast to the paper diary, the weblog is part of a mediated continuum, a lived world in which the individual is always connected. [5] Just as isolation appeared the default mode of paper diaries, reciprocity is now coined as the default mode of blogging. However, just as the solitary basis of diaries turned out to be a myth, reciprocity is not a standard feature of blogs: still half the number of internet diaries turns out to be non-reciprocal (Herring 2004). Although the very medium that enacts blogging shifts the technological condition from isolation to connection, this does not mean that the cultural practices take on a new ‘pure’ default mode; on the contrary, old habits of diary writing coexists with new connected practices, while they get gradually incorporated by a new medium.

The inclusion and exclusion of (potential) readers from one’s weblog constitutes an intricate game, the stakes of which are identity formation and community construction. Identity, as Australian media theorist Esther Milne claims, is always, in varying degrees, a performance:

It is the result of complex cultural, technological, economic and institutional forces rather than being a natural, somatic or psychological process that is fundamentally independent of historical influences. 2004: 8)

Current ‘complex forces’ are geared towards swift and easy distribution of ideas. In the past, the ability to expose oneself to a wider audience of unknown readers was something for which a paper diarist used to be dependent on a publisher who would print and distribute the diary, usually resulting in a considerable time lag between the moment of writing and of publication. A blogger can make her own decision concerning publication and distribution at the very moment of writing. Sharing intimate narratives with an anonymous readership is no longer a future possibility but an actual choice for webloggers; the effect of this technological option is immediacy—instant distribution, without intervention from a publishing institution. From a survey held by the MIT Media lab Sociable Media Group, we learn that 76% of bloggers do not limit their readership in any way, and they have no idea who their readers are, apart from a core audience (Viegas, 2004).

Weblogs or digital diaries are perhaps primarily about synchronising one’s experience with others, about testing one’s evaluations against the outside world. Blogging, besides being an act of self-disclosure, is also a ritual of exchange: bloggers expect to be signalled and perhaps to be responded to. If not, why would they publish their musings on the internet instead of letting them sit in their personal files? It may be instructive to compare blogs and blogging to the use of the mobile phone. In their study of teenager’s use of mobiles, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper (2003) note how phone-mediated activities resemble established social practices such as gift-giving; the ritual of gift exchange is now extended to symbolic messages (sms or spoken), and, like the material equivalent, it is rooted in a mental scheme of obligation and reciprocation. Through a subtle system of shared norms for exchanging phones, rationing access to personal messages, and obligations to respond, users assign symbolic value to tangible or virtual objects. A similar process can be identified in blogging. Opening up one’s secret diary to a selection of friends and relatives, and expecting them to do the same, is an old practice refurbished by bloggers. Attaching items of cultural contents is quite similar to swapping music albums, books or personal accessories—a system of sharing symbolic meanings with friends that is firmly rooted in the material culture of gift exchange. But the potential to open up this process to an anonymous and potentially large readership is new; bloggers are constantly connected to the world at large, and aware of their exposure. Synchronisation, however, does not prohibit self-reflection, just as privacy does not preclude openness. Old and new functions of diary writing thus peculiarly merge into a hybrid networked practice of blogging.

At first sight, a prime function of diary writing seems to be virtually absent in the practice of blogging: paper diaries were meant to fix experience in time, to freeze one’s thoughts and ideas into words (and perhaps illustrated materials) to serve as a reminder of former experience later on in life. In contrast, blogging seems to be more about revising one’s experience over time, allowing to adjust one’s former observations and reflection—even the ones stored in the ‘archive’—as time goes by and as personality evolves. [6] This difference in function is all too easily ascribed to a material fixity of paper diaries as opposed to the apparent evanescent quality of software or screen content. Yet if we focus on cultural practices in conjunction to technology or form, we may find this opposition to be quite ungrounded. For one thing, paper diaries were never ‘finished’ paper products; they were often exercises of writing prone to later revision, because of a changing insight, retroactive embarrassment, or due to a changing ambition or purpose in writing the journal. Anne Frank, for instance, started to write a revised version of her diary in March of 1944, several months before she was deported to a concentration camp. Inspired by a government official on the radio, who advised citizens to keep and save diaries from the time of occupation for publication, Anne Frank decided to revise her diary and turn it into book. The two ‘versions’ of Anne Frank’s diary signify how time changes a person’s experience as well as her memory of that experience. Revising one’s diary entries is inherent to personal growth, particularly at a younger age.

Weblogs obviously meet the revisionist need of a diary writer, as entries can be endlessly edited and deleted, even though the ethicality of this is a matter of some controversy among bloggers (Blood, 2002). Yet, from the contemporary blogger’s perspective, that does not obliterate the urge to fix experience. Even though blogging is by many considered a transitory cultural practice, just as talking on the phone or sending short text messages, the desire for storage and retrieval is evident. In the case of phone and sms-conversations, Taylor and Harper (2003) found that some teenagers included in their research express the wish to store each sms-exchange on a memory card in order to recall the experience later: the message’s physical properties (form, content, time and date stamp) all work in combination to instil meaning into the physical. We can see a similar reconciliation of seemingly opposite functions in the use of digital diaries. For one thing, the very fact that bloggers use writing as their preferred mode of expression indicates a desire to secure these symbolic exchanges in some retrievable form, as their entries gradually turn into interesting memory objects of past experiences. Moreover, almost every software program contains an ‘archive’ holding selected entries and comments, going back to the very beginning of a person’s weblog. Although this has never been empirically tested, it would be no surprise to find that bloggers, like teenagers using sms or the phone, would value their archives as much as their log’s communicative functions. In other words, synchronising experience and fixing experience in time were never completely contradictory functions, but they have perfectly merged in today’s weblogs.

Weblogs as signifiers of cultural transformation

Looking at lifelogs and the cultural practices they engender, we can deduce an interesting reinvention of age-old rituals, newly attuned to the modalities of digitisation. Like the writing of paper diaries, blogging is a process that helps express and order thoughts through rituals, thus defining a sense of self in relation to others; diaries and lifelogs are both acts and artefacts, in which materiality and technology are interdependent on their changing cultural form, their use and users. Rather than pinpoint differences and continuities, I have tried to signal how functions and features of the analogue and digital genre coexist and co-evolve. Some seemingly conflicting genre features that have always existed are now reconciled in the face of evolving hybrid practices, while other paradoxes persist. Even though pen and paper are gradually being replaced by (networked) computers, multimedial materiality still reflects personality and individuality that was formerly signified by handwriting and paper objects. The classification dilemma to distinguish diaries as strictly private (written for oneself and by one person) or public (written to be read by others) does not disappear with the advent of weblogs; on the contrary, the ambiguity is amplified by the potential of instant publishing. And finally, the cultural practice of blogging easily blends the need to synchronise experience with the desire to fix and revise experience in time. However, analysing the evolution of a single case of a technology-form-practice nexus was never a goal in itself; rather, I would like to explain how this particular case signifies a larger techno-cultural transformation that is much more profound than its traces left on the world wide web. In tracking how a new hybrid practice of blogging evolves, it is crucial to acknowledge how it sustains old and constructs new epistemologies and how it indicates a transformation of important cultural notions, specifically the paired-off notions individual and collective, private and public, and memory and experience.

Individuality and collectivity are redefined in the face of a culture that values sharing. Weblog architecture, through encoded features such as ‘my current mood’ ‘mini biography’ and ‘my interests’ on the one hand, and ‘friend groups’ ‘syndication’ or ‘communities’ on the other (LiveJournal), favours a connected exploration of the personal; what the internet does best is to create a forum for collective discourses. Although reciprocation is certainly not a condition for participating in the blogosphere, connecting and sharing is definitely written into the technological condition. Of all weblogs present on the internet today, some still resemble conventional paper diaries while others have morphed into completely new interactive formats, firmly rooted in internet culture. Through weblogs, intimate reflections and revelations about personal, intellectual, and artistic preferences are consciously shared with both known and anonymous audiences. Weblogs and blogging might be seen as part of a larger participatory turn in culture. In this culture of sharing, the weblog finds its natural habitat: the digital diary becomes instrumental as its multimedial modality equally allows for the creation of one’s personal entries as well as for the exchange of cultural contents (clippings, files, songs). Blogging software and internet hardware, in this argument, are neither neutral technical conduits nor simple commodities, but they are cultural artefacts facilitating a social process in which exchange and participation are conditions to enacting citizenship.

However, there is another side to this techno-cultural transformation that often gets overlooked. The culture of reciprocation is not solely based on linking the self to the net, but also on linking the net to the self. Tracing cultural or political preferences of other bloggers, one can decide to connect to people with similar tastes and preferences; it is precisely this feature that makes weblogs interesting for outsiders. With the use of fairly simple software applications like AllConsuming.net, it becomes increasingly easy to find correlations between bloggers and the cultural products they mention via links or sidebars: books, music, television programs, movies, etc. (Benson, 2003). Tracking software allows a glimpse of the patterns and trends that emerge out of the topics shared by a group. Coupled onto vast databases like Amazon and Google, the possibilities for polling and marketing research are endless, explaining Google’s eagerness to buy start-up companies like Blogger. [7] Whereas many diaries (like OpenDiary and DearDiary) started out as small communities of like-minded individuals, many of these services are now owned by corporations. The downside of the culture of reciprocity is instant marketability: personal taste and cultural choices become instantaneously traceable and marketable to commercial ventures. In a networked environment, where information is constantly cached, weblogs have become gold mines for data diggers. For bloggers, social norms concerning individuality and collectivity appear to be in flux; nostalgic notions of personality and belonging still persist, while new media reality prompts a keen awareness of technological strategies directing individual taste and community building.

The same ambiguity applies to blogger’s notions of privacy and openness. As I pointed out above, privacy has always been an effect rather than an intrinsic feature of a paper diary’s content, often achieved through one’s familiarity with conventions for publication and publicity. Our norms and laws of privacy protection are still based on a strict distinction between ego-documents and public records; if boundaries were often crossed in the past, for bloggers they become increasingly fuzzy. As Nussbaum explains, bloggers have a ‘degraded or relaxed sense of privacy,’ depending on your perspective: ‘Their experiences may be personal, but there is no shame in sharing… [and they get back] a new kind of intimacy, a sense that they are known and listened to’(2004). Not only is there no shame in sharing: bloggers actually take pride and find purpose in sharing. Privacy is an effect determined by a click on the mouse. Instant publication, however, changes the rules of the game. As the aforementioned MIT Media Lab survey by Viegas shows, bloggers are hardly concerned with the persistent nature of what they publish; the overwhelming majority publishes private information about themselves or other people without thinking about legal or moral consequences. Not surprisingly, more than one third of all bloggers have gotten into trouble because of things they have written in their blogs and the majority forgets about defamation or liability when writing about others in networked environments. Their understandings of private and public appear full of contradictions: comments are personal yet readable by everyone, intimate yet public. Old and new notions of privacy are contested in the blogosphere; courts and lawyers are currently wrestling with emerging questions like: can entries posted with restricted access be ‘stolen’ when they are posted on an open website? Are public officials or state employees free to speak their minds in the ‘private’ sphere of restricted blog communities? It will take a number of years before this hybrid practice will have stabilised and grounded in social and legal norms.

Lifelogs do not only signal altering notions of individuality and privacy, but also of personal memory in relation to lived experience. The paper diary reflected the idea that the memory object is a petrified, unchangeable relic, stored in its authentic form and retrieved to invoke a past experience. When a diary’s contents were published through an intermediate process of editing, printing and distribution, we were mostly concerned with how the ‘original’ words—assumedly the recordings of experiences—matched the words published in print. The fusion of old and new technologies results in a hybrid tool that seamlessly combines communicative and archival functions; blogging allows for exchanging, storing, and revising entries all at the same time. Blogging itself becomes a (real life) experience, a construction of self that is always mediated by tools for communication and expression; in other words, the medium is the experience, not the message. If the meaning of experience is slowly changing, so is the meaning of memory. As time proceeds, memories of experiences inevitably evolve; revising one’s past inscriptions is a natural part of a process of personal growth. Rather than being fixed in material paper objects, memory mutates through digital materiality. Although the internet is often characterised as a transient, evanescent medium, weblogs have both the ability to fix and the potential to morph; blogging constitutes a new concept of memory, allowing for preservation and erasure simultaneously.

Bloggers are retooling the practice of diary writing, meanwhile creating a new type of cultural knowledge and social interaction via their tools. The reciprocity inherent in networked systems points at a profound reorganisation in social consciousness. Tracing media change through its technology-materiality, as Kitzman proposes, through its specific cultural forms, as Bolter and Grusin advocate, or through an analysis of blogging as social action, as Miller and Shepherd prefer, are all valuable prisms to look at this recent phenomenon. In this article, however, I have attempted to examine technological and cultural changes in constant connection to socio-cultural practices, as an index to understanding the larger socio-cultural transformations. In the case of lifelogs, I have argued how old and new technologies, forms and practices co-exist and yet co-evolve into hybrid practices. These hybrid practices both reflect and construct new social norms and cultural concepts, such as individual and community, privacy and publicness, experience and memory. In a period of transition, these concepts fluctuate and will continue to fluctuate, but unravelling such complex transformation may help us sort out newly emerging cultural values. If we look back at the cartoon, cited at the beginning of this article, we now comprehend that the woman who starts typing her lifelog right after denying her partner’s question whether she keeps a diary, is not simply lying. In fact, the three frames of this cartoon perfectly reflect the ambiguous reality in which millions of bloggers find themselves today.

Author’s Biography

José van Dijck is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Chair of the Department of Media Studies. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego. She has published widely on science and media and on media technologies. Her latest book is The Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). She is currently writing a book on media technologies and cultural memory. [J.F.T.M.vanDijck@uva.nl]

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eric Ketelaar for bringing the cartoon to my attention and for his constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Sonja Neef and the anonymous referees of Fibreculture for sharpening my argument. Thanks to Esther Milne for her editorial help.

Notes

[1] Emily Nussbaum (2004) takes this prediction from an October 2003 inquiry by the Perseus Development Corporation, a company that designs software for online surveys. Susan Herring (2004), sociologist specialising in computer-mediated communication, quotes the number of 4.12 million weblog users from the statistics of the Perseus group. This number of bloggers also includes hosted weblog services; 34% of these logs are used actively.

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[2] Kitzmann (2003) grounds his approach in theories by Hansen (2000) and Lyotard (1991). He emphasises that the concept of ‘remediation’ implies too much linearity and hierarchy, instead proposing to study media change in the context of the much wider phenomenon of ‘material complexification’, in which change is not cumulative ‘but [measured by] structural shifts that may lead to growth, contraction, stasis, or a combination of all three’ (51).

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[3] For the remainder of this paper, I will use the term ‘lifelog’ to refer to the personal weblog, but with all the caveats mentioned in the previous three paragraphs: lifelogs can never be clearly separated from weblogs in general in terms of content, referentiality or directionality.

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[4] Although Kittler (1999: 198) states that the typewriter disrupted the intimacy of handwritten expression, as it ‘tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word.’ It should be noted, though, that this idea does not originally stem from Kittler; he is referring to Heidegger’s Parmenides-lecture.

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[5] As British sociologist John B. Tompson (1995: 233) has eloquently argued, individuals increasingly draw on mediated experience to inform and refashion the project of self: ‘Mediated rituals enable intimacy at a distance; for the generation living in the digital age, the continuous switching between real live and mediated communication is quite normal.’

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[6] According to Viegas (2004), almost 75% of all bloggers indeed edit their past entries, varying from punctuation and grammar to contents and names.

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[7] Pyra labs, one of the first start-up companies who designed blogger-software, was bought up by Google in 2003. For details on this transaction, see Kahney (2003).

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New media presents us with a diverse range of texts which tend to manifest through the centrality of the interface. The interface is often argued as the most important part of any digital application (i.e. Bolter and Gromala 2003: 11). It becomes the surface upon, or perhaps through, which a range of forces and discourses converge and intersect. It can also be argued that these discourses are subsumed within a particular idea of the interface, and in some instances can efface what is at stake in new media texts. In particular, and what this paper investigates, is the question of textuality itself, the limits and liberties of textual models. This paper problematises the notion of the interface with a notion of models of textuality, and considers some of the implications for the future of reading.

A model of textuality is not a natural thing; it is (a) technology. A textual model provides an infrastructure which determines and articulates the structure and possibilities of relationships between those elements of the textual infrastructure – texts, subjects, and their relationships. As a consequence of this infrastructure, the model also largely determines the possibilities for reading and writing within the textual system.

The print-based system of texts, for example, is a thoroughly naturalised and representational mode of textuality which has provided an infrastructure and prescribed and delimited the forms of its objects and relations for three hundred years. The print-based textual system has always presented an infrastructure that consists of a two-dimensional surface to which it sutures a subject in a face-to-face relationship – the requirement is for a certain kind of text, a certain kind of subject, and a certain kind of relationship between them – a highly prescribed and circumscribed textual infrastructure. This model of textuality is assumed as the natural mode of textuality, and consequently the referent for all textuality. What is obscured in the naturalisation of the print model of textuality are the technological dimensions of textuality: that all textual models are technologies. This print model has become so naturalised that it ‘disappears’.

Print and screen based texts (including moving image texts such as film, television and multimedia productions, and simulated 3D texts) conform to this representational model. The close relationship between a print infrastructure and representationalism can be demonstrated through a brief archaeology: a dominant representationalism can be shown to reside in the print model which we can explicate here in terms of Heidegger’s notion of the ‘Age of the World Picture’ (Heidegger, 1977). The problem in representationalism is that everything that is is an object for a subject. In terms of subjects and objects, the essential point Heidegger makes concerns ‘the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism’ and that it is ‘precisely this reciprocal conditioning of one by the other that points back to events more profound’ (Heidegger, 1977: 128).

For Heidegger, in the representationalist paradigm, the very essence of ‘man’ changes in that ‘man becomes subject’. He is very specific about what this means, pointing out that the word sub-iectum in fact names ‘that-which-lies-before’, and which ‘as ground, gathers everything onto itself’ (Heidegger, 1977: 128). When man becomes primary, as the only real subiectum, then ‘man becomes that being upon which all that is is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth’. It is only possible for man to become this relational centre when ‘the comprehension of what is as a whole changes’ (Heidegger, 1977: 128). In terms of this change, Heidegger says, we are asking after the ‘essence of the modern age’ which concerns the ‘modern world picture [Weltbild]’.

[W]orld picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Whenever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.

And further, that:

The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age. (Heidegger, 1977: 129-130)

Modern representing, as we follow it through Heidegger, demonstrates a representational subject constituted and positioned within the system. Positionality is important to representationalism: it requires positionality in order to represent. In this sense, the general structural relations of the print model make it easy for representationalism and the subject of the age of print is broadly defined by these structural elements and relations of a print economy and model of textuality. The print subject is sutured to the page or screen and this always provides it with a representable position. The subject of representationalism therefore comes to appear as naturally given, just as, in this view, technology is also a given. Positionality concerns fixation, or what can be held to be true. Positionality is what Deleuze and Guattari oppose to nomadism which concerns constant movement and circulation.

Heidegger noted the significance of the concept of positionality to representationalism. The establishing of ‘man’ the subject as ground for that which is, positions man in an entirely different way from that of medieval or ancient man. In fact, he says, for the first time there became such a thing as a ‘position’ of man. Man is subiectum, and must stand in front of, or ‘take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective’.

What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for a possible development of humanity. (Heidegger, 1977: 132)

This decisive event, for Heidegger, is what begins a new way of being human (‘the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole’) that gives rise to the world as picture. It is not surprising that a mass textual system or model (the printing press of the fifteenth century) that becomes dominant during this same period serves to instantiate this model of ‘man’. This is an actualisation of the technology of the subiectum, the age of the world picture, that is henceforth demanded in order to produce and to represent this ‘man’, and to represent him to himself. This rather remarkable technological subject of the age of print is constituted and positioned within the infrastructure of a print economy as it must function in the age of the world picture.

Representationalism requires a stable formation in order to function, and infusions of noise into the system are rendered as pathologies, especially of the subject positioned within the system. Immersive virtual reality, for example, in that it disrupts or introduces something that is apparently new into the system, becomes a pathologisation of the subject, and it is on this basis that claims are often made that there is a crisis in modes of subjectivity. Springer, for example, asserts that ‘As does all the computer rhetoric analysed in this book, VR discourses reveal an intense crisis in modes of subjectivity’ (Springer, 1996: 81). Within this model, it becomes a question of repositioning the subject such that the subject may be accommodated in an expanded representational regime. Such claims of crises in modes of subjectivity and for new subject positions always refer to a print-based economy and infrastructure. The need for positionality within the model presumes or pre-scribes the necessity of a position for the subject, in order for the model to maintain itself. New or different subject positions within a print model are changes in degree, and this subject always remains the same kind of subject (positioned in a face to face relationship with the text, and likewise the text remains the same kind of two-dimensional text).

So, if these are the dimensions of the print-based model of textuality, what is then offered to us beyond these dimensions is something that can be called a post-print model of textuality. A post-print model will have to concern a change in kind rather than changes in degree (i.e. different/new subject positions etc.): a change in kind will require a different infrastructure – different kinds of texts, different kinds of subjects, and different kinds of relationships between them. This is the crucial difference between the print and the post-print models: that it concerns changes in kind rather than changes in degree. It is the infrastructure of the model that changes rather than simply a realignment or repositioning of constituent elements. The nature of these elements also changes – the subject shifts from fixed, positional and representational to one which is set in motion, and what is decisive is this question of movement. This decisive change is akin to the point Deleuze makes in The Fold in relation to a transformation of monadology to nomadology, that the conditions of the problem itself change.

The same construction of the point of view over the city continues to be developed, but now it is neither the same point of view nor the same city, now that both the figure and the ground are in movement in space. (Deleuze, 1993: 136)

In this deterritorialisation of accepted notions of space, something has changed, Deleuze says, in the situation of monads, between the ‘closed chapel with imperceptible openings’ and ‘the sealed car speeding down the dark highway’ (Deleuze, 1993: 136-137). In a post-print model this ground has also changed, a question of movement and a different relationship to space.

The significant questions in terms of textual space will concern how the dimensions of a post-print model can be specified and demonstrated and, as subjects of this model, how we can engage with such post-print texts and textuality? What are reading and writing in such environments? What would also need to be asked is whether such a post-print model is or can be post-representational.

A fully three-dimensional text will necessarily have to exceed the specifications of the print-based two dimensional model of textuality, yet what we currently refer to as 3D texts displayed on two-dimensional screens do not escape the structure of the print model. Current 3D texts are simulations which always remain two dimensional. Some simulated three-dimensional environments, specifically, immersive virtual reality, however, do present a hybrid model of textuality. These kinds of texts conform to the order of the print model in that the infrastructure remains (the screen as a head mounted display is sutured ever closer to the representational subject), whilst at the same time they also provide for a subject ‘within’ the text and in motion (moving through the ‘space’ of the text).

What such hybrid models depend upon in order to achieve a simulated post-print model is a changed concept of information. What these simulation technologies provide is a visualisation, an imaging, of information as constituting the textual worlds (re)presented. One of the significant ways in which this changed conception of information has developed over the past few decades and has entered into popular consciousness has been through cyberpunk science fiction, and especially through the work of William Gibson and the very idea of cyberspace. Information is the crucial constituent, or constitutive element, of cyberspace. Steve Jonathanes has pointed out that:

The clearest statements of cyberpunk ideology come from contemporary science fiction texts that combine information, technology and ideology to construct a reality in a near future (a time that seems almost parallel to the present rather than ahead of it) in which information fuels not only the global economy but individual existence. (Jonathanes, 1994: 81)

Rudy Rucker’s Software was perhaps the first to be explicit about the primary focusing on information, although it was Gibson who provides the imagery, the visual metaphor of cyberspace. This visual metaphor is crucial. We first ‘see’ cyberspace in Gibson’s ‘Burning Chrome’, first published in 1981, in which the matrix is produced as a visual metaphor.

The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.

Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine. (Gibson, 1988: 196-197)

Gibson’s description of the matrix was conceptually revolutionary. Precisely what is conceptually revolutionary is, as Wills points out:

the transformation of data representations from the print medium to that of representational graphics, and along with that the use of sensors or dermatrodes attached to the head to relay brain signals or mental representations directly into the computing system, again bypassing traditional language systems. (Wills, 1995: 67)

The often quoted ‘original and authentic’ definition of cyberspace from Gibson is:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson, 1988: 67)

However, this is precisely the point at which we need to rethink the production of the metaphor of cyberspace, rather that accepting this definition at face-value. Firstly, Gibson’s text should be read a little more closely for its context. The context of this ‘definition’ in Neuromancer is that it is ‘spoken’ as a voice-over on a television program being watched by the two main characters, Molly and Case. The program, or what we know about it from the text, can be seen as mimicking a particular style of documentary film-making. In Gibson’s text it is the authorial voice-over of the omniscient narrator which delivers the statement that has become the famous quote. The context arrives immediately following the television voice over:

‘What’s that?’ Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.

‘Kid’s show.’ A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled. ‘Off,’ he said to the Hosaka. (Gibson, 1988: 68)

And so now the definition of cyberspace that has captured the imagination of the world is revealed as being for ‘kids’. This ‘definition’ should be read as provisional, as a point of departure for an exploration of textual worlds beyond the imag(in)ability of a print model. These kinds of misreading often seem to plague the dystopic textual worlds and characters of Gibson’s work. Throughout his texts, Gibson has frequently been attempting to engage sophisticated and complex senses of informational environments and the possibilities of our relationships with them.

The characterisation of cyberspace in Gibson is richer than the decontextualised quotation first indicates. What we find in Gibson is that cyberspace from the very beginning attempts to exceed the infrastructure of the print model, firstly through the dream of directly ‘jacking in’ to the matrix via dermatrodes attached to the head, a dream of bypassing language in favour of direct access to a ‘virtual’ visual ‘reality’. Later, in Idoru (1996) for example, this dream is abandoned in favour of a return to the physical structure of the print model through the use of ‘eyephones’ which is closer to what we understand as an immersive virtual reality environment. Significantly, Gibson’s environments always concern three dimensional space and a mobile subject position, or rather, a return to a body that is able to move, and to act, within the (textual) space. The crucial point here is that cyberspace is an event of information. We will shortly examine Gibson’s Idoru, especially for the way in which he engages with the contemporary metaphorics of information as networked fields of information flow, and nodes of intensity within fields of information flow, and crucially engages the possibilities of reading (within) such environments (Gibson, 1996).

Firstly, however, we will examine a contemporary textual example which explores textuality and reading through three levels of the hybrid interface. In Windows and Mirrors: Interaction design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala explore and analyse a number of examples of digital and installation art from the SIGGRAPH 2000 exhibition (Bolter and Gromala, 2003). The analyses are based in Bolter’s now familiar theoretical work on remediation and associated concepts that have previously been explicated in Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). The concept of remediation is significant in new media in terms of explaining the continuities between media forms and the associated concepts of transparency and reflection. ’Remediation’ is the name Bolter and Grusin have given to ‘the representation of one medium in another’, and they argue that ‘remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 45). By its very nature, however, remediation is conservative: in that it concerns the reinvestment of preceding media forms into new forms, and what might be new in these forms tends to be subsumed or assimilated to the infrastructure of the preceding form. As we will find in the example below, remediation seems unable to apprehend the changed infrastructure, and what might be new tends to be reduced to the notion of the production of (an) ‘experience’ which finally tends to render a new form in terms of preceding forms and their textual model.

Bolter and Gromala examine the fascinating example of Magic Book from the Emerging Technologies exhibit at SIGGRAPH 2000 in a chapter titled ‘Magic Book: The New and the Old in New Media’(Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 76-93). Bolter and Gromala describe Magic Book in similar terms to the description provided on the designer’s web site, and quoted below:

Magic Book explores the transition between Physical Reality, Augmented Reality (AR), and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) in a collaborative setting. A Magic Book looks like a regular storybook with colorful pages and simple text. When readers look at the same pages wearing lightweight head mounted displays (HMD), the pictures pop off the page and come to life as three-dimensional animated virtual scenes. By touching a switch on the HMD, readers can fly into the virtual scene and freely explore the immersive environment. Several readers can gather around a single Magic Book and experience it together. Wearing HMDs, each reader can view AR scenes from their own perspective or fly into the immersive world and see each other represented as avatars in the same virtual scene. Readers that remain in the AR setting have a God’s eye view of their fellow readers as miniature avatars in the virtual scene before them. (http://www.hitl.washington.edu/magicbook/)

Magic Book presents three textual infrastructures within the one text. The first two, the conventional book and the pop-up book (what are called physical and augmented realities, but both still ‘books’) still conform to the infrastructure of the print model, whilst the third (immersive virtual reality) makes the transition to a post-print model (albeit simulated). The second, the ‘pop-up’ book, emerges as an intermediate stage where the text becomes three dimensional but in which the subject is still excluded and must ‘view’ the text from the outside, a textual structure which recalls the three-dimensional stereoscope of the nineteenth century. If two people are reading Magic Book, one in augmented reality (‘pop-up’ book) and the other in virtual reality (immersive), both will have avatars in the text. The augmented reality reader will view both avatars in the third person (because this reader’s subject position or ‘view’ is external to the text. The virtual reality reader, on the other hand, will experience her avatar in the first person, as the body which moves within the text.

Bolter and Gromala describe Magic Book as an experiment in remediation which begins with the printed book. They say that the designer’s desire was to take the experience of a conventional printed book and to ‘imitate, enhance, and ultimately refashion in digital technology’ and to ‘bring out the multiple levels of experience that were latent in a printed storybook’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 80). The differences between textual models are subsumed under the name of remediation and under the strategy of designing an experience – they say that ‘to design a digital artefact is to design an experience’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 22). In imitating and enhancing the physical book the referent remains the printed book and therefore the textual infrastructure that supports it, and the differences between the models of textuality presented in these three versions is effaced within the term ‘experience’. This is what makes it remediation for Bolter and Gromala (‘remediation as a conscious design strategy’), but it is also this conservatism of remediation which inhibits its ability to examine what is or might be new other than what might be an effect of remediation.

The significance of this discussion concerning textual models becomes more apparent when we consider what reading is in these models. Bolter and Gromala say that Magic Book ‘is an experiment in the meaning of reading, a radical remediation’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 80). But just what is this mode of reading, and reading practices, which engage this text?

Bolter and Gromala’s analysis, consistent with the designer’s website, is concerned with the interface, with reading the interface. The content of the text is almost immaterial in this analysis, and passed over in favour of the interface: the singular reference to content is to the reader being able to ‘see colorful gnome-like characters and read a simple story’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 78). Reading the interface in this context is, I suggest, about ‘experiencing’ and coming to understand something of the unfamiliar textual infrastructure, as it is within this context that the possibilities of reading will manifest.

For Bolter and Gromala, when ‘the author’s style of telling the story is compelling, a printed book can metaphorically immerse the reader in the story. The Magic Book renders the metaphor visual’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 80). The reader’s metaphorical immersion in the story of a conventional printed book, however, is not non-visual, the reader imag(in)es the world they construct with the text – a line of flight, escaping the pre-scription of the text in (everyday) reading practices, the subject’s escape from complete determination through negotiation of meaning in the activity of reading.

What is happening then in the metaphor being rendered visual? It appears to be a prescription that, in what was formerly the work of the reader in imag(in)ing the textual world, has now become a pre-scribed visual world. What is the work of the reader beyond this prescription, beyond simply ‘seeing’ what is already placed there? We seem to have returned to Heidegger and the image of the world grasped as picture, and apparently excluding the possibility of a post-representationalism.

I suggest that the problem is of the same order as with remediation discussed above, that what occurs in remediation’s colonising activity is also the (re)investment of a dominant representationalism. An insistence on remediation as the ‘defining characteristic of the new digital media’ also becomes an insistence on rendering the new form (as) representational. The problem in a sense is a certain latent ideology of remediation, and particularly of the conception of reading it seems to assume. Reading, in the Bolter and Gromala analysis (and consistent with the Magic Book designer’s), is equated to ‘seeing’, to seeing what is (re)presented.

Bolter and Gromala report that when the designers of Magic Book asked themselves the question, ‘what is reading?’, their answer was that:

to read is to be transported to a world that the reader can see with her mind’s eye. The augmented reality interface allows the reader to see that world in three dimensions not with her mind’s eye, but with her physical vision. The enhanced view is in turn followed and reimagined by the fully immersive experience of virtual reality’. (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 80-81)

Reading, however, is never simple reception, whatever the nature of the text. ‘Rendering the metaphor visual’ doesn’t of itself exceed simple reception, and if to read is ‘to be transported’ then we should also think metaphor more carefully. Derrida argues metaphor in terms of transportation and circulation, that we cannot speak of metaphor without using it, and that metaphor conveys us as its inhabitants.

We are in a certain way – metaphorically of course, and as concerns the mode of habitation – the content and the tenor of this vehicle: passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor. (Derrida, 1978: 6)

With this notion of metaphor, metaphor is always already event. There is ‘nothing that does not happen with metaphor and by metaphor’, and nothing ‘gets along without metaphor’; and even more importantly ‘it should be said that metaphor gets along without anything else, here without me, at the very moment when it appears to pass through me’ (Derrida, 1978: 8). Rendering the metaphor visual, and with reading being a question of seeing within this paradigm, would then be a (re)incorporation back into representationalism, the metaphor reduced from event to thing.

Reading is an event, an activity of production, of negotiating and producing meaning in the engagement of a text and a subject. Barthes’ distinction between the ‘work’ and the ‘text’ is still relevant here:

The work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse … or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. (Barthes, 1977: 157)

What is the ‘work’ in digital production? The digital text is a highly and precisely coded material artefact (the fact that it is a synthetic CD or on the hard drive of a computer as opposed to bound paper does not change this sense of the ‘work’), including its graphic (re)presentations. For Barthes, reading is not a process of interpreting an essence but is an activity of production (a writing) that is a negotiation of meaning between reader and text, and therefore always social, always based in a desire to engage with something other.

In Bolter and Gromala, these questions of reading and textual models are subsumed within the argument they present that ‘to design a digital artefact is to design an experience’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 22). For them, a digital experience ‘does not simply enhance the delivery of information. The information itself becomes an experience’ (Bolter and Gromala, 2003: 23). What notion of experience and what notion of information is at work here? Reading has always been an experience, an engagement in an activity of production. Here, however, there is an insistence on the ‘experience’ as some kind of abstract entity in itself – one experiences an experience, and this is the experience of ‘information’ (that amorphous and ubiquitous term that means everything and nothing at the same time). Do we take it that reading is now a matter of ‘experiencing information’ visually – is this a return to the concept of literal reading (‘it means what it looks like’)?

In Magic Book, it is a question of ‘reading’ the interface or interfaces, and these three interfaces have been presented in the form of representational graphics. The ‘experience’ provided in this imagery is an experience of the interface, particularly of the difference between these three interfaces. The immersive virtual reality version of Magic Book, however, is more an experience of the changed relationships between the reader and text. The crucial difference is that, in being ‘immersed’ within the text, the reader can ‘fly into the immersive world’ (cf Deleuze’s metaphor of ‘the sealed car … etc.’), and the ‘experience’ is at the same time the fading of the familiar conventions of the print infrastructure and an engagement with the beginnings of a post-print model – unless it comes to be remediated back to representation.

All this passes through the interface. The interface is always between two faces – always in your face, and you face up to it, whatever … one stands before it as subiectum. This notion of ‘experience’ is a fascination with the interface. In maintaining the ‘printed book’, or more precisely the print model of textuality as referent, remediation tends to assume this single model of textuality that can be enhanced and expanded to incorporate other forms (which must always refer back to print texts). It assumes textuality as a single and apparently natural and organic entity rather than as a technology. The naturalised interface is always the two dimensional surface of the ‘originary’ textual model, and what is glossed are the technical and infrastructural conventions of such a model of textuality – its prescriptions for subjects and texts and the relationships between them.

On the other hand, some conventional print texts explicitly interrogate the very model they are immersed in, and engage with the possibilities of it being otherwise. William Gibson’s Idoru is such a text: it explores, as its content matter, the possibilities of reading within a three dimensional textual environment. It has much to say about the subtleties and complexity of reading in this environment which is imag(in)ed via holographic technologies.

Idoru assumes the metaphorics of information discussed earlier in terms of information fields – as flows, nodes and resistances within information fields. Gibson has developed the notion of the hologram over multiple texts from his first published short story Fragments of a Hologram Rose in 1977 (Gibson, 1988). Idoru, however, presents the most sophisticated treatment and exploration of holography as a textual future, relations between information and subjectivity within such an environment, and produces a sustained (fictional) engagement with what reading might be in an informational three-dimensional textuality. Within this informational environment, subjects and subjectivity are exposed to a range of new forces and intensities, immersed within flows of information which pass by and pass through as subjectivity is constituted as nodal points in this flow. In this scene, subjectivity is constituted, and constitutes itself, on the basis of its being-with and in information, and crucially that it returns a body to the text that can (inter-) act within this environment. These forces produce a radical change in subjectivity, and this is one of the major transformations that is explored and mediated by Gibson in the figure of the hologram. Rei Toei, the Idoru character in Idoru, is a hologram, constructed according to popular conceptions of beauty and celebrity. The notion of the holographic character is firstly opened up by the device of the central character of the text, Laney (a later version of the ‘console cowboy’ of Gibson’s Sprawl series). Laney has his weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, but is here produced as working with more sophisticated notions of information in the digital, networked era. Laney’s ‘gift’ is a certain attitude or approach, a special ability in relation to information which is given the name nodal vision, and which is specified as a mode of reading. Nodal vision is different from the way the ‘console jockeys’ of the Sprawl series were wired up with dermatrodes in a direct relation of brain, and mind, to information. Nodal vision emphasises sight, but crucially marks it with a difference in that Laney uses eyephones for his ‘reading’: the ‘phones’ invoking a notion of hearing as well as seeing, and carrying a sense of embodiment.

Laney is sought after by corporations for this special ability and so, for his living, scans information networks. He ‘divines’ information, and is able to ‘sense’ nodal points (or intensities) in information flows. His special ability can be located in the relation of information to his ‘subjectivity’. The importance of the character of Laney lies in the way he is used to explore a particular notion of information and our relations to and in it; and also that this character is able to disrupt our conventional relationship to information. In the first instance, the text sets up Laney’s special ability, his nodal vision, in this way:

[H]e was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney’s concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.

Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic waterwitch. He couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He just didn’t know (Gibson, 1996: 25)

Laney’s process of coming to ‘know’ (to know what it is that he does) is partly what the novel is about, because ‘coming to know’ in this context is about our (as readers) coming to know about our changing relationship to information. The complexity in the (re)construction of these relationships comes from the fact that the impetus for change in the text is provided by the politicisation of the process of coming to know. The text’s statement in this respect is that there can be no innocent knowing, no innocent reading; and even though this is not forced as a prominent outcome of the text, it does gesture towards a coming to politics of the information age. This is explicitly set up by instantiating an ethics in relation to this mode of reading, the nodal vision, through his previous employment. When he is at DatAmerica he is unaware of the context of the information he is uncovering (Gibson, 1996: 25-26). His initial orientation is to information as intrinsically neutral and innocent.

Although he begins his next job at Slitscan with the same orientation, Laney’s transformation is brought about by the effects of Slitscan’s methods, carried out by him, on a woman called Alison Shires ( Gibson, 1996: 23). The transformation was effected partly as a result of his nodal vision. In this way, the nodal vision is presented, crucially, as requiring an ethics as well as an aesthetics. Slitscan hires him after he demonstrates that in half an hour he is able to produce information that had taken ‘three experienced researchers a month to excavate’. The ethics of the operation are immediately problematised in a complex knot of relations between the personal, the corporate, and the state.

‘Some of that was illegal,’ Laney said. ‘You’re tied into parts of DatAmerican that you aren’t supposed to be.’

‘Do you know what a nondisclosure agreement is, Laney?’ (Gibson, 1996: 38)

Laney’s ability makes him a hit at Slitscan as he is able to hone in on sensitive or key data in almost any chaotic mass of information. The Alison Shires incident demonstrates three significant points in terms of the nodal vision. Briefly, Alison Shires is investigated, in order to be publicly exposed, because she is thought to be having an affair with a certain celebrity. The outcome of the investigation, from Laney’s nodal pursuit of her, is that she kills herself. Crucially, however, Laney knows, through his practice, that she has sensed his presence, his scrutiny of her; and he also becomes aware, beforehand, that she will kill herself.

The first point relates to her becoming aware of, rather, her sensing, the investigation. That is, in this mode of reading, if one subject (Laney) can come to know another (Alison Shires) intimately through the nodal scanning of their data, through a scanning that functions largely via an extension of his subjectivity to incorporate what she does in her daily activities, then she can also become aware of his invasion or rape of her (her as data, but in this context, still her). From this we then have the second point: that such a mode of reading, subjectivity, and relation to information is potentially dangerous. It has actual consequences, since she kills herself, and hence there are serious ethical issues in this practice. The third point arises later in the text when Laney revisits the site of her personal data following her death. He finds that the nodal point has gone, and her site has reduced – ‘not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in’.

The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface. (Gibson, 1996: 115-116)

This is a world, and a mode of reading, that marks data as equivalent to life: Laney remembers his ‘apprehension of her data-death’ in what would seem to be a distillation of a proposition expounded by a character in DeLillo’s White Noise, that we are the sum of our data (DeLillo, 1986: 141). The text follows immediately with Laney’s first attempt to access the nodal points of the data of the celebrity character Rez. But Laney is unable to access any nodal points in his data because the data he is given is not of Rez; that is, it is data that has been compiled by others about him, and nodal vision crucially operates on the basis of what the subject does. Rez is invisible to him in this data and Laney will have to meet him. The concept of nodality here is to a lived relation, and it is no certain thing. Laney elaborates, later, to a co-worker about why he was unable to find the nodal points in the Rez data:

Rez doesn’t generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It’s like looking at an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It’s not going to be there. … If I enter a specific area, I don’t get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It’s got to be relational. (Gibson, 1996: 148)

Laney has been hired by the security people for Rez who is a rock/video star from the group ‘Lo/Rez’. Rez’s security people, Blackwell and Yamazaki, are concerned about Rez’s stated intention to marry Rei Toei who, since she is a hologram, does not exist. She is the Idoru, or idol-singer, whom Yamazaki describes to Laney in these preliminary and instrumental terms: ‘She is a personality construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of software-designers’ (Gibson, 1996: 92). From this definition, Laney imagines her as an ‘industrial strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces … their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity’ (Gibson, 1996: 175). Later, he comes to understand her as considerably more, and considerably more complex, than this; and it is this development of the holographic character, its relations to information, and its convergence with the human in the marriage with Rez that constitutes the primary conceit of the text. Rez later describes the Idoru in the following terms, and as more than the sum of her data.

‘Rei’s only reality is the realm of ongoing serial creation,’ Rez said. ‘Entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex.’ (Gibson, 1996: 202)

Laney eventually meets Rez, but it is his meeting with Rei Toei shortly afterwards when they sit for the meal that is most illuminating. We find here something of the intensity of the notion of the nodal vision. It is this special ability of Laney’s that makes his relationship with the hologram, Rei Toei, of special interest. To Laney, Rei Toei appears as an incredibly intense node of information, the most intense node he has ever come across; and because of his ‘nodal’ special ability and the intensity of the node, he finds it almost impossible to look at her during this meeting.

And now her eyes met his.

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. (Gibson, 1996: 175)

He can no longer look directly at her, at her face at least, but catches peripheral glimpses and reflections.

Laney quite clearly saw the light of her face reflect for an instant in the almost circular lenses.

A hologram. Something generated, animated, projected.

Nodal. (Gibson, 1996: 176)

Don’t look at the Idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative. (Gibson, 1996: 178)

During the meal, Rei Toei is described in Deleuzian terms. The explicit references come from Kuwayama, Rei Toei’s creator who describes her as ‘the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as “desiring machines”’; and he states that this is not in any literal sense ‘but please envision aggregates of subjective desire’ (Gibson, 1996: 178). The emphasis is given in the text.

When Laney is provided with access to the ‘global fan-activity database’ he again dons the eyephones and seeks Rez’s nodes. It is the organicity of this data that invokes the nodal vision; as the fan club data comes on line ‘the barren faces were suddenly translucent, networked depths of postings and commentary revealed there in baffling organic complexity’ (Gibson, 1996: 226). In this brief visit into this cyberspace he finds Rei Toei, but this also articulates a difference in the technologies and techniques of ‘different’ cyberspaces. The text offsets current simulation technologies of cyberspace with one that is holographic and nodal and concerning movement within three dimensional space. The simulation technology is designated as never quite there in terms of both technology and technique (especially narrative) – click here, click there, but never fully delivering what it has promised, or what Laney calls its (potential) ‘central marvel’. The holographic is its ‘central marvel’, Rei Toei is there, and is able to speak directly to him and with the memory of him from the dinner that has been produced from security-report data (Gibson, 1996: 227).

This is where the text begins to specify more of what it means by the nodal. The Idoru’s appearance in the data is described as not being a nodal manifestation; rather, she inhabits the data (of Rez and the fan club, in that their union is already becoming), but her data is not yet fully there in its availableness. Laney’s intimate one-to-one conversation with her in this sense prohibits his nodal vision. Laney asks her to put him back outside the ‘room’ they are in, where he can see (Gibson, 1996: 228). That is, back into a representational cyberspace where, as a subject of representation, he can ‘see’ subjects and objects.

The operation of the nodal vision as he inhabits the fan club data is described in intuitive terms, as drifting. He drifts through the data, but relationally, always inhabiting the spaces, and apprehending the movements that constitute the relations between them. The structure of the fan club data coheres around the ‘hollow armature of celebrity’ (Rez). Celebrity is constituted by this data: postings of personal sightings of Rez, girlfriends, band events, and so on, ‘each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it’ (Gibson, 1996: 229). This data is described as human in every detail, but then also not so in its assembly around the ‘hollow armature of celebrity’. Laney can see celebrity here, not as the ‘substance’ produced at, for example, Slitscan but ‘as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world’ (Gibson, 1996: 229). The data accumulated by the fans is much greater than anything generated by the band. It is in this sense that the fan club is what the celebrity, as media product, borrows from the world in order to be. That is, the information that is celebrity is the sum of the events of the lives of others. This is what the media, at least in a corporate sense, poaches from the world and claims as its own.

It is here that we see nodal vision as a critique of media, but a critique that is enabled by its mode of reading. It can make ‘sense’ of media in different ways from conventional reading practices. The fantasy and mystique of the marriage, the ‘alchemical marriage’ as Rez puts it, are here the fantasy and mystique of the media, of all it promises and markets but cannot deliver. The media accordingly becomes a monolithic structure (of discourses) which proceeds remorselessly in the dissimulated fantasy of its self-generation. Nodal vision, then, is the means of an interventionist reading. This has been gestured towards from the beginning by the foregrounding of the problematic of the ethics, at least the need for an ethics, of such reading. To get here, however, to the point and practice of the nodal vision as intervention and critique has required the transformed notions of information and metaphor discussed earlier (or, the becoming-metaphor of information). Nodal vision as constituted in this text deals with information as process, event, metaphor, and is thereby able to apprehend it relationally. This allows it to explore the dissimulation that is media information. That is, what is dissimulated in (corporate) media is what it poaches from the world.

But what, then, does the hologram represent in this schema? Laney meets the Idoru directly, in a car with her creator Kuwayama, after her bandwidth has been adjusted so that he can look at her. This time, as he looks into her eyes, he wonders what sort of computing power could create her, and crucially, as ‘something that looked back at you’ (Gibson, 1996: 237). He remembers what Kuwayama has already said of her in terms of ‘desiring machines’ and ‘aggregates of subjective desire’. Kuwayama explains that the Idoru’s videos are not videos as such, but rather, that ‘they emerge directly from her ongoing experience of the world. They are her dreams, if you will’ (Gibson, 1996: 237).

This encounter in the car has been arranged by Kuwayama and Yamazaki who have interests other than the smooth flow of the media machine that surrounds and orchestrates Rez as celebrity. They want Laney to stay with them after his current job; they recognise the practice and value of the nodal vision, and believe that they need it in order to further develop their technology: that is, (the concept of) the Idoru as an ongoing serial experience. Paradoxically, now that she has subjectivity, technological development requires the development of a relational ethics. The relationship between Laney and the Idoru is precisely that they have this becoming-nodal in common. They are the only ones who are able to communicate directly in cyberspace and as subjects in cyberspace in a real-time of cyberspace: that is, not as simply a simulated and mediated other as self-presence in cyberspace. In this relationship, in cyberspace, we also find something more of the movement and practice, perhaps not quite yet praxis, of nodal vision. We see this relationship in cyberspace after Kuwayama has made the Idoru’s data available. Although we do not have textual access to the Idoru’s subjectivity, we do have access to Laney’s and his experience of the relationship in cyberspace. Laney passes through the data, ‘felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side’ (Gibson, 1996: 251). But having passed through he could no longer see it, it required a turn, as a re-turn, and to look back from a new angle and distance: ‘‘Perspective,’ the Idoru said. ‘Yamazaki’s parallax.’’ (Gibson, 1996: 251)

Also paradoxically, it is Laney’s nodal vision that enables the union of Rez and the Idoru. Kuwayama and Yamazaki want this union to take place; that is, they want the media machine to continue because it is necessary for their ability to continue to develop her (conceptually, technologically). This is so because her level of development already endows her with subjectivity, and as such can articulate desire – she is a desiring machine, also an aggregate of subjective desire. But this desire is not of her, so to speak; it is appropriated from the data with which she interacts. That is, her continued development requires the continued development of the notion and practice of nodal vision because it functions relationally and intersects with the desires and experiences of the lives which she must poach in order to continue becoming. This has already been evident in her desire for Rez (essentially poached from the fan club members). This desire, however, is also the mediatised fantasy of the impossible desire for a pure and representable virtual.

The nature and extent of the Idoru’s subjectivity, as a necessary component to desiring, is demonstrated in the coupled notions of intention and projection. Her desire is desire for, intention and projection; she asks Laney to help her (to become what she wants) and believes that one day she will be able to see faces in the clouds as Laney does (one of the descriptions of nodal vision as memories). This is an impossible future-to-come for her, her desire for becoming-human. Nonetheless, what must be said about her subjectivity is that it is, and will always be, constituted in and as information, as an event of information (in-formation). Laney also comes to understand himself, his subjectivity, as information. This is specified differently for him because he has a real worldly body; but in terms of cyberspace, in that his nodal vision always already implies this informational cyberworld, he is in-formation. We see this as he ‘passes through’: that his subject position in its multiplicity and mobility is constituted as and in relation to information.

We have elaborated the concept of textual models, their infrastructures and how these determine and delimit the possibilities of texts and our engagement with them, in order to consider the implications that textual models have for the possibilities and for the future of reading within new media texts that are beginning to overflow the limits of the print-based representational system of texts. We have invoked a critique of representationalism in order to seek a way for a post-print model of textuality not to be overwhelmed by the colonisation of a new model, in particular through the concept of remediation, by the dominant representationalism of the print model. This has involved a consideration of the way our relationships to information have changed in the digital, networked era – that our idea of information has changed and that it has become an event, a ‘contradictory and heterogeneous process’ (Derrida, 2002: 6).

Many of these changes have tended to centre in and around the concept of the interface. Further, there is a dis-ease or anxiety within the interface which tends to be glossed in an overcompensatory fascination and celebratory rhetoric surrounding it. Remediation tends to efface some of these issues, and as has been shown here to subsume them within the twin towers of the ‘interface’ and the ‘experience’, and in so doing colonises new forms with the dominant representationalism of preceding print-based forms. Remediation is a good and useful explanation of the continuities between media forms, yet its conservatism can negate new conceptual possibilities. What is particularly problematic is the way it tends to reduce the activity of production that is reading to a simple reception, to ‘seeing’ – and this activity of reading seems to dissolve in the fascination with the interface. A post-print textuality is not yet given over to representationalism but could become so without intervention by a critical reading practice that takes account of the changed conditions of textuality and their possibilities for reading.

Print texts have always dreamt or imag(in)ed their textual worlds, as the product of the engagement in an activity of reading, as we have seen in Idoru, and this engagement is both the pleasure and productivity of reading. What then will be the dreaming or desire available to and implicit within a post-print model of textuality? Considering the implications of a post-print textual model especially in terms of the question of reading is not simply a projection into an imagined future of textuality but is a means of thinking what is at stake and what are the possibilities emerging already from hybrid models such as immersive virtual reality.

Author’s Biography

Phillip Roe teaches within a multimedia studies program in the School of Contemporary Communication at Central Queensland University. His research interests include new media theory, arts, practice and pedagogy; poststructuralist literary theory; culture, information and technology; web design and development. [p.roe@cqu.edu.au]

References

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

Bolter, Jay and Gromala, Diane. Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

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Wills, David. Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

New media/information technologies, practices and processes have undoubtedly made a huge difference to our traditional understanding of media. The crucial question – one that perhaps underlies so many other important questions, from shifting relationships to the new terrors and new wars – is, of course, what kind of difference. Yet the question of what this difference is remains unresolved. After at least a decade of serious debate about the defining qualities of new/digital/networked media, we are left with the perhaps more exciting task of engaging with the specificity of events as they emerge. Indeed, this seems the point. The intensity of differentiation intrinsic to media seems somewhat hostile to stable media/information technologies, practices or thinking. A more pliable thinking about media/information events is now required than one constrained by the traditional divisions often still found in academic, media, information, computer sciences and related industries. At the same time, media differentiations are not easily disengaged with the past, although the specificity of media events complicates their relations to the past. A challenge to contemporary thinking also has to account for the persistence and mutation of the past, as if refracted by shattered glass, in the current divergence of media/information events. As Trebor Scholz notes in this issue of the Fibreculture Journal, ‘there is no such thing as one stable new media industry and the required skill sets are constantly shifting. A fixed identity of the artist as it may have been possible for filmmakers, for example, is no longer possible. In new media job opportunities drift from the VJ turntable, VR lab, and the local non-profit organisation to the theatre stage’.

All this is reflected in Issue 3 of the Fibreculture Journal. We are very pleased to publish not only an appropriately diverse series of articles in this general issue for 2004, but also a series of articles that attend in some detail to diversity as an issue itself. The articles here do not just consider diversity as a pre-existing collection of different forms, but pay attention to ongoing processes of formation, divergence and mutation. Belinda Barnet’s interview with the well-known evolutionary biologist (and cornet collector!), Niles Eldredge, concerns ‘the dynamic at work behind cultural evolution’. Eldredge and Barnet discuss the differences between biological and techno-cultural evolution, giving some valuable insights into the specific dynamics of the latter. Trebor Scholz discusses the promotion of different forms of “free cooperation” – collaborative processes, structures and technologies that allow for a socially responsive diversity to emerge outside of the corporatisation of education and social engagements. Describing a series of practices from his first-hand experience of promoting new forms of collaboration, Scholz wonders how we can ‘invent our own future’, with ‘more independent learning projects that orient themselves towards radically new configurations of communities based on sharing and cooperation’. This is a take on education and technology very different to the homogenising corporate and governmental mentalities of ‘audit culture’ (Strathern). In a slightly different register, Phillip Roe problematises a number of concepts central to new media/information theory. In particular he critiques the notion of “reading” the interface. He argues that this notion is based upon a print model of textuality, and seeks to begin to define a ‘post-print’ model. He writes that, ‘What is obscured in the naturalisation of the print model of textuality are the technological dimensions of textuality: that all textual models are technologies. This print model has become so naturalised that it “disappears”‘. This naturalisation avoids both what he calls the ‘dis-ease’ in the interface, and the possibilities of the post-print model (for example, in three-dimensional immersion). Séamus Byrne gives a detailed analysis of the informational side of this ‘post-print’ model, celebrating that which makes some uneasy. He describes the struggles involved in the google bomb, the attempt to influence rankings of search topics within google. He argues that we should be less anxious about this kind of event, instead celebrating it in terms of ‘the widely accessible power that still exists on the web for those who care to engage with it’.

Several articles concern the way that media/informational divergences and mutations have allowed for changes in important cultural practices. José van Dijck asks whether ‘lifelogs and blogging [can] be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing’. Her answer to this question is subtle, hinged as it is upon a refined understanding of the already intense relations between the private, the intimate and the public or communal in the diary. Although this is perhaps intensified further in lifelogs and blogging, blogs do not simply replace the singular or the private with the interactive and communal – there has always been an interplay between them. In a somewhat similar vein, Kylie Veale’s ‘Online Memorialisation’ reminds us just how far cultural processes have moved onto the Internet, with a detailed description of online practices of mourning and remembering the dead. Veale attends to what is different in these practices, but also to what is brought across from the offline. This is a significant development for Internet culture (there’s no culture without the dead). Veale also reminds us that in ‘a society that is increasingly fragmented and where families and friends, often separated by significant distances, cannot actively participate in physical memorialisation’, the online provides a useful form of adaptation, not only for information about the dead, but for the affective expression of the persistence of the past, even in the rapidly differentiating present. In ‘The Online Body Breaks Out’, Jonathan Marshall develops the concept of ‘asence’, a real condition of the body somewhere between presence and absence. Marshall also provides a detailed critique of assumptions about the body online, as well as an anthropological description of what really happens regarding the body in networks. Again, the differentiating series of processes that involve the body online still calls for concepts, but perhaps for more contingent concepts that are themselves in some ways ‘asent’.

The Fibreculture Journal is once again grateful to those who continue to contribute to its smooth operation: those who have submitted material, those who work on the editorial committee and board and, of course, those who have given their time and expertise to the process of refereeing.

The Fibreculture Journal has an ambitious year planned for 2005, with 6 issues. The themes are: Mobility, Precarious Labour, Contagion and the Diseases of Information, Distributed Aesthetics, Games Networks, and we hope New Pedagogies for New Media. If it is true, as Bernard Stiegler has suggested, that the globalisation of media/information technologies is providing an unprecedented series of interventions in the basics of democracy, education, thought and memory, we take it as our task to continue explaining this intervention in the future. More than this, we hope that you will come with us in attempting to intervene in these interventions.

References

Strathern, Marilyn. Audit Culture: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy (London: Routledge, 2000).

Stiegler, Bernard. ‘Our Ailing Educational Institutions’, Culture Machine 5, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Stiegler.htm