Supermodernity

The idea of instantaneity has driven much of the development of the middle class consumer society. The idea of compressing the power of number of living things into a single device, tamed and always-ready leads us to use descriptors such as horse-power. 

A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window through which we can be present in a place thousands of miles away” (Manovich, 1, 1995). (Source: Kunstforum International. Germany,1995;  NewMediaTopia. Moscow, Soros Center for the Contemporary Art, 1995).  

“Remote surgery (also known as telesurgery) is the ability for a doctor to perform surgery on a patient even though they are not physically in the same location. It is a form of telepresence…It promises to allow the expertise of specialized surgeons to be available to patients worldwide, without the need for patients to travel beyond their local hospital” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery).   

In the same way, users teleoperate each other’s Facebook walls. They use technological tools to remotely augment each other’s social identities. The personalities of Facebook users are available to friends worldwide, without the need for friends to travel beyond their local neighborhood, household, or college. 

Facebook is a form of virtual telepresence. Each friend teleoperates each other’s walls through text and the addition of images and social tagging. These technosocial operations cocreate digital identities and the presentation of self in digital life.  

Actors in the network can interaction with representations of others in real time through the use of cell phones and chat, and in delayed time by Twitter replies, E-mail and profiles.  

The personal boundary extends into the public. It is not completely translucent, as one chooses how to represent the self online. Avatar, text, link-sharing, ‘following’.  

The more signals we pass through our computers, the more integrated we become. But the more signals we pass through, the more teleoperated our friends become. The further away and far-spread our communities can actually be. We can have them in the palm of our hand, whether in Germany, Japan or Russia.  

There's a term for what we're experiencing -- technonomadicity -- no matter where we are, we can be somewhere else.  

In my last post, I discussed the development of the phone from a device attached to a set time and space to one attached to any time and space occurred. When the phone was untethered from its The chunk of private space formally attached to the personal landline telephone entered into public space because the walls of the contained private space were no longer there to contain the sound.

Private Space becomes Public

"Once the mobile phone was un-tethered from its cord it was free to colonize the realm of the mobile, or those situations outside of the office or home" (Rheingold 2004).

The disembodied chunk of private space is responsible for making public cell phone use so annoying. This colonization of personal time and space has major social consequences; cell phone users that clash with the privacy of others often do not notice they are doing so.

The cell phone blocks the ability of the user to understand what others in real-life are experiencing when they are nearby. Cell phone use also crowds social space by enlarging the social sphere of the user. A user introduces a virtual person into the nearby social sphere.

Though this person is really a disembodied voice that the individual responds to, the response of the caller to the call-ee is not compressed, and the decompressed dialogue takes up more space than a simple face-to-face interaction. A face-to-face interaction takes up two seats in a social setting, instead of one. The social interaction of a cell phone user takes up one and a half seats.

Compression of Multiple Social Groups into a Small Space

Though this person is really a disembodied voice that the individual responds to, the response of the caller to the call-ee is not compressed, and the decompressed dialogue takes up more space than a simple face-to-face interaction. A face-to-face interaction takes up two seats in a social setting, instead of one. The social interaction of a cell phone user takes up one and a half seats.

Face Saving Mechanisms

A society’s cultural norms define the social forces that push humans to interact in a way that is congruent with accepted social rules. Else, the individual may encounter what Erving Goffman (1982) describes as 'losing face'. Goffman describes the adherence to these norms of behavior and to societally instated rules such as 'face-maintenance or 'face-saving'. The modern individual must practice the techniques of 'face-saving' every day, especially in the public sphere, where the individual is surrounded by strangers.

Ordinarily, face maintenance is a technique that makes public spaces livable and safe, because it keeps uncertainty in social interactions to a minimum and in doing so reduces the stress of the modern individual. "Face-management is a condition of interaction, not an objective" (Goffman, 1982:12). If the rules of 'face-saving' are not followed, the individual may risk 'losing-face', which could make the individual disliked or societally rejected. 'Face-saving' is essential to maintaining order in modern society. It keeps individual movements flowing smoothly and regularly, and it also keeps negative altercations among individuals to a minimum.

"To study face-saving is to study the traffic rules of social interaction. One learns about the code of social adherence as one moves across the social landscape. But as the individual travels he does not learn where he is going, or why he wants to get there" (Goffman, 1982:12).

A pointed look at a mother with a crying child is enough to let the mother know exactly what society thinks of her. A sharp look at a staring stranger works in the same way. Non-verbal cues help individuals waste less time in letting others understand what correct and incorrect behaviors are.

The rules of 'face-saving' work in a society that is not interrupted by the private space that the cell phone brings to the public space. The cell phone user is not closed off to the considerations of others, but occupied in a virtual conversation. Users who talk loudly on cell phones do so because of their inability to perceive how their words affect each other. Richard Ling described social settings as a web of front and back channel interactions. He explains that the use of a mobile telephone in these spaces breaks in on the “complex of intended and unintended front and back channel communications that make up social interaction” (Ling 2002:5).

The light modern state of the cell phone helps them to transcend the heaviness that their body had taken on when introduced to the 'heavily modern' state.

Modern information, or ‘light information’ is only accessible by hybrids, or those who are capable of liminally transforming into technosocial hybrids or ‘light industrial’ objects. It is not enough to simply liminally transition. "An entire set of new social roles have developed around the use of technology. Whereas technology used to be only for 'nerds', it is now ubiquitous, and mobile phones have made their presence felt in almost ever region of the world” (Plant 2005:26).

The private space that the cell phone is able to carry with it began with the cell phone's predecessor – the landline telephone. The structure of the cell phone as opposed to the landline telephone is what allows the private to carry into the public.

Ten years ago,  the ring-tone and the cell phone conversation were hardly a part of modern society's everyday social geography. Now,  mobile telephony has made its “presence felt in almost every region of the world” (Sadie Plant, 2000:26).

It is mobility that makes the cell phone capable of restructuring social interaction and impression management. To understand why the cell phone is capable of this,  it is important to look at the beginnings of the cell phone,  and the genesis of cell phone use.

A Technological Leash

The difference between the cell phone and the landline telephone is that the landline telephone is tethered by its cord to a single place. The telephone is limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack. To those who had never experienced a telephone,  the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993. The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear another’s voice on the other side gives the appearance of personal schizophrenia.

Mainlining It

Over time,  the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the, landline telephone became very important for the modern society it came to support.

Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of, society on a daily basis. The telephone helped them to socialize in the isolated spaces of, modern society.

Cordless Phones

As technology progressed, cordless telephones arrived on the communication landscape. They had a slightly larger reach, but the range of movement allotted to the, user seldom made it outside the house. The phone had to be placed back in its charging, receptacle or it would run out of power and would not ring. Those who needed a phone, while 'on-the-go' or in the city had to find a phone booth. Besides costing money,  they were public phones,  not private ones. The telephone user had to pay for ‘borrowed’ time. Because of this,  public phones were not conducive to long conversations.

Unlike the cell, phone,  the phone booth and the personal household/business telephone did offer some, sort of privacy. They were constrained to location,  and users could only carry them so far, as the cord reached. Wireless telephones offered mobility,  but were large and unwieldy, and users could not travel with them in their pockets., Although the first cell phones were heavy and awkward,  they allowed the first, adopters (generally businesspeople) the ability to talk freely while walking or doing, mobile tasks.

When un-tethered from location,  the mobile telephone was free to enter into, the public social geography. Cell phone users were capable of having mobile, conversations; conversations that could occur at any time in any place that carried a cell, phone signal.

Technosocial Freedom

Today, computation devices are no longer held to the ground by cords but have become wireless and mobile. Telephones are no longer confined to roadside booths or the office of the domestic home. The cell phone is the wireless device that ties computing, and telephony together.

In 1990, Mark Weiser proposed that:

“the future in the first decades of the 21st century wouldn't be a virtual reality in which people put themselves into virtual worlds, but the opposite, in which tiny microchips in everything, from pencils to chairs and walls will literally build computation into physical fabric of the world” (Weiser, 1990).

While microchips do not exist in everything, we carry around devices with us, making computing much more ubiquitous. Technology continues to colonize and structure the communications of an increasingly large number of people. The coffee shop I am currently sitting at is filled with the sounds of cell phone ringtones and conversations, and when I observe the tables of the coffee shop patrons,  I cannot find one that doesn't have at least one cell phone present.

It has become impossible to have a modern lifestyle that is not interrupted by the ring-tone.

Humans are becoming one bloating organism with a technosocial heartbeat, constantly updating in order to compress time and space closer and closer together. The world itself is exists in a liminal state 'betwixt and between' humanity and technology. A new liminal 'communitas' is emerging with technology as the framework for all social interaction and communication. When this liminality is resolved technology will be free to colonize all human interaction.

"The compression of space and time allows the subject to travel more quickly, but the actuality of time and space is sacrificed to speed. When the subject, unaccompanied, utilizes the vehicle, the experience of the motorized journey is one of isolation" (Bauman 2000:37).

Manufactured Environments

The vehicle in transit exists in a liminal state of time/space compression. The inner space of the machine is an area where the experience of time and space is altered. The outside existence of three dimensional reality scenery or 'reality' is compressed into two dimensions as it whizzes by the observer.

In walking, the original form of human transit, scenery is not compressed at all, but directly experienced. Natural phenomena such as the sun and the rain are all experienced. A car, in contrast, blocks out all of these things and substitutes a regulated environment in its place. It is a manufacturer of virtual ‘nature’, virtual ‘space’. A moving living room, complete with a manufactured atmosphere, with temperature regulated by heat controls.

In response to a question from my friend, Ian Anderson, who writes,

"Can you suggest any specific texts on cybernetics and digital media? Specifically focusing on identity and how it is shaped by exposure to said digital media and how it is simultaneously shaped by the user? Posthuman slants are fun, too. And it may be Gutenberg-style print, too, not necessarily this 21st century virtual stuff".

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Ian,

Here are some resources and quotes I've found to be useful. However, there is quite a bit more out there that I have not discovered yet.

Excerpts:
"Cyborg anthropology poses a serious challenge to the human-centered foundations of anthropological discourse. The term "cyborg anthropology" is an oxymoron that draws attention to the human-centered presuppositions of anthropological discourse by posing the challenge of alternative formulations. While the skin-bound individual, autonomous bearer of identity and agency, theoretically without gender, race, class, region, or time, has served usefully and productively as the subject of culture and of cultural accounts, alternate accounts of history and subjectivity are also possible" (Downey, 2).

“The autonomy of individuals has already been called into question by post-structuralist and posthumanist critiques. Cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators.

From this perspective, science and technology affect society through the fashioning of selves rather than as external forces. For example, the establishment of anthropological sub-jects and subjectivities has depended upon boats, trains, planes, typewriters, cameras, telegraphs, and so on.

How the positioning of technologies has defined the boundaries of "the field" as well as the positioning of anthropologists within it has been a notable silence in ethnographic writing. It is increasingly clear that human agency serves in the world today as but one contributor to activities that are growing in scope, that are complex and di-verse, and yet are interconnected. The extent of such interconnectedness has been made plain both by the decline of challenges to capitalist hegemony and by the empowerment of information technologies, the latter through the combined agencies of computer and communications technologies" (Downey, 4).

"A crucial first step in blurring the human-centered boundaries of anthropo-logical discourse is to grant membership to the cyborg image in theorizing, that is, to follow in our writing the ways that human agents routinely produce both themselves and their machines as part human and part machine. How are we to write, for example, without using human-centered language? And if writing is a co-production of human and machine, then who is the "we" that writes?" (Downey, 5).

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People affiliated with the creation and study of Cyborg Anthropology
Sherry Turkle, Sharon Traweek, Sunera Thobani, Lucien Taylor, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Rayna Rapp, Paul Rabinow, Constance Penley, Emily Martin, David Hess, Deborah Heath, Donna Haraway, and Deborah Gordon.

Other sources:
Downey, Gary Lee  "After Culture" Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation.

Gray, Chris, ed. 1995 The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Poster, Mark, "Consumption and Digital Commodities In the Everyday," Cultural Studies. 18, 2/3 March/May 2004, pp. 409-423.

As filing goes digital, more and more images of old files reappear. The memory of these systems of categorization must be brought up again in order to create the new systems. In fact, the systems of filing are never new; to be the most efficient, digital systems must do the work of the old, in a way that is visually similar to the old.

Hence 'tabbed' browsing. It's the most efficient and memorable way to browse, and gives the feeling of depth. It looks just like real-life manilla 3 tab files used for important documents.

Wrote my first contract. Had help from an student who works as a legal assistant to a Law alum.

She told me that in law is simply thinking about what could happen and writing it  into the contract. I asked if it was like chess - where if opponent makes move a, then prepare move b, but at the same time take into account that opponent could  make move a2, which would also mean that your preparations would include b2,  and that b2 would leave you open to a future move by a2.1.

The thing is that perhaps law is not as complex as that. For instance, a contract simply states all action intersections where things might go wrong, or where the hiring party, client, and hired might be harmed.

All harms must be taken into account, which is similar to chess but not as complex, because harms can be listed out, instead of figured in tactically for a series of complex future moves.

It was like this when I used to do speech and debate. If I argued the affirmative, I had to prepare values a, criterion a, contentions a, arguments a. But I also had to think about what opponent b would bring. I would go around and ask the other debaters what the popular neg arguments were. Then I would figure those into my case before neg had the opportunity to pitch ideas in the case to the judge. Hearing a pre-rebuttal of a popular neg argument first denied the credibility of the neg's argument.

The only issue with speech and debate was that I was a lazy case writer. Instead of wasting time with tons of research I would utilize a set of qualitative and quantitative methods to quickly gain the most popular or more powerful information from my opponents, team members, and peers. This was often easy because tournaments were held in the gymnasiums of schools, and hundreds of debaters would be there with legal pads and briefcases. All were under the same resolution for that month. So each month I'd beef up my case as quickly as possible after the first few rounds of action.

I used to think that the methods I used for research were unethical, simply because they were shortcuts to the normal searching methods. The methods I used cut time, because I had 10 classes each semester and had to miss each Friday to go to the two day tournaments. I didn't have time to write coherent cases from scratch. Others somehow found the time to do so.

I feel that what I did was akin to online searching methods today. I felt out the database/ecosystem of the regional/state/national arena that I was competing in, and then sifted through comments and people to see the most popular topics. This is what sites like Digg and Stumbleupon do. In a way, I was networking for information. The other thing was that even though we all competed against each other, the debaters from different schools were often friends. I remember purposefully messing up a finals round for the benefit of a friend's win.

But my methods were not good enough. I always ended up in 2nd or 3rd place at tournaments, instead of first. Perhaps those methods were good only to a certain point. 

One of the problems of this information-chocked world is that answer-seeking becomes too quick to be well-refined. Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon explains this problem very well with his term "Satisfice".

Satisfice*: a hybrid word formed from satisfy and suffice, referring to the tendency of time-starved, information-overloaded users to select the first good-enough solution that crosses their path. Users often use satsificing as a triage strategy, based on the time and effort a more comprehensive search might entail.

How does one avoid making mediocre choices due to last-minute information needs? The solution is to predict what future information will be needed, and then create networks of experts based on those future needs.

Where to start?

• A good place is Linkedin.com Answers (when people you don't know answer your questions well, add them to your network).
• Facebook notes (tag friends in a note and ask for experts, blog
• reccommendations, and books).
• Twitter
• RSS

In this way, your network researches for you en masse, and you can simply wait for
the information to return. In the future, your network may rely on you for your
specific expertise in order to avoid their own Satisfice on the subject.

*Definition of Satisfice taken from Bob Goodman's Usability Glossary.