Literate Technologies

...it has long been argued that it was only through the advent of a purely alphanumeric system that writing acquired what we might call its “autonomy” from what it is otherwise supposed (in the form of pictograms or ideograms) to represent, instead describing an arbitrary referentiality…

In a previous blog I talk about the relationship between spoken and written language, and how certain words or phrases in the vocabulary of our native language can actually influence thinking (such as seeing blue as two different colours or seeing pink and red as one colour, depending on the language’s vocabulary for colours). Armand quotes Walter Ong with a similar idea: “In oral culture, restriction of words to sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.”
However, one of the first things you learn in Stage One Linguistics is that language is arbitrary. There is no relationship between a half-circle, a circle with a half circle on top, a vertical line with a horizontal line running through the middle (written), or the sound /kat/ (spoken), and the concept of a small household feline which likes to chew your shoelaces.
The way Armand phrases it, with writing having “autonomy” from what it is supposed to represent, is an interesting way of putting it. Neither spoken language nor written language is greater of lesser than the other, they are simply two autonomous ways of representing concepts.
But how “autonomous” are spoken and written language? Certainly in languages which use ideographic writing systems, there is for at least some words more than an arbitrary link between the written symbol and what it represents.

But Armand is referring there not to ideographic writing systems but to alphanumeric writing systems.
Because we have grown up with reading and writing and listening and speaking and thinking all being so closely intertwined, it is interesting to attempt to think of those things as autonomous. Realise there is no relation between the concept of a cat, the sound /kat/, and the written form ‘cat’, until someone tells you so.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media.

Right now, I’m legally streaming music online through the new music programme called Spotify. I can listen to any song I want, free, out of millions available on the site – as long as I sign in with my Facebook account. Spotify isn’t the only one. Gradually, more and more apps and sites appear which require you to log in with your Facebook credentials. Countless more sites give you the option of logging in via Facebook – making sure everything is connected in a neat little package with your most favourite social networking site.

Sound and image, voice and text, are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface.

I only have one or two friends that I would phone up now to catch up and ask how they are. Everyone else beams their news to me through Facebook. It all comes to me on the flat, static/non-static screen of my laptop (the same way I’m seeing what I’m currently writing). News about relationships, break-ups, marriages, babies, new jobs, new grades, parking fines, farts, deaths. All of these things appear to me on a white screen in black Lucida Sans, with touches of that comforting Facebook Blue (Hex Code #3B5998).

…one medium’s content is always other media…

Facebook is my photo album, my home video player, my community noticeboard, my Yellow Pages, my email, my MSN Messenger, my calendar, my birthday diary.

What phonographs and cinematographs, whose names not coincidentally derive from writing, were able to store was time: time as a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm and as the movement of single-image sequences in the optical.

Facebook’s new profile layout is called Timeline. Facebook wants you to store time within it, in the form of photos and videos and ‘Milestones’. You can quickly flick back to 2007 and see how much of a dick you were then.

Nodes - Galloway & Thacker

For the last decade or more, network discourse has proliferated with a kind of epidemic intensity.

People have always wanted to connect. It’s always been important to make yourself part of certain groups and distance yourself from certain groups. (A network being not just who is a node in it, but also who isn’t.) Connecting and networking is not a phenomenon of the digital age but a natural parts of what makes us functioning humans. There is something natural about forming groups (including some people and excluding others). Children do it.
But now, because we were in a digital age, the creation of networks means so much more. I remember hearing the term “social network” and not knowing what it meant. Now it is part of common vocabulary (in fact social network and social networking are entries in the OED: social networking n. the use or establishment of social networks or connections; (now esp.) the use of websites which enable users to interact with one another, find and contact people with common interests, etc.) Your “social network” is publicly available: who you are friends with, what businesses you support or like, your favourite bands, books, sports, foods are all for public consumption.

These structures are seen to have their own concomitant techniques for keeping things under control: bureaucracy, the chain of command, and so on.

A network is self-controlled (or uncontrolled) and self-governed (or ungoverned). Online forums and sites, reddit, 4chan, the Cheezburger Network (a collection of funny and meme-based websites), all have their own unique rules by which members, after a while, begin to naturally abide.
Recently, the Cheezburger Network changed. The layout and contents of the websites and the way the comments sections worked were ‘upgraded’. Many users of the Cheezburger Network, especially Memebase, didn’t like the new layout, and stopped visiting the site or commenting on posts. The self-governed commenting rules, which had always been adhered to by readers began to break down. The network broke down.
The interference with a network meant the culture of the network disappeared.

Letters of the Alphabet

I like that I can read IPA.
aj lajk ðæt aj kæn rid ajpiei

It’s kind of like a secret language.
ɪts kajnd əv lajk ə sikrət læŋgwədʒ

Except you never know who can understand.
ɪksɛpt ju nɛvər no hu kæn əndərstænd

And once you get into the swing of it, it’s actually pretty easy.
ɪts prɪti reni awtsajd rajt naw, gɑddæm ɪt

Flusser brings up the demands that the letters of the alphabet place on us, and the effects that writing has on understanding.
ɪz ðæt hejəl? aj hæv tu rajd ðə fɛri ovər tu tawn letə tənait, ænd aj kæn dɛfənətli hɪjə θʌndə

As a linguistics student, I find the whole question of how what we read effects what we understand extremely fascinating. For example, it has been proven than the number of words a language has to describe colours effects how the speakers of that language perceive colour. A language may have two words for blue: one for light blue and one for dark. Speakers of that language would perceive light and dark blue and two distinct colours, the same way we see pink and red as two distinct colours. A language may also have just one words to talk about both red and orange, and so they are seen as just different shades of the same colour.
sʌm ʃit əbawt kʌlərz. sɪriəsli, wot ɪz ʃi goɪŋ on əbawt hijə?

Similarly, the spelling of a word may affect how we perceive we are pronouncing it. I recently had a problem with a haiku I saw because the first line was “If you like this tale.” To me, ‘tale’ clearly has two syllables, the [l] carrying extra syllabic weight which in the New Zealand dialect cannot be carried by the one vowel. A [j] sound is added to break up the separate carriers of syllabic weight. This can be seen in the IPA spelling: teɪjəl.
However, a friend saw no problem with the first line of the haiku, saying that ‘tale’ clearly has one syllable, as there’s only one pronounced vowel: the a (with the e being, obviously, silent). Even though that friend was saying [teɪjəl], he couldn’t tell that’s what he was saying, because his thinking about that word was so entwined with its spelling.
ɪf ju lərn ajpiei, jul bi smɑrtər. ænd jul no mɔr əbawt haw ju spik. kul, hə

Built Pedagogy

My old college’s tag line is “Where everybody is somebody”.

The overhead projectors broke down. The videotapes were stretched and fuzzy. The plastic seats in the Brian Gerrard Theatre made your butt go numb. Some of the photos of students on the school website haven’t changed since 1999. The blocks were T, C, H, A and D, and no one knew why. There was a leak in the music storeroom ceiling. The current principal has been the principal since 1986.
Groups claimed spots around the school and kept them for five years. My old school friends still sometimes refer to each other as the T Block gang. For five whole years, you could walk to a particular spot and know you’d find particular people. The layout of the school encouraged us to cleave. (I mean cleave as in “stick fast to”, not as is “split or sever”).
Everybody was somebody.
In a school of 1000 people, it was pretty easy to be somebody, to find a place you fit (and stay there).
In a university of 30-40,000 students, how can everybody possibly be somebody?

The answer is they can’t, and even if they could they should do it elsewhere. Or if you have to do it here, for God’s sake do it quietly.

The university is designed to keep you moving. I notice this especially in Arts 1, probably because a lot of my classes are there. For the last few months before the new and improved Arts 1 opened, everyone seemed to be talking with much excitement about the common room, ‘with wifi’ (we were told), and I had visions of all us English students congregating there and loudly discussing books and shit.
No common room materialised (tbh I’m a little bit outraged).
There are couch things, sure but they either line walls or are huge circular unmoveable things. Congregating is discouraged. Sitting quietly and reading and avoiding eye contact with the person next to you is okay.

This is what happens when you google "Arts 1"

Gregory L. Ulmer

IKB 79 by Yves Klein

In ‘How to Make a Theory of Method’,  Ulmer explores the idea of creating the reverse of a manifesto. He suggests taking each point in an existing manifesto and providing its opposite as an alternative, displacing the original examples given. As his example, he writes a short “anti-method” which takes as its starting point Descarte’s Discourse.

The statements Ulmer ends up with, after sketching out the anti-method, are things like this:

-Take Don Quixote as a positive emblem

-Assume that any given part suffices, that completeness is not necessary

-Wander aimlessly

-Do not look or seek anything in particular, but let things come or happen as they will.

-I am without importance, therefore I play

-Anyone could do this, could discover these things and write this discourse.

-Seek publicity rather than work.

What strikes me about this “anti” to Descartes is not just, as he later says, its relevance to experimental arts in the twentieth century, but the relevance of each part of it to particular philosophies in life today – in particular the final two points I’ve listed above. “Anyone could do this, could discover these things and write this discourse” seems like the original “my kid could do that.” Art, both visual and performance, has over the past few decades become more about discovering the point of something than the act itself – for examples, IKB 79 by Yves Klein which hangs in the Tate Modern, and Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA (a piece of performance art I am a little bit obsessed with). The concept or execution of artworks like these seems very simple, but the point is not in what’s happened but why it’s happened and what reactions it causes.

The second, “Seek publicity rather than work” seems to be the overarching cry of this century. Life becomes less about substance and more about how many people saw you do it. The use of things like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogs means more people can see the brilliant thing you’ve done quicker.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present