Cybercultural studies

2006-04-25T02:49:00.000-07:00

Technology and terror

Referring to the article ”Over information” by Judy Friedlander, I usher the fact that our personal digital consumption have multi doubled in few years. We are now increasingly dependent on our mobiles music players and electronic devices. However, carrying an enormous amount of information we tend to pay little attention regarding securing this piece of soft ware. I want to transfer the article focus on the usage on a micro level and look what this “irresponsibility” may mean to a nation’s safety.

The catastrophe 9/11 in USA 2001 illustrates how vulnerable the society is. It reflects how important it is that vital information is protected against terrorists with criminal intentions. Because our society is more and more depended on modern information technology, many believe that the future’s terror action will use the digital information systems, both as target and as source of terror.

What happened 9/11 may have had a long-term positive effect regarding the level of securing the world in general. The focus is increasing regarding securing data services and the expansion and improvement to overcome the need for back-up systems. It’s been documented that if the terrorists had put equally effort to plan an attack against USA’s data systems as they worked when planning the terror attack 9/11, they would created more chaos. Maybe they would have done more harm and damage, both in regards to buildings and people if they had attacked the freely flowing online information . Through organised crime they could have managed to create a new era of extraordinary authoritarianism.

It is now speculated that these preparations are happening. The fact that we, especially in the Western part of the world, are totally depending on and vulnerable against attack on large information systems. As Paul Virilio reminds us: Once we invent a technology we invent its drawbacks, its danger and its potential for catastrophe. We must prevent that humans become victims of technology and terror.

2006-04-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

Is there a 'there' in Cyberspace?

Simulacrum are all round us in popular culture, from Disney with its fairy castles and talking elephants to television advertisements and religious iconography. Cyberspace often colludes in their existence. Computer technology present images and information for our consumption at a hight rate. Indeed, it is not always possible these days to tell whether an image we see is of a real event or not. Has our sense of reality been shaken fundamentally?

Much of our world comprises ”simulacra”- images, objects and ideas that are all copies of something that has never existed: A non-representation of something, yet difficult to distinguish from the real; simulacrum is a difficult concept to understand. Another definition states it is a kind of fake real that could potentially supersede the real- still, I find this term unapproachable. What may help to understand the term is Jean Baudrillard’s explanation. He stated that to simulate a disease is to acquire its symptoms, thus making it difficult to distinguish between the simulation and the actual disease. For example, a casino or an amusement park simulacrum of the city of Paris can be seen to be more real than the city itself. A “non-representation” has taken over for the real. In our modern culture, simulacrum is the new image that replaces the representations.

We live in a culture dominated by the flickering screens of our computers and television sets. The world of electronic communication allows "real" communication between "real" people, but it takes place in imaginary space that different users perceive in different ways. "Illusion" as opposed to "reality" is a fundamental part of the digital world, but at the same time such oppositions don't really apply anymore. And since the oppositions- contradtiction, distinctiveness, meaning- are in some extent abolished, the production of an illusion, a 'there' in Cyberspace is no longer so important; it already exists in in people's heads. Instead, what is interesting is the realization of the large amount of possibilities the simulacra can provide.

2006-04-25T02:22:00.000-07:00

Online role-playing – a consensus locus?

The Internet has been characterized as a potentially dangerous medium through which people can pretend to be what or who they are not because they are not “seen”, acting out on-line in ways that may be deceptive and harmful.

In this online role-play, a shift in the interaction is taking place. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out over 30 years ago, communication technologies are much more important than the messages they transmit. It "..is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and interaction." (Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. 1964, p. 24). According to the French philosopher Paul Virvilio, it is a basic paradox of our digital age that virtuality replaces actuality and revolutionizes our idea of reality (The Aesthetics of Disappearance. 1980, p. 91). He thinks that there is a serious social problem afoot when e.g. able-bodied people assume a home-bound existence to conduct their social life on-line and through media.

One famous story that circulates about the Internet concerns a male psychiatrist whom, once mistaken for a woman in an on-line communication, actively assumed the on-line personae of a serious disabled woman. Through this identity, he garnered the trust and personal confidences of women in an on-line discussion group. Participants who, upon learning his true identity, reported feeling “raped”. Stories about men seducing impressionable female youth by presenting themselves in deceptively appealing description and then setting up secret meetings IRL abound in cautionary news stories and tales of arrest.

For some analysts, it is precisely the way in which the Internet facilities role-playing games or MUDs (Multi-user Dungeon) and the possibility of playing with multiple identities in the absence of a visible and material body that makes it unique and promising forum for human interaction and social change. For example, cultural theorist and psychologist Sherry Turkle has argued that the shifting of roles and identity on the Internet is indicative of the ways in which many people experience identity as a set of roles the can be mixed, matched and imaginatively transformed. Internet role-playing thus allows people to create parallel or alternative personae that can facilitate their negotiation and transformation of identity in real life. in other words, Sherry Turkle argeues against the worried voices that hold that Internet is harmful and a wast of time.

In short, the slogan “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” isn’t suitable in this discourse. It’s how we use this online chat environment that decide whether or not it’s a consensus locus.

2006-03-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

Cyborg Manifesto

In the 1980s one of the feminist theorist, Donna Harraway began to recognize that computer technology could present an opportunity for female emancipation. Writing “A Cyborg manifesto”, she took the cyborg analogy for the reconciliation of many of the binary oppositions and boundary breakdown that divide society: black/white, male/female and natural/artificial etc. She stated that there is small difference between human and machines: “People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence” (Spiller. 1985, p 109). In other words, the boundaries are about to erode and disappear.

She sets up a list over elements in a traditional society with the real representation on the left and the simulation on the right. As long as this simulation exists, nothing can be seen as real or natural- the distinction is abolished. As an illustration, human needes are substituted by probability and statistics when something is defined as right or wrong. She further investigates every position on the list with an critical ideological eye, dividing the elements on the list into pieces, putting them back together and forming a new meaning. In other words, creating a new assumption of the world.

Haraway’s text has been hugely influential; it succeeded in bringing issues of sexual politics into the domain of computational technology, using currency of cyberspace and biotechnology to develop discussions on sexual heterogeneity.

Links:
Donna Harraway and Cyborg manifesto
Ghost in the shell

2006-02-17T04:34:00.000-08:00

Memex and Hypertext

Without the computer and its rapid evolution, cyberspace would not exist. Cyberspace is influenced by the ‘mediating’ technology that creates it and allows us access to at any given point of time. Vannevar Bush was the inventor of the first electronic analogue computer to be ordered and addressed. His notion of the ’Memex’, outlined in the essay “As we may think” (1945), was critical in inspiring those who were later to grapple with the complexities of ’hypertext’; Ted Nelson and his Xanadu project, bringing the notion of hyper media computer environment within our grasp, and Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web) to mention some more. In simplest terms, hypertext is the way data is linked in Web pages, e.g., a Web page on important structures in Paris would lead to a page on the Eiffel tower or its engineer, or to similar structures made of steel, or to others toward in the world, and so on. These links have no hierarchy; they merely lead one into different routes through the rich mass of interconnected ideas and facts that is human knowledge. Inspirited by the brain’s way to recognize and make associations and linking system, Bush’s idea of trails of information has become on of the greatest epistemological devices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Link:
Bush
Engelbart
Berners-Lee
Nelson

2006-02-14T04:04:00.000-08:00

The safety of information

Our society is more vulnerable ever before. Interactivity, ‘the passing of the maschinic phylum between humans and computers’ was developed as an intellectual goal by visionary scientists and ‘conquered in battle’ by the hackers. The goal was, and still is, freely floating and shared information access. Today, telecommunication, technological changes and the increasingly complexity in the society contribute to the challenges in regards to safety of vulnerable systems.

It is well known that information sent in cyberspace is usually unsecured. In other words, anyone with basic and simply tools can catch up and read the sensible information. Civil liberty campaigners are concerned with the sanctity of much of the personal information stored in cyberspace’s interconnected databanks. Hackers work continuously to infiltrate information systems in order to plunder their contents or to corrupt their data. According to De Landa’s “Policing the spectrum”(1991), by developing an interactive approach to further explore the machinic phylum, there have also been generated danger and threats of digital technology crime, such as precisely hackers, viruses etc. “To a hacker a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage”. (De Landa. 1991, p. 147) This statement is illustrated in the American thriller "Hackers" from 1995 with Angelina Jolie and John Lee Miller, where the movie, with its plotline ' There is no right or wrong, only fun and boring', discusses the ethics in regards of breaking imformation barrieres.
De Landa claims that the healthy expression of the hacker’s maxim that information should flow freely is now in danger of becoming a new form of terrorism, and organised crime could create a new era of extraordinary authoritarianism.

We may have embraced cyberspace with open arms, yet we cannot predict where all this technology might go and how far states and criminals might abuse it.
Users are developing ever more difficult codes, such as passwords, in an attempt to deter hackers, who sometimes use viruses as weapons of subversion: Viruses are every user’s bane. However, as Paul Virilio reminds us: Once we invent a technology we invent its drawbacks, its danger and its potential for catastrophe.

But one thing is clear, cyberspace cannot be uninvented. It is here to stay, becoming ever-present.

Links:
Hackers

2006-02-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

Media is Technology- with or without a message

The study of human and society is a study of the changes in the notion of technology. Contradictions between nature and culture have existed since the industrial revolution in England changed society and people’s relationship to technology.The idea that humanly machines could substitute qualities and functions was also transmitted to aspects of human consciousness.

Modern technology was looked upon assomething negative by the English poet William Blake (1757-1827). He described the Industrial production companies as “those dark, satanic mills”. Among those who shared Blake's attitude towards the technology was "Lord of the rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien, being inspired of the oppostions technology/nature, evil/good. Today's development, where close and collaborative connection between people, which Blake was fond of, has resulted in a unpersonal and individualistic society: It is a common assumption that technology is instrumental, a tool for a certain targets or goals.

Referred to as the prophet of television time, Marshall McLuhan, in contrast, saw the value of technology in regards to exchanging information through the media (mainly focusing on digital, computers and cyberspace). He argued that television and radio were like natural resources, waiting to be used for the benefits of increasing mankind's collective and individual experience of the world. Claiming that the media was an extension of the man, he pointed out how the media dictate people thoughts and reflections. By writing about the Greek Narcissus myth in 'The Gadget Lover', he illustrates how the technical extension of the man can create a sense of lack of feeling; Narcissus was convicted to fall in love with his own reflection after not responding the love from the young Ekos. When admiring his own reflection, he becomes “a servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image”.

McLuhan's well-known phrase "the medium is the message" can be seen as a technologically determinist way of viewing media because it implies that content is not as important as the medium through which you receive it. Yet, McLuhan was referring to the fact that the medium has an impact on content, and that we understand and evaluate messages in ways that are profoundly influenced by the medium itself. McLuhan felt that media technologies give greater potential for power to our individual bodies by extending our senses and thereby extending our power in the world.

Links:
J.R.R. Tolkien
M. McLuhan

2006-01-26T04:22:00.000-08:00

Virtual reality, cybernetics and cyberspace

Virtual images have no referent in the real, but can be both analogy and digital. The term “virtual space” has been used broadly to refer to those spaces that are electronically constituted, such as space defined by the Internet, the World Wide Web, e-mail, or virtual reality systems. But that do not conform to the laws of virtual space encouraging us to think of these spaces as being similar to the physical space that we encounter in the real world (when they are referred to as “rooms” for instance). However virtual space does not obey the rules of physical space.

The name ‘cybernetics’ was made up by Norbert Wiener to signify the study of communication and control, typically involving dictatorial feedback, in living beings and machines, and in combinations of the two. The term was popularised through Wiener’s book 'Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and machine' (1948) and is closely linked to the idea of virtual reality and another term; Cyberspace.

The origins of cyberspace can be found in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) inspired by the virtual space that exist behind the screen of video arcade games, and by video game user's belief in the reality of tht imaginary space. According to Gibson, the cyberspace, or the virtual world is a sci-fi version of what we know as the real world. Because electronic technology can stimulate realities, the term “virtual” has come to indicate phenomena that seems to exist, but in no touchable or physical way. A virtual version of something, in this case virtual reality, is therefore capable of functioning in a number of ways that are similar to its actual physical or material counterpart.

For example, in virtual reality users wear equipment that allows them the feelings of a particular reality, and they can respond as if they were in that physical space.This space is a “room” based on data and information; it is a room of surfaces, pictures, simulations and empty signs.
Platon described “virtual”, the world of ideas, as the real world and the world we know as reality as false skin. Maybe it is true then, that actual means unreal, and virtual means real.

Links:
Cybernetics
Cyberspace and Virtual reality

2006-01-23T03:32:00.000-08:00

Digital aesthetics

This week’s learning and readings have been Marvell’s ”Following the digital imaginary”, Virilio’s ”The Aesthetics of disappearance” (1980) and Bolter’s ”Essays of operation” (1989). They talk about symbols, speed and computer abilities – all in relation to digital aesthetic.

Both Marvell and Virilio talk about the aesthetic, which refers to the philosophical notions about the perception of beauty and ugliness. In this context Marvell talks about the aesthetic symbols of different time periods of the development of digital history. Some examples mentioned are the Thermodynamic age and its steam engine, the Atomic age’s fission bomb; and the digital ages and its computer. According to Marvell, each of these machines contributed to the imaginary of each age and he values the importance of visualizing things and objects.

In ” the Aesthetic of Disappearance”, the French philiosopher was condsidering the technological world and its development in terms of invisibility and disappearence. He saw the computer, in fact any technology- as ultimately becoming so small that it would disappear. Virilio focuses on the world's speed being "too fast and too furious". He thought the speed influenced our view upon the world where cyberspace and its aesthetic iincreased. As a result, we are not capable to prepare ourselves and adapt– we just wait for the machines to find the answers. Futhermore, in Bolter’s “Essays of operation”, we are presented to the Turing machine and the Neumann machine, and gives us an insight of the main operation idea of computers.

Alan Turing developed the “Turing-test” where the main idea was to disguise machines as humans on the Internet and see if it got discovered. When a computer can convince the human inquisitor that it is human, then the Turing test is passed. The test has, moreover, inspired Ceckard's replicant question-and-answer test that focused on android's eye in Ridely Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, representing a watershed in early cyberpunk fiction. In short, this test has become a symbol of when a machine is capable to think. Today this test is to find in the MSN system, where the user is offered a net-friend to talk to, in other words; a machine substituting human qualities in this chat environment.

Summing up, the aesthetic sense plays a great part in the cultural and scientific description of our world than what is acknowledged. These three texts explore the aspect of machines taking over human thinking, work and reasoning.

Links:
Blade runner
Turing test

2006-01-18T03:08:00.000-08:00

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