Supermodernity

A blog about Time, Space and Cyborg Anthropology. 



August 30, 2008

Presentation of Self in Digital Life Part II

Please add this to the previous post:

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).

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August 29, 2008

The Presentation of Self in Digital Life | Face Saving in Online Communities

A society’s cultural norms define the social forces that push humans to interact in a way that is congruent with accepted social rules. Goffman describes the adherence to these norms of behavior and to societally instated rules such as 'face-maintenance or 'face-saving'. 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. 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. 

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. A sharp look at a staring stranger is enough to get a point across. 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. A Twitter 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 online Twitter community is a highly transparent environment. It is unique because participants have a small amount of time and space in which to represent themselves. 140 characters are all that can be displayed in one "tweet", or communication packet. 

On Twitter, face saving measures have less space to be implemented, and spamming is less tolerated.  

In order to successfully communicate in a transparent environment, face saving must always be taken into account. In an online community where Tweets that are deliberate and sincere and held in higher regard than those that are frequent, obviously promotional, or insincere. It is a place of exchange. The more interesting, useful, and engaging the tweets, the better the face of the user. It is miniature PR. 

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August 29, 2008

Boundaries of Human and Machine | Where Does One End, and Another Begin?

Maureen McHugh that "soon, perhaps, it will be impossible to tell where humans end and machines begin".

Most technological forms can only be accessed through the liminal transitional period. When a cell phone user leaves their earpiece in more than they leave it out, they exist in a constant state of potential liminality. I observed many instances of this at a business conference I attended in 2007. 

The Bluetooth device is an example of a cell phone device that allows cell phone use without non-verbal cues.

What differentiates the Bluetooth user from the normal cell phone user is the reduction of the liminal state that signals the transition between face-to-face interaction and cell phone use to an almost instantaneous moment. The absence of liminality catches observers off guard, because they don't see the normal transition period that characterizes the hybridization of the human to a technosocial actor. Bluetooth users experience shorter distances between pure technology and pure 'humanness' when they accept a call.

Norwegian cell phone researcher Richard Ling (2002) used Erving Goffman’s theories of gesture to study the nonverbal cues that signaled a cell phone user's transition into technosocial conversation. Goffman points out that

"a set of significant gestures is also employed by which one or more new participants can officially join the talk, by
which one or more accredited participants can officially withdraw, and by which the state of talk can be terminated" (Goffman, 1982:34).

With normal cell phone use, the actions of withdrawing and termination of the states of talking can easily be seen. 

When an average cell phone user engages with the device, a change in posture signals the entrance into the liminal state. The subject must first grab the cell phone, open it or press a button to accept the call, and then press the phone to the ear. Once placed, subjects tend to turn inward, lean the head towards the cell phone, and look away from the public. 

These nonverbal actions signal to the onlooker that a subject is about to begin a cell phone conversation.

The Bluetooth use does not require any of these actions in order to enter into a hybrid technosocial state. The Bluetooth device is already attached to the ear. There is no need for the user to hold anything or press any buttons. Thus, a Bluetooth user can simply speak into the device without turning away or touching anything. 

This difference is what causes cell phone users to seem more introverted and take more ‘spacemaker’ poses, while Bluetooth users are more likely to be seen in ‘speakeasy’ poses, since they are able to carry hands-free conversations while walking down the street. They face forward, their shoulders and heads up. They can participate in movements unique to non-cell phone users while maintaining a conversation.

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August 29, 2008

Virtual Communities and Technosocial Relationship: Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipandemonium

To ‘go virtual’ is to free the self from the weight of the flesh incarcerated by ‘heavy, modernity’. Cyber Ethnologist Sandy Stone discusses the theoretical benefits of joining, virtual communities:

"Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical, adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking, community in what Haraway (1987) refers to as ‘the mythic time called, the late twentieth century.” They are part of a range of innovative, solutions to the drive for sociality—a drive that can be frequently thwarted, by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured, according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways, that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban, context" [Benedikt 1991: 111].

Entering into a network by becoming part cyborg creates the ability for the subject, to augment social and physical capabilities. The cell phone allows people to be more, omniscient and omnipresent. Technology allows one to transcend more readily the, confines of the flesh-burdened human body.

Information stored on the computer can be, seen as accessed by many at once,  allowing copies of a person's essence to be present in, many places at once., The desire to upgrade the cell phone is also a desire to upgrade one's body to the, next best state in evolution. It is a means of purchasing power in the form of better,  faster, communication. It is what Cyborg Anthropologist Donna Haraway calls a symbiotic relationship:, a co-production of existence.

“In this context, electronic virtual communities are complex, and ingenious strategies for survival” (Benedikt 1991: 111).

Without human support, technology could not survive,  but without technological support, a globalized society, would not be able to sustain itself.

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August 29, 2008

Cybernetic Data Trails: The Geology of Information

Data management online is becoming a series of lists, where things are new to old, or "most viewed" to "least viewed".

Old information sinks to the bottom of the data pile, but sometimes is dug up by future visitors, or data Paleontologists. Other data is ignored, the bones covered by successive layers of dust and data from other sources.

Multiplicity of Selves

Each edit and profile that is made online creates a copy of the self at that point in time. Taken together, these identities form layers, each building on the last, forming a geological history of presence.

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August 29, 2008

The Recolonization of Public Space

As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create
solitary contractility (Augé 1995:94). Non-places are the sources of modern anomie. In
Emelie Durkheim’s perspective, a malnourished public sphere deprives individuals of
real social connections. In the face of this anomie, the cell phone allows an organic social
network. Through the subject and the technology combined, the subject can become an
Actor on the larger Actor Network.

If the human spends time in a non-place, then the
addition of a non-place accessed through the telephone tears through the solitary
contractuality characterized by the non-place.

Both the place and the non-place can exist at once, because in the supermodern perspective all dichotomies blur into one another.

What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened,
aggressive ego in search of love and help. In the search for itself and an
affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self...Someone
who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer
capable of noticing that this isolation, this 'solitary-confinement of the ego'
is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman 2000:37]

The isolated human in the non-place seeks
to reconnect with those in proximity, but cannot. The cell phone is used as a substitute for
interaction, but the cell phone user really wishes for face-to-face interaction over virtual
interaction, and thus manages face to feign importance.

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August 29, 2008

Cyborg Anthropology and the Extension of Physical Boundaries

Donna Haraway discusses the compression of dichotomies as a result of
technology. “the cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries [and] deepened dualisms
of mind and body, animal and machine” (Haraway 1991:154).

Instead of delineations between place and non-place, or delineations between public and private, the hybrid state
decays the delineation between dichotomies and reduces it to a state the is neither public nor private, place or non-place, or 'here nor there'. Thus, non-place is not separate from place, but is both a place and a non-place at once. 

The realm of the cell phone is a place that may be heard, and only liminally lived in. Augé defines the idea of the communication network as one that lies on the plane of extraterrestrial space (Augé, 1995:79). Thus the cell phone is a liminal extra-terrestrial space, or a space that is actually a place removed from place (the isolation of urban reality) that can be accessed simply by logging onto the Actor Network of cell phone users.

It is natural that so many disconnected individuals would so quickly adopt a technology that allows them some semblance of former society, even though it is mediated by technology and a payment plan.

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August 29, 2008

Book List on Cyborg Anthropology and Liquid Modernity

I recommend reading these books, because they have taken my mind to interesting and intriguing places. I will be creating a list of the best Journal articles about Supermodernity and Cyborg Anthropology soon.

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New
York: Verso.

Bauman, Zygmunt 2000 Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Beck, Ulrich 1995 Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society.

Benedikt, Michael, ed. 1991 Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol 1998 The Practice of Everyday Life.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1982. 

Best, Kellner, "Deluze & Guattari, Schizos, Nomas, Rhizomes," pp.76109. 

Durkheim, Emile, ed. 1951 Suicide, a Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Goffman, Erving 1982 Interaction Ritual : Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. 1st
Pantheon Books ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Goffman, Erving 1963 Behavior in Public Places; Notes on the Social Organization of
Gatherings. [New York]: Free Press of Glencoe.

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

Haraway, Donna 1987 Donna Haraway Reads National Geographic. Video.

Haraway, Donna, Jorge Hankamer, and Gary Lease 1999 Between Nature & Culture
Cyborgs, Simians, Dogs, Genes & Us.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller 2006 The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of
Communication. New York: Berg.

Ito, Mizuko 2004 A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society. Japan Media
Review 2(4).

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

Moore, Gordon E. 1965 Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.
Electronics Magazine.

Oulasvirta, Antti, Sakari Tamminen, Virpi Roto, and Jaana Kuorelahti 2005 Interaction in
4-Second Bursts: The Fragmented Nature of Attentional Resources in Mobile HCI.

Plant, Sadie 2004 On the Mobile; the Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and
Individual Life . Motorola.

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

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1986 The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Sennet, Richard 1978 Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. .

Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols; Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press.

Weiser, Mark 1993 Ubiquitous Computing. Computer 26(10).

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August 27, 2008

Time and Space Compression through Ubiquity

To a user, every click is a time-value liability. Every tab is a waste of time and space. The key is to reduce the amount of clicks needed .



Mozilla's Ubiquity is concerned with reducing the time and space it takes to transfer user relevant information. http://bit.ly/4hIOaG

Do I trust that Mozilla will reduce the time-value liability incurred by the many modern managers of heavy data flows? Maybe.

The project is headed by Aza Raszin, Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs and founder of founder of Humanized, Inc., and  Songza. As an interface showcase, including habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction[1]; undo instead of warnings[2]; and transparent messages [3] designed not to break the user's train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham. Vihn at Aboutus.org (where Ward Cunningham currently works) recently showed me Algorithm Ink. It was very curious and elegant.

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August 27, 2008

Syncretic Engagement

The word syncretic is from Greek synkretismos, "federation of Cretan cities," from sunkretizein, "to unite against a common enemy, in the manner of the Cretan cities," from syn-, "with, together" + Kres, Kret-, "Cretan." (http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2006/12/10.html)

We ourselves need to unite, to create something real and create something real. Of course this is what's been said before, again and again and again. We need to be syncretic ourselves. We need to unite against a common enemy. But what is this enemy but fragments of fragments on a time scale that bloats and squeezes back and forth to fit in the amount of symbols and signs that are needed to keep a status quo modus operandi?

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