Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982). p.179.
Do networked computers constitute a new language dynamic?
If so, how are they influencing the evolution of consciousness?
Ong (p.130-2) lists the following as the effects of print:
1. removed rhetoric from center of academy
2. encouraged quantification of knowledge
3. eventually discouraged iconographic knowledge representations
4. produced exhaustive dictionaries and culture supportive of definitions
5. reinforced language as textual
6. major factor in development of notion of 'personal privacy'
7. created a new sense of private ownership
8. encouraged self-reflexive thought, awareness of thoughts as impersonal things
9. encouraged sense of finished text (final draft, completed work, no marginalia, no erasures)
10. text as subject of literary criticism,
11. text as derived from lived experience (as opposed to borrowed from ancient works in oral tradition)
12 gave rise to romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of textbook which proceeds from definition to definition
14. birth of fixed point of view and fixed tone (McLuhan,1962)
If digital media is accepted as being a dynamic shift in language use comparable to the transition from orality to print, then similar substantiative changes will occur in the evolution of consciousness as the mass of humanity adopts networked digital communication. Ong referred to TV and radio as 'secondary orality'. On that basis, the internet may be 'tertiary orality', but the term may not be apt. Networked computational communication superimposes and potentializes aspects of both orality and print/literacy cultures. Yet it also does more. As an emerging discipline with indeterminant conventions (margins? buttons? motion? links?), it is exhibiting experimental fluctuations. Online interface design is evolving, integrating off-line innovations and introducing new sets of possibilities that are outside the boundaries of oral or print cultures. Networked multimedia introduces unprecedented simultaneous and instantaneous vectors of communication which are altering our collective relations to knowledge: blog comments, social networks, discussion blogs, forums, helplines, chats, mmporg, second life, augmented reality, haptics, biometrics, brain machine interfaces, bots...
What changes will/are occurring?
What are the effects of the internet on conscious perceptions?
1. defocalizing primacy on written word: shift to multimedia
2. visualization of quantified knowledge and eventually emergence of tactile data will re-privilege qualitative and aesthetic aspects of knowledge research
3. rebirth of iconographic representations
4. birth of self-correcting, de-institutionalized, open-source knowledge repositories (wikipedia)
5. language as multi-modal (video,audio,text,interface)
6. major factor in resurgence of public space: social networks, shared bookmarks, shared citations, peer-to-peer networks
7. major factor in resurgence of public ownership : creative commons and open source
8. awareness of thoughts as shared, simultaneous abstract, lifeforms
9. encouraged sense of UNfinished text (blogs, incomplete posts, comments, correctable uploads, redesigns)
10. text as subject of communal criticism / praise : thumbs up or down inside stumbleupon networks
11. text borrowed and woven from other sources online
12 mashups on romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of educational-sites which proceed from link to link
14. birth of networked point of view and rebirth of turbulent collaged tone
Multimedia version to follow.
Labels: dynamic, evolution, literary, orality, printing
[+/-] meanderings mashup What is knowledge? What is poetic knowledge? Is it the surrealist conjunction of contradictions or perceptually distant modalities?
Meanderings is a list of links derived from a six month scrutiny(Nov., 2006-July 19th, 2007) of a myriad of websites converging but not confined to the topic of digital text but not confined to that topic. It is currently an html based single page site, done with free commercial blogging software (blogger and scribefire) that permits rapid highlighting of text and right mouse instant posting. The criteria for inclusion on the list is twofold: did I like it or it is an essential aspect of research into digital poetics. The html will be replaced in June by a Flash interface which revisualizes the list of links into a searchable evolving animated space, where the software code continually sorts and redisplays the data in order to playback a simulation [Baudrillard] of 'thought'. In contemporary web terminology, it is a mashup where "information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse." Sho Kuwamoto.
In order to create the Meanderings mashup, I considered what is thought? Thought at a generic level is comparison and contrast in order to determing what's similar and whats not. From this foundational analysis, an action arises. In the context of the Meanderings, website, the results of these rudimentary comparisons provoke switches between modes of display. Items flock together based on similar characteristics, but the criteria for similarity changes over time, so flocks are temporary. This gives the entire biomass of data a volatile living quality.
This research into visualization of large datasets is endebted and informed by a website I created for Ollivier Dyens in 2004 for his ContinentX project. ContinentX is 3d visualization of a large database of quotations Ollivier collected during the course of his PhD research from new media criticism and literature. He wanted to explore alternative vieing modalities. His inventive mind resulted in a website that attempts to model a visual ecosystem of ideas. Themes and keywords have been hard-coded into the database; these themes are used to draw connections between ; similarily in Meanderings, the tag system (called 'Labels') are hand-coded. Meanderings extends this research by automating the search for thematic similarities; the software automatically searches each post, doing comparative analysis on the basis of word content, length, phrase similarity, tags, etc...Meanderings also plays itself, it does not depend unpon the user to activate change. It therefore exists as a hybrid object, both interactively responsive to user choices and independently capable of functioning without any user intervention.
A project that parallels and anticipates this style of computational remix is Jason Lewis 2001 project " 'I Know What You're Thinking' trolls the host machine's hard drive(s) for all the text (.txt) and Eudora/Outlook mailboxes (.mbx) it can find. It then writes random chunks of text from these various files to the screen, in five streams. Each stream has its own particular appearance, and varies in size and on-screen duration, creating a motion collage of different layers of semi-transparent text. The result is a disconcertingly intimate and schizophrenically lyrical look into your activities on that machine."
Another example of a mashup is Gregory Chatonsky's 2007 website "L'Attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1" which streams text from twitter (an online sms networking service that offers realtime update to social networks) into a web2.0 Flash interface that draws photos from Flickr and dynamically displays the results over video shot in a train station of people waiting for a train. What emerges is a generative fiction, an 'infinite video' [from the meta tags in the page source] that is an assemblage of tightly controlled material (the video) and external material (twitter and flickr).
The boundaries of the art-object in this context become porous to external reality. The sacroscanct centre of the created product is replaced with the fluid context of an ongoing process. The weakness of these approaches is that the material is often not all of the same quality, leading to a sense of sporadic interest. Yet the future of literature will certainly involve autonomous software agents who search and scrutinize the web constantly updating material and foraging for new forms of display.
The art work as construct of software has a living legacy that extends back to Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and beyond them into alchemists like Raymond Llul [Cramer, 2000].
The evolutionary inevitability is that literature will develop new forms to fit the emerging ecosystems of computation.
Labels: dynamic, generative, mashup, thought, volatile
[+/-] Language Gap : toward a poetical theoretics In writing a thesis on digital poetry, several crucial boundaries must be crossed between very disparate forms of communication: critical theory and poetry. Analogous to the long-lived dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus (often referred to by Nietzsche), critical theory and poetry appear to inhabit disparate poles of human cognitive capacities. Poetry is passionate, in its dadaist stream nonsensical, in its oracular form mythological, while critical theory is rigid, values clarity, reason, lucidity and coherent argumentative consistency.
The differences between the two domains may not be as formidable as they seem. They share a common concern with language, specifically dense difficult idiomatic language. There is a shared tension between both and the predominant cultural modes of communication: journalism, fiction, etc...Each operates at the fringes of society and claims for itself a form of authenticity. In short, they are both often elitist.
But this elitism is not where their crucial superimposition occurs. Both poetry and philosophy are concerned with truth and questions. Their methodological approaches may differ. But if as Minsky proposes that humans approach search-spaces with a goal driven orientation, then in this aspect, poetry and theory share a similar goal and respect for truth.
Philosophy is not without practitioners who have embraced a more Dionysian style. Preeminently, Michel de Certeau, whose theoretical project includes poetical discourse, reveries, psychological sensuality and a form of associative reasoning that lubricates his language with a baroque sensibility. When theoretical language approaches poetic expressivity, the strengths of these parallel systems of communication can be optimized. The metaphorical foundation of epistemology (Lakoff,Johnson , 1998) is combined with the lucidity of a scholar appealing for a balance between qualitative and quantitative methods. "We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the street, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one."
Certeau, M.D. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Labels: dynamic, mobile text, typography
