We definitely need to develop our ideas about the social power aspects of phatic communion, i.e. how "staying in touch" has become a control mechanism. Hopefully papers on phatics will yield ways to approach this (thus far my expectations in that regard have been more than exceeded). It also suits me well because the topic of "regulation" is something I'm very keen on.
In any case, Baudrillard's comments on the neutralization of content through the question/answer and stimulus/response form and how the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter the cycles of this form can be tied in with the advent of the so-called "database culture" that Vincent Miller ("New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture", 2008) refers back to Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media, 2001). To quote through Miller:
[New media is dominated by cultural objects and products which] do not tell stories, they do not have a beginning or end, in fact, they do not have any development thematically that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other. (Manovich 2001: 213; in Miller 2008: 393)Although only tangentially related to what Baudrillard is discussing, the logic of database culture seems like the kind of neutralization of content that most characterizes phatic culture (Miller argues that this is where media/communications culture is leading to). Namely, that instead of substantive exchange of information and mutual understanding of life-experineces, etc. the dominant form of communication becomes the discrete, 140-character, package or unit of information, displayed in a chronological order without any contextualizing feature.
Miller, I admit, gets a bit paranoid in this regard and argues that the success of Twitter may indeed be a ploy, a strategic concoction by marketing researchers to turn social media into a digestable database of what is important to people. This contention relies on the fact that tweets are much easier to systematically data mine for information about product use than blogs or forums where there is too much context and variation for references to products to be reliable source for marketing statistics. Personally I don't subscribe to this paranoia but I see how it can make sense.
The fragmentation of images into successive sequence and stimuli to which the only response is either yes or no - I mean, is there a more exact description of the logic of Tinder? You see a face and decide intuitively, within a fraction of a second, whether you like the person's appearance or not. Consequently you swife left or right, yes or no. This is much easier than social networking sites that rely either a 10-point scale (e.g. HotOrNot) or some form of commenting. "Binarization" would describe this logic well, for it reduces the resulting information into a single byte.
When Baudrillard argues that we are moving from a visual universe to a tactile one so that distance reduces and reflection becomes impossible (I'm turning the phraseology around), I had a flashback to Nerdwriter1's analysis of "The Pain of Art House Films" where he argues that art house films are more ambiguous, visually appealing in the sense of giving the viewer the chance to look around and take in the imagery, as opposed to a fast-paced action movie like the latest Mad Max, where, in order for the viewer to even comprehend what is going on in split-second cuts, the director has focused everything relevant in the same area of the screen, so that you're always going to look where the director, umm, directed your gaze.
The same applies to social media in a sense. Returning the question-answer format, there are now more sinister methods for this operation. The response is known beforehand, either through experience or, why not, data mining. An example that comes to mind was the instance when Kanye West made a track with Paul McCartney. Some clever marketing people took to twitter with messages saying something to the effect that Kanye West is promoting this up-and-comer artist. It was known beforehand that this will arouse a lot of people to resond with "What? Don't they know who the Beatles are?" Basically, they used to their advantage the psychological effect, I forget what it's called (it has a specific name), the need to correct people, to go, "Well, actually..."
This is disconcerting because as we learn more about how the human mind operates, what captures our attention and causes us to respond in a predictable manner, there are always going to be people who think "hey! I think I can use this to my advantage". Social media on the whole offers plenty of opportunity to apply these sorts of manipulations. I can't say at the moment what it is, but I'll hopefully come to a better understanding of it once I finish the review of phatic technologies and develop those ideas further with whatever I'll be taking up next (I have a few good papers in mind).
So, yeah, some yarn. I'll try to post more on here. After writing so much text in a quasi-monotone academic style it feels really good to get informal and and kinda "open-ended" to develop some thoughts that otherwise wouldn't have a context. s
In my first read-through I decided to pair this with a song by Bobby Digital, an AKA of RZA from the Wu Tang Clan. I read his book "The Tao of Wu" a while ago... I think Wu Tang Clan is an inspiring example of "paragogy". In the book he says that the Bobby Digital persona goes along with a lot of personal difficulty.
ReplyDeleteAt http://genius.com/albums/Rza/Bobby-digital-in-stereo he's quoted like this:
«I felt like I was in high-speed, where everything was digital, in numbers, mathematics. I said to myself at the same time that as Bobby Digital, I could use a character to describe some of the earlier days of my own life. Partying, bullshitting, going crazy, chasing women, taking drugs. ... It’s what The RZA struggles not to be, in a way, you know what I mean?»
What I was thinking when I was reading is that rap already tends to be a largely digital form. What I mean, a given topic is is advanced, then another one which is linked mostly just by the rhyme, then another, then another. The listener can (more or less) get an idea of a narrative shape from these different elements. It seems like a tangible example of "database culture". The music doesn't really have "a beginning or end", another verse could always be added.
To connect this back to Bateson's analog and digital, I want to point out a nice piece of secondary literature, http://www.carolwilder.net/beinganalog.pdf - this is Chapter 16 in "The Postmodern Presence: Readings on postmodernism in American culture and society".
The way I see it, the digital elements are a bit like the "cross section" of a chaotic attractor. The loop goes around smoothly, and traces out a coherent pattern after many runs. But if you slice it along the direction of its motion, you just see a bunch of abstractly-related but disconnected dots. In language, this might take the form of discourse like ... and ... and ... and ... and... in which things remain relatively formless. I do that a lot, but I also regret the lack of direction that's associated with it. For now I guess it's just worth knowing that it's there; and it may not be avoidable.
A while ago I came across an interesting recent musical form called "glitch" which focuses on break-downs of digital technology.
«While technological failure is often controlled and suppressed -- its effects buried beneath the threshold of perception -- most audio tools can zoom in on the errors, allowing composers to make them the focus of their work. Indeed, "failure" has become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century, reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them. New techniques are often discovered by accident or by the failure of the intended technique or experiment.» http://www.bussigel.com/systemsforplay/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Cascone_Aesthetics.pdf
(That relates to the topic of "serendipity" that I've been looking at recently as well.)
You might enjoy Peter Krapp's 2011. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. I've read it half-way through before something interrupted me and I'm still waiting for the perfect mood to return to it, because it's a very informative book full of surprising things (for me). He discusses glitch music in detail, but also the zettel method of taking notes that was practiced by Leibnitz, Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, Goffman, etc. Digital culture studies is an awesome field.
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