[rohrpost] Hypertext pre0.3

[Henning Ziegler]

[...und der dritte Teil...]



3 Hypermedia Objects and Authorship

Without that material anchorage, text is free to become infinite, to
assume magical, semi-divine powers.  It is such a theological concept of
the infinite text that inhabits cyberspace, and which a materialist
account of reading must expose.
-Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics

I have been mentioning terms such as human computer interface, new media
object, or hypermedia in this article without really describing what's
behind any of these concepts.  Also, I haven't said anything yet to
differentiate between authoritative hypermedia works such as Afternoon
and networked texts on the Web such as the Connex I/O project
(http://www.c-io.de).  Lev Manovich's recent The Language of New Media
is one of the first books that establish a formal view of new media, so
let's now look at the concepts that Manovich employs to lay the
groundwork for a later, more detailed analysis.  In its most basic
sense, Manovich's approach is somewhat similar to Fredric Jameson's
argument in that Manovich seeks to establish a formal, 'digital
materialist' reading of new media while at the same time deconstructing
the 'real meaning' behind new media objects.  He does this by tracing
new media back to a historical convergence between photography and the
computer in the first computers that executed whatever programs were fed
into it in the form of punching cards (just as film is fed into a movie
projector).  While this approach prevents Manovich from engaging in
utopian cyberspeculations (recall Stenger's "our future can only take on
a luminous dimension"), I disagree with the strong emphasis that he puts
on the cinematic character of new media.  The main thesis of the book,
namely, that "the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in
its appearance" and "digital on the level of its material" (Manovich
2001, p. 180), is perhaps best understood in the context of Manovich's
U.S. West coast background in computer graphics, programming, and game
culture (Manovich now teaches at UC San Diego).  But, as Inke Arns has
asked in her review of The Language of New Media, what about text-based
electronic mail as the most widely used service of the internet?  What
about textual Web chats (http://www.chatcity.de) and IRC (internet relay
chat), internet applications that more people use than 3D chat
environments (http://www.thepalace.com) since the latter require elite,
high speed Web connections?  But let's leave this discussion aside for
now, since with the ecstasy about virtual reality (VR) of the early 90s
having subsided and access politics having stepped to the foreground,
the appearance of new media has in some areas become more simple or
textual (hip, stripped-down code editors such as Textpad as opposed to
larger programming environments), while it has become more cinematic in
others (the MacOSX and Windows XP interfaces, for instance).  The
relative dichotomy between Manovich's Californian interpretation of
visual culture (surface/cinematic) over a European low tech aesthetics
(code/textual) does not harm any of Manovich's underlying principles of
new media - cutting and pasting also works on the text-only system of a
Unix workstation.  So let me turn to the new media characteristics.

Manovich employs several terms that I'm using in this article to
describe the politics of cultural objects.  First of all, the term
'cultural object' needs some explanation.  'Object,' for Manovich,
reaches beyond new media to the cultural sphere in that it suggests that
various kinds of cultural 'expressions' share a similar formal logic:
books, CD-ROMs, hypertext, computer programs, video games, or
3D-environments can all be regarded as cultural objects.  Furthermore,
the term 'object' nicely invokes the computer lingo of object-oriented
programming (Java, C++ etc.) and the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)
technology in Microsoft Office (meaning, for instance, the possibility
of inserting an image into a Word document).  Labelling something, more
specifically, new media object emphasizes the "principles of new media
that hold true across all media types, all forms of organization, and
all scales" - new media objects are a subset of cultural objects in
general (14).  With this in mind, Manovich establishes five principles
of new media (as opposed to old media): Numerical representation,
modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.  Numerical
representation refers to the possibility of a "translation of all
existing media into numerical data accessible through computers" (20).
A film, an image, or a sound can be manipulated on a computer without
regard to their original format (for example through cut and past
operations), since it is stored in digital code; as soon as an old media
object (such as a photograph or a book page) is scanned/coded in
numerical form it enters the logic of new media.  Modularity and
automation point to the fact that when composed into a new media object,
data items retain their distinct, original structure.  Think of a
website: Its content is distributed over a database, with images,
sounds, and text usually being stored in different 'folders.'  A Website
is then assembled automatically by a programmed HTML file that 'calls
up' the modules - in fact, if a page has several frames and works with
'dynamical' content (a Website that requires a user log-in, for
example), the content modules are probably even stored on different
computers.  So much for the deconstruction of new media objects:
Starting at a higher, metaphorical level, all modules are equal; on a
lower level, all modules are hierarchical, since they are organised in a
system of hierarchical folders; on the lowest level, the modules again
become 'flattened out' into a stream of binary code.  New media, then,
essentially remain open to changes.  Old media, of course, is not put
together on user request (except in a metaphorical way) - all copies of
a book look the same, and an illustration cannot vanish, or be cut,
changed, and later inserted again.  "The epic world is an utterly
finished thing, not only as an authentic event from the distant past but
also on its own terms and by its own standards; it is impossible to
change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in it," says M.M. Bakhtin
(Bakhtin 1981: 17).  As a closed object, a book structurally does not
permit changes; annotations are always discernible as such from the main
text, and errors can only be corrected in another edition, thus books as
old media objects can be read as a sedimented strategy for unification
and closure of a content that is divergent, or antagonistic, whereas new
media objects remain open and liquid.  Any political interpretation will
then have to take into account the module codes and the form in which
they are remixed.

The most important principle of new media, for Manovich, is transcoding.
Fredric Jameson describes this aspect for cultural criticism as "the
invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code
or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and
articulate two quite distinct types of objects" (Jameson 1981: 40).  In
computer culture, of course, transcoding is not a strategic invention
but rather the everyday operation "to translate something into another
format" (Manovich 2001: 47).  But Manovich takes the concept of
transcoding further, suggesting that, in the last instance, the
socio-political sphere and computer culture are being transcoded when
"cultural categories and concepts are substituted (...) by new ones that
derive from the computer's ontology, epistemology and pragmatics" (47).
New media logic transforms everyday culture in many ways - think of the
useless, interface-like forward/back-buttons that have entered
contemporary graphic design.  On a higher level, we are browsing through
a cultural catalogue to chose modular clothes, music, friends, or food
to copy and paste these things into our lives - we start seeing the
world around us as a database (it is no wonder that Kittlerian
heavyweight media theory has started to advance the concept of
/Kulturtechnik/ again).  Furthermore, the principle of transcoding, as
has often been suggested throughout the last ten years or so, holds some
new implications for authorship.  In the Language of New Media, Manovich
tries to grasp this be referring to the figure of the DJ:  Programming a
new media objects seems to be something like the record mixing of the DJ
in modern musical culture (many DJs prove this logic when stopping to
work with analog media at all to employ notebooks for their sets).  The
German Connex I/O project (http://www.c-io.de) has taken this up and
developed the concept of the text jockey (TJ), but in my mind, such
metaphors of the DJ/TJ largely remain sketchy.  I would rather put
forward an additional principle of new media to understand the different
role of authorship in new media objects more clearly: instability.  As I
have said above, I regard a book as a sedimented strategy for closure of
a divergent socio-political content, so what happens if content and
strategy are not sedimented but modular and liquid?  Doesn't the author
then have to juggle with instable objects that can at best temporarily
forced into a coherent form?  And what happens if there are multiple
authors?  Authorship, in my mind, then generally becomes a matter of
coping with unstable links and programs.  In a nutshell, the computer
can be regarded as a desiring machine, so authorship becomes charged
with intimacy or a closeness that can never be fully attained.  One of
the most obvious illustrations of instability as a sixth principle of
new media are the characteristics of pornography on the internet:
Similar to the early stages of other cultural technologies such as film,
there is a fascination with the indexical in so-called 'adult
entertainment' chat rooms ("Are you masculine or feminine?" is the first
questions asked in any conversation), but at the same time the indexical
is heavily disturbed by the instability of technology - the images are
grainy and Web cams deliver a slow, 'thumb cinema'-like picture quality,
for instance.  This is where the other five principles come in to
oppose, if combined with instability, the fascination with the indexical
in old media objects: Everyone seeks to be close to everyone through the
machine, even if that remains an empty gesture in the last instance
(this has been called the 'desire for the real simulation').
Furthermore, the telematic aspect of Web pornography can be a way to
interpret new media socio-politically: The discourse about intimacy or
closeness in the directing of another person via chat and the
fascination if the person did what one told her to do (Web cam feedback)
also highlights the impossibility of attaining stable links and thus the
impossibility of the fullness of politico-social relationships - and the
ongoing desire to nevertheless /connect/.  To finally come full cycle in
my argument, even the communities of hypertext authors can be read as
imagined desiring communities.  New media authorship, then, is a kind of
authorship that takes place at the within an environment of unstable
technology.



::

Henning Ziegler
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~hziegler 

New article:
"The Digital Cowboys - Hackers as Imagined Communities"
in NMEDIAC, The Journal of New Media & Culture, Summer 2002
http://www.nmediac.net


::

Henning Ziegler
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~hziegler 

New article:
"The Digital Cowboys - Hackers as Imagined Communities"
in NMEDIAC, The Journal of New Media & Culture, Summer 2002
http://www.nmediac.net