Week One Response
Summaries:
In the chapter "What is New Media?" Manovich suggests that the popular conceptions of new media are insufficient. Instead he proposes that the birth of new media was only made possible through the union of concepts involved in the daguerreotype and Babbage's analytical engine in the 1830s. Because of these developments, he focuses on several aspects of new media as a product that: involves the ability to be numerically represented, and by that merit able to be sampled and quantified; is modular (as per the explanation of fractals); has the capacity to be automated; and is open to variability, scalability, and transcoding. In the section "what new media is not," Manovich breaks down "the myth of interactivity" as well as the misperception that new media merely involves "analog media converted to a digital representation"(49). Finally, Manovich warns that the idea of interactivity in examples such as that of hypertext is merely following the trend of externalizing the mind and isn't fully interactive. He states this in terms of the same passive consumer relation to film which "asked us to identify with someone else's bodily image. Interactive media ask us to identify with someone else's mental structure"(61). Therefore, he suggests that hypertext itself is another example of the myth of interactivity in new media.
Enzensberger, in "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" posits that mass media could be appropriated by the Left or a socialist society if the transmitter-- message --receiver model could be reversed such that consumers could also become producers and offer an organized, communicative response. In his words: "Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process"(267). Enzensberger criticizes the Left for using "hand-painted signs" in the example of the Beaux Arts protest and advancing the message that the media manipulates and should be eschewed in favor of more organic, artistic, or "truthful" representations. Not only does Enzensberger disagree with this stance, but he claims that in only supporting technologically advanced media practices in subculture, the Left is handicapping its message and that the employment of media in a structured, orchestrated resistance is necessary to overthrow existing power relationships. This is not to say, as the introduction and Baudrillard points out, that Enzensberger is proposing all people go out and produce photographs, films and texts wantonly or that hobbyist radio users endlessly transmitting will overthrow "the consciousness industry." He states that it is not merely the act of reversibility in the role of consumer and producer but the social organization of purposeful media production that is necessary.
Baudrillard replies to Enzensberger's piece as too optimistic and still responsible for upholding the structure of media use that is to blame for disenfranchisement of the public. Furthermore, he cites the naivety of the Marxist belief of technology and productive forces that "they are the promise of human fulfillment, but capitalism freezes or confiscates them. They are liberatory, but it is necessary to liberate them"(280). He states that the only way to create true communication is to disregard the form of mass media, to utilize new forms of responding and to break the formal communication model and transgress the message. One such example he uses is graffiti. Baudrillard claims that it is not the potential for reversibility in the model of transmitter -- Message-- receiver that will fix the model but that the model itself of mass media is unfixable as it fosters "non-communication" or "speech without response"(280). The forms of media available do not allow the reader or recipient to respond. Therefore, the only hope for communication in relation to media is to subvert the message. In the example of graffiti Baudrillard claims that "Graffiti is transgressive, not because it substitutes another content, another discourse, but simply because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of non-response enunciated by all the media"(287).
On a slightly different note, in "Historicizing Media in Transition," Urichio starts by claiming that the study of and construction of the histories of media encompasses cultural practice in regard to technologies and text and therefore are complicated (24). In his article he gives more of a cultural studies approach to media studies and is concerned with the issues of recording a media history that began with a lack of systematic archiving such that the data contains holes and significant absences and how this has necessitated historians to look at different practices for constructing histories. His main example is that of film history and how by the time early cinema gained legitimacy to be studied historians were forced to adapt new analytical methods. Urichio then continues to outline the transitional period of media studies and the difficulties associated with constructing media histories when historians are still more comfortable with hierarchies, consistency, avoiding contradictory evidence and seeing history as "an object rather than a [constructed] text"(34).
Finally, Bolter, in "Theory and Practice in New Media Studies" seems to bring into context both the debate between Enzensberger and Baudrillard and the difficulties in developing a theory of new media. First, he lays out a comparison of the different disciplines' approach to the word "theory." Unlike in design and computer science, theory in the humanities appears as divorced from practice such that Bolter remarks that "it was clear that the poststructuralists did not frame their critique in such a way as to further practice"(18). In fact, Bolter goes on to outline that there is a continual tension in American academia itself between theory and practice where the practitioners hold a privileged status over the theorists that further muddies the waters. In the end he advocates a model for new media criticism where there is "a hybrid, a fusion of the critical stance of cultural theory with the constructive attitude of the visual designer"(30).
Connections:
When first reading Manovich, I looked to the chapter on "What is New Media?" as a set of guidelines for how to identify new media. Largely, I ignored the final warning sections on the myth of interactivity until finishing the articles between Enzensberger and Baudrillard. At the kernel of their argument I see a tension between what it means to be a consumer versus a producer. What I think Manovich is contributing is the warning that, yes, new media is interactive in terms of variability, scalability and transcoding and that there is a potential for reader interaction, however, reading a hypertext is not interactive or participatory in that the hyperlinks, the non-linear structure and digressions are already provided. Therefore, to be an interactive reader or a producer, one would have to change the text itself, (either in the form of commenting back on a list or blog or changing the text by adding comments or hyperlinks like in a wiki.) The act of "picking a path" through a hypertext or watching a film clip embedded in a document is a false sense of new media fostering a difference in the relationship of an audience to a text. Therefore, although I found the first section most helpful in initiating me into a more rigorous definition of new media, it was the latter section that connected me back to the argument between Enzensberger and Baudrillard.
Which brings me to my defense of Enzensberger. One of the complications I faced in this debate is the fact that the theories are referring to capabilities of mass media, versus new media. However, it seems in my mind that what Baudrillard is calling for it not at odds with what Enzensberger is proposing. Enzensberger calls for a reversibility of the roles of consumer and producer such that the consumer can transmit back or talk back. (Of course this is much more tenable an idea in terms of the radio that Enzensberger uses rather than, say, the film or television show.) Neither theorist believes in production for the sake of production or turning media production into a hobby-horse for the amateur. What both seem to be addressing is the idea of responding. What Baudrillard is objecting to is the transmitter "message-receiver" model of formal communication, however, he uses the idea of dialogue and response as the ideal. However, in dialogue, in a conversation, one person talks, another listens, the directionality reverses, and continues back and forth. Do we not have true communication where Person A "talks" (or writes) person B receives and then reverses infinitely until the conversation is suspended, etc.?
Perhaps I am being naïve in my understanding of Baudrillard's objection but it seems that when Baudrillard disregards reversibility or claims that it is in going to the street that real subversive conversation is being accomplished that it is the idea of space between transmission and reception is what is really being called into question--both space as physical, temporal, and frequent. It is also the reference to the give and take of conversation and the nonverbal cues, smiles, in Baudrillard's piece that makes me feel that he is merely privileging the idea of human-to-human contact, not denying the formal model of communication. The idea of transmitters and receivers, I would argue is not what is at fault, but that there is disconnect as to what constitutes a response. If someone makes a film and I respond with a film is that a response? Is it not a response because the avenues of film-making are closed to average citizens? (Because if so, that goes back more to Enzensberger's argument. . . .)
In an abstract sense, Baudrillard's idea of subverting or smashing the form seems very appealing, but I'm not sure in practice where that leaves us except in the example of graffiti. It seems that new media is actually allowing us to respond better and opening up avenues such that visual mass media may be responded to. Also it is shortening the intervals and space in a visual media conversation where you make a film and I post a film response on youtube, which I think now is starting to attain the kind of reach to be considered a truer channel for "talking back" to mass media.
Although Urichio is more concerned with the historian's perspective of constructing media histories, his points connect with the debate between Enzensberger and Baudrillard in terms of social political issues, and the idea of the communication model and what data or messages are permitted a voice. In the case of the study of projectionists, Urichio is concerned that by being "sensitive to evidence, however scarce or inconsistent" media historians may "[give] the dominated a voice"(34). To me this also seemed connected to the ideas of a monopoly over power and production that both previous theorists are interested in restoring back to the voices of the people.
In conclusion, Bolter seemed to provide a context and reality check for all the previous arguments. I am interested in how new media studies may disembark from a focus on critical theory to an examination of practice. I am interested in how the use of new media which might be thought to invite participation or response holds up its end of the bargain in reality. For me, therefore, Bolter offered a good check to the increasingly more abstract thoughts I was formulating on the idea of conversation as temporally controlled (where we can't both speak at the same time, etc.) to a more practical interest in how the conversation is really being carried out in online, new media communities. It was a good reminder to maintain some kind of distance in thinking about the differences between theory and practice and how that works across disciplines.