The debates which have marked videogame theory to date are wide ranging. However, the explicit focus on the medium of the videogame and the attempts to verify it as an idiom worthy of study, has tended to result in a technologically-determined account of gaming which underplays, even ignores, the longevity and lived practice of gaming on the one hand, and a textually determined approach which does much the same thing on the other. While attempts have been made to look at the wider culture of the videogame (and here I am thinking of Cassell and Jenkins 1998, Newman 2004, Carr 2006, and Dovey and Kennedy 2006) and assert the importance of thinking about the industry in its entirety, these debates are relatively small by comparison to the better known debates within the field. Indeed, whether we refer to the ‘narrative versus gameplay’ debate, the arguments of the Ludologists, issues relating to learning and literacy, the comparative approaches to the videogame as a visual and narrative media, the debates about pleasure and play, or a celebration of the videogame form; the tendency has been to focus on the technology and on the screen often to the detriment of the lived practice of gaming. By comparison to these latter debates, this article suggests that by decentring the technology from the analytic framework, gaming as lived practice can be better explored. Following nearly four years of interpretative ethnographic[1] research into the ‘use’ of videogames[2] in 11 adult gaming households in the UK[3] an analysis which works from the technology ‘outwards’ has proved unhelpful.[4] Indeed, my research highlights some inadequacies with videogame theory to date, where the tendency is to take the game as the first (sometimes only) point of analysis (Wolf 2001; Atkins 2003; Frasca 2003; King and Krzywinska 2002, 2006; Juul 2005). The main stumbling block for early videogame theory was how to theorise the figure of the gamer and their active role in the construction of gameplay. For me, this emphasises that there has always been a need to go beyond exploring what the technology could ‘offer’ gamers. Indeed, Carr (2006: 165) and King and Krzywinska (2006: 100) have (perhaps belatedly) commented that, while visual and diegetic characteristics should be analysed, this is only one element of gameplay when we consider that games also have to be played. While I am not advocating a negation of the text, it is time to shift the focus towards an investigation of the mediation of games by gamers.

David Morley argues that:

We need to transcend the unfortunate media-centrism of much work [looking at the 'domestication' of technology] in this area by decentring the media in our analytical framework, so as to better understand the ways in which media processes and everyday life are so closely interwoven into each other… The issue is both to understand how new and old media accommodate each other and coexist in symbiotic forms and also to better grasp the ways in which we live with them (2006: 29)

Morley’s suggestion forms the methodological ‘peg’ of this article. Indeed it is an argument taken literally in this article, where an alternative framework of ontological narrative becomes the primary means through which an understanding of the relationships between gamers and technology is reached.

Rather than focus on the way videogames have impacted into the home, or the way certain games symbolise the culture in which we live, this article focuses on some key relations with videogames which gamers both expressed and practiced during the years of research. Indeed, rather than focus on what is ‘offered’ to gamers, I focus on the relationships and mediations with the technology. This does a number of things. Firstly, it decentres the videogame as the technology which impacts onto everyday/domestic lives, and re-positions it within an alternative analytical framework which prioritises performance, interpretation and identity. This is primarily as a result of the methodology, which insistently asks gamers what they think, and observes, interprets, and records them gaming. As a result, technologically-determined accounts become inadequate when gamers offer both stories of gaming experiences, and narratives of the game. Secondly, this move positions the videogame as enmeshed into the lives of gamers through longevity of use, and through mediatory gaming practices. Gamers’ narratives of gaming memories figure the videogame as an ever-present technology, and it is positioned as a shaping factor in key social and cultural moments of their lives. This suggests that the novelty of the technology should not be figured around issues of innovation, but around certain social or pleasurable properties ascribed to the technology through gamers’ accounts. Thirdly, this move allows for a certain amount of technological ‘agency’ as the videogame is figured as a shaping force in gamers’ narratives. However, this is not the technologically determined account of the videogame impacting onto the quotidian and changing it. It is an understanding of agency which is complicated through issues of performance, pleasure, identity and interpretation/mediation with the technology. Finally, this move highlights that the relations between gamers and technology and the practices of gaming are much more complex than the concept of ‘convergence’ can allow for.

As a concept meant to highlight the intricacies of communication and content across media platforms and as an idiom encompassing new media, ‘convergence’ is both too abstract and too encompassing for the purposes of this article. It is too abstract because it does not prioritise the politics of interpretation which the observer and the other gamers engage in through communication. It assumes an ability (by both the ‘observer and the other gamers) to recognise, objectify, and name, all aspects converging, when this is not always the case. Instead as Ien Ang has highlighted (1989:101), ‘convergence’ is not the result of objective observation and account; rather, it is a process of interpretation. Consequently it involves a selection process at every level of discourse through which certain issues are highlighted, and others are suppressed (Ang 1989:101). This article for example, works towards a theory of ontological narrative while underplaying other relevant aspects such as the role the living room/home in the construction of the concept of gaming. It underplays the methodology of the research, simply offering examples and extracts rather than emphasising the constructive process involved in their presentation. It concentrates on the way gamers actively narrate their experiences but does not prioritise important identity signifiers also shaping the narratives and narration. In other words, the political and theoretical impetus of the article shapes both the focus and the interpretation of the extracts presented. However, this is not to say that all converging elements have been recognised: in the slippage between imagined and performed roles, in the movements of interpretation and practice, gamers always retain an element of subjectivity no amount of interpretive ethnography can account for. Furthermore, it is precisely because I ask gamers what they think, rather than supposing a role for them within my understanding of gaming culture, that an interpretative account of gaming practice is reached. Focusing on lived practice rather than on abstract forms of convergence, then, means that this research can never be a complete understanding of gaming culture: and this is the point. While convergences clearly occur, claiming I am representing gaming purely and simply as convergence culture not only underplays my interpretive role and my investment in this research, it also misses the point.[5] As Ien Ang suggests:

Understanding “audience activity” is … caught up in the discursive representation, not the transparent reflection, of realities having to do with audiences… it is in the dialectic between the empirical and the theoretical, between experience and explanation, that forms of knowledge, that is interpretations, are constructed. What is at stake is a politics of interpretation (1989: 105)

Ontological Narrative

Before discussing the stories gamers offer, it is worth outlining the concept of ontological narrative as it is used in this article. By ontological narrative, I am referring initially to the term as it is understood by Somers and Gibson (1994) who suggest that narrative is an ontological condition of social life which is itself ‘storied’ (Somers and Gibson 1994: 38). It is expanded, however, by McNay’s (2000) reading of Bourdieu (1990) and Ricoeur (1983), as well as Ricoeur’s (1983) theories of narrative (1980) and temporality (1983), Bassett’s (2007) approach to technology and narrative, and a wider feminist ethnographic methodology which prioritises interpretation and performance.[6] As Somers and Gibson suggest:

[I]t is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities. (Somers and Gibson, 1994: 58-9)

By comparison with diegetic narrative (storyline), or closed formal structure (structural narratology), ontological narrative implies a lived, performative, and generative element. This is a crucial point. Within videogame theory, narrative implies a stasis: it is theorised as functioning to ‘string together sequences of gameplay’ (King and Krzywinska 2006: 46). Indeed, narrative is that which is represented to the gamer, and is a fixed story (ibid. 39) offering an overall coherence to the game. Gameplay, on the other hand, is that which is produced through mediation of gamer and game: it is active (ibid. 9). Moreover, it is active progression through the game (through narrative) and is favoured as celebrated movement and technological innovation. Within videogame theory, narrative may offer a point of comparison with other representational media, but, when framed within a dichotomy of movement/stasis can only ever be a platform on which the preferred action and (active) progression of gameplay is enacted. Ontological narrative, on the other hand, brackets narrative, not with stasis, or as representational structure, but with movement. Furthermore, it is the movements of discursive practice, in which I include the mediations of technology; the movements from the imaginary to spoken rhetoric; and the movements of interpretation. Although I will return to ontological narrative in the course of the article, it is important to introduce it here as both lived practice, and as movement. Furthermore it is the relocation of gaming away from a technologically determined account and into the home which makes ontologicality a priority. Gaming relations and narratives are very much the lived relations of the everyday. Indeed what becomes apparent from this article is that once the technology is decentred, gaming becomes one element in a long line of power relations and mediations which constitute everyday practice. They are the ‘banal’ (Morris 1990:16) narratives of quotidian existences. Although this is not to undermine or negate the ‘technicity’ of the technology (which has however been sidelined in this article), it is to suggest initially that the everyday is precisely where gaming is, and has always been, located for these gamers.

The remainder of the article is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the memories gamers narrate around early mediations of gaming technologies and they highlight the longevity of gaming for gamers. They also highlight that, despite any ‘newness’ of the technology either in terms of present gaming consoles or past innovations, the ways of narrating them are not new. The second section focuses on the recordings I made of gameplay. Here, I argue that the politics of performance which are storied through the narratives of past gaming experiences are also ‘played out’ during gameplay. Furthermore, gaming is an active and ongoing interpretation of not only the technology, but the material, discursive and symbolic elements of gameplay. Indeed, the relations that constitute and ‘produce’ gameplay (which are also bound up in subjective memory, history and identity) are also those which constitute and produce the everyday social routines in a domestic setting: the technology and the social are intrinsically enmeshed.

Finally, the extracts below are not meant as finite indicators of gamers’ opinions and pleasures. They are examples of key moments of negotiation and are quoted here because they best represent the wider trends of all the households. They are used as a springboard for the wider theoretical and political aim of the article which is to situate gaming into the domestic context and think through what is going on in these instances. Although gaming in the home encompasses far more than can be represented here (I do not discuss computer games, nor do I offer a reading of the games played, or an understanding of the technological elements of gaming), this article is meant as an addition to current writings on the videogame. It emphasises what can be achieved when the technology is ‘decentred’.

Gaming memories

As suggested above, the early gaming experiences gamers narrate work to position both the game and the culture of gaming as an intrinsic, and intrinsically social, aspect of their past. Furthermore, the act of narrating past gaming experiences highlight much more than past memories of gaming. They articulate present day power relations and identity signifiers which also shape the narrative:

Sara: well I had a Game Gear, coz I used to go round to one of my friends houses, and she had a Game Gear, and we used to have, she used to have all these really girly parties and everyone would go round and do makeup and put cucumber slices on their eyes and stuff. I didn’t really know what was going on so I used to sit in the corner with my Game Gear and play that
Helen: [laughs] so you’re saying[7]
Sara: and then I got one for Christmas, and we used to go round the neighbours house every Christmas day so I could take that around and play that
Helen: so, any social occasion
Sara: exactly
Helen: you’d be in the corner with your Game Gear
Simon: it would be an escape route
Sara: yeah any social awkwardness overcome through the Game Gear (household 1)

In thinking through the stories of past gaming experiences three things becomes apparent. The first is that gamers use wider ideological and cultural modes and methods of storying to ‘construct’ past gaming experiences, and that this gaming memory is just one of many stories of their childhood. This is apparent in Sara’s narrative, where the early console experience is enmeshed in narratives of childhood social etiquette and feelings of awkwardness. In Bob’s narrative below, stories of schoolyard relations and memories of owning inadequate toys are similarly entwined with early gaming memories:

Bob: there was always one boy at school, there would always be one spoilt kid that had loads like. I think Andy Holmes had fucking all of them like
Duncan: yeah
Al: they always used to turn up when you had your last day before Christmas
Duncan, Bob: yeah
Al: when you were allowed to bring your
Al, Helen: (together) toys in
Duncan: yeah
Al: there would always be these flash buggers wandering around with their Tomy Tronics or whatever, and you know, you’d be fighting over who would have a go on them and stuff
Helen: yeah
Al: you’d come in with your crap board game
[Everyone laughs] (household 2)

The second apparent element is the longevity of gaming experience: these are mid 20-30 year olds speaking about games they played as 8-10 year old children. Third, narrating past gaming experiences and scenarios play a major part in gamers’ ‘justifications’ for present-day gaming, positioning it as a rational, social and logical activity by giving gaming longevity in terms of its existence and role in their personal and social lives. Furthermore the extracts suggest that gamers normalise gaming within their lives, not through a celebration of the technological qualities of the consoles, but through a cultural mode of telling which figures it as always-already an intrinsic part of their identities. The final extract below is as much a demonstration of sibling social performance as it is about pleasurable gaming memories. Here Grant and Cam almost re-enact the memory, offering sound effects and gestures of both the games and the shopping experience. The interplay between Grant and Cam, where they finish each others sentences, gesture frantically, perform each game, and become excited about the memories, are part of a performance which encompasses many topics:

Grant: nah we missed out on the Atari didn’t we, we never had one of them?
Cam: there was all the kids at school always had like the new… I used to remember like…
Grant: I didn’t like the joystick like
Cam: …do you remember like, what’s it called? Cligovision and all that stuff
Grant: yeah, don’t think we had that either. Think we went straight from that white thing to the Spectrum didn’t we?
Cam: aye
Grant: coz there’s a few came out when the Spectrum came out wasn’t there?
Cam: yeah we used to go to Dixon’s for that
Grant: Oric
Cam: Oric yeah
Duncan: I don’t remember them
Grant: you used to type in ‘bang’ and the TV would go ‘pppuuugghshh’
[Laughter]
Grant: you’d type in ‘laser’ and it’d go ‘psshew’ (household 3)

Gaming becomes more than a past memory, then; this memory-work (of which gaming is an intrinsic part) constructs the speaker as authoritative and as the logical conclusion of the history and memory being narrated. In other words, the narrative structure of causality lends itself to justifications of present-day gaming so that the rational, logical gamer is a construct of both the content and the mode of narration. These memories of gaming facilitate a space in which gamers can prioritise certain gaming elements which, in turn, suggest allegiances and preferences reflective of their socio-cultural and political narrated identity. Indeed, as narratives of identity and as subjective performances these narratives are also, of course, inflected by other signifiers such as class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Although there is not the scope to develop these elements within the article, the signifiers clearly resonate in different and shifting ways within the extracts represented here. Furthermore, these narratives shifted over the four years of research. Consequently, while such signifiers should be highlighted as complex factors shaping the narratives represented here, they are by no means finite indicators of each gamer’s identity. Indeed, as I suggest below, one of the attractive elements of ontological narrative as a central concept is that it takes into consideration the active storying of identity. In other words, ontological narrative is always contingent on temporal, social, ideological, motivational, and identity, considerations. Thus while gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity remain central, they are not dealt with overtly in the course of the article. Instead, they are left to filter through the discussions of memory, narrative, and gameplay below.

The gamers quoted all locate their memories of early gaming experiences in relation to social, shared, and personal ‘places’. The memories have specific places in them; they have what Annette Kuhn terms ‘memory maps’ (2002: 16-18) and are in a sense ‘grounded’ in the places (real or imagined) in which those memories occurred. Of course, these places no longer exist in a temporal sense but are nevertheless used as locations for memories in quite a socio-culturally specific way (of telling). They provide not only a visual map for the other people present at the moment of narration, they also follow a socially recognisable trajectory or topology of telling, which works to familiarise both the performer of the memory, and the others within the conversation, to it. The places within these accounts work in multidimensional ways, operating between the locations of the past and present, as well as serving as a bridge between the narration and the place of the memory. These places are not spaces however. As Kuhn suggests, a memory has a specific location, it is a ‘place we revisit, or to which we are transported; it is the road we travel along and also the destination’ (2002, pp16-17 my italics). Although memories may be imaginary in terms of physical existence, they are also to a certain extent embodied, and occasionally (as with Grant and Cam) even enacted in the process of recounting. Indeed, as Kuhn also suggests, ‘memory… is mediated, indeed produced, in the activity of remembering’ (Kuhn, 2002:9).

The recounting of a specific place has the effect, as suggested above, not only of ‘making real’ the location as a specific place of meaning, it also encourages a shared experience both because of the public nature of the location and the manner of telling. This is most notable in the second interview, where three of the conversationalists (including myself) went to the same school. The fourth person (Al) went to a different school, yet the memories of school life are shared ones, and the clichés of behaviours and recognisable school events facilitate a shared memory which also produces a temporally specific inclusive space and moment. As a ‘memory map’, the public and socio-cultural performance of the memory works to frame the private contents of what is produced in the social, temporal and cultural moment of performance. Even the first interviewee, Sara, uses the public event of socialising, ‘go[ing] round to one of my friends houses’ in order to offer an insight into what is actually a comment about her own (self perceived) social identity. By comparison with the two other interviews, however, where the public location is used to invite shared rememberings of either the technology or the place of that technology, Sara offers a much more private statement. This is also in contrast to Simon’s comment that ‘it would be an escape route’ which offers Sara a chance to shift attention away from herself. Instead, her reply (to me) that ‘yeah any social awkwardness overcome through the Game Gear’, shifts the focus away from possible pleasures and uses of the technology in the past, and more onto her self-perceived social inadequacies of the present.

The image Sara provides of a child lost in whirl of ‘conventional’ femininity, where girls practice with beauty products, is not only one of humour, but one spoken by a retrospective adult looking back. The fact that she ‘didn’t know what was going on’, yet in her narrative can offer an insight precisely into what was going on, indicates an easy movement between the child and adult perspective on the event. She frames gaming both in opposition to what she perceives as conventions of femininity, and as a way to oppose or escape a big social gathering of her peers. Similarly, the tone of the comment is an invitation for her (the child) to be collectively objectified (and potentially laughed at), whilst maintaining her adult persona as a rational, objective and analytical being who can also laugh at her child-self. Sara often performed what I would consider an overtly ‘feminine’ role in her interviews. She laughed at herself, or presented herself as incompetent and unknowledgeable. She phrased statements as questions, requesting confirmation from her other (male) housemates. However, this is not to suggest that she was unknowledgeable, incompetent, or unsure. Nor is it to suggest that gender is the sole reason for this performance (which she continued into the all-female household later). Rather it is to suggest that on the one hand, her identity was storied depending on the contexts in which it was narrated, and to whom she was narrating. On the other hand, each narrative in its shifting complexities and constructions represented (perhaps inadequately) Sara’s desires, motivations, opinions, relations and identity at that moment.

This is also apparent in the second conversation. Here, there is a much more serious agenda which is produced in part because of the distance claimed between adult-speaker and child-remembered. Bob’s comment that ‘there would always be one spoilt kid that had loads’, is not just the envy of a child who does not own the device; it is also spoken as a retrospective adult. It is less about gaming, than about (amongst other things) unfair differences between children and his present-day perception of his own financially ‘impaired’ childhood. Bob considers himself firmly working class despite economic, geographic and professional elements highlighting the contrary. His narratives maintain a strong ‘class’ element, but it would be over simplistic to simply highlight this singular aspect as an indicator of his identity. Instead, ‘class’ as both and ideological and economic signifier is clearly filtered through, and enmeshed with, gender, geographical location, personal histories or narratives, and contextual factors shaping the arena into which he speaks. On the one hand, he enjoys the authoritative role this narrative affords, but he also identifies with the child who is envious of the coveted toy. His narrative is not a finite indicator of his performed identity, then, but instead reflects some of the complexities at stake in it which clearly continue to resonate into his present-day performance.

The final extract also moves between past and present, but in a very different way. Rather than the events of the past being narrated to an unfamiliar audience, they are in many ways re-enacted – a move facilitated by the fact that the places of the past are shared by the interviewees. The notion of performance as a bridge between places is more evident in this scenario where the familiarity of remembering and re-enacting is facilitated by the fact that all the people in the present were also there in the (shared) past. The two brothers, Grant and Cam, perform their relationship as timeless. They play off each other, leaving each remark as comment to be filled in or clarified by the other, rather than as an authoritative statement of a rational (male) adult-self. Performing the past is a nostalgic act which works both as a performance to be enjoyed, and as an inclusive invitation to share in the childishness of the performance as nostalgic adults. Grant’s comment that ‘you used to type in ‘bang’ and the TV would go ‘pppuuugghshh’ … you’d type in ‘laser’ and it’d go ‘psshew” is a sensory invitation towards nostalgia. He becomes emotively involved in a humorous way which also invites the other two along his inclusive ‘map’. Here places and games are mythologised into nostalgic embodied performance which is emotively and sensorially captivating. Furthermore, the fact that they physically re-enact these social gaming scenarios suggests that, for them, the fantasy and pleasurable space of gaming in the past is an embodied, even sensory, one. These narratives are pleasurable, and it is the technology which generates and prompts these narratives. Indeed, what seems increasingly evident at this stage (and in a similar vein to Kuhn’s discussion of early cinema going memories), is that whilst the technology may have been ‘new’, the ways of talking about it are not.

The final point concerns movement. Storying gaming memories is a kind of movement, because it is both performed and actively narrated. In terms of the impetus to speak and to narrate, it is also entails movement from imagination (or symbolic) to discourse (to narrative). Here, the impetus to speak is movement in terms of the move to act and to speak. It is a movement from the private to the social, from the internal to external, and from fantasy imaginings to real episodes. The second movement I want to highlight relates to the construction of the fantasy past as real episode. This is the movement of narrative: in the construction of a chronological past the fantasy past becomes a real episode. In other words, the structures of narrative are utilised as a kind of vehicle to take the fantasy memory of Sara’s lack of social skills, for example, and make them real episodes which can explain her current state of emotions. The structure of narrative is the vehicle which facilitates movement from the imaginary to the social. There is also therefore a movement from the present to the past, which is also a movement from the social to the imaginary (the ‘reverse’ of the movement above). The social environment of the living room, in which we are all talking about gaming, prompts and facilitates the move to the private, imaginary, and fantasised ‘space’ of Sara’s past. Finally, there is the movement of the narrative itself: the flow of it and movement from episode to episode, or place to place. In terms of Kuhn’s ‘memory maps’, then, if we think of the map as movement, rather than as pre-ordained routes into the past, narrating past memories of gaming can be theorised as much more than a social mode of narrative. Instead it can include fantasy and imaginary subjectivities as well as episodes and events which contribute to the present-day performance of social subjectivity which is the position from which the narrator speaks. Movement becomes three dimensional and multi-directional. It tells us not only about past gaming experience, but also about the construction of a gaming subjectivity the speaker is trying to construct.

Gameplay

There are a number of things which become apparent from the recordings of gameplay below. The first is that the game and the actions of the game intervene in the ‘extra-diegetic’ conversation, suggesting that some level of ‘agency’ or accountability for the technology needs to be made. The second is that performances of power relations (such as gender) continue to be negotiated during play. This is not a ‘loss’ of identity theorised in first wave new media theory through the complete immersion into the world of virtual reality (see Rheingold 1991: 346 and Mitchell 1995:12): instead gameplay is a continued social performance and negotiation of domestic relations. Thirdly, the movements of the gamers in terms of their active mediation of gameplay, ‘stories’ not only their relationship with the game, but with each other. Taken together, they suggest that gameplay as a domestic, quotidian activity is not removed or abstract from other activities which occur in the living room but is an intrinsic part of them:

Helen: are you enjoying watching?
Clare: Yeah. Maybe. No it’s only frustrating when, it’s like when you’re sat in the passenger seat and someone’s driving and you [shouts] Take his money! [points] and you kind of [shouts]oh for God’s sake, Sara! Sara!
Chloe: [laughing] Sara’s taking out her frustration
Clare: [pats Sara's arm] Sara you didn’t get his money!
Sara: yeah but he’s over the fence
Chloe: climb the fence!
Clare: [to Helen] so it’s not
Sara: what for twenty dollars?
Clare: yeah! Pinch it! It’s just when there is something to do you kind of want to get involved
Chloe: you might as well just give it back!
Sara: [laughs] (household 5)

To return first to the question of agency and technology: Clare interrupts herself responding to my question, and it is an interruption seemingly ’caused’ by the events on screen. Assigning the game ‘agency’ is problematic, however, when it is Clare’s narration of it which affords it such power. Indeed, while we could argue that the game causes an alteration in Clare’s attention and narrative, she is also actively choosing to focus attention on the game for a multitude of reasons. This suggests that the game has an agency insofar as it is made to mean within Clare’s performance. Further, the game is ‘made to mean’ in Clare’s performance through the narration of it. Initially, Clare’s self-interruption facilitates an intervention into the game, which in turn affects Sara’s actions. Her interruption does a number of things which positions her as centre of attention and the knowledgeable gamer. Not only does she demonstrate active knowledge about the game through directing Sara’s gameplay, she also does it in a comedic and lively manner which adds to the tension and excitement of the game, further facilitating her involvement in it. Shouting instructions is a common act within all the households and there is clearly an issue about what constitutes social gaming when the people not clutching the consoles are directing gameplay.[8] In turn, Sara is also distancing herself from the game by reminding the others it isn’t ‘real’ and shouldn’t evoke that level of emotional response. The gender/power roles in this household are also replayed in this extract where Sara is always the worst gamer and Clare and Chloe compete in terms of comedic insertions rather than serious direction over gameplay. Yet these positions are not fixed. Sara’s response: ‘what for twenty dollars?’ stakes a claim as a rational adult, creating distance between action and judgment. She validates her actions though recourse to her ‘own’ monetary values rather than, for example, the avatar’s gaming requirements, not only reminding the others that this is a game, but also indicating her preferable ‘level’ of response. But Sara is also the one with the console. It is her actions which prompt Clare’s commentary and intervention. In other words, neither, ‘power’, ‘performances’, ‘nor agency’, are linear or one-way. They are multilayered and constantly being re-negotiated.

The fact that the game impacts onto Clare’s conversation suggests two further key elements: that she was watching the game while she was speaking to me, and that the action of the game and the excitement of action changes the focus of her speech. Clare gives the material (‘real’) impact of the game a discursive significance in the moment of self-interruption. When she interrupts herself and starts talking about the game, she positions the game within the discursive. Furthermore, the game is afforded a discursive position as the result of action – of gaming. It is also, importantly, the result of a more material power dynamic. The extract is taken during social gaming, where gamers sit facing the television set with the implicit promise of gaming. This means that there is already a materially powerful position for the technology as the focal point of the social setting. The technology and the game have power and this is the direct result of the relationship between their material position within the room and their discursive power as screen media. It is also a discursively powerful position despite the fact that it is a technology supposedly incapable of ‘acting’ without ‘human’ intervention. The discursive and material position of the technology as powerful predates and proceeds ‘actual’ gaming – it arcs beyond the moment of gaming. This suggests that the material and symbolic significance of the technology goes beyond the moment of gameplay: it is also the result of its physical positioning in the room. Social gaming has symbolic and discursive positions as the focal point of the room prior to, and beyond ‘actual’ gameplay.

This brings us onto a further point around the relations between the technology, the social, and performance. In the extract taken from Rob and Rach’s gameplay, Rach offers not only an active and continuous narration of the game, but also a performance of her (gendered) role in the household:

Rob: oh you’re all right. It’s not deep. Oh yeah, you can swim in this one, I forgot
Rach: If I don’t head butt things!
Rob: [laughs]
Rach: how do I get out?
Rob: err, probably square
Rach: [looks at controller] Great
[GTA: 'you're making this worse for yourself']
Rach: oh shit! Think I just took a police motorbike! [laughs] by accident. I didn’t realise it was a policeman til I got in! oh shit! Hang on! Ohhh [laughs] I’ve got stuck! What’s going on? Look! It’s a bloody police motorbike! How did I do that? Whah. Whah. Oops. Lets get the hooker. Rah!
Helen: you just ran her over!
Rach: get off! Well you have to apparently! Oh no! she’s still there! Hit! Hit! Hit! Gimme your money! She’s got no money!
Helen: are you supposed to do that?
Rob: that’s how you get money, by beating people up! Their money. They leave their money behind when you kill them
Rach: right. So. Where am I?
Rob: you don’t actually kill them
Rach: coz they’re only pixel people
Rob: coz the ambulance comes, and when the ambulance comes they bring them back to life (household 4)

The extract above also highlights that her negotiation of gender/power is inclusive of technology. Indeed, it is a performance filtered and narrated through mediation with the technology. What is also interesting about Rach’s dialogue is the way she also negotiates social power by utilising the game. She narrates her gaming experience in order to encourage interaction with Rob, rather than focusing on progressing in the game. It is a performance of chaos, all the more apparent because she is adept at the game. Despite the fact that Rach has played GTA before and considers herself a competent and frequent gamer, her performance during gameplay positions her unequally in relation to it – her actions are ‘accidents’ and she doesn’t know where she is or what she is doing. Her shouts and exclamations require urgent attention and the necessity of Rob’s presence, as well as his interest. Positioning the game into the social means that emphasis and power is afforded the social rather than the technological. However, this is not to suggest that the technology and the social are separate entities: everyone in the room is complicit in creating and performing the social as inclusive of the technology. Rach shifts this balance, however, to suggest that gaming is more entertaining as a social pastime. She uses comedy and immediate action to make herself the funny and entertaining mediator of the game, even though she is claiming it is the game that has autonomy and she is doesn’t know what she is doing. In this scenario, then, it is the social which is important, and which is produced in part through the technology, which has a social function. Rach seems far more concerned that the people in the room feel included than she is about progressing in the game. Indeed, her performance is highly entertaining, and is an entertainment everyone in the room is involved in. By comparison with Rob, who never asks direction, or expresses urgent or excited exclamations, this is a very different performance. Rach is also creating a socially inclusive space (as Sara and Clare do), inviting Rob to comment on her gaming, and to be involved in the game. As suggested, this is a different performance compared to Rob, and suggests that rather than reflecting their gaming abilities, gameplay reflects the social dynamics of their relationship. As Rach comments:

When I sit next to Rob here and he’s gaming, I’m asking him questions. But when he’s sat next to me and I’m gaming, he’s telling me what to do. (household 4)

The point is not that the technology produces the social or vice-versa; it is that, for gamers, the two are already integral parts of each other. The technology is understood through the social, through the narration of it in and through social settings. In turn, the technology is part of the social through its materiality and through the way games are played in social settings both exist as fundamental parts of each other, and are complicit, ‘operating’ not as a binary opposition, but in a generative, creative practice and through narrative. This argument firmly positions technology as embedded in our culture: technology is both created in culture and is understood as meaningful through narrative. This is an argument supported by Caroline Bassett when she suggests that technology can be understood as a process of meditation through which meanings are made:

Interaction between human and machine (the interface) can thus be conceived of not as a punctual process of exchange determined by the machine, but as a distended moment in which the experience of the different temporalities and spatial dynamics involved in computer use is taken up in the arc of narrative, where sense is given to experience through its ordering as narrative. (2007: 32)

There are clear similarities, then, between Bassett’s conception of the way we understand our experience with technology through narrative, and Somers and Gibson’s theories of ontological narrative as a way in which we story our experience to make it meaningful (1994: 58-9). The main difference is that while Somers and Gibson are talking about our social experience, Bassett is referring more specifically to the way we understand our technological experience. The point here is that the experiential/practical dimension of narrative, which is indicated through the juxtaposition of ontology and narrative for Somers and Gibson, is also extended through theories of practice. Gameplay as practice includes an experiential dimension: it is the experience of the relations with the technology which are forged through practice (gameplay) and made meaningful through narrative. In thinking through gaming practice, it is possible to conceive the identity performances of gamers (above) as a kind of narrative of gaming.

The conception of narrative as lived practice is perhaps the furthest removed from theorisations of narrative as structural narratology or narrative as diegetic story. Indeed, its use here demonstrates the range of theoretical possibilities for ontological narrative far beyond oral, diegetic and structural narratives. Although it does perhaps stretch the concept to its limits, especially where it could be replaced with understandings of performance and performative subjectivity to explain how gamers actively perform gaming identities, I wanted to demonstrate how ontological narrative could be used to explain gaming practice. Indeed it is the dual attributes of an interpretative and an experiential dimension which makes ontological narrative attractive here. The interpretative or mediatory dimensions refer to the way the gamer mediates the game, as well as the relations with the other gamers, and with the material setting of gameplay, and interprets them through narrative. It allows an imagined dimension in the slippage between interpretation of gameplay and the performance of it, and is attractive because it figures narrative as the central means through which gamers understand the gaming culture in which they are living and performing. The experiential dimensions insist on longevity of experience for subjectivity, performance, and power, which positions the gamer within certain social power relations. It also allows for the generation of new relations through practice. Finally it allows for feelings of familiarity for the material place of gaming, where gaming is a quotidian occurrence and gamers feel both relaxed, and that they are being social, through gaming praxis.

The movements described in this article therefore revolve around movements into the past, and the movements of live gameplay. They outline primarily that social gaming consists of many movements; here they are discussed in terms of narratives into the past, physical gestures and involuntary cries and comments during gameplay. The movements are those of the social: they are movements within a social setting which are made possible through the technology, but are also towards the human. Indeed, this is the practice to which gamers refer when they discuss gaming: it is a particular familiar setting, with feelings of well being. It is a performance of gaming subjectivities and it is the storying of those relations which made gameplay possible. Furthermore, the generative movements of gaming practice, by which I mean the ebb and flow of gameplay and the way these are socially and technologically played out, are what forges and creates pleasurable gaming experiences for the gamers. Social gaming is a particular and pleasurable routine of quotidian gaming experience. It is not only constituted by a physical co-presence of gamers, it also includes an interactive and mediatory quality with the technology, with each other, and with the material place of gaming.

Conclusions

As I suggested at the start of this article, this project is the result not only of my own discomfort with videogame theory and its focus on the technology or the game, to detriment of how the games were being mediated and thought; it is also produced by the conversations, recordings and interviews with the gaming households. It was clear from the first interview, for example, that gamers found pleasure in gaming, and that they wanted to narrate it. It was not only the game they wanted to narrate, however; it was also their relationship to the game and the technology that they ‘storied’: it was their discursive, symbolic and material relationships which were narrated. They wanted to narrate their memories of gaming: they wanted to offer a chronological logic to their activities, but they also found the memories nostalgically pleasurable to recount. In other words, there was pleasure in the act of ‘storying’, in the familiarity of structures and conventions which lent themselves to their memories. These were ‘memory maps’ (Kuhn 2002: 16-18), and pleasure was located in the ‘journey’ or movement along the familiar nostalgic and fantasised routes as well as in the ‘construction’ of the memories. They wanted to narrate the logics behind owning a console, and these narratives contributed to the construction of themselves as competent, knowledgeable and rational gamers. In other words, these narratives were not only pleasurable, but they also served a socio-political purpose in the establishment of a (certain kind of) gamer identity and subjectivity. In turn, the specific ‘gamer’ identity was enmeshed in wider discourses of power, gender, class, and location. The narrative was much more than a storying of gamer identity, then, it was also a storying and performing of subjectivities, power relations, identity considerations and political and ideological views.

Ontological narrative is therefore not a closed or finite story. It is generative, and assumes the active and continuous creation of new narratives, new relations and new pleasures, as well as re-forming, continuing or negotiating older (more durable) narratives, relations and pleasures. An ontological narrative approach also includes the main theoretical concepts needed to for an investigation of the mediation of games by gamers. It includes a symbolic element (who imagines whom, the desire to narrate); a discursive element (socio-cultural power politics, household dynamics, identity signifiers); and a material element (locational and material specificity, the inclusion of the technology). For me, ontological narrative is movement, and it is movement predicated on the living through of material, social, symbolic and fantasy relations. Ontological narrative is the ebbs and flows of the story being narrated. It is the movement of that story through time as further relations are factored into it, generating shifts and changes in it. It is the movement towards a past event, and the fantasy narrative of a nostalgic past. It is the movement between desire and the narration of it, or pleasure and the fulfilment of it. It is the movements of the discourses of social gaming, and the flows of gamers’ interactions with each others narratives.

Finally, because it is predicated on movement, ontological narrative is always much more than convergence. It implies a direction and a politics, which is conceived through the impetus to movement by the gamer. However, the motivations and desires of the gamer are not transparent, nor can they always be articulated. Thus while there are clearly convergences of bodies, media, content, narratives and performances; they maintain an unconscious and unknown element beyond what is interpreted by myself or other gamers. Although hardly representative of the gaming households, this article has instead attempted to demonstrate that by decentring the technology from the analytic framework much more can be suggested about the social and cultural context of gaming. To return to Morley’s argument; as soon as the technology is decentred from an analysis of everyday gaming in the home, the gaming becomes only one of many influential factors contributing to the mediation of the technology by gamers. Although this does tend to downplay the ‘technological’ elements of gameplay in terms of offering an all-round indication of gaming culture, shifting the analytic frame theorises both gaming and narrative as lived practices. For interpretations of everyday gaming culture, practice as opposed to convergence, positions gaming within complex systems which retain imaginary, performative, and mediatory qualities. This potentially allows the game agency in that the game is a crucial element of gaming practice mediated by gamers through lived relations. Finally, practice includes an active and generative element, and the technology, as always-already inclusive to it, has potential to generate and forge new relations and new practices of gameplay. In offering alternative theoretical approaches to gaming, then, the technological elements have been sidelined, rather than negated.

Author Biography

Helen Thornham is completing a PhD entitled ‘Narratives of the Videogame: Gender, Gaming and Gameplay’ at the University of Ulster. She is also researching issues of learning and literacy in user generated content websites for teenagers at the University of Bristol.

Notes

[1] Which Ien Ang argues is primarily about a politics of interpretation (1989: 105).
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[2] For the purposes of this article, videogames refer to those games mediated though the television set, and with a purpose-built console. I do not include computer games here.
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[3] For the purpose of this article, only five are discussed here.
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[4] An index of the housemates and households represented in the article can be found in the appendices at the end of the article.
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[5] I was originally interested in how gaming was or was not part of domestic leisure routines. I was interested in seeing whether gamers really did ‘lose themselves’ in the game or became so absorbed in it they forgot the world around them. It became increasingly apparent, however, that ‘immersion’ was entirely dependent on the social context of gaming, and that power dynamics (including gender) of each household shaped how gamers performed during gaming. It also became apparent that the power politics of each house continued beyond any game so that separating gaming from its context was unhelpful. Similarly, focusing on the game was equally unhelpful if gamers did not get to play them because of other forces shaping gameplay.
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[6] In terms of practice, this refers to Ien Ang 1989, but also Skeggs 1997; Walkerdine 1997, 2007; and Gray 1992. In relation to theory, it is Butler 1990, 1993, 2004, Ang 1996, and Morley 2000 I am referencing.
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[7] ‘Helen’ refers to me, the interviewer.
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[8] My view is that this is a vital element of social gaming and certainly constitutes gameplay.
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Appendix 1

Brief biography of the households discussed in the article.

Household 1: Sara (24, heterosexual, ‘other’ ethnicity*, middle class), Simon (25, heterosexual, white, middle class), Steve (22, homosexual, white, middle class) and Ben (25, homosexual, white, French, middle class). In the earlier stages of the interviews, Sara and Simon were partners, and when they split up, Sara moved to London with Clare, and Chloe. Simon moved in with Joe and Lorna (another couple). I knew Sara from university when a few of our English Literature courses overlapped, and I recognised Simon in passing (he had gone to the same university). I followed both Sara and Simon when they moved out of this house: Simon stayed in Brighton and Sara moved to London.

Household 2: ‘Methleys 1 and 2′: Nathan (28, heterosexual, white, middle class), Heung (31, heterosexual, Vietnamese), Duncan (28, heterosexual, white, working class), Peter (28. heterosexual, white, working class) and Al (28. heterosexual, white, middle class). This house has been the longest of the households I have interviewed. I started talking to them about gaming in 2003, asking them to do word association games and interviewing them. The house had changed at the start of the second year of research – it became an all-male household. In the original house, Nathan and Heung were a couple. However, Heung and Nathan left in 2004 to return to Vietnam. Nathan was replaced by Bob (26, heterosexual, white, working class), and Peter left in 2005 to be replaced by Ricky (28, heterosexual, white, middle class). This house was located in Leeds. I knew Peter because he was the older brother of a class mate at secondary school. I knew Duncan and Peter from Durham (where I also grew up).

Household 3: These interviews are the results of Duncan’s interviews with the Christie brothers, and my experimentation into how much my presence affected what was said. Duncan interviewed them three times in Durham and I recorded his views of the event afterwards. I found overall that although the interviews were fast paced, nostalgic and humorous, the questions I would have asked were not asked and some interesting points left unexplored. Duncan is represented above in household 2. Cam (32, heterosexual, white, working class) and Grant (34, heterosexual, white, working class) had known Duncan since they were children. Duncan volunteered to interview them when he was visiting his parents in Durham (Grant, Cam, Bob, Peter, and myself are all from Durham).

Household 4: Another house in Leeds and was inhabited by Rob (32, heterosexual, white, middle class) and Rach (as above). I followed Rach when she moved to Leeds from Manchester, and although Rob and Rach lived together, they were not in a relationship at the time of the interviews but got together in June 2007. At the time of the interviews, Rob was in a relationship with someone else. I also knew Rach from university, and we had travelled together following our graduation. We kept in touch and I interviewed her in her house in Manchester when she moved there, later following her to Leeds.

Household 5: This was the London all-female house which was created when Sara split up from Simon and moved in with Clare (26, heterosexual, white, middle class) and Chloe (27, heterosexual, white, middle class). One of the interviews has Ian (29, heterosexual, white, working class) visiting them, but the other two are of the three women on their own. Ian is also represented here because he contributed to one of the interviews but he was not a member of the household.

Over the last few years debates about digital technologies and moving imagery have often evolved around the concept of convergence. By now a powerful term, convergence continues to have a purchase on moving image media. Since it has been a point of reference for many discussions of digital media, convergence has, in a sense, set the context with which academics in the field have had to engage. To explore the pressure the concept of convergence exerts over our understandings of changing expressive practices following the emergence of numerous digital technologies, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s approach to communication. My claim will be that in its current form, convergence privileges either the human users of technological platforms, or the combination of aesthetic conventions from different media. These two understandings of convergence propose that connections through the process of convergence are established by eitherthe user or the aesthetic code.[1] While neither of these two positions would be likely to deny a reliance on the interplay between humans and technologies, it is an issue more often taken for granted than explored. Using Luhmann’s version of systems theory, in particular his ideas about communication and organisation, I argue that we can more effectively grasp the interplay of human and technological participants by understanding their combined roles in changing expressive practices. What connects is determined neither by the practitioners nor the capacities of their technologies; instead, it evolves in a system of communications of which they are a part.

Communicating Convergence

How have we come to communicate about convergence in the ways that we have? How do ideas proliferate, and to what extent is an idea both generative of others, while at the same placing a limit on what can be said. I am broadly interested in the debates around digital technologies, and in particular the ways in which these have an impact on both the materiality of moving images and the expressive practices subsequently made available to moving image artists working within live-action cinema, digital games and animation. For the last decade, and more, convergence is an idea, or a distinction, that has exerted a strong degree of control over what can and cannot be said and communicated about these changes.

Distinctions are central to Luhmann’s theory of systems, which he conceptualises as a means through which sense is made of a highly complex environment. An environment is a mass of information arising from multiple sources, whereas a system relies on a process of communication through which elements of information are selected. This involves making a distinction that limits which elements of the environment can be communicated about. Luhmann’s work on social systems is extensive, ranging from discussions of law, education, mass media, art, love and economic systems. Although Luhmann has considered the ways in which art might be a system, I am not aiming to argue that either digital technologies or convergence are systems in themselves. Instead, I consider how Luhmann’s concept of communication provides insight into thinking about how the academic discourse surrounding these terms has developed to allow the inclusion of some elements but not others.

Digital fx, for instance, are part of a complex environment that exists in relation to the art world of cinema, in particular the art world of the popular cinema. This is a place of constant change, whether through the introduction of technologies, changing work practices, different modes of investment, generic innovation, or the ripple effect of a major and influential star or key production company. While these aspects of the cinema contribute directly to the product seen throughout the world, either in cinemas, on DVD, video or downloads, they do not operate in isolation. We might see this art world as a massively multifaceted lattice structure, in which each aspect represents a node, and each node is connected to others via many routes. For instance, the star power of an actor connects to investment, marketing, distribution, other actors, and directors, which in turn creates another relay of connections around cinematographers, and post-production houses, which then links into the diversifying technologies used in the production of contemporary cinema, bringing us to a another kind of investment practice. Taking into account all these aspects would require an approach in which all the different nodes of the lattice were given place in the process. Conventionally, however, cinema studies has used a series of distinctions through which to make sense of this complex environment, separating out its aspects into domains of the discipline: star studies, genre, aesthetics, historical studies, political economies, national cinemas, queer studies and so forth.

Convergence is another means by which a distinction is made, and a recent definition of convergence by Henry Jenkins is as follows:

[Convergence is] a word that describes technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes in the ways media circulates within our culture. Some common ideas referenced by the term include the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, the search for new structures of media financing that fall at the interstices between old and new media, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want. Perhaps most broadly, media convergence refers to a situation in which multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them. (Jenkins, 2006: 282)

Jenkins’ definition reveals that by the mid 2000s convergence has come to be understood as a complex phenomenon establishing connections across the different aspects of the latticework that defines the art world of popular cinema. Despite the high degree of complexity this definition suggests, it is also clear that convergence is defined by a key distinction, that of platforms that co-exist and the media content that flows between them. The term convergence is a distinction that sets aside convergent from non-convergent media.

A brief look over the evolution of ideas associated with convergence shows the centrality of this distinction. By the mid 1990s convergence had become a predominant element through which communications about new media took place. One early view of convergence was that it represented a revolutionary moment following the growing tendency for technological platforms to be shared across media, a tendency particularly well illustrated by digital media. Over the last two decades, computer-based systems of image construction have become common to television, live-action and animated filmmaking, as well as digital games, digital art and the internet. The concept of remediation emerged as a means of understanding the impact of these convergent platforms on the aesthetics of image making. The distinction of convergent platforms underlies the capacity of remediation to articulate something about changing textual conventions. Convergence, however, is not only interested in the aesthetic conventions of various media, as it also involves the users of those media, and how their participation flows across the different platforms creating new ways of establishing networks of connections and relationships:

Convergence doesn’t just involve commercially produced materials and services traveling along well-regulated and predictable circuits. It doesn’t just involve the mobile companies getting together with the film companies to decide when and where we watch a newly released film. It also occurs when people take media into their own hands. Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms. Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels. Being a lover or a mommy or a teacher occurs on multiple platforms. Sometimes we tuck our kids into bed at night and at other times we Instant Message them from the other side of the globe. (Jenkins, 2006: 17)

Convergence relies on a distinction that reduces the complex environment of digital technologies to a selection limiting communications to those elements that involve some kind of convergent aspect, whether it is the media platforms, the visual and aural aesthetics, or the ways users’ ‘lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires’ flow across these platforms.

What connects discussions about convergence is, then, a distinction. This distinction, convergent/non-convergent, has proliferated via two main routes of scholarship, those of remediation and what we can designate as participant-flow. Both routes are interested in the emergent practices in aesthetic innovation/assimilation, or of novel modes of participation as a consequence of an engagement with a changing technological terrain. Despite the centrality of convergent technologies, these approaches nevertheless tend to privilege either the human user or the textual convention. As a consequence the interplay between the humans and the technology involved in these processes is less easy to explore.

A feature of Luhmann’s theory of systems is that connections occur between conscious and non-conscious elements, which in this case would mean the human user and the technological interface with which they work. In the following I more fully outline Luhmann’s concept of communication in order to finally discuss what this will allow us to say about the interplay between humans and the technologies with which they are engaged. My particular focus will be on the interplay between humans and technologies in the context of the impact of digital technologies on expressive practices, with an emphasis on digital games. A central feature of these discussions will be the question: what connects?

Making Sense of Communication

In Luhmann’s version of systems theory, communications form the material substance out of which a system evolves, and this evolution relies on the connectivity of its communications. To make greater sense of this statement it is necessary to say more about the very specific use to which Luhmann puts these familiar terms. A system is the means through which sense is made of our extremely complex situations. To put it very simply, a system is an ordering and simplification of the multiplicities of possibilities that surround us as life is lived.

At its core a system is defined by the communications that take place within it. The relationship between a system and its environment is tentative, but relationships within a system are directly connected, coupled providing they have meaning. Unlike the more conventional definition of a communication that can be likened to a send and receive interaction, in which the sender is given a special status through intentionality, in Luhmann’s formulation intentionality is displaced. The meaning of the communication resides in the proliferation of connections that emerges out of interactions, and these interactions can be between both conscious and non-conscious entities. Taken as a schema, a communication is a three-act process divided into ‘information,’ ‘utterance,’ and ‘understanding.’ Through a communication a small number of the possibilities that co-exist on a horizon with many others are selected as information, and consequently a process of simplification begins: ‘Communication grasps something out of the actual referential horizon that it itself constitutes and leaves other things aside. Communication is the processing of selection.’ (Luhmann, 1995: 140) A selection can be made by human individuals, for instance, out of all the possible ways of considering digital technologies I have selected digital games. The process of a selection can also be understood to occur via a machine interface. The programmed architecture of a game will offer the gamer a specific selection of moves from a wider array of possibilities.

In the terms that Luhmann lays out, a communication happens when the ‘information uttered is understood.’ (Luhmann, 2006: 47) He does not mean that information has been transmitted from user to receiver, but that instead the participants have understood the process of selection through which communication can occur:

[C]ommunication is never an event with two points of selection ¾ neither as a giving and receiving (as in the metaphor of transmission), nor as the difference between information and utterance. Communication emerges only if this last difference is observed, expected, understood, and used as the basis of connecting with other behaviours. (Luhmann, 1995: 141)

In any communication the recipient of the information is cogniscent of a process of selection, even if they are without much insight. Take the example of a gamer playing a digital game such as Tomb Raider. The recipient, the gamer, understands that in order to make an utterance, the communicating entity, the game AI, relies on making a selection from information, which in turn is a selection from a multitude of possibilities from an environment. The gamer is able to participate in the communication because they know the process through which the utterance occurs. Similarly, anyone reading this piece of writing is able to see it as an utterance that makes a distinction between different ways of using information about convergence, digital technologies and games.

The final step of a communication is the recipient’s acceptance or rejection of this communication. Acceptance or rejection does not mean the same as agreement or disagreement, that is something that might follow on from acceptance. If a communication is accepted, via agreement or disagreement, the recipient engages with the codes already set up in the utterance. The gamer, for instance, could accept by continuing to play according to the parameters of the game, or they could reject the utterance and quit. Making a further communication sets up a connection based on an understanding of those codes. The response entails another series of selections, and is contingent on the directionality that emerges in those further selections. When acceptance occurs, the gamer or reader is beginning to participate with the structure of a system of communications, and as they do so a procession of connectivity is set up through ensuing communications. Accordingly, the meaning of the communication does not reside in the selection of information, but in understanding the difference or distinction between the utterance and the information, and an ability to manage that difference: ‘In contrast to the mere perception of informative events, communication comes about only because ego distinguishes two selections and can manage the difference.’ (Luhmann 1995: 143) It is in the procession from the initial selection of information, to an utterance, and the understanding of that utterance, that the system begins to take hold. That is, it is not until a subsequent communication, which relies on a capacity to ‘distinguish the utterance from what is uttered,’ that communication occurs. As David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker state:

Understanding […] is the distinction between utterance and information; but whose understanding is of relevance here? Again, for Luhmann, it is not psychic systems — that is, the individuals’ minds — that are of interest here. Instead, it is the understanding implied by the connecting communications — in the same way as the meaning of a word in a text is only determined through the following words of the text. Thus, the meaning of a communication — that is, what difference a communication makes for later communications — is only determined retrospectively through the later communications. (Seidl and Becker 2006: 20)

An important point here is that the connection of a subsequent communication begins from the understanding of an utterance, and it follows that the starting point of an understanding is from the information provided in that communication. The referential status of communication becomes clear in this description. Communication is based on the continuity of connections between the communications, but communication itself depends on an understanding of the distinction between information and utterance. If understanding the distinction provides the momentum for the connection, then it follows that the subsequent connection is in part a reference to the original distinction. The connection does not occur outside of this understanding, which makes it autopoeitic or self-referential, in that the distinction is maintained via the connection:

The fact that understanding is an indispensable feature in how communication comes about has far-reaching significance for comprehending communication. One consequence is that communication is possible only as a self-referential process. (Luhmann 1995: 143)

From this definition of communication it also becomes possible to appreciate the distinction that Luhmann makes between a system (or organisation) and its environment. Changes in an environment act as irritants that may be taken up and communicated through a system. However, the communication occurs within the boundaries of the system, not because of any direct connection with the environment. That is, it is only possible to communicate about any changes in an environment through the terms already established within the system:

The unity of communication corresponds to nothing in the environment. Therefore communication necessarily operates by differentiating…Of course, all communication depends on its environment as a source of energy and information, and every communication indisputably refers via meaning references directly or indirectly to the system’s environment. The differentiation relates strictly to the unity and thus the closure of the connection among selections, to the selections of selections contained therein, and to the reduction of complexity thereby achieved. (Luhmann 2006: 44)

The selections made by any participant in a communication result in the closure of connections, so that communications about a complex environment become simplified. Since communications are self-referential, in that the procession of a series of communications always relies on a connection created by an understanding of the distinction between information and utterance, there is a closure of connections. The starting point of one communication to the next is ensured by prior as well as current selections.

As a system creates itself through a chain of operations not just any connection can be made, rather, only those that are defined by the distinction: ‘[the] system has to be capable of controlling its own conditions of connectivity.’ (Luhmann, 2006: 49) For communication to be successful the system needs to be establish conditions that make successful communications more likely, to overcome the impossibility of them ever happening.

If a system has to decide or, to speak with greater caution, create couplings between one communication and another, then it must be able to discern, observe and establish what is compatible with it and what is not. (Luhmann, 2006: 49)

Another way of putting this is that a system enlists only those elements that will have meaning within that system, but at the same time an ‘element is constituted as a unity only by the system that enlists it as an element to use it in relations.’ (Luhmann, 1995: 22) Elements do not have an absolute meaning, but only those conferred by their function within a system.

Organising Convergence

These more abstract ideas about communication and systems can be aligned with the concept of convergence. As I outlined earlier, convergence operates through two primary routes of discussion. The primary code is convergent/non-convergent, and this proliferates through two further distinctions that enlist elements that allow relations to be established through communication about remediation and participant flow. Although the initial distinction leads to a simplification of the complex environment of digital technologies, communications subsequently proliferate by enlisting elements that have meaning within the confines of the term convergence.

When considering a disciplined formation of communication, such as academic writing, any progression operates under a series of controlling restraints. Luhmann’s concept of an organisation is useful in thinking about how such restraints exert control over what elements can and cannot be enlisted as communications. An organisation is premised on the condition that the proliferation of communications operates under some form of control. In an academic discussion of convergence, some of these restraints concern the protocols of performing academic communications, while others concern the subject-specific selection of information that will be used during the connective process of a communication. Even though they continue to transform, it is fair to claim that the form of academic discourse has been decided. There exists a style of language one is able to use, modes of expression, length of paper, speech patterns and the performative mode one might adopt in giving a presentation.[2] Before the question of content comes into play, all of these restraints need to be overcome for a piece of writing or a presentation to be acceptable as an academic communication. If academic disciplines and their sub-disciplines are seen as examples of organisations, then such restrictions are decisions. A decision is a particular kind of communication, a selection of one possibility from many:

A decision may then be comprehended as the transformation of the form of contingency. Before the decision, several possible decisions exist, thus the space of open possibilities is limited. After the decision, the same contingency exists in a fixed form: the decision could have been made differently. (Luhmann 2003: 37)

Just as is the case with communication, a decision is only ‘active’ once it connects to other decisions, and so generates the context for other decisions or conditions one’s expectation or anticipation.

These ideas can be more directly taken to the procession of ideas around convergence. Making sense of the art world through communication involves first enlisting elements that are relevant to a particular system. Take for example a developing area within digital games, animation and also fx work in live-action cinema, that of games engines. These are the core software algorithms of games that create real-time images. They include a renderer for graphics, a physics engine that configures ‘environmental reactivity,’ as well software for sound, animation, the game’s AI and so forth. A game engine can be shared by different games, either within an individual company [Rockstar games uses RAGE for both Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and Rockstar Table Tennis (2006)], or across several companies. The Doom 3 engine is used for Doom 3 (2003, id software), Quake 4 (2005, Raven Software), Prey (2006, Human Head Studios) and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007, Splash Damage). This sharing of an engine, either from within a company or through buying one in, economises on the amount of software development necessary for any particular game.

There is any number of ways in which communications about game engines could occur, through the legal system for copyright issues or through the economic system for share ware, amongst others. Given the distinction evident in my stated interest in expressive practice I am not likely to select information that would be enlisted within the legal and economic systems. Of greater relevance are the consequences of the sharing of game engines across a range of media platforms. As an example of convergent culture, these engines are not only used in the games industry, but are central to the growing use of pre-viz in popular cinema, and also in the machinima movement. In Hollywood, the fx company Pixel Liberation Front has been in existence since the late 1990s, and undertook pre-viz work on recent films including Superman Returns (2006), Dreamgirls (2006) and Spider-Man 3 (2007).[3] Instead of static storyboards, moving animatics are created, and the game engine allows for different lighting, framing and lens set-ups to be explored. Where Pixel Liberation Front operate in the high end of moving image production, more independent practitioners such as machinima artists exploit the technology in much the same way but do so in order to create animated films. Originally a so-called underground movement associated with games modders, machinima is going more mainstream as the technologies are configured so that less specialist users are able to exploit them.

Using the formation that has settled around convergence allows much to be said about the impact of this sharing of game engines. As game engines have developed they have formed an irritation within the environment of digital media, crossing over into the environment of the art world of popular cinema. The diverse ways in which games engines are exploited, either within the regimes of elite pre-viz artists and games designers, or by the growing band of indie games designers and machinima animators, is a prime example of a convergent technology, crossing platforms and being mobilised by an array of interest groups, from the games modder shut away alone in a room, either communicating on-line or going solo, to the industry drone working away at scene 3001 in the production of game XYZ. Described in this way, it is easy to see how game engines could be enlisted as an element in communications about convergence that speaks to aesthetic conventions or participant flow. However, if we want to ask a question about the implication of this moment of convergence for the interplay of human users and these technological platforms as they undertake expressive practice we are left with a series of choices that illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of convergence discourse.

One of the features of a distinction is its designation of elements through which communications can connect. Equally, however, a designation indicates that other elements were available for selection and so other utterances and communications could be made: to make a distinction always necessitates designating something unsaid. If a participant is able to manage the difference of a communication, then they also will be aware that things have not been said. The organisational decision to speak about film, for instance, initially limited communications to film, but it has always been clear that the art world within which cinema exists has other kinds of elements.[4] The decision to change the title of the US-based Society of Cinema Studies to the Society of Cinema and Media Studies demonstrates that the distinction on which cinema studies was initially founded could not continue to operate as an effective decision. This reveals another important facet of systems theory. The operations of communications are closed, but they are not unaware of irritations within the environment. As the environment of the art world of cinema has altered, as moving imagery has proliferated from cinema to television to games, from analog to digital, from static single screens to multiply mobile ones, communications have been bubbling up, beginning to form a competing formation within the discipline of cinema studies. The decision to allow media into the name operates as a symbolic change that reveals the already extensive possibilities of other utterances about other media within the organisation.

The development of new technologies in the art world of popular cinema adds an irritation into the environment that challenges the ways in which the code for convergence continues to proliferate by generating a different range of selectable elements. Once something exists within the environment of an art world, it has the potential to become enlisted as an element within the organisation for communications about convergence, and it also has the potential to establish new connections. As communications accumulate through these new connections they allow the organisation of communications about convergence to continue to proliferate but add further dimensions to a debate. The emergent presence of technological innovations such as digital intermediates, game engines, computers with processing power sufficient to work with RGB ratios of 4:4:4 draws greater attention to the complex interplay between practitioners and technologies in the processes of expressive practice. Luhmann’s conceptualisation of communication is particularly well placed in allowing this interplay to be articulated.

This point can be illustrated by looking at some of the ways in which digital games are approached using the terms of convergence. For instance, the circularity of influences running between games and cinema has been a source for debates concerned with remediation. This may involve a generalised discussion of the increasing realism of digital games, which is essentially about the imagery becoming more like that of live-action cinema, or a focused discussion of a franchise including both games and cinema, such as Resident Evil. Capcom initially released the digital game in 1996, and the first film version, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, was released in 2002. Much of the discussion of this latter film not only involves comments on the imagery, but also on the plot devices shared by the games and movies. The remediation of stylistic devices cycle from the original games through the films, and back again as more films and games are produced. Taking the participant route of convergence culture, Resident Evil is a game that has excited the interest of modders. A brief search on the internet reveals forums discussing various mods for Resident Evil and also video clips of such mods on YouTube. It would be possible to explore both these terrains of convergence surrounding Resident Evil through a focus on expressive practices. In considering the participant route, one might assess the modders self-expression via their desire to rework aspects of a digital game and to share it with others via an on-line community. If thinking about the expressive practices of game’s remediation of aesthetic conventions, one would most likely look at the operation of conventions within the final organisation of an image. In making an assessment of remediating practices a comparison is made across the different platforms, drawing out the ways in which the stylistic codes from different media are combined. Both of these re-iterate and are shaped by the convergence/non-convergence distinction: modders converge via the technologies, while remediation involves a coming together of textual codes, often through a convergence of platforms.

A recently developed game, Okami (2007), reveals the limits that these kinds of approaches place on thinking about expressive practice. At the moment there is little web presence of Okami mods, but the game can be enlisted into a remediation-influenced approach. The aesthetic of the game is unusual, as it is derived from Japanese cultural traditions. The imagery is based on a combination of Japanese woodcuts, ukiyo-e style, and the watercolour tones of sumi-e. Okami remediates the visual codes of traditional Japanese imagery, and also mythologies to provide the story-world of the game. While this kind of information about Okami is useful in allowing a gamer greater knowledge about the cultural referencing that runs through the game, it does not necessarily say very much about the development of game. The aspect of the game’s development that has interested commentators is the ‘celestial brush,’ a unique tool that allows the gamer to alter the physical environment in which the game’s characters perform.

In order to delve further into the expressive practices involved in the development of games, to say more than either participant flow or remediation, a different selection of information becomes necessary. For instance, I wish to enlist information about the impact of the changed materiality of digital environments in order to consider the expressive practices of game builders and filmmakers. This involves enlisting information about the nature of digital images. When constructed using a computer, as is the case with fx in live-action cinema, digital intermediates, digital animations and games, digital imagery is fully accessible to the manipulations of digital technologies. That is, any part of the image can be manipulated using the appropriate digital platform. Therefore the expressive possibilities available to an artist are contingent on their capacity to work with digital tools, which in turn is contingent on the capacities of those digital tools. Just as a game AI can participate in a communication with a gamer by playing a role in selecting information, digital tools too function as communicating devices within expressive practices because of what they can or cannot select during interplay between a human user and a technological interface.

The development of the celestial brush of Okami has produced an interesting series of communications about the capacities of digital tools, which can be enlisted into communications about the interplay of human users and technological interfaces. Within the game the celestial brush allows a gamer to change an environment’s dynamics in a constructive way by altering the colour and detailing of objects, as well as enabling tactical play within the game. Although using the brush is a tactic within game play, the process is also an act of remediation. The celestial brush allows gamers to create a gust of wind, and Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760-1849) landscape work has been noted as a key influence. The connections established via remediation can be taken further by bringing Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993) into the discussion. Wall’s image is in fact a collage of more than a hundred digital images manipulated so that the whole captures movement in a still image in a quite striking way. This connection takes me back to the point that to understand the expressive work of any given text the evolution of a new communication is not only complicated by the products of competing media, but also by the competing processes involved in the creation of that communication.

Conventional approaches to convergence emphasise media interaction via textual conventions, or the flow of information between platforms:

Medium-specific perspectives may limit our understanding of the ways in which media interact, shift and collude with one another. The evolution of new communications systems is always immensely complicated by the rivalry of competing media and by the economic structures that shape and support them. (Thorburn and Jenkins, 2003: 11)

Rather than looking at competing media, another approach is to instead consider the competing processes that influenced the construction of moving imagery. For instance, the final look of Okami can indeed be described as remediating the conventions of both ukiyo-e and sumi-e, but this occurred by necessity rather than by design. The original intention of the game’s makers, the now defunct Japan-based subsidiary of Capcom, Clover, was to render the images as photorealistic 3-D images. During the development of Okami, the CEO of Clover, Atsushi Inaba, discussed in interview how the limitations in the rendering time capacities of the Playstation 2 (PS2) platform caused the production team to the reassess how they should design the look of the game:

We were as I mentioned previously, constrained by the hardware performance. However, this caused the 3D style of brush touch to be born so Okami as we know it would not have existed if we had not encountered issues with the hardware. All the consoles come with some restrictions, so this probably makes developing games more challenging and interesting. (Inaba, quoted in McGarvey 2006)

In a later interview, at around the time of the game’s release in early 2007, Inaba was also questioned about the inspiration for the concept of the celestial brush:

Actually, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t originally in the game; it wasn’t part of the original concept. It’s sort of something that was borne of the graphical style of the game. Once we fixed ourselves on a graphical style and got down to the brushwork, we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow get the player involved and participate in this artwork instead of just watching it?” That’s how the idea of the Celestial Brush was born. (Inaba, quoted in Shea 2007)

Throughout this article I have been working with the ideas of Niklas Luhmann since his model of communication gives us a way of thinking about connections established across communications. From the above description I can select information about the development of Okami and use it to argue that the processes of production be conceived as a series of communications, and that tracing the connections established in these connections gives insights into the interplay of practitioners and technological systems. The first point to bring out is that the elements enlisted in the communication are not only derived from the verbal communications of the production team, they also derive from the capacities of the technological processes that are engaged in the activities of the design group. Both the design team and their technological interfaces form the organisation through which the game is developed. When a practitioner is making a selection of information that they want to enlist in their communication, in this case an image they are aiming to produce, in addition to any cultural or aesthetic influences, their selection can draw on the possibilities of the technological interface that they are using. In creating a digital game the range of selections will be potentially enormous, but are likely to include the design of the game play, the architecture of the game, the visual and aural imagery. The concept of organisation is again relevant. An organisation relies on decisions, and game design involves decisions. For Okami the practitioners worked according to the decision to construct 3-D photoreal imagery drawing on influences from Japanese cultural traditions. The elements enlisted in order to achieve this would be connected according to that decision. We can envisage artists using 3-D packages to draw environments, developing the story-telling to highlight the aesthetics of 3-D imagery. One of the few examples of original imagery of the game shows the white wolf, Amaterasu, running through the depth of the screen with grass reactive to her presence.[5] Each of these are communications, and as they develop they maintain the integrity of the decision while other elements remain unenlisted, part of the complex environment of possibilities. Just as communications are autopoeitic, the connections generated through a decision are so too.

To describe the expressive practice of such a process, it is not necessary to think about the intentionality of an individual. In the same way as for other communications, meaning emerges through the connections that are established as the communications proliferate. Rather than looking at anything to do with originating intentionality we can look instead at the outcome, and understand how the operations of the communications have yielded certain expressive practices and not others. This is not to say that individuals do not start out by acting with intention, but that their intention does not necessarily connect with the outcome of their communications. Within Luhmann’s theory, it is the system that generates its meaning through a proliferation of communications, and both the human and technological participants provide the elements around which relations are formed in a series of communications. Therefore, the expressive practice that emerges comes out of the relational interplay between these elements. I am not suggesting that expressive practice emerges randomly, but that it evolves out of the possibilities offered by both technologies and practitioners, with each step a communication based on the selection of information from those possibilities.

This claim can be given more substance by continuing to trace the connections evident in Atushi Inaba’s statements about Okami. The game designers set out to create a game that would not only be successful but also distinctive, and in order to do so they decided to exploit Japanese cultural traditions, something that had not been much done in the game industry. Based on the accolades the game has received these intentions were achieved, though the route by which this occurred was never within the game designers full control, but rather down to the organisation within which they operated. They, of course, are part of this organisation, but the organisation itself is autopoeitic and so too played a role in the outcome. Take the decision to use Japanese traditions in Okami. This placed limits on the possible selections for the visual and aural architecture of the game, and also the gameplay, since the creators wanted to draw on Japanese legends. The decision exerted an influence in such planning, but also entailed fitting in with the limits of the possible selections, as is evident in the problem with the rendering power of the PS2 technology. The problem of slow processing capacity, given the detail of the photoreal imagery, necessitated a change in decision. As described by Inaba, the process occurred as followed:

Originally the Director wanted to create a realistic looking world, but we had to give up on this concept as we were not able to realise the level of detail we wished for given the constraints of the hardware. One day an art designer came up with the brush painting style, we all liked it and it became the final style. Therefore I can say that team members did not talk to decide the direction but an inspiration of a designer stimulated the director’s sensitivity and the art as we know it today was born. (Inaba, quoted in Shea 2006)

The initial decision to build a game exploiting the visual and aural iconography of Japanese culture still holds in this new direction, but the PS2 problem acts as a selection, and ‘it’s’ communication entails further selections that lead to a communication about using a brush painting style. As this last communication proliferates, other elements, which had initially been confined to the environment, become enlisted into the communications through which the game was designed. If we apply this kind of thinking to the celestial brush, the unique innovation of Okami, then the expressive practice that this entails occurs as a result of the relations between the elements that are enlisted within the communications of the production team. The interplay of selections involves both human and non-human participants, and neither fully determine the actions of the other.

What Connects?

To ask what connects, then, becomes a complex question, whose answer depends on the distinction used in making the selection of information to deploy during a communication. Luhmann’s central concept of autopoeitic communications provides a means of exploring what current communications have allowed cinema studies scholars to say or not say about digital practices. The predominant debates of convergence have accumulated around the remediation of aesthetic conventions across different media, and around the ways different participant groups exploit the possibilities of the emergent techniques. These two routes of proliferating communications continue to engage with the impact of digital technologies on the changing patterns of media aesthetics, the numerous platforms for consumption of media texts, as well as the growing ways in which we participate in digital cultures. Despite everything we do know from these ideas, they have not really told us much about the changing nature of expressive practices within the digital cultures of various art worlds.

My discussion of Okami uses Luhmann’s concept of communications to suggest an alternative way of thinking about expressive practices. They can be conceived of as a series of communications that connect through an organisation of human and non-human elements consisting of practitioners and the interfaces they utilise in their creative work. There are several outcomes of taking this approach, one of which is to disperse the capacity of being able to mark a difference between human and non-human elements, and also to displace the notion of intentionality. Given that this article is about expressive practice, such a tactic may well seem bizarre. However, in the context of an art world that relies on teams of workers, of networks of computers and other filmmaking technologies, of assistants and designers who may never set eyes on each other, let alone reside on the same continent, any concept of intentionality was going to have to deal with dispersal. This is not to suggest that filmmakers, animators and games designers act without intention as they generate moving imagery. Instead, it is to see that the visible outcome of making moving images emerges through a proliferation of connections across an array of both human and technological activities.

Author’s Biography

Aylish Wood has published articles in Screen, New Review of Film and Video, Film Criticism and Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal. Her recently published book Digital Encounters (2007) is a cross media study of the impact on digital technologies in cinema, games and installation art, with an emphasis on the on narrative organisations and t he agency of viewers.

Notes

[1] Henry Jenkins is probably the foremost scholar on the ways in which users exploit convergent platforms, while David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of remediation continues to influence how we understand the coming together of textual conventions.
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[2] The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers demonstrates that decisions have been made about what is acceptable for academic writing, and the history of that particular handbook would also reveal how writing has transformed.
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[3] Pixel Liberation Front’s website includes illustrative materials that can be viewed on-line. See http://www.thefront.com/.
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[4] Not all communications outside of film were excluded, but they did remain peripheral.
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[5] See for instance, the video of the two versions of the opening scene, which can played at http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/5057. The video allows a comparison between the more photorealist 3-D imagery and that of the more graphical imagery used in the final game.
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References

Bakken, Tore, and Tor Hernes. Autopoeitic Organization Theory: Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Perspective (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003).

Bolter, David and Richard Grusin. Remediation (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Keane, Stephen. Cinetech (London: Palgrave, 2006).

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Luhmann, Niklas. ‘Organization’, in Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes (eds). Autopoeitic Organization Theory: Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Perspective (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003): 31-52.

Luhmann, Niklas. ‘System as Difference’, Organization 13.1 (2006): 37-57.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000).

McGarvey, Sterling. ‘Running with the Wolves: Atsushi Inaba talks Okami (PS2). The head honcho of Clover Studios briefly breaks down his upcoming opus’. Feb. 23, 2006. http://uk.ps2.gamespy.com/playstation-2/okami/690940p1.html.

Seidl, David and Kai Helge Becker. ‘Organizations as Distinction Generating and Processing Systems: Niklas Luhmann’s Contribution to Organization Studies’, Organization 13.1 (2006): 9-35.

Shea, Cam. ‘Okami Interview AU: Okami’s Producer on the stunning art direction in the game’. IGN AU, Jan 30 2007. http://uk.ps2.ign.com/articles/759/759997p1.html.

Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003).

Films Cited

Dreamgirls (2006, Bill Conlon)

Resident Evil (2002, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Spider-Man 3 (2007, Sam Raimi)

Superman Returns (2006, Bryan Singer)

Games Cited

Doom 3 (2003, id software)

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007, Splash Damage)

Grand Theft Auto IV (2008, Rockstar)

Okami (2007, Capcom)

Prey (2006, Human Head Studios)

Quake 4 (2005, Raven Software)

Resident Evil (1996, Capcom)

Table Tennis (2006, Rockstar)

‘What terrifies you most in purity?’ I asked
‘Haste,’ William answered.
—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Introduction

Every entity, be it human or non-human, leaves traces as it struggles against entropy. Whether an entity’s existence is projected as being, becoming, or having, it inevitably involves a spatial locatedness. That is, it can be approached as a thing leaving spatial traces, or annotations, which in turn can be observed, or tracked. Even the journey of the smallest grain of sugar, from a plant in a plantation to a human sensation in a morning coffee, is a spatial phenomenon of mind-boggling complexity, involving an enormity of other entities. Until very recently the banality of this realisation served no further purpose, as all those other entities and the logistics of their relations receded in an invisible and mute background, never to be found again. While a mute and invisible background is a simple matter of fact (or a pure externality as economists term it), a visible locale endowed with a multitude of voices becomes a matter of concern not to be ignored.

The emerging practices of locative media mapping have been preoccupied with re-approaching spatiality as the locale of heretofore unseen relations and transforming it from a matter of fact to many matters of concern, sometimes at the cost of great controversy. Whenever independent or corporate-funded locative media projects utilise network techniques to map entities, collectives or locales, they expose hitherto hidden or ignored logistics and relations. However, more often than not, they are met with critique ranging from accusations of sell-out to naiveté regarding the dangerous implications of tracking and annotation. All new media mapping projects[1] attempt to trace network entities in one way or another, yet the controversy starts when the movements of those entities, or their lack, become visible.

This article suggests that two divergent approaches to space (spatial projections) would condition differently the entities perceived to form, or exist within, that space. In other words, the problem of movement can be depicted as a function of the spatial projection employed. It follows that an investigation of spatial projections would probably reveal the conceptual horizon of a mapping approach and the types of entities visible to it. Therefore this text constructs the arguments around locative media as originating from two divergent spatial projections, resulting in two forms of mapping: one for which a map is always an extraction from or a revealing of spatiality (unveiling), and another for which a map is always an addition to a process of performing spatiality (attaching). Projects from locative media and counter-cartography are used to illustrate those positions.

In particular, the article argues that a spatial projection approaching networks as a priori homogenous topoi makes itself blind to the entities and logistics performing the effect of homogeneity. It is suggested that the mapping approach resulting from this spatial projection tends to display spaces of total convergence and homogeneity, a depopulated landscape of subjects and things without attachments. It is argued that the alternative projection would approach spatiality as a performative effect, therefore repopulating the resulting maps with all the entities and attachments involved in the performative process. The article concludes that when a spatial projection allows the tracing of the logistics of performativity, it may see little but see it very well. It suggests that perhaps the controversy around locative media can subside only when mapping efforts concentrate on tracing the intensities of performativity, rather than mistaking its effects for an already present context.

Spatial projections

Proponents of Actor Network Theory (ANT) such as John Law (2002) and geographers such as Nigel Thrift (1996) have long argued that there are two basic approaches to space. One sees space as a container pre-existing the entities within it, and can be recognised as the projection familiar to Euclid, Descartes and what – for lack of a better word – could be termed as “the common sense opinion”. Space here plays the role of a referential context – each entity within it is a priori defined by its reference to the spatial context – serving as an absolute determinant of the relations performed within. In other words, space is viewed as always primary to any relations that might be observed. The second approach in turn, sees space as a performative effect of the relations between entities, and could be described as the projection familiar, for example, to many indigenous peoples, to the special theory of relativity, and to some academics in the social sciences. For this projection, entities and their inter-attachments come first, and space comes second. In other words, the relational attachments between entities perform the space, not vice versa. While the first projection sees space as a static referential context, the second sees space as a dynamic relational effect.

The two projections result in wildly divergent approaches to spatial entities (subjects and things), their movement, and the traces they leave. The former projection produces imagery preoccupied with a totality where convergence and inter-linking are taken as the natural state of affairs,[2] while heterogeneity and autonomy are rare flowers to be explained and tended. The latter projection in turn produces imagery unable to see beyond the local (even if it seems to represent something global), where convergence is a rarity to be explained, autonomy from attachments does not exist, and heterogeneity is the rule.

For the former spatial projection, a map represents relations in reference to a context, which is, for example, an already existing politics or an a priori topos. For the latter in turn, a map is a tracing of the relations performing the politics or the topos, which in this case is not an a priori context but an effect of performativity. The only movement that the former projection can detect is the referential jump from an object to its context, while the latter in turn sees all manner of circulations and shifts being performed by, and in their turn performing spatial relations. In other words, the difference between the two spatial projections is best observed in the types of moves they are able to see and display.

The former projection is capable of detecting a referential movement from an object to a frame, which I term as unveiling, because it aims to display the hidden context in reference to which an entity is defined. The latter in turn captures something akin to a relational movement between circulating frames, which I term as attaching, because – contrary to displaying a reference to a context – it produces an interface between two forms of circulation.

Mapping as unveiling

The increased importance of cartography for new media practitioners and various critical approaches to modernity is connected to the effects of information networks on representations of space and time. The unprecedented ability to map various topoi (and spatial relations) stems from the proliferation of fluid information networks, which multiply and perpetuate both traces of and potentialities for tracking and annotation.[3] Yet simultaneously the fluidity of these networks makes network maps less and less stable. The more traces and annotations there are, the less explanatory and revealing maps seem. Efforts at mapping networks of power concentration seem to be the hardest hit by this paradox. Finally there are tools available to uncover, map and display the doings and dealings of the powerful, but, somewhat counter-intuitively, efforts to map network structures of domination are not really effective.[4]

Figure 1. The World Government (image by Bureau d'Etudes)

Obviously the circulation of entities within those networks is too fluid for the projection, and therefore the resulting map is too poor an interface to assess the relations of those in power. It is, again, a problem of movement. It is my contention that this problem is generated by the inability of the cartography of unveiling to see, or even look for, the logistics of performativity. It constantly mistakes barely stabilized effects for total contexts and so makes itself blind for the entire range of actors, intermediaries and mediators who produce those effects.[5]

Figure 2. The World Government (detail)

Two examples of what I term mapping as unveiling are provided by the range of cartography projects of Bureau d’Etudes,[6] and Josh On’s They Rule.[7] Bureau d’Etudes is a collective producing a series of mapping projects, aiming at charting and exposing hidden structures of global power and domination (see figures 1-2). They Rule in turn, is an interactive database mapping tool on the web, created by Josh On, and visualizing the links between the ‘old boy’ communities of corporate America based on membership in Fortune 500 boards of directors (figure 3).

Both projects can be characterized by the epistemological outlook that networks have become the dominant structures of power, and that this power is largely invisible (Holmes, 2006a: 20). Furthermore, their epistemology leads them to see network mapping either as critical and dissenting or as established and dominant (Holmes, 2006a: 20). As Brian Holmes argues, the objective and aesthetics of dissident cartography is to dissolve social hierarchies ‘by a deliberate twisting or counter-application’ (Holmes, 2006a: 22) of network technologies against the instrumental logic of the established cartographies.

This goal is believed to be achieved with the help of both static network maps and dynamic energy diagrams which respectively display structures of network power and show potential openings for action. The projection takes it as an a priori condition that there is a “normalised” and “dominant” way to use maps, which, according to Brian Holmes, produces maps of domination and power. Concomitantly, the mirror opposite of the “normalised” use is the autonomous practice, which through an exercise of Situationist detournement re-appropriates the tools of power. The counter-cartographers in this scenario are believed to “denormalise” the predominant order ‘with the very tools that consolidate the control society’ (Holmes, 2006a: 25).

Meanwhile, the established and dominant cartographies and the global networks represented by them are seen as forces of imperial infrastructure. When presented with this totalizing formation, the counter-cartographer’s goal is ‘an inscription of the individual, a geodetic tracery of individual difference’ (Holmes, 2004). The role of mapping in this epistemology is to locate a subject who has been lost in Manuel Castells’ “space of flows”, and to allow the subject to regain her capacity to act and struggle. This is achieved, as Holmes theorises, through the “twisting” and “denormalising” of the established attachments so as to free the subject (and the thing) from links of domination and position her in a state of pure autonomy. Therefore at its deepest level the cartography of unveiling is in a two-pronged search, on the one hand for a subject-identity and on the other, for knowledge that will bring empowerment and the ability to act. Its goal is nothing less than ‘to go beyond representation, to rediscover and share the space-creating potentials of a revolutionary imagination’ (Holmes, 2003).

Accordingly, after all the attachments of dominance have been cut away, the subject is supposed to establish a relation to the a priori spatiality now free from instrumental logic. In this epistemology, the subject is presented with a total space, alone and without attachments or intermediaries, while the goal of mapping is to constantly capture this totality.[8] ‘The force of these maps is in any case to represent a totality which demands specific analysis in order to grasp its potential to function as a whole’ (Holmes, 2006b). Perhaps this epistemology is borne out of the belief in a logic of total surveillance (Manovich, 2006), permeating an equally total imperial infrastructure and demanding an appropriately total alternative?

Indeed, some theorists would go as far as suggesting that the instrumental logic supposedly permeating those networks of domination and control ‘accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time’ (Fusco, 2004). Accordingly, practices of locative media, examples of which will be discussed below, are accused of succumbing to the logic of homogeneity because of their interest in all kinds of topologies, which, after all, according to the cartography of unveiling, are always-already under the spell of total domination.[9] In her critique of locative media, Coco Fusco directly suggests that the very act of viewing the world as a map ‘eliminates time, focuses disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life’ (Fusco, 2004).

By adding ‘to the studiable and modifiable skein of means to achieve powers, an un-studiable, invisible, immovable, homogenous world of power in itself’ (Latour, 2004a: 225), this projection simply re-inscribes an a priori state of convergence and homogeneity to each and every mediated interface to the world. By substituting the heterogeneous and messy rhizome of modifiable effects for a pure homogenous context the cartography of unveiling commits the sin of haste and overlooks all those others, all the mediators performing the attachments it is so impatient to denounce and severe.

In addition, it is important to find out how these so called “networks of power” operate. There seems to be an underlying assumption that a network structure is a homogenous, static and total topos, which contextually by itself enables all subsequent claims of action. All the branches of a messy, heterogeneous rhizome are a priori expected to lead to a common referential root. When looking at the They Rule or Bureau d’Etudes maps one could ask,

What if we introduced a suitcase of money into this structure? Which path might it take? With path shown, would we have to redraw the map, perhaps fade out some nodes or remove them? Once the map is redrawn continually, “structure” (in the historical sense) may or may not emerge. We may or may not have history “layers” to turn on an off (Rogers, 2006).[10]

More importantly, how do we know what is the intensity of the links, who and what performs them, how many mediators, how many intermediaries, at what cost? The unveiling epistemology cannot afford to display such detail, because if it does, it will not deal with a totality anymore. Instead of dealing with a totally homogenous imperial infrastructure it will have to deal with unstable techniques.[11]

We now understand why critique, whether high-brow or popular, cumbersome or miniaturized, costly or cheap, brave or facile, sees nothing but lies everywhere. It still longs for a full, wholesome reality and finds only strands, paths or channels that it doesn’t know how to follow, objects that it can’t see how to fathom, stumbling at each step on the same abysmal distance between words and things, past and present (Latour and Hermant, 2006).

The unveiling impulse leads to maps from the top down, ‘attempting to understand the systems they represent from above or from the outside’ (King, 2006: 49). The image produced by such an epistemology is probably best illustrated by a dialogue from the English TV series Blackadder in which the character ‘General Melchett’ looks at the back of a war map, erroneously thinking it is the actual image, and exclaims: ‘God, it’s a barren featureless desert out there, isn’t it?’ (Shardlow, Fletcher and Boden, 2002).

The cartography of unveiling is willingly blinding itself by occluding the entire process of summing up, stabilizing and upholding a rhizome. Unfortunately, by occluding this process for the sake of constantly presenting a total view, it ends up presenting a view from nowhere. The maps of unveiling are similar to panoramas, in that they see everything from all sides, and yet, as panoramas they see nothing ‘since they simply show an image painted (or projected) on the tiny wall of a room fully closed to the outside’ (Latour, 2005: 187).

There is no way to “be” simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privileged positions structured by gender, race, nation, and class. The search for such a “full” and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history (Haraway, 1991: 22).

However, network situations and identities are never stable enough to fit the straight and totalizing roles prescribed to them by a cartography of unveiling. To the contrary, the entire system of constantly re-deployed techniques holds together not one homogenized mass but a plethora of differences. The effort of mapping should be precisely to avoid homogenization, to avoid the appearance of “the masses”, and instead look for the tiny conduits along which an image of the masses flows. Arguably the cartographer does not unearth the occult connections between power networks, but, to the contrary ‘it is the format of the map that (dramatically) organizes these networks’ (Rogers, 2006).

Instead of searching for the subject without ties (Latour, 1999), or for the Heideggerian Ding,[12] isolated in their purity of being free from attachment, perhaps what is needed is a concept of mapping agency (and identity) that opens up possibilities for finding connections within social worlds where actors always fit oddly, at best. If there is a totality, it does not present itself as a fixed frame, as a constantly present context. Instead, ‘it is obtained through a process of summing up, itself localized and perpetually restarted, whose course can be tracked’ (Latour and Hermant, 2006).

Therefore if new media cartographers agree that the goal is to map difference, trace heterogeneous attachments, and annotate desire, perhaps it is necessary to be blind to all totalities while being attuned to the moves of all those others who produce the difference, attachments, and desire.

The problem of movement

As Bruno Latour argues in an influential essay on formalism and time (Latour, 1997), the difference between spatio/temporalities does not lie in an illusionary bifurcation between domination and autonomy, but in the intensities of performative spacings and timings. These intensities are a function of the relation between the two simultaneous vectors of transportation and transformation. Latour illustrates this relation with the example of two travellers, one sitting comfortably in a bullet train, the other hacking her way through a jungle. Both travellers move, yet they exist in radically different spaces and times. According to Latour, that is because while the first is transported without any visible transformation, that being in turn delegated and handled by a large support network of rail institutions, electrical power stations, technicians and machinery, the second traveller undergoes transformations with every step. While she has to undergo a series of transforming trials provided by the wilderness of the jungle, the former traveller can revel in the effects of a seamless flow of speed.[13]

What differentiates the flow of the train passenger’s movement from the discrete spacings of the jungle-explorer is not some fundamental difference between the “domination” techniques employed by the former and the “autonomous” living body of the latter, but the intensity, the ratio of transformation-to-transportation resulting from their movements. It is, accordingly, these intensities, which produce the timings and spacings, and not the other way around. The effect of speed is therefore the result of how much transformation an object undergoes during the trial of transportation. If the network transporting it is stable enough and allows someone or something else to transform instead, then the effect of seamless transportation without transformation occurs. The speed and seamlessness of internet flow is precisely such an effect (Celletti, Leong, Mitew and Pearson, 2008).

Latour’s argument can be illustrated otherwise through the famous Königsberg bridge problem, and Leonhard Euler’s solution to it (Biggs, Lloyd and Wilson, 1976).[14] Time, the event as duration, was flattened by Euler into a series of spatial relations distinguishable in just two variable states – nodes and edges (Andrasfai, 1977). Edges designate an action, a movement from one spatial end-state to another. However, movement through what and at what cost? This question exposes an illusion of movement through a container-like Euclidean space, of transportation without transformation. Once such a container-like space is taken for granted, then every quality with which one chooses to endow it gains a total presence. Moreover, all types of movement in this space become unproblematic because they bear no costs.

As long as one does not need to negotiate countless mediators, to account for transformations, to exhaust resources in upholding a network, one’s movement consists of rapid zooms, of revolutionary jumps. As an example, picture the manoeuvres of an army. For the performative projection, an army would seem as the rare effect of long and perilous logistical chains which have to be tended and repaired, while for the cartography of unveiling an army would resemble some fantastic entity consisting of lightning-fast avant-gardes, pure domination free from any attachment. The cartography of unveiling takes a rare effect for an unproblematic and a priori homogeneous given, thus obfuscating an entire world of spatial complexities. However, the logistics of transportation and transformation become visible only through a projection attuned to the performativities of movement.

When one wants to see a panorama of a series of bridge crossings, to create an imaginary observation point, one has to perform a magic trick similar to Euler’s: flatten time into its surface-plaits and pretend for the sake of the panorama that the entire projection is somehow a purely spatial, topological phenomenon. This means that any and all visualisations of network space produce a summing-up, an un-folding to some extent, of what is a purely relational performance of attachments. As long as it is remembered that what is seen is the effect of a trick of projection, one is safe. However, when pushed to a ludicrous extreme this effect gives birth to illusions of panopticon and total convergence, and allows mistaking a rare effect of relationality – the appearance of an always local referential frame, for a main feature of the projection.

Therefore mapping networks has to be thought as the inscription of movement qua transformation. The reification of presence and absence, which the cartography of unveiling first takes for granted, and then sees as the emanation of a new form of control, is in fact the effect of the process consciously undertaken by Euler, to trace a particular movement, to perform it spatially in a cascade of surfaces. Why this spatial performance of temporality? Without it one is blind to transportation and transformation. If you want to see the crossing of multiple bridges at once, you have to transform them from stone, water and humans into dots and lines, and then transport them into a room on a sheet of paper where you can finally see them all. This process of summing up however has to be understood as such, and never mistaken for an emanation of homogenous instrumental logic.

When Michel Serres humorously refers to air travel by quipping ‘my address is A340; DJ298; 14F’ (Serres, 1995: 64) he alludes precisely to this process. Passengers in airplanes are a good example of the relational and performative nature of spaces and charts; again, the key to a map is in movement. A transportation lasting only a couple of hours and virtually no trials, will take days and a multitude of trials if undergone on foot, outside of the networks of circulation whose tiny interfaces produce addresses such as 14F. Therefore the question of importance concerns the logistics permitting circulation without transformation (Latour, 1987: 237). At no point should one take immutability and homogeneity for an always-existing granted framework. Once we direct our studies in this direction we see actors, intermediaries and events which otherwise would always already be hidden from us.

When we compare an airplane passenger and an intrepid explorer using her own two feet to cross the same distance, we are not comparing two subjective perspectives of time-space, and neither are we comparing two objective displacements through time-space. Instead, the difference is between the amount and intensity of other members of the assembly involved in the displacement. In the case of the airplane passenger those others are stable and invisible intermediaries involved in a constant offsetting of the transformation that is being generated by the displacement – that is why the passenger located at 14F is steeped in the boring and uneventful time of airline food, the murmur of the couple in the row behind and the distant buzzing sound of the engines. Not so the intrepid explorer whose every step is a trial defined by mediators with their own terms.

If we start tracing and mapping what allows and upholds the uneventful trip of passenger 14F, we will discover international agreements, standards, time zones, bureaucracies, humongous technical assemblages, corporations, oil rigs, refineries, ships, little humans with flags running on the tarmac of airports, infrastructures, radio towers and so on and so forth. These are the long and perilous logistical chains from the army example used earlier.

The smooth ride of passenger 14F gives the illusion of time and space that are fixed and container-like, and from this flows out the perspective in which mapping functions as either a simple measurement of homogeneity, or as its radical detournement. Meanwhile, the travails of the intrepid explorer, her constant negotiation with mediators, leave the taste of a lived time and populated colourful local space – in rapid contrast to poor 14F who can only think of herself as an individuality diminished to a mere number. If these conclusions were someone’s starting point, then instruments, clocks, and maps start looking like unnecessary additions to, or hegemonic extractions from, an already fully-formed and lived time and fully immanent space. Yes, the airplane passenger is steeped in sameness, while the explorer has to deal with nothing but difference, yet those are caused by the qualitative and quantitative relations between intermediaries and mediators. It is entities acting as mediators that make the space-time homogenous or not, and it is them that our mapping has to trace and annotate.

Only a mapping tactic that opens its eyes for the intensities performed by heterogeneous entities, neither subjects nor objects, will be capable of displaying the full spectrum of logistics upholding an otherwise impossibly ephemeral homogeneity. How to approach mapping through complexity, uncertainty, and flux while retaining the capacity to trace, annotate, and know? More importantly, how to approach it without haste?

The thread of Daedalus

Perhaps the most legendary map ever made, in both senses of the word, was the one given by the mythical master-craftsman Daedalus to Ariadne, helping the Athenian hero Theseus escape the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. When Ariadne, in love with Theseus and condemned to die in the maze, asked Daedalus, builder of the labyrinth, for help, he gave her a ball of thread. He did not give her a parchment with a plan of the labyrinth carrying a big red sign ‘and here is the EXIT’, but a simple thread. The thread is crucially a method for tracing and annotating space, both dynamically in real time, and slowly, that is taking account of every step and every turn. It opens potentialities for action and is a storage technique allowing the retracing of past movements through space. The thread is an interface for accessing space and time, transportation and transformation. Following a thread is slow, but it is the only way to track and represent spatially (and temporally) all topological shifts of the actor.

The trickery of Daedalus leads to a different conceptualisation of a map – not as a static representation of spatial power relationships, or a hegemonic extraction of difference, but as an interface for the construction of agency in space. The moment one shifts from representations of total power to the construction of local agency, the cartography of unveiling becomes absurd. As a result, however, the cartographer finds herself surrounded by actors and intermediaries she was never able to see before. The shift could be traced directly back to the two divergent spatial projections described in the beginning of the article. The thread of Daedalus leads to a performative conception of space and movement. ‘We create space in the process of travelling through it and in creating narratives of journeys we simultaneously construct knowledge’ (Turnbull, 2002: 133).

From knowing space to spacing knowledge

Such a performative understanding of spatiality is not limited to the locative media projects described below, and has indeed been observed by anthropologists in recent discussions of indigenous wayfinding (Ingold, 2000; Turnbull, 1991, 2000). Being in the world entails movement, and movement entails knowing and performing the surrounding spatiality:

In wayfinding people do not traverse the surface of a world whose layout is fixed in advance (…) Rather they “feel their way” through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-human agencies. I develop a notion of mapping as the narrative re-enactment of journeys made, and of maps as the inscriptions to which such reenactments may give rise (Ingold, 2000: 155).

The performative approach to space appears first as the granting of powers of spatial enactment to entities, and second as the readiness to perceive the multiple forms of spatiality emanating from the formation and circulation of objects. In other words, first one needs to have a projection allowing entities to perform spaces, and second to be able to trace the movements of entities through various spatialities. Admittedly, while some relations would be well understood within the confines of Euclidean space, and others within the confines of network space, still others would be visible only through the juxtaposition of various spatial projections (Law, 1999: 3). As John Law argues, the process of performing an entity appears to be also the process of performing its spatial protocol of movement – what he terms as ‘spatial conditions of im/possibility’ (Law, 2002: 92). These conditions concern the formatting of movement in space, the protocol of im/possible shifts that an entity can perform in the process of its spatial travails.[15]

One can no more know in places than travel in them. Rather knowledge is regional: it is to be cultivated by moving along paths that lead around, towards or away from places, from or to places elsewhere (…) all knowledge systems including science are integrated laterally rather than vertically (…) we know as we go, from place to place (Ingold, 2000: 229).

Therefore, and this is an important element of the argument, movement is the component allowing to register the variation between transportation and transformation, while simultaneously performing the entire texture, or setting, of displacement. This simultaneity could be thought of as the cause permitting the double move of tracing and annotation.[16] When we move, we perform the surrounding spatiality, that is, we annotate the space with a performative presence, while simultaneously the spatiality performs us, by constraining and channelling our movements and assembling potentialities of attachments, thus allowing a tracing and subsequently knowing. Knowing, and mapping is after all an interface to spatial knowledge, is therefore deeply attached to moving through space, to spacing.[17]

For example, the Ongee tribe from the Andaman Islands bases its entire navigation skills and spatial knowledge on performative movement rather than fixed locations (Pandya, 1990: 793). The topography of their territory does not exist for them as an a priori context waiting to be explored, traced and annotated, a total referential frame to which they can relate, but literally emerges through the practice of movement. Their maps are

not of places in space but of movements in space. Movements from one locality to another and the sequence in which movements are accomplished become direct representations of changes in places in a space. For the Ongee, movement alone defines and constructs space: space does not define and construct movement (Turnbull, 2002: 136).

In other words, similarly to one of the two spatial projections described at the beginning, they see space as a performative effect of the relations between entities. Furthermore, a spatial projection capable of detecting the intensities produced through movement would not make an a priori ontological difference between the networks of command and control supporting global corporations and the complex travails of indigenous fishermen. Similar to the scenario of the airplane passenger and the jungle explorer, the difference between control networks and Ongee fishermen is not one of pure concentrated domination versus pure autonomy, but one of ratios of transformation to transportation, immutability to displacement. Networks of command and control are much more stable than the networks of the Ongee not because of some inherent instrumental logic, but because they enrol an immensely larger number of immutable mobilities, the cost of whose circulation in turn is offset by yet other performative relations.

Mapping as attaching

Therefore the essential starting point of a cartography of attachments is that ‘if space is performative, it has a history, and if knowledge is performative it is spatial’ (Turnbull, 2002: 137).[18] This approach, although it relies on the tracing and performing of multiple attachments, does not preclude the emergence of a general picture, a “big map”, but reaches it through as many heterogeneous paths as possible. In performing and imagining different spatial settings, ‘it allows far more differences to be explained than when a single meta-narrative is applied after studying just one of them’ (Martin, 2005: 299).

The cartography of attachments would see maps as inscriptions on space, as extensions and stratifications of space (Tuters, 2005). This realization applies especially to the technique of the grid: for the cartography of unveiling the grid is a hegemonic extraction of instrumental logic out of lived space, it is the symbol of domination; for the cartography of attachments, however, the grid is simply an architectural convention, a negotiation, an agreement.[19]

In order to bring the distant and the large to your table top you need perspective geometry, reproducible and combinable representations, a grid and the agreement of your fellows (Turnbull, 1989: 26).

The grid does not mark the frame along which the individual moves, and neither is it an interface for referential relations of power and domination: it is simply ‘the interface between two forms of circulation’ (Latour and Hermant, 2006). That is, it is the interface between at least two different spatial performativities. Yes, it simplifies, but that is also why it allows augmenting and performing spatialities we could not imagine before.[20]

The complexity of this projection brings the realization that rather than fighting an illusionary “imperial grid” new media cartographies need to rapidly multiply interfaces for accessing and tracing performativity, they need matrices for accessing spatial semantics.[21] ‘What there is high up there, underneath and everywhere are intensities looking for expression’ (Rolnik, 2005).

In the context of convergence, and new media approaches leading towards or away from it, one could argue that for a projection capable of tracing the logistics of spatial performativity, convergence would always constitute a rare effect rather than a predetermined Omega point or a stable equilibrium. Nothing, of course, prevents new media projects from deriving a total image of a performative topos; it is still useful after all, to see a setting from all sides, but it should by now have become obvious that this is an effect achieved because ‘we are inside a room in which the illusion is mastered, and not outside’ (Latour and Hermant, 2006). In other words, if a map is total, it is because it is very local. If it unveils, it should be understood that it unveils very little, if it discovers a context, this context is very small and circulating along paths one needs to trace. Tracing the modalities of an entity allows establishing the logistics behind a setting, that is, not only its locale, and not only who or what belongs, but how the entire assembly changes in time, what transformations does it undergo under trials during movement.

If the cartography of attachments approaches performative space through a particular prism, it is as an interface. Maps then would not be viewed as representations of space, but as ways to open an interface – just as Daedalus’ thread opened up the labyrinth for Theseus. This projection allows realising that homogeneity is so rare, so expensive, and so hard to stabilise, that it needs to be explained.

If it is no longer a question of opposing attachment and detachment, but instead of good and poor attachments, then there is only one way of deciding the quality of these ties: to inquire of what they consist, what they do, how one is affected by them (Latour, 1999).

In fact, taking spatial homogeneity for granted would in most cases amount to blinding oneself to all the difference percolating and performing the topos.[22] Annotating and tracing simultaneously, the cartography of attachments allows thinking space and time, knowledge and the body, as one continuous percolation.[23]

every room has an accessible history
every place has emotional attachments you can open and save
you can search for sadness in New York (Russell, 2003)

One example of what this article means by cartography of attachments is provided by the work of Dutch location-media artist Esther Polak. In her Amsterdam Realtime (AR) mapping project several inhabitants of Amsterdam carried PDA’s (personal digital assistants) with an embedded GPS (global positioning system) receiver that traced their movement in the city in real time over a number of weeks.[24] Their movement literally aggregated and performed the city in real time, or in other words, provided a glimpse at just how different a spatiality Amsterdam presents to a taxi driver and a student. AR also demonstrates how a network extends surfaces into time; it allows time and movement to become a series of surface traces in an ever-expanding present of cohabitation. It shows maps as interfaces between knowledge and experience (van Weelden, 2006: 26), memory and potentiality.

The MILK project, a collaboration between Esther Polak and Latvian artist Ieva Auzina, used GPS to trace the actors involved in the production, transportation, and distribution of cheese.[25] The main actor, cheese, undergoes a series of transformations in its movement from grass, to milk, to cheese, and MILK manages to account for all of them. From a Latvian farm, to a local factory, a truck on a long road, a Dutch cheese warehouse, an Utrecht market, and finally the plate of a particular human, the spatiality is performed through movement and transformation on the part of all participants. Instead of the invisible space of flows of global capitalism, we have the fragile journey of milk in which cheese is the main actor and every human is an intermediary. There is no social, technical or natural space here; there is only the circulation of actors and attachments which the project traces, while never losing sight of the intermediaries and mediators performing this ephemeral yet stable spatiality.

The action in this cartographic exercise is brought in by the intermediaries. Remove the intermediaries and one ends up with a Borges map.[26] Trace what mediates, who attaches and how many intermediaries there are, and the resulting map becomes a mediator for the construction of agency in space.

Another example of mapping the performance of spatiality is provided by the Real Time Rome (RTR) project created by the MIT SENSEable City Lab as a contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale.[27] The project aggregated data from cell phones, buses and taxis in Rome to trace dynamically and in real time the intensity and rhizomatic topology of human locatedness in the city. The essence of RTR is movement characterized by the visibility of the intensities of transformation and displacement.

The more network mapping tells us about connectivity, the more we find we are actually studying versions of metadata. Network mapping tells us that connectivity is not virtual at all (van Weelden, 2006: 29).

Approaching spatiality as a performative process also allows tracing topologies of desire and affect. For example, Christian Nold’s Biomap project performs topology as an emotional plait. It consists of a tool recording the Galvanic Skin Response (a handheld indicator of emotional arousal) and the GPS location of the person wearing it.[28] This allows charting a map of individual and collective emotions and desires in space. Biomap shows that space is always also performed as affect. It demonstrates that ‘a map is not a copy of a space but a way of opening up space through information’ (van Weelden, 2006: 28), it is a way to add potentialities to space (Figures 4-6).

Figure 4. The Biomapping devices - a Galvanic Skin Response detector and a GPS receiver (image by Christian Nold)

Figure 5. An emotion map in Greenwich; 'Argument with Mum' performs an otherwise banal t-section into an emotional centre of the walk (image by Christian Nold)

Figure 6. Another Greenwich emotion map - this time a busy traffic crossing provides the intensity of the "lived" experience (image by Christian Nold)

Another observation suggested by the Ongee fishermen example is that perhaps we in the West have grown accustomed for too long to read space as a grid of latitudes and longitudes, while forgetting how this compromise came to being, and why.[29] Critical approaches to mapping have tirelessly searched for a lived, performative space, free from the homogeneity and domination of Cartesian projections, while simultaneously forgetting that the topoi surrounding us have never stopped being lived and performative. There is no dialectic of instrumental flows and lived places – just circulations of attachments, all the way up and down, opening potentialities in spatial interfaces. The cartography of attachments shows spaces as negotiated alliances around which rules of cohabitation spring up; it creates an image

whose aesthetics can be said to rely upon a range of characteristics ranging from the quotidian to the weighty semantics of lived experience, all latent within the ground upon which we traverse (Bleecker and Knowlton, 2006).

Unlike state maps, annotated with “official” points of interest, or unveiling maps upholding a dialectic of domination and oppression, these immersive maps permit users to inscribe space on their own. The focus of this cartography is the production of space; in it maps are inscriptions on, extensions and stratifications of space. They are preoccupied with the tracing of associations of attachments, and therefore the more centred they are on the individual actor as a “producer of space” the better.[30]

Conclusion

It is the “producers of space”, or “knowing locations” as John Law terms them, already long ago declared lost in networks of flows and timeless time, which locative media is preoccupied in finding. True, ultimately, that is the goal of counter-cartography as well. However, as I argued, what differentiates the two practices and justifies the dichotomous relationship between mapping as unveiling and mapping as attaching are the spatial projections within which they operate. The positing of a homogeneous and a priori spatiality obfuscates the entire field of attachments, which conspire to produce the effect of homogeneity. This article hoped to demonstrate that the cartography resulting from such a projection has all the characteristics of a panorama, which displays everything and yet sees nothing.

Furthermore, by juxtaposing two spatial projections and the mapping approaches they effect, this article does not suggest that counter-cartography is not critical enough and in need of an even more autonomous “new critique”. On the contrary, it argued that the problem originates with the spatial projection that sees only totalities in need of unmasking, rather than effects in need of tracing and explaining. It was argued that this stance is a priori incapable of perceiving that homogeneity and domination are not a context out of which the individual in search of autonomy has to extricate herself, but, to the contrary, are a rare and ephemeral effect of an aggregate that has to be constantly upheld.

The most serious problem with this projection is that – while reifying presence and absence – it makes it impossible to see, trace, and understand how spacings are produced, how difference emerges and recombines itself in the networks of circulation we have been always building. While taking rare effects as always present givens, it blinds itself to the enormous heterogeneity of the world outside. When it encounters global networks of command and control, it would always find it hard to explain the cost of exercising stability and would instead take them for granted features of the landscape to be traced and eventually resisted. After all, if connectivity and convergence are taken as an a priori state then stability is a one-off expense.

Indeed, the haste to which the opening quote alludes has nothing to do with speed, or time and similar banal associations, and everything to do with the iconoclastic impulse impatient for purity from attachments, which makes itself blind to the richness and complexity of the world, so as to be able to perceive everywhere only the caricature dichotomy of autonomy and domination.

The cartography of attachments in turn was found to display very little but to see it well, because it allows tracing the logistics of performativity, that is, the series of spacings involved in any given space. When tracing attachments one never encounters the subject or the thing alone; the thing, the slab of cheese, is always attached to humans, and so in an endless chain. It is my contention that new media cartographies can only hope to unlock the enormous complexity of network topologies if they literally repopulate their maps with the rich performativities of subjects never detached from things. Counter-cartographies can be successful, as I hoped to show, only when they stop mistaking the effects for already-present contexts and instead concentrate on tracing how, through what transformations, detours, assemblies, and alliances are those effects produced. Or, in the words of Bruno Latour: ‘the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles’ (Latour, 2004b: 246).

Author’s Biography

Teodor Mitew is finishing a Doctoral Degree in Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth. His thesis analyses network politics from the perspective of actor network theory and the work of Michel Serres. He is also a trained historian with a Masters degree from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests lie in philosophy of technology, science studies, history of ideas, and pragmatist philosophy.

Notes

[1] A general term denoting mapping projects from locative media to Brian Holmes’ ‘counter-cartographies’ (Holmes, 2006a).
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[2] As is to some extent suggested by Albert-László Barabási’s network theory. See his Linked: The New Science of Networks (2002).
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[3] This is also the reason why surveillance has become such a thorny issue for locative media practices.
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[4] As the political philosopher and new media theorist Noortje Marres observes with regards to network mapping: ‘the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low’ (Marres, 2003: 54).
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[5] The importance of the logistics of performativity for understanding network assemblages has also been suggested by the work of geographer Nigel Thrift (1996; 1999; 2006), and urban sociologist Mimi Sheller (2001; 2004) among others.
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[6] http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html
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[7] http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php
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[8] As philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has argued, the belief in a total and homogenous spatiality (or power, with a capital letter) always transforms the rhizomes and networks into trees.

[Each] branch is “explained” by its relation to another branch, one closer to the trunk, and, indeed to the roots, that is, to the site – occupied by a “logic” if not by actors – from which all the rest can be denounced as puppets, acted on beyond their intention and their plans (Stengers, 2000: 123).

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[9] The argument between locative media and critical cartography has been raging for some time, with theorists from the latter camp accusing locative media projects of nothing short of a “sell-out”. According to Mark Tuters and Kazys Varnelis, locative media projects generally fall under one of two mapping practices, ‘either annotative – virtually tagging the world – or phenomenological – tracing the action of the subject in the world’ (Tuters and Varnelis, 2006). I would suggest, however, that annotation and tracing amount to two sides of the same move.
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[10] Richard Rogers is one of the founders of the Govcom foundation (http://govcom.org/), creators of the Issuecrawler web-mapping software (http://www.issuecrawler.net/). The Issuecrawler is a link-analysis tool, which visualizes the entities performing a particular issue online.
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[11] Perhaps the desire for a total autonomy from all attachments perversely results in imagining a total enemy against whom one can take a symmetrically total position?
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[12] Heidegger’s dream of a thing (as opposed to objects) pure from the instrumental logic, supposedly pervading human technics (Heidegger, 1967; 1977).
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[13] The problematic of stability through transportation is perhaps best captured in the concept of ‘immutable mobiles’ developed by Latour in his groundbreaking work Science in Action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (1987).
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[14] The seven bridges of Königsberg (then in Prussia, now Kaliningrad in Russia) connected two islands and the banks of the river flowing through the city. A popular pastime of the citizens was to find a route crossing all bridges exactly once. What started as a pastime became a famous mathematical problem only solved by Leonhard Euler in 1736, when he proved that such a route is mathematically impossible. His solution to the problem gave birth to graph theory and topology (and therefore the very concept of a network consisting of nodes and edges). Out of the infinite amount of spatialities performed by the citizens of Königsberg Euler focused only on the act of crossing a bridge, thus re-presenting the burghers’ morning walk as a linked series of nodes and edges.
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[15] In the sense that, while an entity such as a car or a corporation remains stable in the network space of its internal relational composition, it simultaneously is mobile in another performed space (i.e. Euclidean). The ‘conditions of im/possibility’ to which Law refers, are in this case the result of relations between the spatialities occupied by an entity.
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[16] This argument also applies to the illusionary dichotomy between mapping and being mapped. If knowledge entails movement then tracing (that is – mapping), and annotation (that is – leaving traces to be mapped), are the same manoeuvre viewed from two opposite angles. They both constitute Daedalus’ thread. This is not to exorcise the daemons of so called cartography of power, but to point out an entirely different way of understanding and performing spatiality.
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[17] A similar understanding of performative spatiality has been developed in the work of architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. They develop the concept of a ‘landing site’ that simultaneously is performed by and performs the body (Arakawa and Gins, 1994, 1997). They argue that the body cannot be thought outside of its performative world, and a landing site ‘expresses the field of action connecting the body with space’ (1994: 14).
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[18] Philosopher Adrian Cussins uses the notion of “cognitive trails” to express this spatiality of knowledge (Cussins, 1992). A cognitive trail is a technique to avoid the tired epistemological bifurcation into things and words; it is a ‘travelling account of understanding and representation that does not opt for an epistemological grounding in either of the two standard alternatives, thought or experience’ (Cussins, 1992: 654).
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[19] The spatial aspect of knowledge can be illustrated through the mnemotechnical invention of Simonides of Ceos, also known as Ars Memoriae (Kittler, 2002). It consists of imaginary locations (loci) tied to a particular memory. The act of remembering performs an architecture in order to retrieve a knowledge.
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[20] The concept of ‘augmented space’ originates with Lev Manovich, who argues that information networks allow the transformation of physical space into a dataspace ‘extracting data from it (surveillance) or augmenting it with data (cellspace, computer displays). (…) Thus augmented space is also monitored space’ (Manovich, 2002). The cartography of attachments however would riposte that performative space has always already been dataspace (and thus monitored, annotated, traced, etc), and information networks finally allow us to see the traces of performativity better than ever before.
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[21] McCullough calls this agenda a ‘situated semantics’ (McCullough, 2006), a piling up of annotated layers of space one upon another, thus both enriching performativity and allowing for better tracing of intensities.
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[22] As in the Interestmap social network mapping software, whose creators quickly discovered that mapping “persons” gives much richer results than mapping “users” (Liu and Maes, 2005). Another example comes from the location-based game Uncle Roy All Around You, which combines street and online players while using an actual city as a canvas-in-performance (Benford et al., 2006).
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[23] Or as the makers of another location-based game – Asphalt Games insist, ‘hybrid games such as ours acknowledge that spatial knowledge becomes social, and the social can become spatial’ (Chang and Goodman, 2006).
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[24] http://realtime.waag.org
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[25] http://milkproject.net/. MILK won the 2005 Golden Nica award at the Ars Electronica exhibition, and was also exhibited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel in their Making Things Public exhibition at ZKM (2005).
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[26] Borges famously mocked the concept of mapping as representing space in his short story On Exactitude in Science (1975), describing an imaginary country whose scientists produced a map of its territory on a scale of 1:1. Naturally – since the map was such a precise representation that it actually was the territory – the citizens quickly realised that they might as well just follow the territory and ignore the map. Borges’ point was that a map is never a representation of but a key to a topos.
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[27] http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/
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[28] http://biomapping.net/
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[29] On the epic, almost mythical, struggle to establish a stable technique of finding one’s relative position away from known locales, see John Law’s magisterial exploration of early European navigation (1987, 2001).
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[30] In this context it seems somehow off the mark to critique locative media for their implications for privacy and surveillance, from a position based in a projection unable to trace those same moves, let alone lend itself to the risk of surveillance misuse. It is akin to first making oneself blind to the logistics of networks, and then reproaching locative media for being able to see and trace those logistics. Perhaps if locative media maps seem ambiguous and outside of the sterile autonomy domination loop, it is because the traces to be mapped are themselves ambiguous?
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Preface: Ubiquity

Ubiquity is a key principle of ’2.0′, that bundle of technologies, plans, possibilities, industries, codes and practices, architectures, fictions, and factions offered up as a definition of a post-cyberspace (SooJung-Kim Pang, 2007) world. This is information technologies’ second life, sometimes given to us as ‘a whole [new] way of life’, to adapt Raymond Williams’ famous definition of culture (1958/1993), so that it becomes far more than an industrial logic. And ’2.0′ and ubiquity go together in another way too: The model is everywhere. Writing this paper, for example, I am referring to technical accounts of Web 2.0 and to various specific cultural analyses (see below), but I am also surfing a poster proclaiming a ‘politics 2.0′ and We the Media (Gilmoor, 2004) is open on my desk, inviting consideration of user generated content (UGC) and other actually existing forms of collaborative media production. Simultaneously on-screen I am accessing postings by tactical medium theorists discussing their response to ’2.0′ (e.g. Lovink) and am also accessing a set of stormy debates on a British list about whether media studies should be abandoned for an all-new ’2.0 version’ (see the MeCCSA list).[1] I am also reading Charles Stross’s Accelerando, a Science Fiction 2.0 exploring what happens to society when Hans Moravec’s uploaded mind children, here configured as the entertainingly Vile Offspring, clash with more or less embodied-humans within the grounds of a universalised Economy ’2.0′ (Stross, 2005). Stross’s work is easily read as a fictional/dystopian extrapolation of principles explored in Yochai Benkler’s Coase’s Penguin (Benkler, 2002), itself only one of many popular and business studies based treatises considering real-earth ’2.0′ information economies. Rheingold’s Smart Mobs (2003), a defining account of connected and pervasive computing, is there too, although retrospectively – and it is now submerged by the slightly later plethora of 2.0-ness. Here is evidence – dispersed, unofficial, partial, chaotic, self-interested, but also apparently compelling, inescapable, pervasive, ubiquitous, of a changing order of information; both a new technical configuration and a change in informational culture.

This paper sets out firstly to explore the relationship between the ’2.0′ and the artefacts, architectures, and use cultures gathered under its banner. ’2.0′ is explored as a model with descriptive and performative powers; a model that operates with some force, tending to occlude certain characteristics of contemporary techno-cultural forms and practices whilst foregrounding others, and tending also to produce a particular assessment of past and future convergence trajectories (what is to be corrected, what is to be realized). In the later sections of the paper, other ways of mapping contemporary convergence are explored. Some of these are finally pulled together to form a series of axes of convergence; not offered as a complete model, but as a series of connected lines of inquiry.

Introduction: New Models for Old?

2:0-ness is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform…’ (Tom O’Reilly, 2005, my emphasis)

It has refreshed the tarnished visions of the information revolution, but what is new about the 2.0 model, and what connects it to informational models widely influential in the last century – including early convergence models such as the one developed by Negroponte at MIT in the late 1980s? Is the difference ubiquity itself? Within the highly converged/highly pervasive environments that ’2.0′ maps, are there still meaningful distinctions to be made between cultural and technological/industrial models of ICTs, or have these simply broken down? Certainly ’2.0”s broad (territorializing) ambitions seem to resonate with events on the ground. For instance, in an age when technical/industrial modellers are set on mapping the ‘cultural’ uses of the internet ‘scientifically’ (e.g. through semantic mapping) and industrially (with the aim of exploiting the labour of consumption), what are the terrains of a specifically cultural mapping of contemporary techno-cultural developments, and what chances are there that it can produce a genuinely alternative understanding of the general dynamics of the emerging global information and communicational system? More, what might this cultural mapping need to look like, what would it include, at what scale would it operate, and what might it occlude? In sum, given the energetic way that ’2.0′ has been applied, given the contexts within which it has arisen, and in the particular, given the way that it has been made to do cultural, social, and political, as well as industrial work, is this one model that really does fit all?

’2.0′ is understood by Tom O’Reilly, who framed the term, as a technical and business corrective to the shortcomings of the early Internet. It points to ways that new and emerging technologies can be exploited in the ‘right’ way to provide for the web ‘a fuller realization of [its] true potential’ (O’Reilly, 2005). The interplay between the 2.0 model (and its performative force) and the technologies it describes is explored further below, but of course there were also earlier models, themselves inter-twined in complex ways with the terrains they mapped. The first of these is more narrowly industrial/technical: In the 1990s, the Internet was contextualized within a series of accounts of technological convergence developed from the 1970s (see de Sola Pool for instance), most famously articulated by Nicholas Negroponte as a set of ‘teething rings’ (see Brand, 1987:10). This model became a standard way of thinking about convergence and is thus one of the models that ’2.0′ re-thinks – doing so both in relation to new formations on the ground (in other words convergence has not developed as expected) and in relation to its core pre-suppositions. One key difference is this: Negroponte’s model mapped the actual and predicted coming together of industries and objects/apparatus/content (e.g. telecoms and telephones, Hollywood and content), ’2.0′, by contrast diagnoses/projects/demands a particular relationship between forms of practice and forms of architecture. ’2.0′, in other words, is based on an understanding of the dynamics of the system (the new media ecology) in use. Taking this distinction or ‘correction’ as a key starting point, the cultural stakes of ’2.0′ can be opened up through an examination both of the model itself and through a consideration of how the model maps the dynamics of some of the modes of participation new media networks afford – and this does not imply a narrow focus on use practices by established users, which would amount to mapping user activity back onto audience activity, but an exploration of the participatory dynamics of the media system, as a whole. This technically, industrially, and market-driven system, needs to be explored critically and in relation to questions of social power to be viewed in its fullest extent, and that requires consideration of questions of culture, once again taken as ‘a whole way of life’. Not only industrial but also technical models are myopic if they do not do this. Unsurprisingly – but this is surprisingly often ignored – culture is an obligatory passage point in exploring techno-cultural formations.

The question of participation may not have been fore-grounded in Nicholas Negroponte’s convergence rings but it was important to many cultural theorists exploring techno-cultures in the ‘cyberspace’ years of the 1980s (where the locus was largely imaginary) and in the 1990s (within early net culture). In particular, Fredric Jameson’s influential analysis of informational culture and late modernism provides another starting point from which to consider today’s models and what they set out to fulfil or correct (Jameson, 1984/1991). The question of what kind(s) of ‘corrective’ might now be applied to Jameson’s original analysis of informational culture, or whether Jameson’s cultural logics can in turn provide a ‘corrective’ to contemporary mappings, is also taken up in this paper.

A consideration of Negroponte and Jameson’s work on information thus here frames an exploration of ’2.0′ as a 21st century model of convergence. Of course ’2.0′ is not the only contemporary model of developments in ICTs emerging post what we might call convergence 1.0. Of particular note here, Henry Jenkins has recently elaborated an influential take on convergence culture from the perspective of (a particular variant of) cultural studies (Jenkins, 2004, 2006). This paper thus engages with four models: with Negroponte and Jameson’s two early mappings, with ’2.0′ as a technical and business model, and with Henry Jenkins’ account of the ‘cultural logics’ of convergence culture. The latter is interesting because it sets out to redress both 2.0′s perceived neglect of culture and to critique cultural studies’ recalcitrant insistence (at least in some quarters) on retaining its engagement with questions of ideology. That is Jenkins’ sets out to ‘correct’ Jameson (and his view of cultural studies) as much as he wants to correct ’2.0′ (for its narrow technical focus). Being one of the recalcitrant myself I wish to engage with, but also to diverge from, Jenkins’ account and to develop an alternative reading of informational culture.

The immediately following sections of the paper look briefly at these models, both as they stand alone, and in relation to each other. In the final sections of the paper I propose a new correction. I explore contemporary convergence processes through six axes, each of which focuses on different modes of participation. The intention is to expose a dynamic of expansion/contraction, common to many notions of convergence, implicit in the dialectic of information as control and freedom, and embedded in arguments around activity and recuperation, which is configured in each of the axes explored. In particular I focus on contractions in the system, defining these as moments of reconciliation or alignment where meaning or significance is taken. These axes are not intended as a new model (one that terminally corrects ’2.0′) but are intended to make a ‘different’ point about ‘the differences that make a difference’ between cultural and business models of contemporary ICT networks.

My intention is to show that cultural theory’s capacity to explore questions of social judgement or cultural critique (to ask how information’s ‘potentials’ might be valued or judged in their cultural specificity) is important. I also want to suggest that the ontological approach under-pinning the latter form of inquiry does not share the teleological approach of much 2.0-speak. Put bluntly, my starting point is that there is no net out there waiting to be ‘fully realized’ once the early models have been corrected and implemented, there is only what is produced through a complex and on-going process: the materialization of a technocultural form in a particular historical context within which earlier models and future predictions also figure. This take on the ‘what will be’ says the coming shape of techno-culture cannot be understood in relation to an already existing ‘ideal’ future system to which contemporary models approximate increasingly closely (when the degree to which they do this often indicates the degree to which they are judged a success). It also changes the status and role of maps and models, when the latter are understood as interventions in the cultural imaginary, as seeking to fix the future before it has been made.

Precursors: Convergence Models and Cyberspace Cultures

‘Convergence 1.0′

In the last decades of the 20th Century a series of influential figures, amongst them Ithiel de Sola Pool (in 1983 in Technologies of Freedom), Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab (Brand, 1987), and John Sculley, CEO of Apple Computers, set out to explore/predict the coming together of a series of previously discrete forms, industries, processes, and hardware and software objects. Negroponte’s ‘teething rings’ or Venn diagram model of convergence became the best known of many models mapping convergent processes in the late 1980s and 1990s (see e.g. Yoffie et al. 1997). All described the dynamics of the integration of older media technologies into new informational/communicational forms and contents (through re-mediation or absorption) and predicted the emergence of new (converged) media technologies and contents as part of the same process. All also understood (rightly) that the converging information networks would in the near future occupy a vastly expanded terrain, penetrating far further into spheres of previously unmediated culture than the sum of their constituent parts might suggest. This general model of convergence informed many industry blueprints for future developments in the last decades of the 20th Century. Apple’s Knowledge Navigator vision, drawn up in the 1980s, is an early example of an attempt to think imaginatively about the consequences of convergence, for instance,[2] and is also a model that had a certain performative force within the PC industry, influencing the development of hardware and software projects and products – the ‘integrated application’ concept drew on it as did the Newton PDA, Apple’s early stab at what is now termed mobile and locative computing.

The computer industry explored content/controller convergence via multimedia in the mid 1990s, but the Internet sat behind early convergence models, even before its possibilities were widely understood outside relatively specialist circles. By the late 1990s the Internet was a buzzword in popular culture and convergence had become synonymous with the ‘internet explosion’. From then on the trajectory of convergence was understood to describe that process through which the emerging ‘network of networks’, gathering together the intelligence and control capabilitiesof a myriad computers, accreted to itself older media forms, yoking together their discrete contributions and activities and organizing, amplifying and corralling them into a new totality. Convergence models with networking computing placed at their centre, thus mapped out an existing ICT configuration, pointed to a proximate destination for such a system, and also pointed towards (described) a fully informational system to come.

The trajectory of this model was towards total convergence. If it was increasingly clear that the rings in the Venn diagram Negroponte drew in the late 1980s would not come to overlap completely, the inference made was often that this was due to local difficulties (specific reverse salience issues to be engineered out), bad implementation, inefficiencies in the market (where the re-introduction of distinction/difference or monopolization could block progress or where delays in deregulation/liberalization prevented its full operation). The prioritization or naturalization of the technically-given trajectory of convergence, whose ‘nature’ would be derived above all from the digital ‘substance’ of the new networks was thus used to inform a particular industrial/market direction. This produced a form of convergence between the technological and industrial within these models, so that some convergence maps current at the time elided the technological with the industrial while others skipped over the technological shift entirely, explaining convergence in terms of the fusion of the various industries (‘telecoms’, ‘computing’, print, ‘Hollywood’) that the arriving technical shift would bring about.;

In sum, convergence discourses, leaning on a sense of ontological revelation, by definition entailed a destining of the cultural and the social by the technological, a sense that convergence in one domain, the domain of the technical, would have ‘inevitable’ consequences in others. This is why convergence became something of a ‘dangerous word’ (Silverstone, 1995) for those committed to an analysis of the intersections of information technology and the social world that begins not with what is given, but with what is made between humans and their machines, techno-culturally as it were, and what might therefore be critiqued. This, however, did not mean there wasn’t a certain take-up of the convergence model, with its teleological understanding of information technology, within social scientific and humanities-based accounts of new media culture in the mid 1990s.

Informational Capitalism

A cultural mapping of information expansion, produced more or less simultaneously with the early industrial convergence models, is found in Frederic Jameson’s account of post modernism/late capitalism (Jameson, 1984, 1991), which grapples with the information society analysis developed by Daniel Bell and others in the post 1968 era. In this work Jameson set out to reveal the cultural logics of informational capitalism, engaging with the architectures, films, bodies, and with modes and forms of experience arising in a world re-built at previously unimaginable scales by information technologies. The vastness of architectural structures and technologically defined landscapes Jameson explores become key to a vision of a depthless cultural space. This space, too vast to navigate or measure, provides no place from which to launch older forms of analysis or critique, and renders older forms of ordering such as narrative ineffective. Within it the human body can no longer easily hold itself together, or indeed hold itself apart from what might previously have been presumed to be distinct from it – nature, non-human objects, the organic and in-organic bleed into each other (the allusions to Haraway and Deleuze, pre-dating later cyber-theory where they are widely taken up, are evident here). This account of forces at play in late capital at once stresses the centrifugal and centripetal. If much – community, narrative patterning, the individual’s sense of the self as a unified self, for instance – is forced apart, much is also brought into the same plane through information’s capacity to dematerialize/re-materialize. More, the logics of the disintegration/integration explored in relation to culture and experience are here bound up into a wider dynamic. Jameson argues that late modernism produces a culture that shows itself to us as purely technological but that remains informed by another logic. As he puts it:

[O]ur faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something deeper, namely the whole world system of present day multinational capitalism…(Jameson, 1984: 79)

It is through seeking to understand the cultural forms that this contradiction produces and articulates, that Jameson concludes that cultural logics of the coming information society are characterized by ‘schizophrenia’ – a fragmentation of the self and of language, and by a dis-orientation. The latter is both critical, in the sense that traditional forms of critique are stymied, and ‘real’ in the sense that it is configured in, and materialized through, the forms of material culture (the informational technologies hard and soft, in buildings and on screens, in fictions and experiences) these dynamics produce.

In response to this dis-orientating new world, which articulated its own disguise, Jameson’s call was for exploration: New forms of cognitive mapping and sensory re-orientation capable of rendering this new world known, needed to be developed, he said. Elsewhere Jameson explored a series of tools of figures that might begin to do this. His exploration of ‘dirty realism’, a figure describing the forms of sensory life and action possible within the landscapes produced by highly informated capital, in terms of intensity and by way of an exploration of circuits of appropriation/re-appropriation, is one example of this (see Jameson, 1994; Bassett, 2007b).

Jameson’s and Negroponte’s models of the cyberspace age, strikingly divergent in register, nonetheless map the same period, providing more or less direct contexts for the claims for ‘realization’ or ‘correction’ made by those now developing ’2.0′ as an industrial model and for those exploring the cultural stakes of contemporary information networks. They may also pre-figure a naturalized set of alignments that become evident in later accounts since centripetal moments of the convergence process are stressed in the technological/industrial account, and centrifugal moments (moments of dissolution or fragmentation) are emphasized in the cultural analysis (although in Jameson’s case this is clearly by no means all that is explored). This emphasis, common in models of convergence at the time (and oddly enough found also in many ‘weak’ accounts of social construction), exposes a presumed division between culture and technology that might be questioned rather than accepted – and in this paper my intention is to disrupt the naturalized vision that says cultural perspectives (cultural theories) on information and society focus on the gaps and the spaces (the increasingly rare moments when the lifeworld disrupts the system or irrupts into it) while technologically/industry led perspectives explore the ways in which information technology increasingly joins itself up.

After ‘Convergence’

’2.0′ as Post-Cyberspace Manifesto

If Negroponte’s teething rings modelled convergence and the rise of ICTs in last decades of the 20th Century, Web 2.0 sets out to describe and predict development trajectories for contemporary forms of new media and, as noted above, it is intended to describe ways to realize what the earlier project left incomplete. The term itself was formulated by Tim O’Reilly, a net publisher and industry insider with a long track record of engagement in the cultural politics of the new media (via the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for instance). He defined ’2.0′ as a set of ‘design patterns and business models for the next generation of software’ (O’Reilly, 2005),and offered up it up as a normative and descriptive model for the development of new tools, products and ICT architectures (Berry, 2007). Developers present at the launch event were invited both to take up ’2.0′ as a challenge for future development and to start writing to its standards.

The affordances, architectures, protocols, tools, services, and products that make up ’2.0′ thus both map a new landscape and produce a new model for the evolution of ICTs. In particular ’2.0′ de-prioritizes the question of (degrees of) device convergence which was a central issue in the earlier industrial models such as Negroponte’s, although traces of this concern are still evident (for instance in debates around the relative merits/industrial strengths of phones over pods as base platforms). Instead ’2.0′ focuses on architectures and tools enabling new or more advanced forms of participation, naming them as key elements in contemporary ICT networks. And, it explores participation itself as the motive force that may enable the real and/or final fulfilment of these networks. The ’2.0′ list thus includes software architectures enabling new and extended forms of collaborative production, new forms of interaction and social networking, new forms and extensions of code sharing, and new forms of content handling, across platforms.

The technologies offered up as ’2.0-inspirational’ in O’Reilly’s list are overwhelmingly those allowing users and producers to navigate, map, make sense of, and contribute to an expanding information ecology in smoother, smarter, and more dynamic and engaged ways (e.g. RFID, tagging, Wiki, Google), or to interact with each other more ‘smartly’ through informated social networks (e.g. Facebook). This list thus recognizes the centrality of user activity to the well-being of (social capitalization of) the network as a whole, and understands this activity as essential to the evolution of what is read as a profoundly collaborative system. These principles inform the choice of web artefacts, services and operations taken to define the new (’2.0′) over the old (blogs over homepages, folksonomy over taxonomy for instance) in a ’2.0′ in/out list proffered by O’Reilly, and since then widely adapted and extended. They are elaborated to produce, as a meta-discourse, a demand for open architectures as a general principle. ’2.0′ then can be summed up as a business manifesto demanding the sustaining of the open architectures deemed to be required for the maintenance and development of the collaborative peer production, and for the development of new tools that will enable the continued evolution of the net as a technical and business proposition; keeping it ‘live’ (non-coincidentally RSS is one of the 2.0-list technologies). Disturbance here is regarded as intrinsic to the developing architecture of the converged media system (indeed in this restricted sense the ’2.0′ model is rather more informed by first wave cybernetic principals than the earlier model) and the future well-being of the system is contingent on enabling a continued process of interplay between the extended uses the system enables and the exploitation of what is produced or adapted through use; new code, new objects, new practices, new standards, new architectures.

’2.0′, as a model, is in sympathy with contemporary network dynamics. It is also the case that modelling this kind of activity within Negroponte’s original rings would be almost impossible, not because the rings model was entirely static but because what grows the media system in the early model is the one-dimensional movement of technologies and industries into the central overlapping quadrants, rather than the heterogeneous forms of activity found within the field as a whole and undertaken by many kinds of actors/actants. ’2.0′ might be an effective corrective in this sense. But is it also a cultural model? Certainly it immediately skipped registers. Spreading from its industrial base it has been widely deployed within cultural analyses – the ’2.0-theoretical’ adoptions come thick and fast. Four reasons for the allure of ’2.0′ as a cultural model are briefly set out below. I raise them as provocations:

(i) Processes of the informatization of the lifeworld, to which ICTs are integral, are (continuing) to re-draw boundaries between what have traditionally been understood as the terrains of culture and technology. Jameson’s account of the information society and Negroponte’s mapping of the convergence of the key technologies underpinning a new media landscape were developed in the same time frame but operate in registers that set them far from each other. It was often with real difficulty that cultural theorists, digital artists and informatics professionals of the 1990s recognized that they were talking about the same sets of technologies. The possibility they may be able to use the same frameworks to do so, was remote. Today the languages, at least of computing and culture, have converged somewhat.

(ii) ’2.0′ appears to plug a real gap in media theory: Contemporary forms of convergence require a cultural studies/media studies model able to move beyond standard political economies of media (for example UGC and the recursive principle of reality TV both blur Hall’s circuit of culture model even within the restricted field of television for which he developed it). ’2.0′ is easy to deploy as a replacement media model.

(iii) The deployment outlined in (ii) is perhaps the more tempting because ’2.0′ does move beyond purely technological description/prescription and it may be concluded that on the basis of the meta-call it makes – its support for open architectures as a principle – it is far more than a technical/business model. Certainly it appears to make some ethical assessments of the technologies it maps. Viewing the ‘freedom’ to author ‘co-operatively’ to be good for (the software) business, it describes and valorizes what it understands as an architecture of freedom. This is of course a restricted claim, and within O’Reilly’s manifesto, it largely remains so. However, many later accounts of ’2.0′ presume that ’2.0′ take-up in pervasive ICT systems must also be good for other things: freedom of information, democracy, the encouragement of forms of media content that might support the production of a workable public sphere in a democracy, and/or a fifth estate, or the avoidance of entirely surveillant societies, for instance. I return to ethics briefly below but note here that the forms of use and deployment outlined above may be possible in the architectures a ’2.0′ model might enable and may well be closed down in models designed around closed systems such as the proposed ‘clean slate’ internet. On the other hand they are incidental to the central thrust of O’Reilly’s model itself – which concerns efficient software production and the conditions within which it can prosper [3]- and this in the end is how the system is judged as delivering or not.

(iv) Finally, there is the notion of technology itself as self-corrective: Jameson, as noted above, argued that new forms of navigation, new ways to speak, and new ways to share knowledge were culturally necessary to understand informational culture in the 20th century. His mapping of post-modernity thus ended with a demand for new forms of mapping. Today, the technological developments that ’2.0′ models are themselves all about mapping, modelling, navigating, about designing forms of interaction enabling participation: This ‘improved’ form of informational culture, we might say, comes with its own Sat Nav, its own on-board navigation system. In this context ’2.0′, as a model, might lay claim to descriptive neutrality – functioning as an alias or pointer to what is self-contained within the technologies it describes – rather than operating with any performative or shaping force: If code can do our mapping for us, beyond what any industrial/technical or techno-cultural text can offer us, do we need any other map?

With these – disputable – points in mind and in pursuit of cultural distinction in an age where theory itself (a form of mapping) threatens to begin to ‘converge’ with its object, I turn to Henry Jenkins’ consideration of convergence culture, the fourth model to be explored here. The virtue of this account is Jenkins’ adamant assertion that specifically cultural accounts of the new forms of information are (still) necessary and are necessary to build an understanding of the formation of the system as a whole.

Jenkins: Fandom as a general principle?

Henry Jenkins’ vision of convergence culture begins with the assertion that technological accounts of convergence are in the main accounts that are unable and unwilling to grapple with social and cultural questions (Jenkins, 2004, 2006). Jenkins argues convincingly that this produces a degree of blindness, not only to the cultural implications of ICT networks, but to the dynamics of the network as a whole. He thus recognizes that questions of privatization/open computing are crucial to the future shape of this system and stresses that its technological development trajectory (the future flowering of ’2.0-ness’, or its curtailing) will be decided on the grounds of culture and political economy. Many cultural commentators’ share this view of the importance of the outcome of contemporary intellectual property disputes for the shape of future systems, arguing that the topology of future systems will be the outcome of the tussle between backers of a system based on the advanced actualization of various forms of collective (Levy, 1994) or participatory intelligence and those who back the re-privatization of information networks through the extension of the Intellectual Property Law and its implementation in various hardware and software forms (e.g. trusted computing, clean slate style moves, ad hoc DRMs, or further legislation).

From this starting point, one which amounts to a defence of architectures enabling participation and collaboration, Jenkins extends his earlier reception and fan based explorations of audiences and users (e.g. Jenkins, 1992) and his work on television to map some of the new practices of participation across new media networks of many kinds (e.g. transmedial narratives, new forms of blogging). To these twin ends Jenkins’ account melds political economy, audience studies, and genre analysis to considerable effect,[4] and the model he develops thus lays claim to being more extensive than narrow technical versions of contemporary convergence. In addition, because it can more fully map the dynamics of ICTs and because it can explore questions such as the social significance of contemporary techno-cultural forms (e.g. transmediality) and practices (e.g. social networking), it can potentially facilitate the (re)formulation of a cultural politics/cultural policy.

My own problems with this account begin with the cultural politics it configures. Jenkins’ understanding of the dynamics of contemporary convergence culture is avowedly based on his earlier work on fandom and what is being suggested here is the generalization of the logic of fandom, now designated by Jenkins as the preferred mode of participation in convergence culture. Viewed as a mode of participation that comes of age with the development of a particular media system (a system that demands interaction), as a response to a particular form of production, and as a particular user relation, fandom is configured here both as normative and descriptive. For Jenkins’ it is this mode of engagement that is finally ‘fulfilled’ by the technologies of contemporary convergence – and it is essentially fan studies that he offers as a corrective to earlier ideological mappings of the dynamics of informatization. Fandom, that is, becomes Jenkins’ contemporary info-cultural logic. This produces (naturalizes) a particular set of demands. Firstly it requires that the open system model is broadly defended, and although this may make many kinds of sense, it does not begin and end the discussion. There remain issues about how and why and in what way and in what form it should be defended (as a business model, as an emancipatory model, as a creative model, as an ethical model?). Secondly it argues that a new kind of contract between big media and consumer-citizens-fans based on joint responsibility in a shared, although clearly entirely unevenly controlled (and Jenkins’ does recognise this) media economy, in which we can all participate, needs to be developed. Thirdly, this is explicitly translated into a demand that academics and policy makers abandon the historical distinction made in media/cultural studies/cultural theory between different kinds of cultural producers – the market, the public sector, activists for instance – to work with corporations to shape and forge agendas for forms of participation that satisfy perceived social and cultural needs. The cultural injunction, offered at the level of critique and at the level of policy, but generated by a particular reading of what the forms of information give, is to participate from within, rather than disrupt from without. As Jenkins puts it we should blog not jam.

The mapping of the cultural logic of an informational system made by Jameson and Jenkins’ at specific moments in the history of informational capitalism, each widely designated as moments of the new, may thus be understood in very divergent ways. Unlike the Jameson account, where an ideological reading of the claims of the information age distances (techno)cultural analysis from the technological landscapes it describes, Jenkins’ ‘corrective’ account is determinedly post-ideological and as a consequence both highly functional and highly convergent. In his fan model, participation, engagement, and collaborative work all build the system and are therefore to be promoted. The gulf between Jameson’s sense of the cultural politics of informational capitalism last time around and Jenkins’ account, developed in an era where ’2.0′ begins to have purchase as a model describing a new system, is wide here. And the key differences concern not so much the evolution of the technologies of which these two theorists write, nor the principle of activity (Jameson’s account, after all, explores the experience of living within the forms of information). What divides these accounts is their critical approach to thinking about the relationship between forms of technology and forms of culture as they play out within a particular historical horizon. At issue is not participation itself but how participation in this informated cultural landscape is understood and judged.

The final section of the paper explores forms or modes of participation within ICT systems across a series of six axes. Put together, they begin to trace an alternative cultural map of the contemporary constellation: an alternative account of what connects, after convergence.

The axis of actors and agents

Participation in contemporary systems is not reducible simply to ‘use’: The system/user model may imply a break with the broadcast/receiver mode typical of older media (retained to some extent even within ‘active audience’ theses), but can simultaneously produce a problematic restatement of the under-pinning binaries text/audience, producer/receiver. These binaries are inadequate because ICT networks increasingly involve actors who do not ‘use’ as earlier audiences used to ‘watch’. As an example we might fly in some pigeons: In the Internet of Things Julian Bleeker explores the changing dynamics of participation and agency emerging as ecological networks delegate forms of action to non-humans agents (Bleeker, 2005). His example is a Beatriz da Costa artwork which equips pigeons[5] with sensors, so that, as they move through the city, they map pollutants in the environment;[6] the ‘they’ here refers to the pigeons (who move) and to the sensors (which/who sense). The pigeons, the sensor technologies, and the information gathered all help to constitute an active network (to stay with Bleeker’s ANT-influenced account), or a mapping system in process. This pigeon system underscores the degree to which the conventional distinctions between the user and the system, to which we have referred, are undermined through the insertion of non-human actors/actants into the media ecology. Participation in this model cannot necessarily be aligned either with human use (for obvious feathery reasons) and nor with use per se if this is distinguished from what is being used (the system). Thus the term ‘user’, which once so usefully took us so beyond the (television age) notion of audience, is here revealed as problematic – and this is one reason why the fan/system model, with its naturalized (and binary) division between (human) user and (machine) system, itself produces problems in mapping systems containing these new forms of delegation. Going beyond ‘use’ allows some new distinctions to emerge between forms of agency. Notably, the human/non-human agency of different actants in hybrid information networks can be understood as at once irrelevant and highly significant – irrelevant in that humans and non-humans can be actants in a system (taking on old user positions), but significant if the intention is to trace out the power dynamics of these systems; if it ‘matters’ how, or with what choice, or with what degree of understanding (or how reflexively) humans might be incorporated into information systems ‘pigeon-style’, providing their ‘incidental’ inputs for free. Bleeker’s analysis, of course, centres on a specific network, but smart non-human agent/actor hybrids increasingly feature in the developing internet of things.

The sensory axis

Bleeker’s/Da Costa’s pigeons, particular kinds of actors, cannot be said to attend to what they are doing in the same way as humans. However, exploring forms of (human) attention might provide insights into sense perception, a mode of participation often neglected in the early web studies, partly because of its relative neglect of the body. In an account of digital identity exploring how individuals feel and act across multiple spaces Helen Kennedy has argued that the pre-occupation with identity slippage/play that marked much 1990s writing on earlier cyberspaces needs to be reassessed (Kennedy, 2006). Asking how the forms of separation and fragmentation that multiple spheres of action produce are overcome, Kennedy argues that it is necessary to de-emphasise performative models of identity which have often stressed fragmentation (e.g. Stone, 1996) and think in terms of a phenomenological focus on embodied forms of ‘feeling and being’. This not only because it is through the body that connections are made and re-made, and through which diverging ‘selves’ are reconciled or brought home, but because it is through the senses that we interact with the increasingly informated environment.

In work on mobiles I have explored similar issues of connectedness considering forms of attention that emerge in mobile phone use in public spaces where, using intimate technologies to re-organize our engagement with the sensory environment, we divide and combine auditory and visual streams in layered and partial ways, so that moving across the re-configured (because informational) city, sensory streams are divided, re-doubled, and overlaid (Bassett, 2003). Viewed through the axis of sense perception and attention, it is clear that participation, involving fracture and division (divided attention), also implies reconciliation. This form of sense-making is sensual and cognitive (through the sensing body we bind up these experiences into particular forms and patterns and make them meaningful in specific ways), operates continuously (e.g. we use it to navigate the city from moment to moment), and also operates in retrospect (to retrospectively apply particular forms of meaning or significance). It is also learned, indeed it is a form of habitus, and as such socially constructed. To explore participation through the axis of sensory engagement opens up rather than closes down questions of social power (e.g. in an urban space what lets particular groups divide their attentions, what forces others to attend only to the present, or sets up a wish to ‘abscond’ as far as possible from a particular place), and in doing so opens space for the development of forms of political contestation.

The third axis is cultural production. Forms of contemporary (digital) content production increasingly involve the recombination of shards of already existing code or content and the use or re-use of shared cultural memes (using the word metaphorically). What is made in this way can be viewed simultaneously or serially as an individual production, as a discrete production with multiple authors, and or as a radically shared production. As the number of these products grows, disentangling their genealogies, and making these kinds of attributions becomes increasingly complex – specifically borrowed chains (of code for instance) are hard to trace while distinguishing between internal components of the production and the tide of opinions, knowledge, content arising within the web, which might contribute in non-specific ways (or which might contribute non-bundled knowledge) to the production of new cultural objects becomes almost impossible.

This does not stop arbitrary divisions being made. Indeed at the moment at which a work becomes a commodity (when its social/cultural capital is translated into economic capital) precisely these kinds of divisions are necessary. At that point not only is the loose ‘network’ view of creative authorship hard to sustain, but a diachronic view of the work itself, one in which the work is understood to contain the archive and the time of the archive that makes it, so that it becomes something across which meaning and significance may emerge laterally rather being defined at a single moment, is also lost.

The market thus performs a work of reconciliation that operates in tension with other more organic processes of reconciliation and expansion that are also characteristic of the formation and reformation of contingent artefacts within web culture. The latter might allow for different forms and modes of production to be recognized as contribution to the formation of a work and might therefore take forward new forms of creative production beyond the traditional commodity.

The Creative Commons copyright/left system is of course an attempt to negotiate precisely this imbroglio (see Berry, 2007). It seeks to define ownership in ways capable of recognizing the complex genealogy of an object (through recording multiple creative inputs) and of rewarding ‘authorship’ (of each recombinant shard) when rewards are in the offing, both in order to allow the continued making of objects and to reward those made. It thus famously ‘reserves some rights’ for the individual while attempting at the same time to recognize the essentially collaborative nature of cultural work and the particular forms of collaboration immaterial work supports (Berry, 2007). Even in the Creative Commons system, the status of a work is thus finally defined in relation to its position vis a vis the market[7] – and even here this is a translation that can produce the disintegration of the work as a legible object or that can exclude forms of contribution that are not measurable in terms of individual ownership: Seriously considering the axis of production in an account of contemporary ICTs provokes questions about the role of the market in defining not only ‘who owns what’ but ‘what kind of participation counts’ as a contribution towards the constitution of creative digital work.

The axis of representation

The fourth axis is representation, and the intention is to focus attention onto what Appadurai called the mediasphere and distinguished somewhat from the supporting technosphere (Appadurai, 1986) in order to question the terms of representation in newly convergent systems. Roger Silverstone’s 2007 account of mediapolis, defined as the cosmopolitan space created through and within global ICTs, through which we encounter the other, is useful here. Arrangements pertaining in this space (e.g. through narrative, genre, image treatment) organize the distance and/or proximity between those taking part in these encounters – which might imply those who authored the spaces take responsibility for the encounter. Silverstone however, argues that in new media ecologies both producers and users have to take responsibility for this encounter: As he sees it, the ubiquity and electivity of media use in an era of pervasive ICT networks, viewed as a key distinction between new media post-convergence systems and old ones, makes this kind of responsibility inescapable. If there are some parallels with this approach and with Jenkins’ sense of ubiquitous participation, there are two key differences. First questions of participation and responsibility are here explored in relation to questions of civil society rather than fandom. Second (following on from this) Silverstone’s intention is to question what might constitute responsible participation. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work on civil society (e.g. Arendt, 1998) he defines an ethical space of appearance in today’s mediapolis as one in which an ‘appropriate distance’ between those involved is produced. Thus the ‘encounter’, in and of itself is not enough to constitute a virtue, incidentally, as it were. Here we may find a rejoinder to the claims above that connection, in and of itself, is essentially virtuous, that we cannot not love ’2.0′ and what it stands for.

The axis of embodiment

Arendt’s work on ethics is closely related to her work on narrative identity – where the narration of a life becomes an act that is performed by another, something that may offer a form of restitution for lives and identities previously denied. The connection between the tale (and even here the focus is on the narrative arrangement rather than the narrative content) and the life is useful in considering our participation as embodied beings in contemporary networked culture.

Processes of fragmentation, multiplication, and dispersal, are characteristics of forms of action, practice, and production, in contemporary techno-cultural systems: We are encouraged to reach out across networks but these moments of expansion are balanced by moments of closure, contraction, reconciliation: when dispersed elements – identities, sense streams, life stories and lives, layers of experience, temporalities, are collapsed back together again. The constant demand is that we both fragment – to play the market, to work more, to consume more, to experience sounds in one place, images in another, to expand our sensory intake – and that we reconcile these identities on demand, that we work the centrifugal and centripetal qualities of contemporary networks. We are neither equal players within the space of appearance, nor do we entirely control the rhythms of convergence and fragmentation that organize our embodied engagement and participation in informational culture. More the planes within which we operate (one form of narrative or another perhaps) are sometimes in tension with one another – something evidenced by moments of somewhat brutal reconciliation, when all the aspects of our multiply engaged selves are brought back together.

Today security systems give us a foretaste of the consummation of this trajectory in everyday life. The increasing stridency of the demand that our database counterparts match up with our (increasingly scanned and sampled) bodies, our credit records with our plane tickets, our passports with our stories, that we stand to attention, get ourselves ‘together’ while presenting ourselves and our documents; all are examples of moments when this kind of coercion is exercised, and offer an indication of the centrality of exploring questions of power and control when investigating the cultural dynamics of these technological systems which change what I would describe as the order of participation (Bassett, 2007). Kate O’Riordan is exploring this trajectory through a consideration of the intersection of bio-tech, bodies, and information, a constellation she describes as the ‘genome incorporated’ (O’Riordan, 2007).

The axis of the imaginary

The axes proposed above explore participation in relation to agency, identity, sense perception, cultural production, representational economies, and embodiment. Of course there are many other axis along which it might be possible to map the dynamics of participation in post-convergence systems (social networking as a mode of participation for instance is gestured towards here, being subsumed into other categories). Here I point to one more, and since it has been central to the article, perhaps it only needs mentioning briefly: The axis of the imaginary might be constituted partly through fictional works (for instance through the science fiction mentioned above), by the many popular takes on post-cyberspace culture, and by web-formed material (blogs etc), but it also includes the models and maps of future systems and taxonomies of the present such as those being discussed here. ’2.0′ itself is productively considered not only as an industrial model, but as a cultural imaginary, as is Jenkins account of contemporary convergence and Jameson’s take on informational capital.

Part of what is explored in this article is what it means to declare that new maps are necessary. That is, what is at stake in taking a bundle of internet technologies, architectures, products and practices, computing/ICTs, all of which in different ways change the mode of engagement with the system and the forms of interaction with others, with knowledge bodies, and with information systems themselves, and declaring them distinctively different from earlier web forms (different culturally, technically, ontologically)? Claims for innovation impact on forms of thinking about informational culture, and it is useful to be aware of the ideological consequences of refreshing the promise of computing, and of refreshing forms of critical analysis, both in relation to industrial and cultural discourses, here evidenced by the ’2.0′ map, and in a more disciplinary way, by Jenkins’ intervention. ’2.0′, at least in so far as it was taken to usher in the new, certainly refreshes ideas about consumer activity (expressed in terms of participation rather than power/resistance) and therefore gives us a new romance of technology. It re-focuses attention onto participation as an intrinsic part of the system, and defines some of the terms of participation. What it does not do is clarify either the cultural specificities or the power geometries of developing new architectures. Nor except in incidental ways does it give us any sense of how to define or understand or develop an ethics or politics of contemporary information.

Conclusion

Above I have explored examples of participation across a series of axes – finding in each case new forms of convergence/divergence. These variously emerge as a negotiation or a struggle over the ownership of what is (jointly) made, over the identity of those who are made in many spaces at once, over representation, over the space of appearance and the construction of distance/proximity in newly cosmopolitanized spaces, over forms of cultural production and engagement, over the ways in which the system itself is imagined.

If there is a characteristic cultural form or mode of engagement to be ‘outed’ in the contemporary informational ecology, one that shows its traces in all the axes I have outlined here, it is beyond fandom. My reading of the contemporary techno-cultural constellation diverges from Henry Jenkins’ whose analysis focuses on participation as integration (‘only blog’). It is also, however, beyond the particular kinds of dis-orientation Jameson described; the bodies that act within new media ecologies are not adequately described by the forms of human fragmentation or ‘schizophrenia’ of which Jameson wrote. Or at least, if these bodies are fragmented, they also continuously re-conformed, sometimes into larger (hybrid) networks, and their actions may also be said to produce new forms of (narrative) life.

The cultural forms and forms of cultural production discerned across these axes also suggest a different negotiation between (structural) complexity and scale and proximate significance and form than that offered in the Jameson model. On the other hand, and here I remain within the Jameson tradition, the cultural stakes of 2.0 are found beyond the model itself – at least in so far as the model is given by the logics not of technology but (informational) capital. My own sense is of a meta-narrative (fragmentation/convergence) given by techno-cultural capitalism, one in which the forms of reconciliation proffered, understood as a series of different scales and through a series of axes, are ultimately non-reconcilable – despite the constant enjoinder that we do just that. For this reason, in the age beyond cyberspace, in the age of ’2.0′ with all its navigational aids, its folksonomies, its apparent flexibility and freedom, we (still) need to develop new cultural maps and new forms of critical mapping.

Author’s Biography

Caroline Bassett researches and teaches technology and cultural form in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex, where she also Director of the Centre for Material Culture. Her book The Arc and the Machine (MUP, 2007) explores narrative modes of experience in an age of information. She has written widely on gender and digital technology. She is currently completing a book on anti-computing movements.

Notes

[1] Media,Communication and Cultural Studies Association.
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[2] Slightly later predictive accounts of the networked informational future found in business journals, in the technical press, and in ‘boosterish’ magazines such as Wired (but also in ‘critical technical’ or hacker journals such as Mondo 2000), evidenced the same trajectory.
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[3]Alternative business and technical blueprints for future network development do notunderstand open systems and the principle of collaboration as inevitable, oreven as viable. David Clark’s demand for a new ‘clean slate’ internet, where property rights are to be reinstated and protected, provides a different blueprint for the future, and was criticized in some quarters, not only on the grounds that it might block the efficient exploitation of the ICTs but also for its supposedly totalitarian qualities (see I welcome my Internet Overlords,Baard, 2005).
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[4] The US-focussed nature of this account in so far as it pertains to cultural studies is made clear heresince Jenkins claims that this is a new meld: It may seem far less new beyondthe States. The Birmingham tradition for instance and those emerging from ithave arguably made this connection. However Robin Mansell, in New Media andSociety, also argues, from a rather different direction, that political economy has been neglected in accounts of techno-culture (Mansell, 2004).
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[5] The pigeon that blogs (da Costa, http://www.beatrizdacosta.net)
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[6]The argument there does not focus on the x-morphic forms of agency such creatures mightarticulate (see Laurier and Philo,1991), which could also be explored.
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[7]The links between forms of ownership of cultural productions and forms of dispersed identity are interesting to note here – not least because the system Creative Commons systemhas nothing at all to say about ‘moral’ rights of ownership which are based on a recognition of the sense of personal ownership or identification that an author might feel.
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References

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Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998).

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____. ‘Forms of Reconciliation: On Contemporary Surveillance’, Cultural Studies 21.1, (2007): 82- 94.

____. ‘How many movements?’ in M.Bull and L.Back (eds) The Auditory Cultures Reader (Oxford. Berg, 2003), 343-356.

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Hills, Mathew. The Pleasures of Horror (London, Continuum, 2005).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).

____. ‘The cultural logic of media convergence’, International Journal of Cultural Studies. 7.1 (2004): 33-43.

____. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Jameson, Frederic. ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146: (July-August, 1984): 52-92.

____. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1991).

____. Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Kennedy, Helen. ‘Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet research’ New Media & Society 8.6 (2006): 859-876.

SooJung-Kim Pang. A (2007). ‘The end of cyberspace and the emerging telecommunications convergence’, paper to Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence, Hungarian of Academy of Sciences, Budapest September 21 – 27.

Laurier Eric, Philo Chris. ‘X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology’, Environment and Planning A 31.6 (1999): 1047 – 1071.

Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York. Plenum, 1994).

Mansell, Robin. ‘Political economy, power and new media’ in New Media & Society 6.1 (2004): 96-105.

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Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: the next social revolution (London: Basic Books, 2003).

Silverstone, Roger. ‘Convergence Is a Dangerous Word’, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1 (1995): 11-13.

Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality: on the rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

Stone, Roseanne Allequere. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT, 1996).

Stross, Charles. Accelerando (New York: Ace Books, 2005).

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958).

Yoffie, David. Competing in the age of digital convergence (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).

At the end of 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) selected ‘podcast’ as its word of the year. Evidently, enough people were making podcasts, listening to them, or at least uttering the word podcast in everyday contexts to warrant the accolade. Despite occasioning a media sensation, the actual extent of podcasting is still unknown. According to a PEW Internet and American Life survey (Rainie and Madden, 2005) – still the most substantive publication about podcasting trends – approximately 6 million of the 22 million U.S. adults who own a portable audio player have downloaded a podcast. Richard Berry’s (2006) review of research in the area places the figure of podcast listeners in a similar range – between 6 million and 8 million currently, with the numbers projected to rise dramatically by 2010. However, the available surveys don’t include anyone under the age of 18, nor do they account for listeners who enjoy podcasts on devices other than their MP3 players, so the listenership may be underestimated.[1] As a Nielsen Research report (2006) on the trend makes clear, the available statistics also neglect the significant number of public and private broadcasters, movies studios, financial services firms, travel agencies and universities that are delivering their “traditional” content via podcasts (some excitedly, some begrudgingly). The exact number of podcasts and their listeners may be difficult to quantify, but podcasts are now a prevalent part of the new media landscape (Nielsen, 2006). 2005 was enough of a breakthrough year for podcasting that the NOAD felt the word was more worthy of attention than runners-up like ‘bird-flu’, ‘trans-fat’ or ‘sudoku’ (oup.com, 2005).

The NOAD’s definition for the neologism was simple: ‘a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player’ (McKean, 2005); but podcasting is a considerably more vexed term. A colloquial hybrid of “broadcasting” and Apple’s trademarked ‘iPod’,it contains a reference to a well-known and heavily branded product, while simultaneously conjuring notions of personal freedom and escape from the vice-grip of commercial broadcasting. For cyber-mavens, hobbyists, and not-for-profit organisations, podcasts embody a new, more democratic kind of expression. For media companies and other corporations, they represent a new way to connect to niche audiences and another potential revenue stream. For Apple, whose iPod music player is at the center of the very term, the trend has been both a PR boon and a legal hot point. In fact, the company spent the fall of 2006 embarking on a project to gain legal and proprietary control of the term, sending threatening letters to start up firms like Podcast Ready and software publishers such as myPodder for using the term podcast and other “pod” derivatives in their product names (Van Buskirk and Michaels, 2006).[2] Apple’s pointedly commercial attempt to control the term podcast – sadly standard practice in the corporate world – is but one of many negotiations and contestations that mark podcasting’s early history. However, it opens up larger issues regarding podcasting’s relationship with existing broadcasting models and links to corporate institutions.

This essay approaches the political questions surrounding podcasting by interrogating the history of the term. Podcasting is usually presented in the press as a marriage of Apple’s iPod and RDF Site Summary (usually known as Really Simple Syndication or RSS). RSS allows audiences to subscribe to a website – through RSS “feeds” subscribers are automatically notified every time a site, such as a blog or podcast, is updated. Some RSS-enabled software will automatically download new content for subscribers, while other software will simply alert subscribers that new content is available. RSS is a powerful means of organising seriality online because it relieves subscribers of the requirement to look for new content every time they go online; the content comes to them instead.[3] The iPod/RSS connection is important and captivating for two reasons: portable MP3 players allow listeners to take audio content that originates on the internet with them, away from the computer, which makes it more like listening to a broadcast, or, to borrow a mobile-media cliché, it makes online audio files available ‘anytime, anywhere’. The RSS dimension creates an expectation of seriality which shapes both production and consumption practice: podcasts are supposed to repeat over time, so listeners subscribe to “shows” and podcasters make “shows”. The confluence of the tools allows for stylistic and experiential similarities to radio, but with some important twists, since podcasting is not regulated like radio and podcasts are considerably easier and cheaper to make and distribute than radio broadcasts. As colloquial explanation, the iPod/RSS connection offers a quick fix; as cultural analysis, it leaves a lot to be desired. It treats everything about the practice as pregiven, from the branded name, to the connections of technologies, to the political and cultural implications.

Our essay historicises the term “podcast” and offers some new contexts for understanding the history of the term, the practices it designates and its relation to broadcasting.[4] The paper proceeds in four sections. We first analyse the origins and emergence of the word podcasting among the press and the digerati. We dispute the standard argument that podcasting’s main innovation is a marriage of RSS and Apple’s iPod by presenting podcasting as a practice that arose from a network of actors, technologies and behaviours. In the second section, we discuss how podcasting works and why we need to look beyond distribution to understand its historical emergence. In the third section of the essay, we connect podcasting with the development of affordable and easy-to-use consumer audio production software and hardware, technologies that are necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions for podcasting to offer greater access for audiences and producers than traditional models of broadcasting. We conclude by examining the implicit contrast between “podcasting” and “broadcasting” in order to trouble the commonsensical definition of broadcasting and thereby reopen some basic questions about who is entitled to communicate and by which techniques. While podcasting is neither a complete break from broadcasting nor part of any kind of revolution, it is the realisation of an alternate cultural model of broadcasting. The practice of podcasting thus offers us an opportunity to rethink the connections between broadcasting and other kinds of media practices and to re-examine the political and cultural questions broadcasting presents.

Origins of the Term

Despite Apple’s fervent desire to control all things pod, the term podcast was primarily the product of a disorganised exchange carried out amongst technology journalists and online computer enthusiasts in the early 2000s. In an article dated 12 February 2004, Guardian technology writer Ben Hammersley rhetorically asked what the emerging practice of amateur online radio should be named: ‘Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?’. Hammersley offered no answer to his query and never again referred to these terms, but in this moment he unwittingly coined a name for the practice of circulating and listening to serialized audio online. The issues Hammersley raised became central to the emerging discourse surrounding podcasting when the topic of amateur online radio returned to journalistic spotlights in the fall of 2004. Specifically, writers focused on podcasting’s supposed techno-democratic orientation because of its ease-of-use and open source foundation, its implicit anti-corporate inflection, and emphatic declarations of podcasting as the “future of radio”. But it was the indiscriminate adoption of the term podcasting by UK-based online technical journal The Inquirer in an August 2004 interview with former MTV host and self-anointed tech-guru Adam Curry (Mohney, 2004) which informally initiated the explosion of the word podcast in the popular press. Sparked by the broad circulation of this interview and Curry’s own efforts to publicise podcasting on his personal homepage, intense online discussion of the practice ensued and the first generation of podcasts subsequently emerged under the banner of Hammersley’s term. What began as one journalist’s off-hand comment became the standard name for the RSS 2.0 delivery of MP3 files for playback on computers and mobile devices.

From the beginning, some observers were suspicious of the term’s corporate inflections. In a move that could be understood as an effort to detach the podcasting phenomenon from its most widely known playback device, Apple’s iPod, Doc Searls (2004), senior editor of Linux Journal, attempted to redefine the term as an acronym for ‘Personal Option Digital-casting’.[5] It was a small gesture and one that was never emphasised in ensuing mainstream discussions of the podcasting phenomenon, but as a leading figure in the tech community and someone frequently called upon by mainstream media to play the part of “expert” in technology news, Searls’ un-branding of the term resonated across the internet. Searls’ greater contribution to podcasting discourse, however, was his emphasis upon framing the term within a new-versus-old dichotomy of broadcasting, explicitly linking the technology’s supposed revolutionary qualities to its internet-based distribution and the convenience facilitated by RSS enclosure. The medium-specific nature of the discussion perhaps explains why there is rarely any widespread consideration of the fundamental difference between the content of podcasts and more traditional forms such as radio documentary. In other words, the development of the term ‘podcasting’ followed the pattern set out in Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s essay ‘The Californian Ideology,’ (1995) where new information technologies are uncritically championed as embodying a Jeffersonian democratic ideal.

Searls viewed the vital importance of the new technology as its ability to shift the “casting”-model away from a time-bound experience to one that allows listeners to choose what they want to hear, when and how they want to hear it. This argument became a central component of most journalistic coverage of the podcasting explosion and extended into a metaphorical relationship with the timeshifting enabled by digital video recorders, which combine older television timeshifting capabilities of Video Cassette Recorders with the advantages of hard disc storage and random access (a resemblance Searls first identified) and other hard drive-based technologies that facilitate an on-demand model of media consumption (see for e.g. Carpenter, 2004; Howe, 2004). Searls thus suggested a break between podcasting and earlier forms of online syndication, such as web-accessible radio archives and audio-video delivery via on-demand streaming clients and container formats such as RealMedia. Podcasting was a portable technology, while the earlier forms of online syndication kept audio in the computer. Searls’ argument treated earlier models of online syndication as passé and collapsed them into other old forms of electronic distribution. This despite the fact that commentators had hailed these older forms as revolutionary alternatives to corporate media in their time (Lovink, 2004).

Within a week of Searls’ widely circulated commentary on podcasting, the number of “How to Podcast” articles in online technology journals grew exponentially.[6] A piece in Wired News appearing 08 October 2004 addressed the podcasting phenomenon within the most conventionally journalistic context since the original Guardian article and focused at some length on the aspects of automation and accessibility that made podcasting easy (Terdiman, 2004). Importantly, the piece also detailed Curry’s belief that podcasting was perfectly suited for commercial exploitation. Coincidentally or not, it was at this point in the young life of podcasting that the mainstream press began taking note of the technology.

The first North American newspaper articles about podcasting began appearing in the wake of the Wired News piece. Often accompanied by How-To or Tips manuals, these articles once again positioned podcasting as the “new radio” and focused on the marriage of RSS delivery and iPod devices. Susan Carpenter (2004) of the Los Angeles Times authored an article that was syndicated around the world and cemented, not only Hammersley’s original term, but those aspects of podcasting that became central to journalistic discourse detailing the practice. She addressed the techno-democratic and accessible nature of podcasting and foregrounded an anti-corporate position that was perhaps implicit, but often absent, in online discussions of the practice. The once emphatic declarations of podcasting as the “future of radio” were re-cast in light of both Searls’ TiVO metaphor and Curry’s appeal to commercialisation, and the discussion instead focused on the unique relationship between producer and consumer that podcasting facilitated. Other major U.S. and Canadian newspapers covered the podcasting phenomenon in the closing weeks of October 2004 (most significantly, The New York Times) and a special seminar on podcasting at BloggerCon2 (06 November 2004, Stanford University) – an annual conference that brings together bloggers and other interested parties – re-confirmed the tech community’s commitment to the name.

Matthew Fordahl’s (2005) piece for the Associated Press, ‘Radio Shows Ride Different Digital Wave’, placed special emphasis upon both the low-production costs that allow amateurs to enter the podcasting field, and the interest of mainstream broadcasters in this new potential source of revenue. Wired Magazine, meanwhile, ran a feature story on the topic in March 2005 and re-positioned Curry as the central figure in podcasting (Newitz, 2005). Curry’s continuing commitment to developing the commercial potential of the practice underscored tensions evident within podcasting discourse regarding its role in global media. Many writers discussed the phenomenon in terms of a new frontier-ism – again, podcasting as the “new radio”. Simultaneously, there was the opinion that podcasting was less the expansion of the existing broadcast universe than an opening for the possible discovery of new audiences, voices, and talents far removed from conventional radio. The frontier position failed to recognise that it described less the practice of podcasting than the still-emerging satellite radio systems (such as Sirius and XM) that have positioned themselves as direct competitors of terrestrial AM/FM radio. In this way, the debate concerning the industrial prospects of podcasting echoed the discourses surrounding the rise of FM radio in the late-1960s.

Public discourse throughout 2005 almost universally embraced the term podcasting and focused on the specific practices and technologies that aided in its evolution and diffusion. Like early articles on the subject (see for e.g. Carpenter, 2004; Farivar, 2004; Mohney, 2004; Terdiman, 2004), discussions of podcasting continued to reinforce the importance of the iPod and RSS. Surprisingly Apple, whose music device occupies a central position in the history of both the term and practice of podcasting, only formally adopted the term podcasting (to classify particular types of content in the iTunes Music Store) in the spring of 2005 when it incorporated an RSS 2.0 aggregation service into its iTunes software interface. Though Apple’s involvement came relatively late in the game, the fact that the name of one of their most popular products lay at the root of the term the press had been bandying about for the last year meant that Apple benefited from a significant amount of peripheral publicity without being directly involved in podcasting’s beginnings. By formalising their desire to be a player in podcasting’s future development, Apple served notice that podcasting was no longer simply an underground hobby. Industry analysts and podcasters alike took note of this corporate interest, which only intensified as Apple mounted its legal challenges to control the use of the term in the marketplace.

What Is Podcasting, Anyway?

While the NOAD offers a standard, distribution-channel-based definition of podcasting, Wikipedia offers a somewhat more inclusive definition: ‘a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. Like “radio”, the term can refer either to the content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.’ (Wikipedia.org, 2007).[7] Taken together, the definitions connect podcasting with a range of other practices. Podcasting is linked to radio since it sounds like an audio broadcast (though video podcasts are increasingly common). Podcasting is also a close relative of blogging because of its cultural associations with amateurism and its serialisation through RSS, as opposed to radio, which is generally understood as a medium dominated by professionals.

In order to better understand what podcasting is, it may help to understand how it’s done. There are five basic steps involved in creating and disseminating a podcast and several of these steps can be automated using software to simplify the process.[8]

A. The podcast must be made and uploaded:

1. The podcaster (an individual or a company, it doesn’t matter) creates an audio file (e.g. voice recording; musical performance); whether the production of the audio occurs in the analog or digital realm is unimportant provided the result is digitised using audio software.

2. The podcaster prepares the audio file in a compressed digital audio format suitable for low-bandwidth web distribution (e.g. formats such as MP3; M4A; WMV) and uploads the file to a web server. The content of the podcast is now created.

B. The podcast has to be rendered “findable” online (these parts of the process are now usually automated):

3. The podcaster writes a file using established RSS mark-up tags containing information about the audio file including the location of the file on the web server.

4. The podcaster publishes the file to a static web address, allowing users to bookmark the directory of links including any updates and revisions made by the podcaster. This directory file can be amended to include information about additional audio files and thus serves as a growing directory of links, or RSS feed, to a collection of audio files.

C. The podcast has to be downloaded and listened to.

5. By using an RSS aggregator (in the form of software such as iTunes or Mozilla Firefox, or web-based services such as Live.com or Bloglines), users receive updates regarding the content of RSS feed “subscriptions” and can choose to automatically download new files for playback on personal computers or mobile devices.

The most striking thing about the process is the simplicity of distribution. There are a wide variety of entities that can make podcasts, there are a wide range of kinds of podcasts and there are many ways to listen to podcasts. But all these diverse users and content forms employ the same basic distribution technology to achieve their goals. This is perhaps why the iPod/RSS definition holds so much sway.

Although this paper is not a listener study, it is worth considering the range of ways we might take in a podcast. We could burn podcasts to CDs and listen to them in the car; we could download them to a hard drive and listen directly from a personal computer, or we could transfer them to a portable device. We could listen or watch alone or with others. We could listen to every show produced by a single podcaster, or only one. We could listen shortly after a podcast is released or much later. Each of these choices would shape the reception and experience of the podcast. They would also impact the amount and kind of information we receive, since associated text, images and other metadata may be lost or appear differently depending on the end playback device (e.g. CD, MP3 player, etc.). This flexibility is not particularly revolutionary or new, since most of these options would be available for terrestrial broadcasts as well – though the opportunity for listeners to timeshift is particularly important for podcasting, so much so that many mainstream radio broadcasters now make some shows available as podcasts so that audiences can listen at different times and locations. Distribution is thus the key dimension that holds together this diverse range of listening practices.

Just as there are a wide variety of possible ways to listen, there are a range of program types that might be grouped under the umbrella of podcasting and podcasts: archived versions of regular radio programs, advertisements, educational programs, radio-style programs that nevertheless employ different conventions and production values than mainstream radio (perhaps closer to community or pirate radio). Again, because of this variety, in one sense, the distribution channel can seem to define the “medium”. To echo the Wikipedia definition, a podcast at its most basic is indeed an audio or audiovisual file that can be downloaded and then read/listened to/watched in a number of ways at the time of one’s choosing. However, this definition does not bring us closer to what matters about podcasts and podcasting.

If Apple does not own the term podcasting, and if the term itself is something of an accidental success, a product of journalistic convenience more than debate or calculation, we should also question its referent. In an article on blogging, danah boyd (2006) raises issues that have implications for debates over the definition of podcasting. Blogging, she argues, creates a distinction between reader and writer (or listener and producer) in ways that other forms of computer-mediated communication, such as instant messaging, do not:

The practice of blogging involves producing digital content with the intention of sharing it asynchronously with a conceptualized audience. It [is] an n-to-? practice where some discrete numbers of bloggers share with a[n] unknown number of readers. An n-to-? model is not unique to blogging; the practices underlying radio, television and print publication also take this form.

According to boyd, a blog is like paper; they are both distribution channels at heart. Yet this fact alone does not define the content that may pass through those channels.

Richard Berry, one of the few academics to have written on podcasting, describes it as new medium, a converged medium that brings together the web, audio content and portable media devices (2006:144). Podcasting is an ‘empowered’ (144) version of radio broadcasting, aided by the internet, which enables both audiences and producers. In addition to features like timeshifting and portability, podcasting empowers listeners because it uses MP3 technology, a semi-open standard – a marked difference from the proprietary streaming technologies (e.g. RealAudio) found on much internet radio. Podcasting is also empowering for podcasters: as a kind of ‘grassroots radio’ that ‘draws on the world of weblogs’ (152), it is a democratised form with few established conventions. For Berry, this makes podcasting a ‘disruptive technology’ (152); it is free, open, automated via RSS, and radio-like, and thus, a direct assault on the radio industry. Although we argue later that this utopian view of podcasting is slightly problematic, especially considering the range of technologies and practices that qualifies as podcasting, Berry and boyd both point to the value of reframing podcasting as a practice.

Following boyd’s lead, we might conceive of podcasts as simultaneously distributing and representing expression – in a manner different than, but perhaps analogous to blogs. Like blogs, podcasts set up distinctions between producer and audience in an n-to-? relationship that also occurs in traditional broadcasting but that is asynchronous. Podcasts also allow for the viability of a certain amateur aesthetic that is not available in commercial broadcasting (and here we note important links with online streaming video services like YouTube that emerged shortly after the podcast boom). Podcasting opens up opportunities for audiences to hear new kinds of content, or old kinds of content in new ways. It also offers opportunities for people who could not easily broadcast to distribute their content online on what at least initially appears as a level playing field.

But podcasting is not, strictly speaking, a new medium or a new format. Rather, it is a group of connected technologies, practices and institutions. It therefore raises some of the same questions that we normally associate with the emergence of new media. It offers us an occasion to reconsider those elements of mediality and practices in the “neighbourhood” of podcasting and not consider it as a thing-in-itself. We need to consider podcasting’s historical emergence in relation to other media technologies, institutions and practices, and to move beyond the discourse of iPods, blogging and RSS.

Some Origins of the Practice

The accepted history of how podcasting began is relatively straightforward. Three key figures share the credit for conceiving of the integrated programming and software environments which enables podcasting: Dave Winer, a prominent blogger and software application developer; Christopher Lydon, a long time Boston-based media personality; and Adam Curry, ex-MTV host and amateur computer geek (Doyle, 2005).[9] Winer is credited for the development of RSS and, in 2001, he proposed an additional specification for RSS feeds that allowed “enclosures” of non-text content (i.e. sound files, images) to be “fed” to a subscriber. To demonstrate the technology, Winer successfully enclosed a Grateful Dead song in a post to his blog on 11 January 2001 and it was at Winer’s insistence and prodding that Lydon decided to use RSS technology to share some interviews he had recorded online (Lydon had recently been fired from a radio station job and needed a distribution outlet) (Doyle, 2005). If Winer provided the technical capabilities and Lydon provided the content, some say it was Curry who saw the potential in the format. Supposedly, it was while listening to Lydon’s interviews that Curry developed the idea for iPodder, a piece of software that could transfer audio downloads to iPods and make podcasts portable. In October 2003, these three technologists joined hundreds of others at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for BloggerCon1 (Doyle, 2005). Audio blogging, the practice that would come to be known as podcasting, was at the top of the agenda.

The 2003 conference offers an easy origin point for the podcasting phenomenon because all three “podfathers” were in the same place at the same time. That year also saw booming sales of Apple’s iPod music devices (Bullis, 2005; Howe, 2004; Lewis, 2005) with sufficient storage space to hold more than just songs. However, there are other developments and lines of descent that also deserve consideration as podcasting precedents.

For example, a form of podcasting actually arose in the late nineties as Nullsoft, the software company that made the Winamp media player, experimented with SHOUTcast, a program that allowed for the recording and broadcasting of MP3 audio streams (Frankel, 1999: 82). With SHOUTcast, users could create their own virtual radio stations from audio they recorded or from their MP3 collections. Using the SHOUTcast software, SHOUTcasters published their streams to a server, where it was available to listeners looking for amateur (and sometimes professional) radio on the internet. SHOUTcast is still available for download today and is used by independent and mass media producers, though it is basically a streaming-only technology and it lacks some of the functionality we now associate with podcasting (e.g. RSS alerts, syncing to portable devices). Additionally, the audience size for SHOUTcasts – at least for early versions of the software – was much more limited than the potential audience for podcasts. The intense resources SHOUTcasting demanded of computers at the time meant that broadcasts could only accommodate 20-30 listeners (Frankel, 1999: 83). Still, SHOUTcast was an important technology for helping users broadcast their opinions and their music libraries. Perhaps more importantly, it gave users a glimpse of the potential of connecting with other people interested in producing and consuming alternative/amateur media.

In August 2000, i2GO was another company exploring podcasting-like services. Although i2GO’s main product was the eGo portable digital music player – described at one gadget review site as the ‘Cadillac’ of MP3 players – the company also developed a web site called MyAudio2Go.com (Menta, 2000). Users of the service could download audio news feeds from the internet and transfer them to their portable players (Menta, 2000).[10] In language that anticipates podcasting discourse, an i2Go spokesperson stressed how the service would ‘allow the digital recording of content off the internet for replay at a “convenient time”‘ (Sean Wood qtd. in Fridman, 1999). Despite making prominent deals with content producers like ABC News, i2GO ran out of capital during the dotcom crash so the service never truly expanded (Credeur, 2001). Apple introduced the iPod shortly thereafter and began to dominate the portable music player market. Ahead of its time and a victim of history, i2GO’s foray into practices that we would now call podcasting is rarely mentioned by journalists and remains little more than a footnote. Yet i2GO’s attempts to auto-sync digital audio content for hardware playback foreshadowed the formula that helped podcasting take off a few short years later.

Also overlooked in many discussions of podcasting’s origins are the hardware devices and software packages for recording podcasts. For instance, the emergence of portable digital audio recording devices in the late 1990s is a crucial beginning for the podcasting movement. Amateur technologists responsible for many of the first podcasts had little knowledge of advanced recording principles. They also had scarce means to record with high tech studio equipment. The advent of affordable portable digital recorders allowed audio enthusiasts to record and transfer files directly to their computer or website, making the sharing of user-generated audio content easy and immediate. With the right equipment and software, and a desire to generate content, making your own “radio” show available to a (potentially) wide audience was both conceivable and attainable.

The rise of accessible digital recording devices would mean little were it not for equally important developments in digital audio recording and editing software. Capturing audio is one thing; having the tools to edit, manipulate and eventually re-package that audio requires a different set of technologies. Although podcasters can create basic podcasts with little or no editing – in fact, some of the earliest podcasters simply recorded audio content on the fly and transferred it to their computers and the web – those looking to produce more complex podcasts with multi-track mixes, edits and special effects, turned to dedicated audio editing and recording software to achieve this goal. Professional level computer-based audio programs (e.g. ProTools or Cubase) have been available since the late eighties and early nineties and are the industry standard in recording studios. Retailing for thousands of dollars, the programs were hardly within reach of amateur audio producers initially. But as processor speeds and hard disc space on consumer machines increased throughout the 1990s, software recording solutions became more practical, affordable, and intuitive for interested computer users.[11] Top of the line software suites still command top dollar, but software companies now routinely make basic versions of their programs for producers and musicians with less-inflated budgets. Available for both Macintosh and PC users, these easier-to-buy and easier-to-use programs provided computer hobbyists and amateur musicians the ability to create professional sounding audio content from the comfort of their computer (Théberge, 1997: 231-235). Independent musicians and producers were experimenting with different ways of recording/producing and computer users with an interest in music were toying with new ways to create sound. By the late nineties, music stores and computer companies alike were adjusting to a new culture of (and market for) amateur digital audio production. Stores began to dedicate retail space and sales staff towards assisting interested buyers in setting up home studios and the number of computer-based audio programs flourished. At the turn of the millennium, it was conceivable to have a decent and functional home studio for little more than $1000 (excluding the cost of a computer).

Although professional audio recording/editing programs were becoming increasingly user-friendly (in both cost and design), it was with the launch of Audacity (2002) and Apple’s iLife suite (January, 2003) that audio production software became a standard tool on personal computers. Audacity, a free open source audio editor, gave anyone looking to record or manipulate audio data a powerful and free program with which to do so. iLife, on the other hand, was part of an overall image makeover for Apple (Apple.com, 2004). Building on the successful launch of the iPod in 2001, Apple’s strategy was to position their products not as computers or MP3 players but as ‘digital lifestyle’ devices (Apple.com, 2004). Bundled with most new Macintosh computers as of 2003, one of iLife’s key digital lifestyle innovations was a program called GarageBand, an easy-to-use and slickly designed recording/editing platform. Compared to higher end audio production software, GarageBand removed some options and control in favour of a streamlined and simple recording interface. Both Audacity and GarageBand presented users with a flexible platform to combine audio data from multiple sources, edit it, and output it as an MP3 (or some other compressed, transportable) file. In 2003 and 2004, as early adopters of podcasting were experimenting with the practice, they were using programs like these to create and edit the content of their shows. Authors of How-To articles often cite Audacity and GarageBand as useful software for making podcasts (e.g. Newitz, 2005), yet their popularity, and the widespread interest in amateur sound production they encouraged, is seldom linked to the explosion of podcasting.

Podcasting as we know it was possible in part because of a decade long trend in developments in computer audio hardware and software. In addition to the actual recording gear and editing software, we shouldn’t underestimate the diffusion of broadband connections over the same period in the rise of podcasting. Depending on their length and content, podcasts can range anywhere from a few megabytes to a few hundred. For users uploading and downloading these files on a regular basis, broadband connections are certainly assets. The distribution innovations of Winer, Lydon and Curry mentioned above came right at a time when computers were powerful enough, digital audio software cheap and simple enough, and broadband widely enough diffused, that something like a podcasting phenomenon could happen.

Indeed, it was several months after the launch of GarageBand and Audacity that Curry offered readers of his blog a software script to let users move internet-based MP3 files into iTunes and onto iPods. By 2004, an aggregator site that linked to podcasts all over the internet, called PodcastAlley.com, emerged and it wasn’t long before others picked up on the trend. Curry launched PodShow.com in late 2004, a web destination designed to facilitate the publishing of podcasts and to introduce audiences to the concept of podcasting (not to mention introducing media companies to a new potential audience). On June 28, 2005, Apple redesigned the iTunes Music Store to include a massive podcast directory (Apple.com, 2005). Users could now search the iTunes database for podcasts by genre, category, and topic. The redesigned interface also simplified the process of subscribing to podcast feeds. iTunes’ large market share and sizeable marketing budget furthered podcasting’s transition into a mainstream media activity. Apple continued to capitalise on the trend with the release of GarageBand version 3 in their iLife ’06 package (January, 2006). Among other program features, the new edition included a “podcasting template” and other elements to facilitate podcast recording. For podcasters, GarageBand simplified the process of podcasting even further by including tools specifically designed for podcast production (e.g. vocal tracks with EQ settings for radio-type voices, jingles, musical stings, etc.) and by offering export options for uploading podcasts directly to websites. Meanwhile, as the podcasting trend took hold, audio software and hardware companies began to see podcasting as a potentially important segment of their market: microphones, mixers and a series of other consumer-priced audio tools were marketed (or in some cases, re-marketed) as ‘perfect for podcasting’.[12]

The ability to create podcasts, in other words, depends not only on devices to listen to them (MP3 players), or technologies to help consumers find them (RSS) but also on a host of software and hardware innovations, many of which began long before RSS or even iPods. The proliferation of relatively affordable and easy-to-use audio recording and editing software and hardware, increased broadband uptake, and an amplified appetite for producing and consuming amateur audio content all contributed to an environment ripe for the practice of podcasting. Rather than a driving force, portable digital players (even the iPod) were simply one condition of possibility. While the early podcasting press painted a convenient picture of how iPods sparked an explosion that propelled podcasting from underground hobby to latest fad, this closer look at the network of technologies, people and practices tied to podcasting shows a somewhat messier sketch. Although Apple’s iPod benefited from instant publicity as soon as Hammersley coined the term podcast, the computer company’s role was more one of mainstreaming than pioneering. Try as Apple might to legally limit the usage of the term, the practice of podcasting has clearly spread further than the company and its stylish music devices. Apple may own the iPod but it can hardly be considered the owner of podcasting.

Podcasting vs. Broadcasting

For all the populist and DIY associations attributed to podcasting and its constituent technologies, it is perhaps a bit too much to suggest, as Berry does, that podcasting is a ‘disruptive technology’ capable of reorganising the way radio and other media outlets operate. So far, major media companies have adjusted to the introduction of podcasts with ease. For instance, with the exception of a large number of CBC podcasts, the Canadian Top 20 podcasts for October 14 2007 on the iTunes Music Store was heavily dominated by figures from corporate media; the featured podcasts are similarly all classic big-media organisations from ABC to the Wall Street Journal. Independent podcasters share space with these public and private media corporations looking to use podcasts as a profitable form of content delivery.[13] Beyond its predictably ‘Californian ideology’, the podcasting-as-liberation argument also carries a little bit of corporate counter-culturalism with it, partaking of the knowing wink that one set of corporate products (a computer, an iPod) might set us free from all the others (both Klein (2000) and Frank (1998) have thoroughly critiqued these ideas).

Of course, podcasting does offer a much wider range of audio content than broadcast radio does, especially when one moves beyond Top 10 lists and sorts through the vast and sometimes weird range of material available in the podcasting universe. It is this diversity that gives podcasting its cultural cache. There is also something about broadcasting as a cultural form, with its labyrinthine regulatory apparatus, its massive institutions, and its heavily professionalised practices that invites this kind of David versus Goliath thinking, which renders podcasting as a term that seems full of potential and possibility even when the landscape of podcasting is dominated by its own star system, the major media players have all made inroads into the practice and some podcasts are even supported by (or themselves consist of) advertising.

To understand the cultural cache that podcasting gets from its opposition to broadcasting, we have to understand a bit about the history of the term broadcasting and the rhetoric that surrounds it. Put simply, the definition of broadcasting we now have – as something corporate or state controlled, with a few elite producers and many consumers, is itself an historical contingency. The straw figure of broadcasting that podcasting is “cast” against, what we might call the “we-have-the-equipment-you-don’t” model of broadcasting was the result of an extensive PR campaign and years of work by mainstream broadcasters. This is important because if we come to understand podcasting as a kind of broadcasting – and not as something opposed to broadcasting – we are afforded a very different political vision of the communication landscape.

Broadcasting has historically had a broader definition that corporate or state attempts to professionalise the term might suggest. But today, for most people, broadcasting signals mainstream media practice: it is a one-to-many operation, enshrined in a government-controlled or for-profit system, where access to the production side is relatively limited, but access to the audience side is relatively cheap and open. To be a broadcaster means to have a certain amount of power and access to dissemination that is not available to everyone in a nation, and it usually means that one is in compliance with a massive body of regulations designed to give rational order to the practice and, in democratic societies anyway, maintain some rudimentary level of choice over what one watches or listens to.

This model of broadcasting, as state-supported or for-profit, with restricted access and wide dissemination, seems almost natural. Indeed, a parade of media theorists have suggested as much. In his contribution to a 1994 collection entitled Radio Rethink, Friedrich Kittler writes that:

Media that have reached their levels of saturation are hard to write about. They disappear at the juncture of high technology and triviality. They reach your ear from neighbouring yards as only the nightingale once did [....] The normal scenario however (to quote the engineers) is that transmission is constant although, or just because, it is wireless. Due especially to being the first electronic medium to program day and night, radio has become a Platonic substantiality that causes it to vanish irresistibly as a technological medium. (Kittler, 1994: 75)

Kittler’s point was that the form of radio appeared to be settled, given and something easy to take for granted. Perhaps in 1994 it was, but looking forward and backward, broadcasting has a more vexed history as a term.

The ‘Platonic substantiality’ idea of broadcasting certainly works as a useful straw-figure for advocates of podcasting, who celebrate the freedom of access for both producers and listeners, and who will happily point out the greater flexibility and range of podcasts available to listeners. Where radio seems to require some logistics of scarcity (after all, the electromagnetic spectrum is a finite resource), podcasting does away with scarcity entirely – even if access to its tools are still much easier for those with access to large institutions or first-world incomes. Yet if we look beyond the immediate past, 70-80 years back and further, we see a wide range of competing definitions of broadcasting. If we recall some of these alternative definitions, then podcasting appears less as an alternative to broadcasting as such, than as an alternative cultural model of broadcasting, as a wedge with which we might pry open the jaws of common sense that have clamped down on our understandings of radio and television for the better part of the 20th century.

Many corporations and institutions worked in concert and in parallel to solidify a definition of broadcasting as something to be controlled by large institutions in concert with government regulators. In the U.S.A., that model took a corporate and for-profit form, whereas in Britain and some of its former colonies (such as Canada and Australia) a more paternalistic state model took hold (Douglas, 1987; Hilmes, 1997; McChesney, 1993; Raboy, 1990; Smulyan, 1994). Since podcasting is often counterpoised to the limitations of corporate radio (Canadian podcasters do not, for instance, tend to single out the publicly-funded CBC as that which they are resisting), especially American style corporate radio, we will follow the efforts of one particular corporation to define broadcasting in the early part of the 20th century: RCA. While it is a rhetorical convenience, it also gives some focus to our argument. The choice of RCA is also not accidental, since it perhaps worked harder than any other American corporation to define broadcasting in the first half of the 20th century.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “broadcast” has a long history, as a general metaphor for dissemination, first for scattered seeds thrown in all directions (rather than planted in a line), then like scattered seeds (the two examples given are of ‘broadcast accusations’ and ‘a host of spies [...] scattered across the land’), and only in 1922 does the OED take note of the application of the term broadcast to radio (or rather, to ‘wireless’; OED, s.v. “broadcast”). In point of fact, the earlier notion of broadcast, basically lifting the agricultural metaphor of scattered seeds, was already applied to sonic media in the 19th century. An 1888 address on the gramophone by Emile Berliner suggests that the Pope could ‘send broadcast’ his blessing by recording it, mass producing the records and distributing it via mail to countries all over the world (Berliner, 1888). An 1899 history of wireless telegraphy suggests that ‘many cases of impromptu communion arise where, as Professor Lodge says, it might be advantageous to “shout” the message, spreading it broadcast to receivers in all directions’ (Fahie, 1899). In both cases, broadcast in its adjectival form is a fairly tight agricultural metaphor. Yet it is also worth noting that Berliner’s use of the term broadcast is actually quite close to what podcasters do: they record something and disseminate it widely. They can skip the industrial production process needed for gramophone discs since computers reproduce files with great ease, and of course RSS is faster than the mail. But the practice of recording and disseminating, in an n-to-? formation is relatively consistent across the two centuries.

The agricultural metaphor is also an excellent normative definition of broadcasting: wide dissemination of content through mechanical or electronic media. John Durham Peters writes that dissemination is the form of communication most friendly to ‘the weirdly diverse practices we signifying animals engage in and to our bumbling attempts to meet others with some fairness and kindness’ (1999: 62). The problem with RCA’s definition, as we will see, is that it renders broadcasting as dissemination without the possibility of ‘weird diversity’. Here is a graphical representation of the process from 1922 (Sterne, 2003: 226):

Note the emphasis on equipment – in the picture you can find wattages, vacuum tubes, broadcast transmitters, control rooms, microphones and speakers. Broadcasting is high technology, and perhaps high fashion as well. This picture epitomises RCA’s attempt to define broadcasting as professional, laden by technology, based on a network that makes use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and one where the “sender” and “receiver” are not only separate in time and space but essentially different classes of people. A few people make broadcasts; many others listen. Or at least, that’s how RCA wanted us to see it.

One particular employee of RCA was especially obsessed with the definition of broadcasting. George Clark spent his entire adult life (starting in 1902) collecting material related to radio. From 1908 to 1919 he worked for the U.S. navy, and thereafter went to work for Marconi Wireless Telegraph, which was renamed the Radio Corporation of American in the 1920s to assuage fears of foreign ownership. Clark started out working in sales but moved on to the legal department. He collected materials for a “radioana museum” that never materialised, but the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C still holds his collection.

Clark was a true believer in RCA’s definition of broadcasting. After a 1934 speech by RCA president David Sarnoff, Clark wrote that broadcasting should be defined as ‘The operation of a station, for the people, on a regular schedule, and with these people well equipped in their homes to turn on a switch and move a dial and then receive – and if this be our definition, then KDKA was the first’ (1934). Clark contrasted his definition with a more open ended construct of broadcasting as ‘an army of amateurs, who, on the air, in the laboratory, and in the old family garret, proceeded to contribute what they could to the art’ (1934). In other words, broadcasting wasn’t real until RCA started to do it. Clark’s decades-long argument with Lee DeForest (inventor of the vacuum tube) further evidences this position. DeForest championed the transmission model of broadcasting, whereas Clark insisted that broadcasting was defined by its industrial formation: ‘De Forest the “father of broadcasting?” He certainly is not. I told him so, at a personal talk in Washington in 1939, and we nearly came to blows’ (Clark, 1939). Apart from the macho man posturing, Clark worked his whole career for, and in a sense his collection is dedicated to, the idea of broadcasting as centrally-provided and corporately controlled. Clark’s story is only a small anecdote in a much larger history, but it is a nice synecdoche for the process.[14]

The historians cited above – Susan Douglas, Michele Hilmes, Marc Raboy, Robert McChesney, Susan Smulyan and a number of others – have documented the process by which RCA’s definition of broadcasting came to hegemony. While there is some debate over specifics, a very truncated version of the story goes something like this: In the early days of radio, amateurs and the military dominated the airwaves. Corporations didn’t see broadcasting as a profitable activity in itself but rather put content out over the air to help sell radios. In 1922, AT&T discovered that it could sell airtime to advertisers and radio became a profitable enterprise. At the same time, nation-states began to take an interest in radio as a means of building a common national culture. Combined with the popularisation of radio sets that could only receive (and not transmit) and a massive PR campaign by companies like RCA, the for-profit model of broadcasting took hold in the United States, while the BBC and CBC were founded in Britain and Canada. By the mid 1930s, broadcasting had moved from a polymorphous practice undertaken by amateurs and professionals alike to a practice heavily regulated by states, who ensured a rarity of access to airwaves, and at least in the U.S., dominated by a for-profit model that saw audiences as something to be cultivated in order to sell them to advertisers (Meehan, 1990).

It is worth noting that the rich history of alternative broadcasting – from ham radio (which was a kind of radio until the 1930s) to independent community stations and whole networks – generally define themselves against corporate broadcasting (Riismandel, 2001; Fiske, 2001; Newman, 2004). Even such august institutions as the CBC were at various times in their history legitimated in terms of their ability to contribute to the creation a distinctively Canadian identity and Canadian content to counter the onslaught of American radio signals that did not politely stop when they reached the Canadian border. Rhetoric around podcasting sounds a lot like the rhetoric one finds alongside community radio projects or even in policy documents about the need for national cultures. The difference is that podcasting isn’t licensed, it doesn’t require any formal training (even the most radical community station usually requires aspiring broadcasters to go through some kind of minimal training program) and it is not centrally scheduled; perhaps this is why it seems so easy to juxtapose podcasting against broadcasting.

Despite the existence of alternative models and at times active resistance to commercialisation on the part of audiences and broadcasters alike, RCA (and in this respect, the early BBC and CBC weren’t substantially different) won out in both policy and everyday parlance with a “we have the equipment and the license and you don’t” model of broadcasting. In this model, broadcasting was a one-to-many endeavour, but the “one” was either a state-mandated organisation or a corporation seeking an audience. This is the model of broadcasting with which we live today.

If podcasting is named for a corporate product, it is only reasonable to give the dominant model of broadcasting a name more fitting to its history. Perhaps the for-profit, corporate controlled, limited-access, mass-audience-hunting model of broadcasting should be called “RCAcasting”. Sure, it’s an ugly term. But so is “podcasting”. To be fair, RCAcasting could also be called BBCasting or CBCcasting or USSRcasting, since they all worked on the same principle: few producers, many consumers, and most crucially limited access to the means of transmission. Berliner was a utopian socialist Jew, so we ought to save him the indignity of calling his model of recording Popecasting – but only because his model of broadcast was essentially open to all comers who could afford to make and press a record. It was, relatively speaking, more accessible. It also serves as a nice historical precursor of the kind of accessible broadcasting we might hope for with what is currently called podcasting. It is not too much to hope for broadcasting that is open to all — so long as they have access to the right gear — and broadcasts that are equally available to all regardless of who made them.

Conclusion: Podcasting is Broadcasting

The popularisation of podcasting as a practice ought to turn our attention back out to questions regarding who has the right to communicate, to what extent and by what means. The iPod/RSS story of podcasting, so pervasive in press accounts, connects nicely with the technoutopian currents of the business world, but offers little insight into the potential cultural significance of the practice. Indeed, the term podcasting itself seems more a product of the citational practices of bloggers — and mainstream news outlets’ tendencies to take their terms and debates as preconstructed (see Bourdieu 1998) — than any meaningful reflection on the nature or significance of the practice. If podcasting is like blogging, it is not only because it uses RSS technology or allows for the possibility of an amateur aesthetic, but because it opens up cultural production to a whole group of people who might otherwise have great difficulty being heard. This audio culture is fuelled by a producer culture that has developed around the emergence of (relatively) cheap audio production hardware and software, and it encompasses both professionals and amateurs alike.

Greater access is the rallying cry of podcasting, but the point of our historical detour is to suggest that if the problem is the corporate control of broadcasting, then we should be talking about a new vision of broadcasting as a whole. If we free the term broadcasting from its corporate connotations and remember its longer history, then podcasting is not simply an outgrowth of blogger culture, but rather part of a much longer history of dissemination. Podcasting is not an alternative to broadcasting, but a realisation of broadcasting that ought to exist alongside and compete with other models. If broadcasting were a more generally available term, then perhaps we could begin to speak of our own broadcasts without sounding grandiose or pretentious. The point is not endless celebrations of individuality in computer culture. It is not enough to add ‘My Broadcasts’ to ‘My Documents’, ‘My Music’ and ‘My Photos.’ Rather, we would like to see broadcasting reopened as a political and cultural question. In some small way, and in spite of its preposterously branded name, podcasting might contribute to that project. At its best, it has certainly already contributed to the weird diversity of audio out there in the world.

Authors’ Biographies

Jonathan Sterne is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003). His next book is tentatively titled MP3: The Meaning of a Format, and he is editing a reader in Sound Studies. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

Jeremy Morris is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill. His research interests include the current state of the popular music industry, the marketing of cultural goods and technologies of music production and consumption. In addition to his academic work, Jeremy also records, engineers, and hosts podcasts. To contact him, go to www.jeremywademorris.com

Michael Brendan Baker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and a part-time faculty member at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. He is a past recipient of the Gerald Pratley Award and an executive member of the Film Studies Association of Canada.

Ariana Moscote Freire recently completed her M.A. studies in communication at McGill University. Her work will appear in a forthcoming special issue of The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media on “Contemporary Radio in North America”.

The authors would like to thank one another, the issue editors and Carrie Rentschler for readings and commentary on the text.

Notes

[1] A Forrester research report casts some doubt on these inflated numbers, claiming only 1% of online households regularly download and listen to podcasts. The report also acknowledges the difficulties of obtaining accurate measurements on the fledgling media form (e.g., downloads vs. subscriptions etc.). See Li (2006a and 2006b) for more details.
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[2] After realising that the vernacular nature of the term podcast essentially rendered it beyond trademarking, Apple set its sights slightly lower and formally expressed its interests in the term “ipodcast” in an application filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) (AppleInc. 2005). While the application defined the term at great length and attempted to acknowledge every possible application ipodcast could possibly encompass, it was precisely the widespread use of the term podcast and the broad range of practices to which it applied that foiled Apple’s (and others’) efforts to successfully trademark and control its use. The ipodcast trademark application was eventually successful after Apple responded to a series of oppositions and challenges from the USPTO requiring the company to delimit the scope of their definition of the term before considering the file (USPTO trademark application nos. 78706746 & 78706741, 2007).
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[3] RSS documents are prepared with Extensible Markup Language (XML), a text format designed for electronic publishing and not dissimilar from the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that constitutes much of the content published on the web.
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[4] Thus, our paper is not intended as a holistic account of podcasting, nor as a study of podcasters, listeners or industries.
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[5] It is Searls who famously cites his own Google search for the term podcasting on 28 September 2004 – at the time it produced 24 results – before suggesting that within a year ‘it will pull up hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions’ of results. On 01 February 2007, the same informal search returns over 123 million results.
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[6] An early and representative example of these articles can be found at Endgadget.com, http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/05/engadget-podcast-001-10-05-2004-how-to-podcasting-get/ (Accessed 03 February 2007).
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[7] The Wikipedia entry for podcast has been the source of some dispute itself (See note 9). However, the debate surrounds the contribution of the individual actors involved in podcasting’s emergence; there is little dispute we know of that questions the wiki’s definition of the term.
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[8] Video podcasts are now being prepared, posted and indexed in much the same way as audio podcasts.
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[9] It should be noted that the precise chronology, contribution and merits of Winer, Lydon and Curry’s roles in the development of podcasting remains in some dispute. In December 2005 it was revealed that Curry had been anonymously editing the Wikipedia entry for podcasting in such a way that Winer’s role was reduced and other key contributors (including programmer Kevin Marks, who wrote the script effectively linking RSS with iTunes) were deleted entirely. At the time of writing, Wikipedia entries for various terms and concepts relating to podcasting are no longer editable by unregistered users and the controversy itself is documented – see “Podcast”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast (Accessed 26 June 2007).
[back]

[10] Being a web-based service, users of any other digital player (e.g. the Diamond Rio) could also download files from MyAudio2Go.com but the service bolstered i2GO’s attempts to position the eGo player as a device specifically designed for use in cars and other consumer vehicles. For more, see Fridman (1999).
[back]

[11] The launch of Cubase (1989) and its virtual studio tools (1996), ProTools (1991), Cool Edit (1997), ACID Pro (1998), Nuendo (2000), Reason (2000), Ableton Live (2001), and Audacity (2002) all signaled a recognition of the market potential of audio software.
[back]

[12] For examples of hardware and software that brands itself as “perfect for podcasting” see, e.g., the HHB FlashMic (http://www.hhb.co.uk/flashmic/), the Samson C01U Studio Condenser Microphone (http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1810), the Behringer Podcastudio (http://www.behringer.com/podcastudio-firewire/index.cfm?lang=eng), and other studio-in-a-box solutions (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/PodcastFactory-main.html).
[back]

[13] The New York Times, for example, once offered exclusive podcasts and other multimedia as part of the TimesSelect online paid subscription service. The Ricky Gervais Podcast, one of the most consistently popular podcasts, hosted by Guardian Media Group, had such a successful 1st series of (free) podcasts that the second “season” was only available for a fee ($1.95 per episode).
[back]

[14] Series 134 and 135 of Clark’s papers at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History are heavily populated with attempts to define broadcasting and to link it to the particular from which it took at RCA.
[back]

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A Turning towards Code

Over the past thirty years there has been an increasing interest in the social and cultural implications of digital technologies and “informationalism” from the social sciences and humanities. Generally this has concentrated on the implications of the “convergence” of digital devices and services, understood as linked to the discrete processing capabilities of computers, which rely on logical operations, binary processing and symbolic representation. In this paper, I suggest that a “grammar of code” might provide a useful way of thinking about the way in which digital technologies operate as a medium and can contribute usefully to this wider debate. In using the term “code” I include computer software source code, associated executables, and static data structures and I want to build on previous work by authors such as Manovich (2001), Hayles (2004), Fuller (2004) and Mackenzie (2006) who all identify the importance of looking at computer software. I also want to connect with interesting debates that are currently taking place between practitioners and theorists within software studies and critical code studies, on the importance of “reading” and “writing” code – see Manovich (2001) and Marino (2006). Here, though, I would like to concentrate on the performative aspects of code, especially when the code is translated (either as an executable or into another state). Code is usually written by programmers to be ‘run’, and when it is executed it operates as a discrete final state machine (FSM) usually with some form of symbolic performativity associated with it – in other words, a useful heuristic is that code usually does something to something (although this is contested by some critical code studies theorists such as Marino (2006)). It performs functions and processing; from airline booking systems, banking processing, real-time military calculation, to the ‘idle task’ process that keeps the CPU ‘busy’ when no other process is running (e.g. process zero in Linux). Code is thus strongly linked to activity within the domain of the digital computer, and indeed, within computer programming generally – good software writing is linked heavily to ‘running code’ (although see arguments about “code poetry” and “software art” discussed by Mackenzie 2006:32).

Currently theorising code is made difficult by the extremely mutable and plastic form of computer code, not to say complications that arise with regard to appropriate methodologies and approaches for understanding the way in which code is produced, circulated and consumed. Rather than directly engage with these methodological questions, in this paper I aim to contribute towards developing a grammar of code, in as much as Stiegler (2007) discusses the importance of an understanding of the ‘…systematic discretization of movement – that is to say, of a vast process of the grammaticalization of the visible’ (Stiegler 2007: 148-149, original emphasis). Where Stiegler is interested in the discrete image, in this paper I am interested in the way in which the dynamic properties of code can be understood as operating according to a grammar reflected in its materialisation and operation in the lifeworld – the discretisation of the phenomenal world. As part of that contribution I wish to develop some tentative Weberian ‘ideal-types’, where I understand an ideal-type to be an analytical construct that is abstracted from concrete examples. The ideal-types I discuss in this paper are intended to help make “code” more clear and understandable; to develop an understanding of the kinds of ways in which code is manifested; and by helping to reduce ambiguity about “code” by providing a means to develop adequate descriptions that contribute to understanding code’s historical characteristics (see Morrison 1997: 270-273).

Due to limits on space, in this paper I only develop the ideal-types as fairly abstract concepts, but one could certainly imagine developing a grammar to include computer code structures such as: objects, classes, variables (of different types), methods, namespaces, conditionals, interfaces and so forth. This could then become useful for understanding code-in-itself, social dynamics mediated through code, cultural artefacts produced through the use of code and perhaps suggest interesting relations between what Latour (1992) calls ‘delegation’, the encoding of particular imperatives and values, and ‘prescription’, that is the reverse application of imperatives back onto us as human beings. In the discussion below, for example, I directly link this sense of delegation and prescription to the “reading” and “writing” of computer code.

To develop this argument and to demonstrate the importance of understanding code as performative and processual (rather than as a static artefact), I undertake a media-specific analysis (Hayles 2004) by an examination of what Bolter and Grusin (1999) called reverse remediation. To do this, I outline a short comparison of digital and code based analysis of digital technology to develop a notion of atomic versus articulatory aspects to computer code. I initially propose seven heuristic ideal-types as a contribution to developing ways of conceptualising and researching code, namely: digital data structure, digital stream, delegated code, prescriptive code, commentary code, code object and critical code (section 1). I then apply these ideal-types to the work of the Japanese composer Masahiro Miwa whose innovative ‘Reverse-Simulation music’ models the operation of basic low-level digital circuitry for the performance and generation of musical pieces, that is, in the articulatory expression of code (section 2). Finally I look at the implications of this approach and the ways in which the ideal-type grammar could be extended and developed.

1 – Coding Code

First I would like to develop the ideal-types that I wish to apply throughout the paper by theorising the different forms of “code”. For example, the term “digital code” or the “digital” is often used to broadly refer to the digital collection of 0s and 1s that can be used to store functions for operating a computer (i.e. machine-code) and alternatively for storing information (i.e. binary data). These different forms of data structure are stored in the memory of the computer or hard disc in the encoding of binary data – as rows of 0s and 1s in patterns and grids. However, ‘digital’ is also related to the discrete way in which computers, and digital technology in general, translate the analogue continuous phenomenal world into internal symbolic representational structures. These structures are limited to specific sizes that are ‘fitted’ to the external world by a translating device such as an analogue-digital converter. So I would like to introduce the ideal-type of the digital data structure as the static form of data representation. So to take an example, music when represented within the computer is translated from its analogue waveform (which is a continuous wave) and quantized into discrete ‘chunks’. In the case of CD technology, which uses Pulse Code Modulation (PCM), the chunks (bytes) are 16 bits wide, that is, they are able to represent only 65535 different values within the wave, that are sampled at 44,100 times per second. In translating between the external world and the internal symbolic representation, information is lost as the 65535 values are a grid, the digital data structure, placed over a smooth waveform. When translated, or played back through a digital-analogue converter, those with keen ears (and expensive audiophile equipment) are able to hear the loss of fidelity and digital artefacts introduced by errors in translation between the two (i.e. back from digital data structure to analogue sound). The digital encoding of analogue information (such as in the ripping of an old vinyl LP) is the transfer from one medium of storage (continuous grooves in vinyl) to another (discrete values that can represent waveforms).[1] Something of the detail is always lost when moved from the phenomenal world to the discrete world of the computer. This highlights the importance of a focus on the materiality as different embodiments fix data in different ways. Similarly, in any transmission, digital data is broken down to its most basic level as a string of 0s and 1s and chopped into neat packets of data and sent through a network, rather like little parcels sent through the post. This is in marked contrast to the analogue modulation required to send continuous signals that have live end-to-end connection (think of the mechanical switching technologies in old telephone networks), rather than the virtual ‘connection’ of network technologies like digital mobile telephony.

Here I think it is useful to think of the ideal-type of the digital stream as the flow of static computer digital data structures as flattened one-dimensional flows of 0s and 1s. When computers store media content to a hard disc or other medium, the media is encoded into binary form and it is written to a binary file as a digital stream. Similarly when data is transmitted across networks or through other mediums (such as radio). Within the digital stream file there are markers (such as the file-type discussed below), structural forms and data patterning that provide an encoding that allows the computer to bring the data back to its original depth as a digital data structure. To do this the computer relies on standard file and data structures to decode these binary files. When the file lies on the hard disc its functionality remains inert and static as a digital stream, for the file to become usable requires that the computer re-read the digital stream back into the computer and re-create the hierarchical structure. In a similar way, we take delivery of 2D flat-pack furniture from Ikea (the digital stream) and are required to read the instructions (the file structure) to piece together and rebuild the 3D wardrobe (the digital data structures located inside the computer memory) prior to being filled with clothes (or ‘run’ on the computer). Therefore any digital stream presented to the computer is always already overcoded with meaning. For example, to take a trivial example of the ‘file-type’, the computer uses the last three characters of the filename to decode the type of file that it is dealing with and hence how to operate upon the file (e.g. which parent application it should be opened in conjunction with). Thus the last three characters ‘doc’ are indicative of a file that is a digital stream that should be interpreted as a digital data structure word-processing file and therefore should be opened with the Microsoft Word application. The characters ‘gif’ in contrast mark the file as a digital stream that is interpreted as a digital data structure ‘graphics interchange file’ image file encoded with an algorithm developed by Compuserve. On the other hand, file-type ‘exe’ indicates to Microsoft Windows applications that it is an executable prescriptive code file (see below) that can be ‘run’ by the computer and can then be given control of the processor (‘app’ is the Apple Macintosh equivalent, Unix uses a different system of permissions to achieve the same effect).

The flexibility of being able to render information, whether audio-visual or textual, into this standardised digital stream form allows the incredible manipulation and transformation of information that computers facilitate (e.g. Unix uses a digital stream of text as the ubiquitous universal format in the operating system). This stream format also enables the access, storage and relational connections between vast quantities of data located in different places, such as demonstrated through search engines like Google. This translational quality of digital representation and storage (albeit at an often degraded resolution within digital data structures) is something that highlights the strong remedial qualities of digital representation.

Whereas the static atomic form of digital data storage, representation and transmission generally has a passive relationship with technology, it is with computer code that one is involved with action and articulation within the computer, particularly where the code is unfolding and performing particular functions. Code can be understood as the mechanism that operates upon and transforms symbolic data, whether by recombining it, performing arithmetic or binary calculation or moving data between different storage locations. As such, code is operative and produces a result (sometimes at the end of a number of sub-goals or tasks), often in an iterative process of loops and conditionals. Therefore, developing the notion of code as an active agency within the computer brings us to the next two ideal-types, code as delegated code and as ‘autonomous’ prescriptive code.

Code has a dual existence, as delegated code residing in a human-readable frozen state that computer programmers refer to as ‘source code’ and as prescriptive code that performs operations and processes. For example, in computer programming, to explain the way a particular piece of code is to function, and to avoid talking about a particular instantiation of a programming language, algorithms are written out in ‘pseudocode’. That is in a non-computer, non-compilable language that is computer-like but still contains enough natural language (such as English) to be readable. That is, the algorithms allow the process to be described in a platform/language independent fashion, which can be understood as a pre-delegated code form. So for example, a common computer programming method, the bubble sort could be outlined thus:

In this example, the bubble sort is a simple sorting mechanism that takes a vertical list of numbers and puts the elements that make it up in order by running in a loop which compares each number in turn with the one above and swapping them around in the list if one is bigger than the other. Essentially the smaller numbers ‘float’ to the top and the larger ones ‘sink’ to the bottom (e.g. bubbles float to the top).

To enable programs to be written more quickly by programmers, an abstraction of the underlying machine is used that is not dissimilar to pseudo-code. These are the contemporary programming languages, often known as third-generation languages (3GL), in which the human programmer or coder is usually required to write, for example C++, Java and Basic.[2] It is at this level that the delegated code is written by the programmer as these highly abstracted languages use a formalised syntax and are usually constructed around simplified English keywords. Together with symbols and punctuation, programs are written in a structured syntactical style made up of statements, loops and conditionals by the programmer to construct the logical operation of the program (see above). This pseudo-code would then be implemented as delegated code in specific computer languages; here the examples are Java and Perl;[3]

Source code is usually understood as the concretisation of general algorithms instantiated into particular programming languages in plain text files. Computer programmers write source code as a script of delegated actions that are to be performed by the program. Here, then, we might think of the ideal-type of source code as delegated code. For example, the mechanical process required to move a unit of data from point A to point B.

swap(A[j], A[j+1])

Delegated code is written in preliminary documents that contain the logic of program operation. But, in addition to the controlling logic of the delegated code program flow, the source code will often contain a commentary by the programmer in a special textual area usually delimitated by special characters. These comments assist both the programmer and others wishing to understand the programming code and I introduce the ideal-type commentary code to describe these areas. These textual areas are used to demonstrate authorship, list collaborators and document changes – thus source code offers a hermeneutic and historical record in commentary code in addition to the processing capabilities of the explicitly delegated code within the file. However it is important to note that as human-readable text files, the delegated code is also open to interpretation by different ‘readers’, whether human or machine (see Marino 2006 for a discussion of this).

For the computer to execute the source code as human-readable delegated code it would need to be translated into an executable, that is, machine-readable prescriptive code (see Stallman 2002: 3). At machine level, executable code, as prescriptive code, is represented digitally as a stream of 0s and 1s and is very difficult for humans to write or read directly. To the human eye this would look like long streams of 0s and 1s without structure or meaning, hence they are often referred to as machine-readable files (insinuating the inability of humans to understand them directly in contrast to human-readable files). Indeed, the mythology of expert programmers and hackers dates back to the times when this was one of the only means of programming computers (Levy 2001). The production of computer code at this low level would be prohibitively complex, time-consuming and slow for all but the smallest of programs. The programmer simplifies the act of programming by abstracting the code implementation from the actual machine hardware. So, when the bubble-sort delegated code is compiled into prescriptive code it is translated into the 0s and 1s that a computer can understand. When complied the program can then run the bubble-sort correctly for the appropriate hardware, in this case taking an unsorted list of numbers in a digital data structure and re-ordering them.

The further the programmer is positioned from the atomic level of 0s and 1s by the programming language, the further from the ‘metal’ – the electrical operation of the silicon. Therefore the programmer is not required to think in a purely mechanical/electrical fashion and is able to be more conceptual. At the humanised level of abstraction of third generation languages, delegated code can become extremely expressive and further abstraction is made easier. Away from thinking in terms of digital data structures or digital streams, the programmer begins to think in terms of everyday objects that are represented within the language structure, so rather than deal with 0s and 1s, instead she might manipulate another ideal-type which I will call code objects – such as ‘cars’ or ‘airplanes’ which have related properties such as ‘gas tank’ or ‘wing span’ and functions (i.e. methods) such as ‘accelerate’ or ‘open undercarriage’. There is a growing use of the relatively new concept of the discrete ‘object’ within computing. It is used as a monad containing a protected internal state, methods and interfaces to its external environment. This ‘object’ is used within the source code as a technique called object-oriented programming, as an abstraction where it is deployed as a visual metaphor for users to manipulate digital artefacts (see Scratch n.d), and also as an active process within a network of programs, users and other objects. Nonetheless, at some point the abstractions manipulated by the programmer within delegated code will have to be translated into the necessary binary operations for the correct functioning of the prescriptive code.

Finally, I want to introduce the ideal-type of critical code, which is code that is written to open up existing closed forms of proprietary computer code, providing users the ability to read/hack existing digital streams and hence to unpick the digital data structure. This could be where software lock-in has become a particular problem, such as with using Microsoft Word documents, or proprietary data formats. But I also want to include code that is designed to hack existing closed proprietary code – often encoded as prescriptive code, such as DeCSS, which by careful examination of DVD prescriptive code opened up the DVD format for GNU/Linux users (Mackenzie 2006: 28-29). Equally the recent Jailbreak software for unlocking the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, hacks the prescriptive code that controls the phone with the intention of opening the hardware and software platform up to the developer/user. Critical code is drawn from the concept introduced by Fuller (2004) of ‘Critical Software’ but is contrasted to prescriptive code in the normative content of the delegated code. That is, that the delegated code is written against the normal performative software development aims of efficiency, modularity or reusability and instead has an implied ethic or good. I am thinking particularly of free software and open source projects here such as the GNU/Linux operating system (see Berry 2004; Chopra and Dexter 2008: 37-71). Therefore a requirement of critical code would be that the source/executable would be available for inspection to check the delegated processing that the code undertakes. If the source were unavailable then it would be impossible to check the prescriptive code to ensure it was not bogus or malicious software and it could not then be critical code.

Now I want to turn to the articulation of code through its remediation in cultural works beyond its use in the technical sphere. The aim is two-fold, firstly to apply these ideal-types to unpack the way in which cultural appropriation of the language of new media is taking place; and secondly to look at the application of code in cultural practices. Although, computers’ increase in power and speed have facilitated a greater abstraction and distance from the ‘metal’ for programmers, below I discuss a composer who ironically, seeks to get closer to the basic operations of computer technology as part of his compositional approach.

2 – Reverse Remediation

Masahiro Miwa is a Japanese composer who has been experimenting with a form of music that can be composed through the use of programming metaphors and frameworks.

[Reverse-Simulation Music] experiment seeks to reverse the usual conception of computer simulations. Rather than modelling within a computer space the various phenomena of the world based on the laws of physics, phenomena that have been verified within a computer space are modelled in the real world, hence the name, reverse-simulation. (Miwa 2003)

In 2007 he presented his new compositional ideas of ‘Reverse-Simulation Music’ at Prix Ars Electronica, an international competition for Cyber Arts. Miwa explained his new approach to ‘Algorithmic Composition’ and how he was interested in using the possibilities of algorithmic methods to demonstrate the relationships between music and technology, and music and the human body. He described the technique as a ‘new musical methodology’ that he has used as the conceptual basis for several compositions (Miwa 2007). He explained that in 2002 he had originally outlined the approach as a relatively abstract idea for composition but that it has undergone iterations and developments over the past five years (discussed below) and in the last two years it has been materialised in practice, both as composition and performance art. Miwa has now released pieces for solo performance, choir and large ensembles based on these concepts.

In these pieces, Miwa argues that action, not sound, whether by musicians or dancers, is regulated by algorithmic rules. Miwa (2007) outlines the development of his compositions as: (i) Rule-based generation, where the model is developed in the computer – which is analogous to delegated code; (ii) Interpretation, where it is materialised in actions for the musicians or performers – analogous to prescriptive code; and (iii) Naming, where a narrative is developed that gives meaning to the actions of the musicians/performers – analogous to commentary code.

In a similar fashion to computer programming, Miwa has developed the Reverse-Simulation music pieces by creating delegated code models that are constructed on computer programs such as Max/MSP, a graphical environment for music, audio, and multimedia composition. After the logical and mathematical structure has been explored they are materialised into algorithmic rules for the musicians that they learn and follow mechanically. Miwa’s first piece of Reverse-Simulation music was the piece Matari-sama (2002).[4] This is a simple piece for eight players who ring bells and castanets based on defined rules which are outlined in a delegated code algorithm for the performance of Matari-sama (Miwa n.d):

• 8 players are to sit in a circle, each player facing the back of the player in front.
• Each player holds a bell in his or her right hand and castanets in the left.
• According to the rules of “suzukake”, players are to ring either bell or castanets by hitting the next player’s shoulder after they have been hit themselves.

Rules of “suzukake”:

• Ring the bell by tapping on the next player’s right shoulder.
• Ring the castanets by tapping on the next player’s left shoulder.

Depending on which instrument he or she has played, the player is said to be in “bell mode” or “castanet mode”. This mode determines which instrument the player will use for the next turn according to these rules:

When the player is in “bell mode”: play the same instrument.

• A player who is in “bell mode” and is hit by a bell will ring a bell and stay in “bell mode”.
• A player who is in “bell mode” and is hit by castanet will ring a castanet and change to “castanet mode”.

When the player is in “castanet mode”: play different instrument.

• A player who is in “castanet mode” and is hit by a bell will ring a castanet and stay in “castanet mode”
• A player who is in “castanet mode” and is hit by a castanet will ring a bell and change to “bell mode” (Miwa n.d)

Miwa (2007) explains that these rules are defined through the use of what is called an XOR gate – one of computers most basic logical operations.[5] In Matari-sama, each player acts as an individual XOR gate using their left hand with a castanet to signify a binary ’1′ output and a bell in the right hand to signify a ’0′. The musician’s hand being played (either a castanet or bell) would be combined with the instrument of the player behind to create the ‘input’ for the XOR operation, the ‘output’ would then remain through a loop to be re-inserted back into the input of the next repetition of the circle. In addition, each musician has a one-bit memory or state, that is, they remember playing either a bell or castanet and there ‘hold’ the state in a ‘castanet’ mode or a ‘bell’ mode ­- analogous to 0 or 1 in binary. The musicians sit in a circle of eight players playing their ‘output’ (bell or castanet) onto the back of the player in front, and the piece creates a closed circle of repeated operations (or ‘loop’) which plays out patterns on the castanets and the bells.

The patterns that arise from these local rules and made audible by the bells and castanets are not a “composition” per se and are not in any way an improvisation either. Matari-sama is a concert of players who have gathered to guide sonic diversity without a score proper. In other words, it is music that concerns itself only with pure collective action (Miwa n.d).

In order to understand the behaviour of the XOR gate and to optimise it for this compositional piece it was first modelled on a computer using software and six loops were developed from experimenting with the initialisation patterns. Matari-sama is a form of performance piece that does not call on sight-reading of score. Miwa claims that it requires neither memorisation nor any improvisation by the musicians involved except for a one-bit memory (the player remembering playing last bell or castanet) (Miwa 2007). In other words, when the initial state has been set for the musicians to play from, everything that follows in the musical development derives from the repetition of the simple rules derived from the XOR gate.

In the case of an 8 player ensemble, it will take 63 cycles (504 individual steps) to return players to their states at the beginning of the performance (castanet or bell state). That is to say that the piece forms at 63-cycle loop. There are two exceptions to this, one of which being the case where each player starts in bell (0) state, in which case the loop lasts only one cycle (Miwa n.d).

Here the musicians are acting as if they were running ‘autonomous’ prescriptive code performing as individual logic gates performing logic operations based on the internal logic operations defined by XOR. As such they are not open to investigation, and as the piece develops in complexity from the number of loops repeated, the audience will find it increasingly difficult to understand the underlying code operations taking place. The state of the musician (bell/castanet), for example, is internalised by the player and in any case most people in the audience will not understand the operation of a XOR gate. But crucially, it should be possible, at least theoretically, to follow through each step of the process unfolding, rather as one would if debugging computer software.

In this case Miwa claims that the code is running to an exact and limited prescriptive code which the composer has defined drawing on the knowledge of low-level computer programming. However there are differences that are being introduced with the translation from an XOR gate to that of a processing subject (i.e. the musician). The first is that generally speaking, XOR gates do not have any memory capacity; they supply an electrical output (0 or 1) depending on the inputs. The second is that internally, the one-bit memory that Miwa is assuming is hardwired back into the input of the XOR gates of his piece is not usually found in XOR gates. The XOR gate that Miwa is modelling then is actually only very loosely based on a ‘real’ XOR gate – it is probably more profitable to think of it as a model of a XOR gate which has been extended for the purposes of his composition. Thus the XOR gate in Miwa’s schema is in fact more like a code object containing state and methods, which communicates with the other code objects in the piece based on the passing of a digital stream, which in this case consists of only one-bit of information (castanet or bell). Further, in attempting to ‘reverse simulate’ the operations of these logic gates there is also the problem of synchronising them (called boot-strapping within computer science). In other words how does the process start? As currently wired, the circuit of Matarisama requires an outside agency to start the process running. There is also the question of timing, what external agency supplies the ‘clock speed’ of the ‘thread’ that is running within the circuit of the musicians? There is also a radical instability introduced into the initial state of the musicians as we are not told their initial state (0 or 1) as it is not defined in the delegated code of the piece.

There are further problems with how we know which of the code objects (i.e. musicians) has the focus of processing (as it would inside a logic circuit). Indeed, it is performed as if the piece acts like mechanical clockwork and that is how it looks to the audience, but there are many unwritten assumptions regarding that claim that the musicians are not thinking or improvising and ‘it is music that concerns itself only with pure collective action’ (Miwa n.d). It is interesting to note that the music generated sounds like an idealised version of what one would assume the internals of computer circuitry might be. This perhaps points to where the reverse remediation of the Matarisama piece begins to break down when subjected to critical scrutiny – the delegated code of Matarisama is unlike computer code in that it is does not run autonomously but is mediated through the human musicians. In some ways the piece becomes a representation of some idealised form of computer code, or perhaps computer-like code. It is interesting to note that computer programmers seldom program in the form of logic gates any more (see above discussing the abstraction of code from digital streams) yet here the composer has chosen to ‘write’ at that level. It is paradoxical to note that the closer one tries to get towards the operation of the Matarisama circuit, the more unstable and unlike a logical circuit it becomes and the more like higher-level interacting code objects. Indeed, the hermeneutic abilities of the musicians and performers become more critical as they fill in the compositional ‘lack’. This also means that in practice it is impossible for an audience to reproduce the piece and predict its final output (in contrast to computer based prescriptive code).

As part of the development of the piece, Matarisama was also realised in a form that was neither human nor computer, Matarisama-Doll (Ningyo). Instead it was modelled on a water-based model that has a one-bit memory which was presented at the Ars Electronica festival in 2003 (Miwa 2007). In this form it is again reminiscent of prescriptive code as the rules underlying the composition are delegated into the hardware (in this case the pulleys, wheels and weights) that are not very clear in operation to the viewer. In this form the piece is performative rather than compositional and demonstrates the way in which the logic of digital technology could be delegated to material objects. However again here the autonomy of the prescriptive code is suspect, as agency is supplied via the continual input of the human user/spectator.

In 2003, a similar performance, Muramatsu Gear “Le Sacred u Printemps” (2003) was developed where a group of seventeen women form a circle called a lifecycle. Inside this circle a smaller group of five men rotate around the circle and come face-to-face with one of the woman. In the piece, the men turn around like a gear and perform an XOR operation with the woman they happen to face. Depending on the output of the operation made when they clapped hands the women would sing a particular note. The women’s singing voices (as a musical note that is taken as an ‘output’ of the circuit) was then transcribed into an orchestral piece into musical score, in this sense the prescriptive code is outputting a digital data structure that can later be played back by an orchestra. The players of the orchestra are no longer required to simulate logic gates, instead they play the piece according to how it has been transcribed – they are assumed to be passive players. Here the digital data structure encoded into the score is now human readable and printed onto paper that is distributed to the players. The complexities of the piece thus become clearer to both the musician (who presumably could now introduce another layer of interpretative flair into the piece) and to a listening audience that can obtain the score for examination or may be able to understand the piece due to the norms of orchestral layout and our familiarity with the way orchestras are organised. Nonetheless the ‘output’ encoded in this score represents a discretisation of musical complexity to a limited range of signifiers (depending how the translation was organised).

In developing this method of algorithmic composition, Miwa experimented with new forms of logic operation to progress from the use of XOR gates. During 2004, during a workshop, Miwa developed a new operation called the ‘Jaiken’. The Jaiken-zan is represented by the operation ‘A – (6 – (A+B) ) MOD 3′ (Miwa 2007). This is represented in a table as:

Out of this workshop in 2004 the piece ‘Jiyai Kagura‘ was created, that was composed by members of the workshop ‘Making the imaginary folk entertainment’. In this piece an imaginary folk culture is explored through the use of playing the Japanese ceremonial drum, the Ogaki. In a similar way to Matarisama, the musicians each play turns on the drum based on performing a logic operation on the last action of the previous musician combined with the ‘input’ of a separate dancer/singer whose pose is representative of her internal state (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Jaiken-zan three-state dance (Miwa n.d)

With the Jaiken-zan one might immediately note the change from the base 2 numeral system (i.e. binary- bits 0 and 1) used in the previous pieces, to the base 3 numeral system (i.e. ternary or trinary- trits 0, 1 and 2). Here is perhaps the best evidence that Miwa is not working in any conventional way with binary logic circuits, and certainly not within the standard binary system used within digital computers. The Jaiken-zan now has three ‘inputs’ and three ‘outputs’ which are matched to three different sounds (or actions within performance) based on a table that Miwa (n.d.) refers to as stone, scissor and paper (see Figure 2). A cursory glance at the map of the structure (see Miwa n.d) shows that the human compositional rules are a simplified version of the Max/MSP version.

Figure 2. Jaiken-zan in Japanese (Miwa n.d)

The Jaiken-zan operation was also used to develop: (i) the piece Jaiken-beats (2004), a piece for hand clapping which was performed in 2006 at the Computing Music IV conference in Cologne; (ii) a silent piece, ‘Jaiken-bugaku’ (2004), where the performers only move around based on the logic gate operations defined in this formula and which creates a visual sense of the logic operations; (iii) screen music for a film by Shinjiro Maeda Music for ‘Hibi’ (2005), performed by the members of a workshop at ‘Possible Futures, Japanese postwar art and technology’ using shakers as representations of the logic outputs; (iv) and lastly, Jaiken-zan was used to develop a possible form for a game that might be played by children called Shaguma-sama (2005) which relies on a drum beat to set the time of the piece (analogous to the computer processor clock which organises the timing of the logic gates) and which used hopping and, hand movements and singing to represent the logic operations. With the Jaiken-zan pieces, the discretisation of musical performance is foregrounded in this compositional strategy (three ‘inputs’, three ‘outputs’ from each performer). Only certain forms of ‘dance’ are allowed and the generation of sounds is equally limited to the stone, scissor and paper types.

The piece, ’369′ homage for Mr. B (2006), written for string orchestra was also written through the use of the Jaiken-zan logic gates. Again in this piece the digital data structure was output from the computer simulation of the Jaiken-zan and transposed into score. The hermeneutic transfer of the tenary output into conventional musical score is elided in his descriptions, which seem to indicate a simple one-to-one translation, yet as we have seen through the entire analysis, the interpretative moment of the human actors is strangely backgrounded in Miwa’s pieces (see Miwa 2007).

Coda

In this paper I have introduced the ideal-types: (i) digital data structure, (ii) digital stream, (iii) delegated code, (iv) prescriptive code, (v) commentary code, (vi) code object and (vii) critical code. Using them, I have explored the rule-based compositional work and claims of the Japanese composer Masahiro Miwa. Miwa has used computer-based concepts, such as logic gates, binary and processing operations and translated them into performance pieces and musical compositions. I argue that these ideal-types assist in showing that the translation between atomic and articulatory code, and the materiality of the code matters. In this case, the computer-based Max/MSP code translated into human-readable code for the human actors (based on idealised notions of atomic binary computer logic gates). In subjecting Miwa’s work to close critical scrutiny I have also outlined the extent to which his compositions are not based on a passive cloning of conventional circuitry, but rather is a creative re-interpretation. Additionally I raise questions about Miwa’s claim to bypass human interpretation and the way in which this form is understood and interpreted by audiences. If the performed music is not really an implementation of a ‘programmed’ form of composition, then it is not truly a ‘Reverse-Simulation’, more accurately it might be termed ‘reverse simulacra’.

More importantly, these ideal-types bring to the foreground the discretisation that takes place in both computer code and in cultural work that draws on this form. That is, that a simplified model is constructed when writing delegated code that consists of discrete states that computer-based circuits can process. In the work of Miwa, ideal-types can help to understand the way in which his work is centred on delegating limited compositional circuits that are then prescribed back onto performers and musicians. This cultural practice is interesting because of the simple initial states and relations that Miwa has chosen to model and apply. The ideal-types highlight the translational work that is backgrounded in trying to implement these circuits in cultural practice.

Although the ideal-types introduced in this paper are of a relatively high level of abstraction, I argue that they are useful to develop our understanding of the way in which computer code is an important part of our cultural milieu. The prescription of discrete states from code applies to a large portion of our lives; think of traffic lights, digital dashboards, home heating systems and television volume controls. We need to develop a richer grammar to understand the way in which code represents and articulates our phenomenal world. Developing and extending these ideal-types would contribute toward a better way of understanding historical examples of code in practice. Ideal-types could be used to look at a number of ways in which computer code has prescribed qualities that are becoming naturalised and help to highlight these changes by opening them up to critical scrutiny.

More work is needed on understanding computer code and our current tools and methodologies are limited in trying to unpack its production, meaning, circulation and reception. Continuing the development of a grammar of code and enumerating the discretisation that takes place within the symbolic processing of computers and digital technology gives us a useful way of speaking about code which might contribute to our better understanding its limitations, prescriptions and potentials.

Author’s Biography

David M. Berry is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at Swansea University. He writes widely on issues of code and media theory and his other work includes Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source.

Notes

[1] Sometimes referred to as ‘de-materialisation’, that is the transfer from a physical expression or container to a representation within binary data on a computer system. This is usually stored as 0s and 1s on a magnetic storage device such as a computer hard drive but can also by optically stored as binary pits on an optical storage device such as a CD or DVD.
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[2] Java is a programming language which was developed by Sun Microsystems and is owned and controlled by the corporation. The patents, trademarks and copyrights of crucial parts of the Java system are asserted by Sun. Recently Sun has announced that it intends to re-license the Java language under the Gnu GPL (in fact it intends to dual-license it for commercial works) possibly in 2007 (LaMonica 2006). Perl was written by Larry Wall and dual-licensed under both the Artistic Licence (also written by Larry Wall) and the Gnu GPL.
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[3] Most languages now are Object Oriented Programming languages (OOPs). This means that they have a formal structure that is in contrast to the older Procedure/Data division (that still tends to inform more media scholarship on the subject) and instead relies on an Object/Method division. In practice this means that the software developer attempts to create a model of the world within the computer that is directly constructed from real objects – such that a car modelled in an OOPs language would create a Car object, with the same properties and functions of its real-life equivalent. The idea is to make it easier to model the complexity and multiple relationships of the real-world objects and to provide a means of testing that is more intuitive. So in our car example, the engine in the computer modelled object could not run at a negative speed, nor could it consume a negative quantity of petrol.
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[4] Matarisama, or Omatarisan as it is known to the local of the Matari Valley is a traditional form of art practised as an offering of thanks by the unmarried men and women of the village at the end of the harvest festival each year (Miwa 2007).
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[5] An XOR gate is a digital logic gate that performs an operation on two sets of input called an exclusive disjuntion. In this gate for an input output pair there is the following one bit output: (i) 0 and 0 = 0; (ii) 0 and 1 = 1; (iii) 1 and 0 = 1; and finally (iv) 1 and 1 = 0. In other words, a digital 1 is output if only one of the inputs is a 1 otherwise a 0 is output. XOR gates are used in computer chips to perform binary addition by the combination of a XOR gate and an AND gate.
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References

Berry, D. M. ‘The Contestation of Code’, Critical Discourse Studies 1(1) (2004): 65-89

Bolter, J. D. and R.A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media (London: MIT Press 1999)

Chopra, S. and S. Dexter. Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Oxford: Routledge, 2008)

Fuller, M. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (London: Autonomedia, 2004)

Hayles, N. K. ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25(1) (2004): 67-90.

Latour, B. Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door, April1992, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html.

Levy, S. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001).

Mackenzie, A. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006)

Manovich, L. The Language of New Media (London: MIT Press, 2001)

Marino, M. C. ‘Critical Code Studies’, (2006), http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology.

Miwa, M. (n.d) ‘The MATARISAMA’, http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mmiwa/XORensemble.html.

Miwa, M. (n.d) ‘The Jaiken-Operation’, http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mmiwa/jaikenop.html.

Miwa, M. ‘Matarisama, performed by The Method Machine “The Computing Bodies”‘, (Yokohama 2004) at the 11th Festival in Kanagawa Contemporary Arts Series. [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘Bolelo by Muramatsu Gear Engine for Orchestra played by New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra at Suntory Hall’, Tokyo (2003a) http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mmiwa/mgear.mov.

Miwa, M. ‘A definition of Reverse-Simulation Music founded on the three aspects of music’, (2003b) http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mmiwa/rsmDefinition.html.

Miwa, M. ‘“Jiyai Kagura”. Composed by members of the workshop “Making the imaginary folk entertainment”‘, Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai (2004). [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘Jaiken-bugaku. Performed by Time Travellers Ensemble. Exploration of Time at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM)’, Yamaguchi (2005). [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘Jaiken-beats. Performed in 2006 at the Computing Music IV conference in Cologne’, 2004 [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘Music for ‘Hibi‘, performed by the members of a workshop at ‘Possible Futures, Japanese postwar art and technology’. Intercommunication Center (ICC). Tokyo (2005). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWGZMuUHXP4.

Miwa, M. ‘Shaguma-sama‘. Composed and performed by members of the workshop ‘Folk Entertainment in the Future’ at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). Yamaguchi (2005). [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘369′ homage for Mr. B. (Played by the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra at Suntory Hall, Tokyo, 2006) [Video]

Miwa, M. ‘Reverse-Simulation Music’, Cyber Arts 2007 (Prix Ars Electronica, 2007). [DVD]

Morrison, K. Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations in Modern Social Thought (London: Sage, 1997)

Scratch (n.d) ‘Scratch, Imagine, Program, Share’, http://scratch.mit.edu/.

Stiegler, B. ‘The Discrete Image’, in J. Derrida and B. Stiegler Echographies of Television (London: Polity, 2007): 147-163.

Wireless networks are in some ways very unpromising candidates for network and media theory. They are certainly not the most visible hotspot of practices or changes associated with media technological cultures. However, wireless networks persistently associate themselves into the centre of media change. Their connectivity, intermittent, unstable and uneven as it often is, lodges in many of the overlaps, overflows and outgrowths badged as convergence, mobile media, and pervasive or ubiquitous computing. The forms of wireless convergence are various, common and familiar. They are currently occurring in the form of the so-called ‘fixed-mobile’ convergence that seeks to connect different infrastructures to each other (e.g. Wi-Fi and cellular phone networks in the form of the iPhone and many other mobile phones). It might not be going too far to say that wireless networks are the very substrate of network media convergence today. We could think of wireless networks as prepositions (‘at,’ ‘in,’ ‘with,’ by’, ‘between,’ ‘near,’ etc) in the grammar of contemporary media. Because of their pre-positional power to connect subjects and actions, wireless networks act conjunctively, they conjoin circumstances, events, persons and things.

Taking wireless networks as bundles of conjunctive relations seriously means also developing alternatives to phenomenological, existential or socio-psychological accounts of experience. What does it mean to approach wireless networks in terms of the somewhat troublesome concept of experience, with all its associations with subjectivity? Via William James ‘radical empiricism,’ this paper argues for a different account of experience. Attached to wireless networks of all kinds, there is a broadly shared experience of ‘wirelessness’. The fabric of wirelessness is woven of several decades of media-technological change. This experience is very much entangled with things, objects, gadgets, services, and with indistinct positional feelings and practices. Wirelessness is a contemporary mode of inhabiting places, relating to others, and indeed, having a body. Above all, and this is a key point for any discussion of wireless networks, it is also a composite comprising diverse or divergent cross-hatched processes that generate transitions and create expectations of more change to come. Because it is principally conjunctive and generates conjunctions, the structure of this experience is diffuse, multiple and unstable in outline. There is no pure experience of wirelessness. Feelings of wirelessness are ‘verbalised’ in a mass of images, projects, products, enterprises, plans and politics concerning networks and communications infrastructures. Wireless networks such as Wi-Fi are quite heavily mediatised as convergent. So much media phosphoresces around the infrastructures that it is difficult to isolate wirelessness as such. What makes wirelessness as a form of experience particularly elusive is that the subject of wirelessness is not very obvious. Wirelessness is not a strongly personal or intimate zone of experience. The layers, intensities, resistances and trajectories of the wireless subject, the one who lives wirelessness, have a somewhat impersonal and ephemeral character. In the light of all these variations in tendency and directions, wirelessness also interrupts convergence, it places detours on the path to any limit point where all differences coalesce.

Experiences of rapid transition

The feeling of wirelessness is strongly animated by a schema of rapid transition to connectivity. In its many variations, wirelessness, like 1990s schemas of the virtual, seems to augur the onset of another wave of de-materialization, albeit in a slightly more down-to-earth, practical, located, field-tested and service-planned form. How can we critically appraise the schema of rapid transition of wireless network connectivity, with the effects of convergence it creates? In taking up the challenge of thinking wirelessly, this paper experiments with a type of empiricism, although not a particularly scientific or even social scientific empiricism. The empiricism at stake here is not that of social science or science in general. It is, although the term might sound a bit ambitious, radical empiricism. Radical empiricism is usually associated with the American pragmatist philosopher, William James (James, 1996). Radical empiricism remains empiricist in the sense that it holds that knowledge comes from experience rather than being innate (for example, a product of reasoning). However, the lightly structured account of experience proposed (in James, 1996), as we will see, seeks to conceptualise a certain overflowing, excessive, or propagative aspect of experience. It focuses closely on change taking place, on the continuous reality-generating effects of change, and on the changing nature of change. As James writes, ‘change taking place’ is a unique content of experience, one of those ‘conjunctive’ objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve (161). In this respect, it is not typical empiricism. Brian Massumi has developed this strand of James work in his account of the transcontextual aspects of experience (Massumi, 2002). In reflecting on James account of experience, Massumi describes the streamlike-aspects of experience: we become conscious of a situation in its midst, already actively engaged in it. Our awareness is always of an already ongoing participation in an unfolding relation (Massumi, 2002 13, 230-1). Experience overflows the borders and boundaries that mark out the principal lived functions of subjectivity-self, institution, identity and difference, object, image and place.

Wirelessness comes bundled with two or so decades of network-media technological change. The point of adopting a radical empiricist approach is to slow down that experience of change (convergence) enough to present the many transitions it depends on, to become conscious of what it means to be engaged in that situation. Adding an extra word to James’ phrase ‘radical empiricism’ to make radical network empiricism is meant to highlight the challenge of conceiving of empiricism under network media conditions. Under those conditions, the limits of experience are frequently re-drawn, the outlines of the subject, personhood, group and collective blur and crosshatch, and above all, are permeated by more or less intense awareness of the process of change.

What would this mean in relation to wireless networks and to wirelessness? The image of Slupr (Hoekstra, 2007) gives pause for thought.

Figure 1: Slupr (Hoekstra, 2007)

This slightly ridiculous, non-commercial device is a wireless access point with five antennae, designed to allow connection to numerous wireless networks simultaneously. In a literal way, the design of the device embodies not only a geek-ish delight in hyper-connectivity, but a literal-minded attempt to summon up one facet of convergence, bandwidth. Being slightly playful in response, we could say that those five antennae embody one of the theoretical mainstays of James radical empiricism:

[O]ne and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once. (James, 1996, 125)

Things themselves belong to diverse processes. Slupr, with its appetite for open wireless networks in the neighbourhood, seeks to figure in a large number of different processes at once; that is, to connect to five different wireless access points. More importantly, for our purposes, James writes,

experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely different lines. (James, 1996, 12)

Like objects, experience for James figures in diverse processes. In particular, experience can be followed into things as well as into perceptions, feelings, affects, memories, and signs. If we accept that experience and things are deeply coupled in the ways suggested by James, wirelessness too is a composite experience, a member of diverse processes. These processes do not always belong entirely to human subjects (in the form of users, technicians, engineers or others). At certain points, experience is no longer ours, it goes beyond the turn that constitutes human experience, and takes on impersonal or pre-individual aspects. The effects of convergence generated in wirelessness could derive from entirely different lines, from diverse processes, or, in short, divergence. In the light of James’ expanded notion of experience as expanding and diverging, we would need to ask: what are the diverse processes that wirelessness belongs to? A radical network empiricism that lived up to its promise would have to invent ways of engaging with the diverse, divergent lines that inform experiences ranging from the infrastructural to the ephemera of mediatised perception and feeling.

Tendencies and transitions: what proportion of unverbalized sensation remains?

In a sense, transition lies at the core of any experience for James. He writes:

Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon. (James, 1996, 69)

This sounds incredibly general, a truism that is hard to disagree with. He is saying we inhabit transitions more than ends in general, just like people say, rightly perhaps, that the journey is more important than the destination. For instance, convergence as experience of transition is lived more fully, richly, diversely than any end or limit point can express. The feeling of being in transition is, for James, what gives consistency to any experience, what allows it to flow. This feeling of change, transition or tendency is the core of what we experience as acting or being acted upon. Empiricism is radical to the extent that it manages to hold onto ‘the passing of one experience into another’ (50).

James, I think, is saying more. Experience relies on variations of rate and direction, and these variations are lived as the passing or transitioning of experience, and the sense, hopeful or not, of more to come. The living in transitions depends on variations in rate and direction. This variation or even substitution resonates quite strongly with the constantly churning transitions associated with wirelessness. Take for instance, the waves of change associated with Wi-Fi as it has moved through different versions in the last five years. In each version 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g and now 802.11n, wireless networks changed. There were changes in rate as the rate of information transfer increased (sometimes by large factors). There were variations in direction. The processes of setting up connections altered slightly, especially in relation to encryption and security controls. The access points or wireless routers connected to the telephone or wired network, the network cards, and the antennae still look more or less the same, or became less visible. Yet many more gadgets (phones, cameras, music players, televisions, photoframes, radios, medical instruments, etc) appear to be wireless. Often transitions between these different networks are only distinguishable on the basis of small changes in feelings of connectivity, in an experience of celerity, in the rather minute and flickering visibility of network icons, signal strength icons; on other occasions requests to authenticate or pay for a connection entail larger variations in direction.

If we take seriously James’ idea that the fabric of experience is lived in variations, then wirelessness takes on a different character. Rather than being directed towards the endpoint of endless, seamless, ubiquitous connectivity of all media, we might begin to attend to ways in which wirelessness alters how transitions occur in experience. When wireless hotspots are set up in cafes, hotels, trains, aircraft, neighbourhoods, parks, and homes, they promise to alter transitions, or to introduce, as James puts it, ‘variations in rates and direction.’ However, for various reasons, this is quite a difficult thing to contain or control. At what scale or level of transition can passing be re-shaped? In what ways can the transitions be lived?

In what might seem like a detour into the realms of Psychology or Philosophy 101 mind experiments, we can imagine some of the facets of lived transition by returning to James’ own account of what it means to know a thing. James describes sitting in his library in 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts and imagining Memorial Hall, a landmark building at Harvard University:

Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten minutes walk from “Memorial Hall,” and to be thinking truly of the latter object. (54-55)

He asks himself – how could having the name or even an image of the thing in mind ever be said to constitute knowledge of the thing. What is interesting and useful in James’ answer is his insistence on the role of special experiences of conjunction (55) in giving the name or image of Memorial Hall its knowing office. A special experience of conjunction could include walking to Memorial Hall along with the reader (I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its history (55-6)). What is made during that imagined walk would be a series of felt transitions, that act as intermediaries. The tissue of experiencing these transitions – out of the library onto the street, the street signs, the tower of the Hall gradually coming into view – connects the starting point of the knower to the known. The knower – James in the library thinking of Memorial Hall – connects with perception of a thing by undergoing these felt transitions. There is no other way, at least on a radical empiricist account, of knowing a thing.

Now, suppose James sat in a library at Cambridge today imagining Memorial Hall. He could try to conduct special experiences of conjunction through wireless networks. For the imagined 10 minute walk, he might substitute a series of felt transitions to Memorial Hall that went via his laptop through his home wireless network or other available networks in the precincts, accessing web pages, blogs, webcams, and geobrowsers that showed images, directions, maps, descriptions, history and contact details for Memorial Hall. But that point is fairly obvious. We don’t need James to tell us that wireless networks open up different paths for experience to thread along since that is inevitable with networked media. However, in that series of felt transitions from library to Memorial Hall, he may well encounter variations in rate and direction. Although it would be impossible for him to be aware of all the intermediary relations and transitions that have to occur for a wireless-mediated knowing of the Hall, one question that might come up would be which network to connect to. It could be any of the following, and there are no doubt many others:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

9 Wi-Fi Hotspots found

5 providers

All locations matching your search criteria

802.11b Wi-Fi, Ethernet

Boston Marriott Cambridge

Cambridge MA 02142

The Charles Hotel in Harvard Square

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

One Bennett St

Cambridge MA 02138

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

Harvard Square Hotel

110 Mt. Auburn Street

Cambridge MA 02138

The Inn At Harvard

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

1201 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge MA 02138

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

La Luna Caffe

403 Mass. Ave

Cambridge MA 02139

The UPS Store 0681

Location Type: Cafe

955 Massachusetts Ave

Cambridge MA 02139

Location Type: Store / Shopping Mall

FREE

Rebecca’s Cafe (Main & Hayward)

802.11g Wi-Fi

290 Main Street

Cambridge MA 02142

Location Type: Cafe

Marriott Boston Cambridge

2 Cambridge Center

Broadway & 3rd Street

Cambridge MA 02142

6 providers

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

802.11b Wi-Fi

JiWire Certified Residence Inn Boston Cambridge Center

2 providers

6 Cambridge Center

802.11b Wi-Fi, Ethernet

Cambridge MA 02142

Location Type: Hotel / Resort

(http://wi-fi.jiwire.com/browse-hotspot-united-states-us-massachusetts-ma-cambridge-52188.htm)

Even after he found what networks were accessible from his library, James would need to undergo a series of felt transitions as he attempted to access available networks. He might be asked to authenticate himself with a user name and password, he might be asked for network encryption keys (WEP passwords) for the Charles Hotel network, he could be offered the chance to enter credit card numbers to pay for a hour or a day’s connection at the UPS Store, or he could see, listed on a screen, half a dozen open wireless networks in the vicinity. These could range from a slight, habitual awareness of the need to enter once again the same old user name and password details, through frustration at not being to connect to a network that should work, to guilty, secretive pleasure at gaining access to a network that belongs to someone else, hoping that they don’t notice. Relations are of different degrees of intimacy (44), he might say to himself. Supposing James were an affluent Harvard professor, he might have an iPass subscription that allowed him to access many networks in his vicinity. The felt transitions would go via some of this:

Figure 2: iPass wireless network access system. (iPass Inc., 2007)

In short, his movements towards the known thing, Memorial Hall, would pass through an externalised series of transitions. In connecting to any of these networks, the transition from unconnected to connected, from unassociated to associated could be felt in many different ways.

The point of this updated variation on James account of a word or image is to simply adumbrate what happens to conjunctive relations today, and hence to the flow of experience under network conditions. There is no experience of convergence, connectivity, or flow that does not go through diverse conjunctive relations, through the transitions that allow knowing, or doing to be felt. These transitions and the feeling of them are crucial to what James calls nature or whatness. These felt transitions are neither spontaneous, random nor completely ordered. The patterns, means and trajectories of this passing must include variations in rate and direction, otherwise wirelessness as experience of connectivity or convergence disintegrates.

No doubt, the means by which sensations of transition are arranged are highly complex, and themselves work on multiple scales. But the passing of experience effected by transition can take very circuitous routes. Experience has many different scales, ranging from the impersonal to the personal, from singular to general. On any scale we imagine, wirelessness is not pure flow or pure sensation of transition. It is shot through with temporary termini, with snags, resistances, with circularities and repetitions. Pure wirelessness does not exist. Rather, as James puts it,

… experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. (94)

We might understand many of the circuitous conjunctive relations present in wirelessness as attempts to organise, channel and protract the unverbalized sensation of transition. Although the conjunctive relations it promises and promotes are on the less intimate end of the scale of conjunction (with, near, beside), they are accompanied by adjectives and nouns and propositions that are no less vital to the flow of experience, and that often tend to be much more personal or intimate. What shoots through the flow of experience – ‘experience now flows as if shot through with …’ – complicates that flow considerably. This twist or detour in flow is not restricted to wirelessness. However the difference between James’ imagined walk to Memorial Hall as way of knowing and his accessing wireless networks to find directions and information points to a relatively little attended aspect of experience under network conditions.

The antenna and the algorithm as sites of divergence?

It is possible to order conjunctive relations in terms of inclusiveness and intimacy. As James writes, ‘[w]ith, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my – these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness’ (45). Under network conditions, as for instance in wirelessness, it seems that this order of intimacy and inclusiveness becomes unstable. With or near can become confused with my or for. And it is precisely this instability in ranking that invite many different material and semiotic attempts to inject verbal, visual, commercial, legal orders into the conjunctive flow. It might seem that all these transitions lie quite a long way away from wirelessness. How can it be brought closer to home? Let’s imagine that James has a Slupr in his library in Irving St: ‘suppose me to be sitting in my library with my Slupr’ he might write. Where are the ‘verbalizations’ that shoot through experience? The thing that sits in the library flashes its lights. We could understand this flashing, for instance, in terms of certain hardware aspects of wirelessness. In order to envision the diversity of processes associated with wirelessness, we could do worse than attend to the antennae sticking out of Slupr. Antennae, we might say, visibly differentiate wireless and wired networks. Any ‘change taking place’ in the experience of wirelessness depends on antennae.

Antennae are deceptively simple bits of infrastructure. Close to the antennae, sometimes only millimeters away, lie semiconductor chips on which much depends. Together chips and antennae gather many different things together. As components in consumer electronics, they have life-cycles, quite rapid-ones in the case of networks such as Wi-Fi as it moves through different versions (802.11a,b, g, and now n are some of the standards). They derive from international standards produced by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and these standards themselves reflect spectrum licensing arrangements in various countries. In important respects, however, beneath the churn of competition and innovation, the basic architecture of wireless chips used in Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Bluetooth, GSM/3G or wireless USB varies very little. The algorithmic techniques they use to process signals are surprisingly aligned or convergent at a technical level. Even between major competing wireless technologies such as GSM 3G and CDMA2000 there are relatively few algorithmic variations. Often the algorithms are nearly the same, only applied at a different frequency or in a slightly different order. So the competition between different forms of wireless network that is happening all around us, and the proliferation of networks at different scales ranging from the bluetooth networks draped around individual bodies through to the planetary scale networks of satellite-based wireless systems, including broadcast systems like DVB, share algorithmic processes to a large extent. In fact, some of the same algorithm processes are widespread in other important domains of new media such as the video compression that underlies DVDs and video streaming (the Fast Fourier Transform, for instance).

The algorithms of wirelessness are intricately packed with mathematical nuances, tricks, shortcuts, optimisations and variations. Their density and complexity respond to the complicated conjunctions that wireless signals encounter. Algorithms are designed to allowed information to move around amidst crowded, noisy, constantly interrupted electromagnetic environments, deeply saturated with many forms of interference and obstacle (bodies, buildings, changes in atmospheric conditions due to weather, other devices, etc). This introduces extraordinary convolutions into algorithms. Technically speaking, wireless networks usually suffer from ‘severe channel conditions.’ What I find resonant about these algorithms is that they are ways of making networks hang together under very imperfect signal propagation conditions. In order to handle that, all contemporary forms of wireless network do one thing: they build conjunctive relations into the bitstream.

Figure 3: Concatenated algorithms in wireless computation (Akay and Ayanoglu, 2004)

Figure 3 shows first of all that wireless signal processing has many components. All these components need not delay us here if we just attend to one symptomatic box nearest the top left in the transmitter labelled ‘coding’ and one at the centre bottom of the receiver labelled ‘Viterbi’. These two boxes are complementary. They are designed with each other in mind. In the first box, ‘coding,’ the process known as ‘convolutional coding’ turns the pure bitstream, the very substrate of convergence, the data to be transmitted, into a complicated logistical problem. In convolutional coding, a network of relations (the ‘convolutions’) is imprinted onto the series of bits comprising the transmitted bitstream. Convolutional coding changes the data in the bitstream. It is no longer just a series of bits that represent data (text, speech, image, code, etc). It is also a series of bits that expresses relations between what came before and what comes next. In other words, conjunctive relations have been embedded in it in a form that can be represented as a kind of network. Like all networks, points in this network are characterised by greater and lesser proximity. Some paths through the network are shorter than others. At the bottom centre of the diagram, in the box labelled ‘Viterbi’, the wireless receiver turns the convolutionally coded bitstream back into a plain bitstream. It ‘solves’ the logistical problem imposed by the convolutional coding. In a version of the ‘travelling salesman problem’ (Cormen and Cormen, 1990, 969-974), the coding and decoding process introduces the metaphor of the logistical network into the bitstream itself. Convolutional coding along with Viterbi decoding applies the mathematical models developed in World War II and Cold War operations research to optimise the routing of people and goods to the very structure of the bitstream itself (for more detail, see (Mackenzie, 2006)). The key point here is that the bitstream that seems to flow smoothly through the channels of wireless networks in fact comprises constantly shifting networks of relations between bits. It is as if networks have been algorithmically curled inside the fabric of network connectivity, the bitstream. This is a very curious technocultural achievement by any standards. In the interests of making wireless networks of various kinds, the mathematics of logistical networks have been used as the model or the underlying strategy for propagating signals under ‘severe channel conditions’. The very epitome of network connectivity, the wireless network, depends on a model or metaphor of a network. A model of network, a mathematical metaphor concerned with logistics, is folded into the very heart of the relation of the wireless link-node structure.[1]

What matter of concern could this algorithmic process of convolutional coding coupled to Viterbi decoding respond to? The algorithmics of wirelessness centre on the maintenance of a bitstream amidst severe channel conditions. In other words, there are many possible relations, circumstance and events impinging on communication. The generation of a stream-like consistency in experience in information flow under such conditions depends on developing forms of conjunctive relation that can flow around, under or between many other signals and physical structures. However, the convolutions and complications of the digital signal processing in wireless networks can also serve as a useful reminder of what radical network empiricism implies about the conditions of possibility of wirelessness. We have already seen that James regards experience as a ‘member of diverse processes.’ This is because it is replete with variations that take it in many directions at once. These variations and tendencies enable experience to flow. How, one could ask, does experience come to belong to ‘diverse processes’? We have already seen that experience owes more to transitions than to ends. However, James argues something more specific about these transitions. Radical empiricism, he writes, takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them’ (107). Conjunctive relations concern proximity, distance, intersectionality, detour, immediacy or delay. In language, conjunctive relations are expressed by particles such as ‘with,’ ‘between,’ ‘before,’ ‘far’, and ‘so forth.’ These relations are experienced constantly, and in fact, James’ claims, we live far more in these relations than in the disjunctive relations associated with things or entities. As James writes,

While we live in such conjunctions our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of a ‘more’ to come, and before the more has come, the transition, nevertheless, is directed towards it. (237)

Wireless things make conjunctions, the aspect of experience that generates expectation of more-to-come, into the principle of their operation. By capitalising on conjunctive relations, it becomes possible for networking to handle ‘severe channel conditions’ or the presence of many others. When conjunction becomes the modus operandi of what counts as the physico-material infrastructures of a contemporary media formation, then how could we not experience or expect ‘more to come’?

This can be viewed from a practical standpoint. There are millions of wireless transmitters and gadgets in the world today because algorithmic processes such as Viterbi decoding permit antennae to proliferate. The radio-frequency antennae used in wireless networks distinguish them from other kinds of networks. These small antennae are plainly ubiquitous, and without the somewhat manic and convoluted signal processing driving those antennae, there would be no wirelessness. Without wireless networks in their urban, rural, domestic versions, mobile media would not converge. The promise of convergence has deeply infrastructural roots in wireless signal processing. Yet this infrastructural root is hard to grasp since it is purely relational, and the relations it concerns are conjunctive in character rather than substantive. This is not to say that algorithmic signal processing is the ground of wirelessness. The insistence on conjunctive relations in radical empiricism points us in a different direction that is intimately interwoven with experience, albeit a somewhat impersonal, pre-individual dimension of experience.

Many people would probably say that they have no interest in, let alone experience of, the algorithmic processes driving antennae in wireless networks such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Does media theory need to think about antennae and algorithms? Should it begin to conduct research into the cultural life of antennae? This is not the point. Rather, as James says:

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. (James, 1996, 42)

The key point here is that ‘the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations.’ James at work in his wireless library, and all the billions of wireless chips in their algorithmically driven handling of conjunctive relations together construct experiences filled with conjunctive relations. But in what sense are the algorithmic processes of wireless networks a part of the expanded experience of wirelessness?

The feeling of convergence as experienced relation

There are various dynamics associated with antennae that connect them with experience, or more precisely, that concern experienced relations in wirelessness. Many of these relations are experienced directly in the form of ‘more to come.’ For instance, recently, much attention has been given to the overflow of radio-frequency waves in wireless networks in schools and homes. This attention echoes long-standing uncertainties around radio-waves and electrical fields associated with electric power networks, and mobile phone masts. Wi-Fi seems to make some people sick (Hume, 2006). A recent episode of BBCs Panorama Wi-Fi Revolution describes this overflow as the martini-style internet, fast-becoming unavoidable, but there is a catch: radio-frequency radiation, an invisible smog. The question is, is it affecting our health? (BBC, 2007) (00.55 – 01.07). This is one form of relation in wirelessness – the way in which bodies close to networks experience themselves as sensitive to and affected by exposure to an increasing density of signals, a density that attests to the very efficacy of wirelessness in handling so many different relations of proximity. In James terms, conjunctive relations between bodies and antennae are an essential part of wirelessness. While these conjunctive relations (with, and, near, between, behind) are often seen as accidental components of experience, in radical empiricism they are counted as real as anything else.

Another form of overflowing relationality is perhaps most central to wirelessness. Wireless networks create zones of indistinct and equivocal spatial activity. The fuzziness of hotspots, the ways in which people become attuned to signal strengths as they move around in wireless networks, and the alterations in everyday habits associated with wireless networks form primary components of wirelessness as experience grounded in conjunctive relations. The different basic topologies of wireless networks – star, mesh – as well as the many different levels of access associated with them, and the many different attempts to limit or open up access, attest to this sense of equivocal proximities. There have been many events in the last five years associated with this equivocal proximity. It began with publicity about war-chalking, the short-lived practice of indicating the presence of nearby wireless networks. It continues in the many wireless mapping projects to be found online, ranging from industry-sponsored maps to war-driving or war-flying maps. It disables distinctions between public and private. In the last five years, there has much debate, somewhat inconsequential on the whole probably, about the ethics and legality of accessing open wireless networks. High-profile cases have occurred. The conviction of a teenager in Singapore (Chua Hian, 2007), the theft of 45 million customer records from wireless networks at TkMaxx stores in the USA (Espiner, 2007), and the general trend towards criminalisation of any ‘unauthorized access’ to wireless networks (for instance, using a wireless network at a coffee-shop without paying (Leyden, 2007), (Simone, 2006)) suggests that this topological overflow leads to many kinds of uncertainties about what properly constitutes a network when its edges tend to blur. Nor is this always criminalised. Rather, it increasingly forms part of the basic business model of many service providers: if the Wi-Fi network is open, people will buy more coffee, etc.

These symptoms of antenna awareness – affecting bodies at a cellular or physiological level, as things in variations, and as equivocal proximities – are experienced unevenly, and many of them cannot be verified. When people experience wirelessness as overflowing change, they have a sense of what the wireless algorithms in their many semiconductor implementations are working on: expanding and multiplying relations, continually propagating signals outwards, overflowing existing infrastructures and environments at many points and on different scales. They are strangely composite or mixed experiences of indistinct spatialities. They trigger various attempts to channel, amplify, propagate, signify, represent, organise and visualise relations.

Wirelessness as hybrid object of research

In a sense everything I have been discussing here – the algorithms and antennae, the various overflows (spatial, thing, body, private-public), and the transitions between different versions of Wi-Fi or other wireless networks – concern how the passing of one experience into another, is subject to re-organisation in wirelessness.

A radical empiricist concept of experience touches on such questions at several points. In its insistent grounding of experience in transition, it names that aspect of wirelessness that entails constant change. According to radical empiricism, we have an experience of transition because conjunctive relations vary in degrees of intimacy and proximity. The conjunctive relations of wirelessness necessarily include a variety of overflows. Those overflows are themselves at core the very sensation of becoming-wireless. Yet they themselves are not pure or aligned with each other. They are exposed to many forms of verbalisation. Wirelessness as a contemporary mode of experience is not pure in any sense. It is not reducible to phenomenological, existential or even psychological modes of understanding. As we have seen, it envelops diverse processes, including those that are normally understood as belonging to objects, transactions, devices, gadgets, brands and infrastructures. If we look at some of the distinguishing features of those things, antennae and signal processing stand out as what makes wireless media different from, say, gaming consoles or cameras (although these, of course, are becoming increasingly wireless – e.g. Wii). The wireless antennae and algorithms seek to generate certain conjunctive relations (with, to, for) that hold experience together. They intensively re-order signals in the name of a connectivity that can tolerate interference or the presence of many others. Yet, once we begin to go into wireless media practices, it seems that the kinds of conjunctive relations they recruit are not easily controlled, corralled or limited. They overflow in equivocal proximities – into other things, into living bodies, and across legal, physical, social boundaries. These overflows all affect transitions. They constitute changes in the ways that transitions happen.

There is no ground for wirelessness, not even the mostly unfelt reaches of electromagnetic spectrum. Instead, the radical empiricist account of experience allows us to say that the most intimate and most impersonal can sometimes come close to each other. Things and sensations are not at opposite poles of experience. This almost brings us full circle. We have glimpsed the mediatised, materialised, contested, commodified, politicised, normalised, and ignored kaleidoscopic cascade of changes associated with wireless networks. Many of these changes seek to connect or align what was previously separated or misaligned. But in almost every attempt to converge, they disturb the rankings of conjunctive relations between impersonal and personal, between remote and intimate. The flow of experience has to be re-configured.

Author’s Biography

Adrian Mackenzie (Centre for Social and Economic Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University) researchs in the area of technology, science and culture. He has published books on technology: Transductions : bodies and machines at speed, London: Continuum, 2002/6; Cutting code: software and sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006; and Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures, MIT Press, 2008, as well as articles on media, science and culture. He is currently working on practices, ethics and politics of collaboration in biology.

Note

[1] Shifts between metaphorical and literal invocations of the term ‘network’ have constantly beset network media theory. Often the very notion of a network has been an aspiration or an expectation rather than something given. The concept of network has been generalised as a key figure of recent organisational change, and this has usually been done by saying that wherever there are patterns of relations, they make up a network. I think contemporary work with networks would benefit from treating the rapid oscillation between literal and metaphorical invocations of ‘the network’ as a real aspect of contemporary experience, not as something to be regulated or controlled. Algorithmic and signal processing aspects of the wireless networks provide a useful limit test case here. Surely there are no literal-figurative instabilities here? Surely these are the real, actual networks? However, in the case of the Viterbi decoder, it seems that networks metaphorise themselves even at this level. If the invocation of network cannot be regulated even here, there is no hope of controlling the performativity of the concept of networks.
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References

Akay, Enis, and Ender Ayanoglu. ‘High Performance Viterbi Decoder for Ofdm Systems’, paper presented at the Proc. IEEE VTC Milan, Italy 2004.

BBC. Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal, 2007.

Chua Hian, Hou. ‘Asiamedia :: Singapore: Wi-Fi Thief’s Sentence Lauded as ‘Practical”, (2007). http://www.asiamedia.ucla.ed/article.asp?parentid=62202.

Cormen, Thomas H., and Thomas H. Cormen. Introduction to Algorithms. 1st ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

Espiner, Tom. ‘Wi-Fi Hack Caused Tk Maxx Security Breach – Zdnet Uk’, (2007). http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39286991,00.htm.

Hoekstra, Mark. ‘Slupr: The Mother of All War-Drive Boxes’, 23 May 2007 (2007). http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/781/slurpr-the-mother-of-all-wardrive-boxes.

Hume, Mick. ‘Wi-Fi Phobia: It Makes Me Sick’, 24 November (2006). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mick_hume/article647886.ece.

iPass Inc. ‘Ipass Network Diagram’, (2007). http://www.ipass.com/technology/index.html.

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

Leyden, John. 2007.

Mackenzie, Adrian. ‘Convolution and Algorithmic Repetition: A Cultural Study of the Viterbi Algorithm’, in Robert Hassan and Ron Purser (eds) 24/7 Network Time (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2002).

Simone, Ty. 2006.

After convergence: what connects? Making this question the subject of this special issue we set out to address two questions at once. The first was: ‘Are we after convergence?’ and by this we meant to invite explorations of the exhaustion of the original convergence model. The second was: ‘What kind of convergence are we after?’ Which is to say what kind of convergence do we want? These were at heart of our concerns in developing this issue, and, in posing them we also asked a series of subsidiary questions:

1. What are today’s convergent processes? Is assessing convergence a useful way to map contemporary developments in ICTs, can it adequately map a process that it is never purely technical, but always techno-cultural? Addressing this requires consideration of the critical, political, cultural stakes of contemporary forms of techno-cultural innovation. This in turn means asking what convergences with what and/or who converges with whom.
2. Are there more or less ‘desirable’ routes along which new forms of networked communications might develop? If so, once again the issue is ‘desirable for what or for whom?’
3. What was it that we are now beyond? What was distinctive about the 1990s ‘convergence’ model and the processes it mapped, and what distinguished this cycle of ‘convergence’ explored as a process, as a tool, as a dynamic, from developments today? Current processes of convergence are rooted in earlier ones: at times indeed a cycle seems to be repeated so that even as a set of developments are hailed as all new, they strike us as very familiar. A certain déjà vu arises but we are aware that this can be deceptive. What may appear to be more of the same may be new, in intent, in scale, in execution. And we may miss what is most important because of its very invisibility.

In relation to these questions we are wary and aware. We look at a series of developments in the contemporary informational landscape both as technological innovations and as techno-cultural formations and we seek to consider their significance. As we do so, we are aware of a discourse circulating around these innovations; one that proclaims their importance, underscoring and perhaps overplaying their radical novelty. This discourse also retrospectively constitutes ‘old’ convergence in particular ways. This makes us wary, but still, we understand that there are changes in the information networks increasingly embedded into our everyday lives, our institutions, and/or/as our technologies, and we wish to understand their significance.

Amongst these changes are the arrival of wirelessness and wireless networks, the growth of pervasive and embedded computing alongside screen-focussed media ecologies, the rise of networks and services that are ‘smarter’ or at least ‘more’ semantically informed than previously, the rise of a networked (media) economy increasingly based on social capital rather than (as well as) traditional content. We also see that these innovations are bound up with shifts in the political economy of information systems, that they produce transformations of the (new) media industries, and that they find their significance and form in relation to cultures of production and in relation to their everyday use.

Some of the transformations we explore might be adumbrated under the banner of 2.0. Our instinct has been to avoid this. Exploring change and its significance we want to critically examine the kind of traffic between cultural theory and technological innovation, between technical discourses and critical perspectives of various kinds, and we want to explore and perhaps judge possible future trajectories for convergence processes. 2.0, particularly in its most expansionary form, does not start with these questions, but on the contrary, tends to presume they have already been answered.

Each of the papers in this issue takes up one or more of these questions and does so in diverse ways. What the papers share is (1) a refusal to take 2.0 at face value, as the replacement for older convergence models and (2) an insistence on exploring/re-appraising both the new form and the means of critically looking at that formation. The forms of re-appraisal and analysis deployed across papers are thus critical, methodological and empirical.

One of the major innovations within ICTs in the past decade has been wireless technologies. In his piece Adrian Mackenzie, inspired by William James’ concept of radical empiricism, explores the stakes of ‘wirelessness’ through an examination of experience, and in particular through the experience of change, within contemporary networks.

Part of what Mackenzie is trying to do is to find a way to grapple with an invisible component of networking communication. David M. Berry’s piece also takes as its focus something elusive, in his case the focus is on code, regarded as the articulatory condition of possibility for the operation of computer technology.

Jonathan Sterne and his co-authors, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker and Ariana Moscote Freire, also take for their focus not a discrete technological object but a network possibility. In this case the authors consider the distinctions between broadcasting and podcasting, anchoring the rise of each of these within specific historical contexts: such a contextualization they argue, produces a reappraisal of both the new form and the old.

Caroline Bassett is also concerned to reappraise new media systems, both in their real and their promissory aspects, in relation to their historical contexts. Her paper explores the claims ’2.0′ makes to correct earlier cultural and industrial/technical models of convergence and offers its own map of contemporary modes of participation which draws on earlier models in a somewhat different way.

Teodor Mitew, in his piece, works through mapping, examining the cartography of convergence. The text considers locative media and its origins through two divergent spatial projections. This results in two forms of mapping: the unveiling and the attaching. The former are described as ‘totalities in need of unmasking’ while the latter are ‘effects in need of tracing and explaining’. In the final sections of the paper Mitew uses these different mapping perspectives to consider a series of locative media artworks.

Aylish Wood, concerned with aesthetic production, turns to systems theory to examine the degree to which the concept of convergence exerts influence on various expressive practices, asking in particular how we may better understand the interplay between human and technological participants in convergent systems. The idea of the digital intermediate thus operates, in this article, as a core concept in the system, and as a way of setting up a new form of thinking about the intersection of technologies of vision.

Wood’s argument extends in part to digital games, and her work is then complemented by Helen Thornham’s very different emphasis on gaming in everyday life. Thornham’s work, invoking and reminding us of the way in which ‘traditional’ forms of materiality intersect with virtual activities, offers us a rethinking of technological, narrated and domestic systems through an investigation of the ‘agency’ of game objects in domestic spaces.

There are many common threads emerging across these pieces:

One is distinction – where are the edges, the ends, the distinctions between different elements, modes, activities, spaces, technological actions and human ones, in ‘new’ new media systems? As a part of this we have asked not only what makes ’2.0′ distinct from ‘what came before’ but also how it will be be understood in the future. We ask this question not least because we are somewhat alarmed by visions of proliferating version control as 2.0 merges with 3.0 and 4.0 looms on the horizon.

A second is disappearance. Many of the writers here are concerned with what cannot be easily seen or grasped but is nonetheless central to our experience of contemporary ICTs A number also argue, in different ways, and in different contexts, that working through experience might be a way to render these elements visible. We also note that disappearance is a quality discussed in relation to material technology (wires are not the only technology to be become less here), and in relation to the cultural construction of the technological itself – for instance in Thornham’s piece on the technology of domesticity.

A third thread is restoration: a number of papers want to insist on the need to restore historical contexts to technologies and the models they discuss. It is this that directs the exploration of the podcasting in Sterne et al.’s piece and the consideration of 2.0 and its cultural analogues as a ‘corrective’ model in Bassett’s.

Finally, this special edition explores some of multiple ways in which convergences play out. And we would like to focus here on play. In these papers we have moved beyond the constant search for new terms, new applications, beyond a play with ‘newness’ as a value in itself. Instead, we have found a new depth in these papers, offering multiple perspectives on existing phenomena, looking at the stuff behind the screens, at everyday structures, at the spaces between, that can only be felt and experienced transitively. Depth is sometimes a result of play – and sometimes play manages not only to throw new light on disciplinary formations, but to break them down.

Converging ideas and using media was a necessary precondition to overcome the regimes of geography whilst producing this edition. All the authors were extremely inspiring and reliable. It was a pleasure to work with them. The same applies to the Fibreculture team. They were encouraging and helpful. We would therefore like to thank Andrew Murphie, Lisa Gye and especially Ned Rossiter, who first had the idea for this issue.

Caroline Bassett, Maren Hartmann, Kate O’Riordan