Embodied Lives?

Every generation has its utopia; its distress too. Often I feel they are two sides of the same coin, the way that an invidual’s greatest strength is his or her weakness. If the Apocalypse of the Cold War was the success of the Cold War (all those stockpiles of weapons and so few enemies) the Apocalypse now is the distress of a world made into a village, with nothing left to discover and only platitudes to exchange.

This week I read an article by Sherry Turkle, the first psychologist of the online world.

She writes about being tethered, about how the online “second self” she proposed in the 1990s is now becoming something else: itself. It is not that we have an online life that is separate or secondary to our “real” life, but instead we have a life in which we are connected to bots, profiles, avatars, search engines. What is the embodiment of life when we have no time for reflection, when turning off our devices is psychological torture because we invest in them the power to make us feel? I feel this torture myself when the icon next to someone I love indicates his absence. Maya, has written about projecting her anger on to one of these icons — the double absence of her lover all the more poignant in its embodiment in a small green circle.

With all of this mediation, how do we determine how we are alive? In her article, Turkle wonders about our evocation of “aliveness,” in the age of robotics. What does it mean that something is alive? That it can interact? Or is there something more fundamental to life itself? Is it important to have live endangered animals in zoos as opposed to animatronic ones?

Aliveness becomes more poignant in a world with fewer different live things to encounter. Endgame an article in Harper’s magazine about the disappearing wilderness, discusses the “shrinking wilderness”. Edward Hoagland is an elderly man living in the woods in Vermont. With slight melancholy, he enumerates the animals with whom he shared his space, describing their interactions with each other and with him. He then criticizes contemporary environmental movements of becoming meaninglessly abstract: instead of talking about saving wild spaces that people have experienced or animals like the ones he lives with every day, they now talk about carbon offsetting, wind production, climate change management. Even saving nature is becoming disembodied – a task for the connected and digital and not for the settled and rustic.

Hoagland and Turkle both evoke a world with no mystery – a world where everything is known, every path travelled (even the tourist trail to Antarctica). There is a distress in both of their articles that the authors cannot fully communicate. The distress of the connections having pulled so far (away from place, ecology, human connection, or thoughtful reflection) that they are impossibly shallow. The depth and extent of this distress is probably unknowable, and it shapes, I think, our present experience of the world.

The question becomes one of alleviating distress. We each find our solution: my good friend delighted in telling me that particle physicists have encountered the limits of the scientific method. She felt solace in the fact that science could disprove the basis of its own existence. Other friends go hiking, feeling their bones settle as they climb rocks and breathe mountain air. In the midst of travel, disembodied love, and a professional interest in the role of technology, I am hoping to find the place, the experience, the compromise that will tell me – I AM ALIVE.

My favorite police state (OR: Who is the media?)

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May Day we took a day off and took to the streets to support fair labour laws, human rights, and the right to peaceful protest. Red flags in the street, yellow police jackets on the sidewalks. It seems the British still have the right to protest — sometimes. But certainly not anonymously. With all this camera equipment on the sidelines, the exercise became as well-documented as a trip through the London Underground — never far from the camera’s eyes. But as InnerHippy found out last time he took pictures of the cops, the right to record doesn’t seem to extend to everyone . . .

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In front of the Houses of Parliament, protest is another matter. It’s recently been made illegal within 100 m of the buildling. The BBC explains that most protests now try to draw attention to this fact. I decided to find out more. With my best Canadian accent, I asked these police officers whether it was really true that the British no longer had the right to protest. One of them carefully explained that they could protest, but only after filing paperwork with the police detailing the number and identity of protesters. Why? “To prevent just anyone from coming up and protesting”. Of course.

Thesis Elevator Talk

I passed my thesis proposal defence in January, and three months later I can finally say — THIS is what I am writing about:

Imagining and Building WiFi: Social, Cultural, and Policy Consequences of Community Communication Infrastructure

My thesis examines how the local, non-commercial development of wireless internet connectivity projects are sociotechnical utopias, reconfiguring the dreams of previous generations of communication technologies through their impact on social organization and their place in the contemporary social imaginary. Grounded in qualitative, empirical study of the planning, design, and implementation of three such networks, the thesis examines how both discourse and practice shape these local technology projects, revealing in them the ongoing points of tension between the global and the local, and between the openness of “free information” and the enclosure necessary for society (and for communication) to function. While previous work in communication studies has examined how community media and community technology projects can confound structures of ownership and diffusion based on broadcasting and create ideal sites for local communication, this project goes further. By using ethnography to read the traces left by actors — humans, and material objects – it analyses the consequences of the reappearance of the community as the site of the production of communication technologies. These consequences include new social and cultural relationships, including questions of governance and policy. Throughout, Wi-Fi radio technology, a means of networking computers and connecting them to the internet by using unlicensed radio spectrum, acts as an example of how a technology’s material capacity becomes interwoven with social action and mutually configured by it.

Is Code Beautiful, Part 2: Black boxes, invisible work

In a fit of thesis-writing procrastination, I have been reading articles that explore how difficult it is to call some things “society” and other things “technology”. One of these is Adrian Mackenzie’s article on Java programming as a virtual practice. In it he describes the way that Java programmers, because of the way they construct their functioning code from repositories of previous APIs, are caught between perceptions of their own role as “consumers” and “producers” of the internet. At the same time, the code they write is configured by attachment and identifications to all kinds of other documents. In other words, the work of Java programming is in reading, understanding, and recombining other bits of code, written knowledge, and marketing pressure. So what is presented as Java, then, is a virtual construction: virtual because it is shifting, unstable, and perpetually reconstructed.

All of this made me think about the work of coding, so I thought I would return last year’s question about the beauty of computer code. For me as a non-coder, the actual functioning of computer code is completely hidden – in science studies terms it is “black-boxed” – about as obvious to me as the controls of an airplane. But blueprints for an airplane are beautiful, so why not code?

A little while ago I tagged along to Rotterdam as part of Hive Network’s entourage at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. At the festival many pieces played with the idea of stripping off the representational elements of “new media art” and displaying the means of production (code, hardware, electrical current, machine construction) as themselves artistic (see MK’s wonderful photo here for one example). But is the code itself beautiful? I was tempted to think of it as a sort of technique that could facilitate art, but might not in and of itself constitute art. A bit like the way watercolour can produce both subtle landscapes and paint-by-numbers, or tiles can make a mosaic or line the bathroom wall.

I wasn’t sure if this was being uncharitable, so I one morning I decided to ask the In-House Hacker (IHH). As usual, we had stayed up rather late and left the flat in a mess before going to bed, but by the time I got up everything was tidy and the kettle was boiling. The IHH was already frowning at a laptop in concentration. It was as if the disaster of the previous evening had been made invisible: housework, essentially, placed in a black box. Outside the window the garden had been watered, weeds pulled, blossoms coaxed and tended. And the IHH, sitting there working was still at it. Tidying, streamlining, ordering, compiling.

Making things beautiful? Or creating the perfect conditions for art, for beauty, to blossom?

Infrastructures of openness and enclosure

I’ve been reading Bowker and Star’s excellent book Sorting Things Out today. They write a history of various types of classificiation systems to make an argument that informational infrastructure has a social, political, and economic history. They call this approach infrastructural inversion.

While running in the park in the curiously golden English sunshine, I began to think about how infrastructures (especially the way Bowker and Star describe them) and protocols (especially the way Alexander Galloway describes them in Protocol) work together to define spaces of openness and enclosure. The infrastructures of the park, especially the fences and paths, physically define spaces for specific purposes (dogs here, but not there; children under 5 on these jungle gyms, not those ones; sand in the sandbox but not in the wading pool). But so too do the protocols that have shaped these infrastructures and make them meaningful. They are invisible, and perhaps more subtle, and as a foreigner I am unaware of some of them (pass on the left, not on the right, unless you want to be smushed by cars or step on a small child). Others are more obvious: (don’t talk to strangers) or insidious (language and accent place the park visitors clearly on a defined social ladder).

But still, a curious social scientist out jogging can draw some conclusions about how protocol and infrastructure can define some spaces as public or open (like the park) while still maintaining strict forms of control or enclosure over them. The argument becomes more difficult when we consider the mediated public spaces we build through mediated communication.

On the lunch table below are the physical traces of any number of infrastructures and protocols that regulate communications (among other human endeavors). A thorough enumeration of them (which I will spare you) would have to include the infrastructures of book distribution, electricity, cellular telephone communication, computer operating systems both open-source and proprietary, and innumerable protocols ranging from the arcane (integration of sensors into ad-hoc networks) to the banal (creation of legible cursive writing using a pen).

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If as Bowker and Star point out, infrastructures have their histories and futures built into them, and if cultures are necessarily built upon protocol, how can we manage this bewildering jumble of infrastructures and protocols to create some public space for communication? Is it possible to use the terms of openness and enclosure when both of them are necessary?

Samosas, bags of mackerel, and the Blues

I had a busy weekend. My colleague M woke me up early on Saturday to “go to market” and have breakfast. We did both at once, dashing through the late morning crowds in Fredericton’s market (it opens at 6 am Saturday and closes at 1pm) to find a prime eating spot in the cafe in the centre of the market hall. On our way we passed manufacturers of fur hats, handmade greeting cards, carrots, eggs, meat, and fish. Mackerel, it seems, sells by the bag (I deeply wanted to buy a clear plastic bag of shiny fish, but that would require eating mackerel morning, noon, and night). At the cafe, it seems we inadvertently occupied the habitual seats of the local politicians, who must also get up early to partake in the relatively crowded and vibrant market exchanges. “I see you’re holding court” said one acquaintace, dapper in tam and tartan scarf. But our prime spot for our heart-attack-on-a-plate breakfast, which included a cinnamon roll on top of the usual excesses, gave us lots of opportunity to overhear local mutterings about the “samosa situation”

Last week the managers of the farmer’s market told three vendors that they would have to set up shop outside, instead of inside the market hall. Why? The vendors all sold samosas, a product so successful that people queued up all over the hall, blocking other vendors. This Saturday morning, market visitors were rueful: “my family is gonna complain: no samosas!” “Well, there aren’t many folks here, what with the kerfuffle about the samosas” “that was absolutely the worst decision ever! Why make people a victim of their own success?”

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Welcome to Canada

I am in Fredericton, New Brunswick this week and next, doing fieldwork research for my thesis, and for the CWIRP project. I have come here to find out more about North America’s first free public wi-fi network, the Fred eZone. This study complements the work I have already done as part of Montreal’s Ile Sans Fil. As I settle into this small, polite city of 50,000 people I feel that I have arrived in a Canada that I haven’t visited in a long time.

Although I grew up far from here, I grew up in a place like this: where you say hello and make conversation with people on the street, where most residential streets have no traffic at all, and where the local park is busier on a Sunday than the downtown. A place where after the university theatre department’s performance, a traffic jam forms.

Fredericton is not the largest city in the small province of New Brunswick: that is Saint John, a seaport city whose architecture still testifies to the wealth of the early nineteenth century. But it’s home to the oldest university in North America, and the seat of the Anglican Church in Canada. In fact, it was considered a city (in cultural terms) only after building its cathedral. Walking around, I see comfortable homes hunkered down in midwinter snow, fellow skiers in the park, and many university students trekking across campus or toboganning down its hills in the dark.

Trying to put the city’s efforts to build their own communication infrastructure in context reveals to me my own biases: the ones I have developed from living in big cities for the past six years. Not everyone is looking for the Next Big Thing, nor to sharpen the cutting edge. Many people want to live in places where they feel safe, happy, and comfortable, with good jobs and the same advantages as everyone else. They also want their efforts to be recognized when they do something remarkable – like becoming their own telecommunications operator (AND giving away free Wi-fi) when the big companies tell them they are too far away from the main markets to get fair rates.

At home in Montreal some folks I know have been complaining about a lack of “buzz” around new technology projects. What is more important? The buzz, or doing what needs to be done? From the snowbound banks of the St. John River, I am arguing for the latter.

Preaching and progress: Day 1 of Media Reform Conference

Friday morning, Bill Moyers and Jesse Jackson. Bill, a great investigative journalist, gave the best speech I have ever heard. Perfectly constructed, and using the metaphor of the plantation (bosses in a big house with control of the land, and enslaved workers who know something is wrong but don’t know what to do . . .) to talk about media consolidation and the need for reform so that people can understand what is at stake. Like all good speeches, it took us gently somewhere troubling that we were not expecting to visit, and then returned us, shocked and galvanized, to a place of action.

Next Jesse Jackson, the preacher. We should be rising up, extending coalitions, building out and integrating. We should tell our stories, write our stories. We have a movement, a movement for democracy, against the war, for free and open media.

It was like being in church. Thousands of people sitting listening, then standing and yelling and clapping. It made me think about how preaching — in the American tradition anyway — is not just a form of engagement but a form of media, a way for people to get information contextualized and made relevant to them in their own communities, and in keeping with their own values.

Then I spent the afternoon at the Civil Rights museum, and the discourse of movements was drawn into sharp focus. Black people in the South experienced segregation, lack of employment, disenfranchisement, and real limits on education and life. Cities like Memphis still bear the physical scars: downtowns emptied by “white flight” full of eloquent panhandlers and gorgeous abandoned buildings. It has not yet been forty years since Martin Luther King was assassinated in a building I visited today. The South is still segregated, and people are poorer than ever and deeper in dept. The country is bankrupting itself in war, and depriving its citizens of jobs and health care.

The media is one part of the equation, but only one part. The ecology is complex, and the forces of the mighty well ingrained in so many spheres. I don’t know if we need to call media reform a “movement” — compared to getting women the vote, or ending slavery, it seems a small thing. But put together in the larger picture, it is part of what we need to think about when we think about how to do right with our time on earth: to do the best that we can, with as much energy as we have, for as long as we can.

Media Policy – Publics vs. Celebrities

In this crowded room in Memphis, at the Media Policy Pre-conference just before the National Media Reform Conference, we are talking about policy, about media, about the essential overlap between activists and academics, but mostly about the public .

Craig Calhoun (who was apparently once a preacher and still speaks like one), argued that the challenge of articulating a public or community good requires a necessary knowledge. Further, for “those of us with less money and power, we need knowlege even more”. This knowledge is meant to assist with the opposition of what Calhoun calls, “the priviatization of everything”.

These comments are inspiring for someone who has always valued knowledge, but I wanted to take them in the context of the promotion of the Media Reform conference. Across town, in the mass media and online, the faces and names of celebrities: Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Geena Davis, are working to attract attention to the “media reform movement”. But celebrities are *not* the public, and the “celebrity government” and celebrity philanthropy (Oprah and Bill Gates as major investors in African education) that attract attention might actually be deeply problematic for the development of knowledge.

Celebrities, and the necessity of using celebrity to get attention within dominant media, is, I think, a major barrier for creating knowledge. Celebrities are the accidentally mighty — they have wealth and power in some cases, accidentally. They attract attention, but Calhoun would call the appeal to celebrity a “forced choice” that reveals the arbitrary limits of our current media system.

We need strategies and tactics to make change. If more people come through the door to find out about media reform because they want to see Jane Fonda, great. But this tactic still opposes the overall strategy of producing, developing, and inspiring “necessary knowledge”

PS I will be guest-blogging the NCMR over at Media@McGill the next couple days

The frontiers of design

I bought a “design” book yesterday for a friend of mine. Not so much of a surprise, since for the last week I have been working on an article on the relationship between IT research and design theory and methodology. The article has been a struggle, taking me out of my comfort zone and into the conflict between art and science, between the description of the present and the imagination of the future.

I bought the book because of the cover image, which is of the Nabaztag rabbit, a WiFi router in bunny form that talks, collects information, and communicates with other rabbits. I interviewed one of the designers of this rabbit this summer, and besides falling in love with the rabbit, I was also struck by the way the designer saw this “cute thing that people will buy” as an illustration of something much greater, the development of a pervasive computing network. But pervasive, interconnected networks are hard to explain. No one knows what they might be good for. But a blinking rabbit that moves its ears? Much more accessible.

Design, the creative, aethetic, imaginative, problem-solving kind, might be what makes the abstract accessible, and illustrates how we might want to communicate. As more of the messy infrastructure of communication moves into the background or into the abstract, is there some kind of expanding role for this sort of design? Maybe what we need to make sense of our world is more talking bunnies.