From Word To Word

I have been reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death again, and I think he may have been wrong, not in entirety, but at least in one critical point that bears materially on any attempt to extend his work to social media.  Postman’s central thesis is essentially that textual media and visual media produce profoundly different kinds of public discourse.  He claims that textual media require active interpretation and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by rational, propositional, and informed discourse, while visual media encourage passive amusement and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by concern with image and appearance.  This is not to say that visual media are in every respect inferior to textual media, only to say that they produce a public sphere that is less able to conduct the kind of discourse required for an informed and functional democracy, and I would agree with this analysis in its broad outlines.

Where Postman errs, I think, is in including the telegraph and the telephone among the technologies of amusement, when I would argue that these media are actually forerunners of the social media that currently dominate the media landscape.  Because his book precedes the internet and the rise of social media, it fails to see how profoundly different these kinds of media are from both textual and visual media, even in their simplest forms.   This is not exactly Postman’s fault of course, not considering the time in which he was writing, and I have been told that he did address the idea of cyberspace in some of his later work, but I would like to presume on Postman’s ideas a little by extending his analysis of textual and visual media to social media, probably in ways that he would not endorse.  I apologize to anyone I might offend in so doing.

Here is what I would suggest.  First, where textual media require active attention, and where visual media require only passive attention, social media require a kind of attention that is neither active nor passive but idle.  We have these media continually on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, but we seldom actively apply ourselves to them or passively amuse ourselves with them.  We play with them.  We fiddle with them.  We trifle with them.  Rather than absorbing our attention actively or passively, they absorb our attention idly.  Though they are capable of supporting active and passive attention, the natural mode of social media is merely idle attention.

Second, where the activity of textual media results in understanding, and where the passivity of visual media results in amusement, the idleness of social media results in diversion.  These media operate by ceasing to be merely on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, and by demanding to be answered, now, in this instant, by ringing or chiming or vibrating or appearing on our desktops, and they thus diverts us from whatever it is that we were doing at that moment.  They can be ignored, of course.  We can let our phones go straight to voicemail, ignore the message telling us that we have mail, put off reading the latest item in our feed, but the natural mode of these media is to disrupt, to demand instant response, and so they divert us.  Indeed, they very often divert us from a previous diversion, so that we intend to check only one meassge and end up looking at the pictures of some guy we hardly know, or we intend to follow one link that a friend tweeted and end up surfing youtube for half an hour.  Diversion leads to diversion.  This is the mode of social media.

I am not implying, of course, that social media cannot support other modes of attention and activity, only that idle diversion is the natural mode of social media, the mode into which they fall by default, the mode in which they are most comfortable.  I am also not implying that the mode of idle diversion is necessarily without value, because it is very good at accomplishing certain ends.  What I am suggesting, however, is that this mode tends to produce a particular sort of discourse in the public sphere, just as textual and visual media do, and that the sort of public discourse produced by social media is not necessarily in the best interests of a healthy democracy.

The reason for this is that success in social media is not a matter of attracting active attention, as in textual media, and not a matter of attracting passive attention, as in visual media, but a matter of diverting idle attention.  To put this practically, it is a matter of going viral, of getting more likes and more retweets and more comments and more hits.  It is not necessary that we understand the political issues, not necessary that a candidate amuse us with witty talking points and distinguished good looks, only necessary that something divert us long enough to click it.  Our engagement in public discourse becomes reduced from active engagement, to passive reception, to idle clicking that diverts us from something else and will almost instantly be replaced by another diversion in its turn.

This is not, as I said above, the only mode in which social media can function.  It is possible to stimulate tremendous political action through social media, as history has shown already.  Social media can reach massive numbers of people almost instantly, and can mobilize these people in powerful ways.  However, even when it is successful in producing action, this action remains mostly uninformed.  It is a viral action that mobilizes over a slogan or an event, something that can be summarized in a hundred and forty characters, something that we can post on our feeds and send to our lists, something that we can click, and it lacks the kind of sustained, reasoned, informed public discourse that is necessary to produce healthy political action.  It is political action as a diversion from the other things we do, and we are as quickly diverted from it as we were to it.  When something else hits our feeds, we are off in another direction altogether.

It is certainly possible to use social media against their natural mode, to conduct through them the kind of political discourse that a healthy democracy needs, to disseminate information through them, to hold government accountable through them, and I affirm anyone and everyone who uses them in these ways.  The real problem is, however, that these social media produce us as much as they produce the discourse in which we engage, and they are increasingly producing a population which is incapable of any political action beyond following a feed and clicking a “Like” button, not merely because this seems natural, but because they have no experience of any other political discourse or any other political engagement.  It is not only the public sphere that is being changed by our media, but we ourselves.  We are becoming a culture that is capable only of idle diversion, and the implications of this impoverished ability to engage politically can only have a detrimental effect on the health of our democracy.

I have this idea.

The publishing industry has traditionally produced different editions of texts in order to market them to different kinds of customers, from lightly annotated popular editions to help readers with places, names, archaic terms, and unusual language, to heavily annotated academic editions that come complete with relevant historical material, critical essays, chronologies, bibliographies, and every other textual apparatus imaginable.  These editions are, of course, limited by the number of customers willing to buy them, so they tend to include mostly the major texts, and they tend to be edited by scholars who are more or less experts in their fields.  Texts that are not commercially viable or that are edited by people who are not experts in their fields are understandably left unpublished.

However, publish-on-demand style websites like Blurb or Lulu or Xlibris, among many others, now make it possible, at least in theory, for people to make their own editions of public domain texts quite easily.  The texts themselves are readily available from sites like Project Gutenberg and Digital Book Index, and they can be simply copied and edited and published as new editions with the tools provided by the publishing sites.  The cost is nil, except to have the new edition printed, and the result is an edition that meets the precise needs of the one who edited it.

The most obvious users of personal editions would be teachers.  In fact, the idea first occurred to me when I tried and failed to find a decent academic edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.  How hard would it be, I reasoned, to lift the text from Project Gutenberg and add my own introduction and notes specifically for my class?  As I thought about this, I also realized how easy it would be to make course specific collections of essays or short stories, so that I would always have exactly the texts that I wanted and not have to bother paying for anthologies that restricted my choices and never had the texts I really wanted anyway.  I am at the moment working on some of these kinds of ideas.

There are other less obvious uses for personal editions, however.  For example, I might make notes directly into a digital copy as I am reading it and include appendices of anything that it prompts me to write, so that I can publish a very intimate edition of the text.  A group of friends might read a text together and compile their responses into an edition.  A conference on a text might collect the papers that were presented and gather them into an edition.  Wherever critical or scholarly work on a text takes place, in other words, it should be possible to gather that work together and to create an edition of the original text that includes this work.

Of course, these editions would not often be interesting to anyone who was not directly involved in their production.  An edition prepared for my class or myself or my friends or my conference will likely only be interesting to my class or myself or my friends or my conference, but just because something is only locally valuable does not necessarily mean that it is less valuable.  In fact, for me, the one involved in the production of these editions, personalized texts of this sort might very well be an invaluable record of my intellectual practice through my teaching, studying, and discussion with others.  Their interest to third parties would hardly be relevant.

On the other hand, by publishing personal editions publically rather than just making notes privately, it becomes possible that someone just might find the personal edition useful and be able to access it.    As a teacher, I might be able to find an edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill or a collection of Renaissance literary criticism that is in fact useful to me, because someone else has taken the time and the energy to make it.  As a reader, I might be able to find an edition with a style of notation and commentary that is particularly conducive to me, because someone has taken the time and energy to make it publically available.

So, there you have it: my idea.  Let me know if you think it has merit.

I have been thinking about ideas of relation and connection for several years now.  I mentioned them together first back in May of 2008 in a post called “An Addendum of Sorts” and then again in a post called “Social Holocaust?“, and these ideas have been percolating in my mind ever since, so much so that I thought I would take some time to look at what the words have meant in our language historically as a way to start making sense of what they could mean for us today.

The word ‘connect’ in the sense of ‘joining together’ has been in use in the English language since the middle of the 15th century, and it has been employed in the sense of ‘establishing a relationship” since at least 1881.  With the introduction of telephone connections, it has also been used since 1926 in the sense of “getting in touch”, and this sense has grown to include ‘awakening emotions’ or ‘establishing a rapport’ since the early 1940’s.  In contemporary usage, it has become used increasingly in both technical and interpersonal ways.  In a technical sense it is now used to describe virtually every contact between electronic devices, so that we now routinely speak of internet connections and cell phone connections and wireless connections and network connections.   In an interpersonal sense, we also now refer to our relationships increasingly in terms of connection and connectivity, especially as our electronic connections begin to dominate our interpersonal interactions, so that we now keep connected to our friends through our various devices and applications and speak of these relationships in terms of connections also.

The word ‘relate’, by comparison, comes into English usage a little later, sometime around 1530, and it is first used in the sense of ‘recounting’ or ‘telling’.   It does not come to mean ‘establishing a relationship’ until 1771, and it is only around 1950 that it comes to mean ‘feeling sympathy or connection’.  Whereas the word ‘connect’ originates in the act of joining together, especially in a technical sense, the word ‘relate’ originates in the act of telling.  It comes to describe interpersonal relationships, not in terms of mere contact, but in terms of telling and recounting stories to one another.  We relate our stories, and we thereby come into relation.

Considering the differences in connotations between these two words, I think that our culture’s increasing preference for the word ‘connection’ over the word ‘relation’ is perhaps symptomatic of how our devices and applications are coming to mediate our relationships.  Because these technologies have changed how we interact, we have taken on new ways of speaking about our interactions.  It no longer makes as much sense to speak of having a relationship with someone, because the nature of our interaction is no longer that of relation, no longer that of sharing our stories with one another.  Instead, it makes more sense to speak of our interpersonal interactions with the same terminology that we use to speak of the technology that now enables and produces these interactions, to speak of connectivity rather than relation, to speak in terms of being put in contact or being joined together.

As I was thinking about the implications of this cultural and linguistic shift, it occurred to me that I might also make a similar etymological study of another word that has been significant to me with respect to how we are relate ethically to one another, the word ‘encounter’.  It appears in the English language much earlier than either ‘relate’ or ‘connect’, being used as early as the late 13th century.  Its initial meaning was ‘the meeting of adversaries,’ but by the 16th century it had already weakened to mean ‘a casual or chance meeting’.  This is one of those instances, I think, where the ancient sense of the term bears a much profounder meaning than the contemporary one, an instance where the continuing resonance of the ancient sense is what makes the word so powerful even in its contemporary usage, especially when it is used in an ethical sense.

It is after all a pair of enemies who encounter one another in the quintessential story of ethical relation, The Good Samaritan.  The Samaritans and the Jews were cultural and religious enemies, refusing either to socialize or to worship together, and this enmity is the element of the story that makes the Samaritan’s actions so remarkable.  In a standard interpretation of the story, the Samaritan rather than the Priest or the Levite is the one who acts as a neighbour, is the one who acts ethically, because he shows compassion to the man who had been robbed even though he was a cultural and religious enemy of his people.  I have myself characterized this moment as the moment of ethical encounter in much these same terms, but I wonder, considering the ancient meaning of the word ‘encounter’, whether this is a moment of ethical encounter needs to be understood a little differently.

Perhaps it is only because the one I encounter on the road is other to me, because this one is not of my faith or my race or my gender or my politics or my social status or my pay grade or my whatever, perhaps it is only because this one on the road is other to me, not just different from me but other from me in a way that is a threat and a concern to what I am, perhaps it is only because of this otherness, this enmity, that I can truly encounter the other at all.  Perhaps it is not an ethical encounter even though the one on the road is the other.  Perhaps it is an ethical encounter precisely because the one on the road is the other, must always be the other, no matter how much he or she may appear to be like me.

This otherness, this enmity, this hostility, may in fact be what is essential to ethical relation, may in fact constitute ethical encounter as such.  I am reminded here of Derrida’s idea of hostipality, in which hostility and hospitality are both necessarily present in the gesture of the host, and it seems to me that the ethical encounter functions in much the same way.  It is the decision to treat the other as myself, precisely because the other is not myself.  It is the decision to love the other, precisely because this other is what I do not love.  It is the decision to befriend the other, precisely because the other is my enemy.  It is the moment comprised, necessarily, of both enmity and amity.  The moral of the story is not that everyone is my neighbour and so I must be a neighbour to them.  The moral is that no one is my neighbour, that everyone is my other, that everyone is my enemy, and that I must be a neighbour to them anyway, because there is no other way to be a neighbour.

All this has brought me a fair distance from where I began, but not without value, at least for me, because if it is true that in our culture we now speak more of connection than of relation, and if we have always spoken more of connection and relation than of encounter, the origins of these words should warn us that perhaps our language is betraying a shift away from relationships based on the sharing of our stories toward connections based on little more than mere contact, and that even this shift does not account for a deeper and more worrying refusal to understand how we relate ethically to each other, how the other always encounters us an enemy, how this otherness may even be a precondition for us to act ethically in the world.

I spent the afternoon in Toronto yesterday, which is not a horrible thing, so long as I do not have to drive into the city, and so long as I do not have to be anywhere in anything resembling a hurry.  I arrived on the train just before lunch, got a hair cut, and still had about five hours before I was supposed to meet Mike Hoye, and David Eaves, and Dave Humphrey for dinner.  I spent the time walking thirty blocks or so of Yonge Street, browsing six used bookstores along the way, and stopping occasionally to refill my coffee mug, which was not always as easy as you might expect, since I dislike chain coffee shops and will settle for nothing other than coffee that has been fairly traded in one way or another, and since there is apparently a lack of such coffee on Yonge Street, along with an utter absence of real bakeries, incidentally,which would in itself be sufficient reason foe me to live elsewhere.  In any case, hot black coffee and fresh buttery baked goods aside, my time in Yonge Street’s bookshops was fruitful.

I found several books:
Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension;
Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe;
Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Alterity and Transcendence;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Humanism of the Other;
Emmanuel Levinas’ Entre Nous: Thing-of-the-Other; and
Martin Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?

I also found a few documentaries:
Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson;
Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers’ Lioness;
Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson’s A Man Named Pearl;
Katy Chevigny’s Election Day; and
Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan’s Soldiers of Conscience.

Interestingly, the conversation at dinner that night, between Dave and David and Mike and I, turned largely around the function of the printed book and of the digital text as forms for creating, publishing, reading, and archiving text, and it is strange for me to think that my experience yesterday is one that my children may never share.  It is entirely possible that they will never need or want or even be able to have books in the way that I do, replacing the blocks that I walked and the shops that I browsed and the books that I purchased with a few moments of search and download on whatever digital interface has become standard for them.  I admit this possibility, and I even admit the further possibility that this shift might reflect an advance according to some measure of efficiency, but I cannot help but feel that they will have lost something beautiful.

Dave Humphrey posted on the subject of grammar the other day, arguing against the now cliche assumption that new textual media like texting, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, and blogs are creating a generation of students who are poor writers.  Now, as a teacher of English Literature, I have been confronted by some horrible writing over the years, and very little of the writing that I see is of the quality that I would like it to be, but this does not imply an easy correlation between new media and poor writing.

In my opinion, the shift in writing has not been from good writing to bad writing at all, but from technically correct writing to technically incorrect writing, which are related but not identical questions.  Though good writers generally do have a certain facility with the technical aspects of writing, it is certainly possible, as the schoolwork of previous generations would testify, to write correctly, by dint of rote and repetition, but still to write poorly, without style, without rhetorical force, without intellectual or emotional insight, without sensitivity to the subtleties of sound and connotation and allusion.  It is entirely possible, therefore, even likely, that previous generations of students were no better writers than the students of our own day, even if they were better able to write correctly according to a certain definition that may or not be very useful in any case. I am certainly not suggesting that today’s students are better writers  than their predecessors, because they may in fact be worse on the whole.  I am only suggesting that it is not possible to measure writing ability solely by the degree of adherence to certain technical standards.

With this distinction in mind, I would argue that new textual media do in fact have a relationship with the ability of students to write in ways that are technically correct.  It is not that these media have produced an increase in incorrectness, in colloquialism and informality, but that they have made our already colloquial and informal communication a textual and public activity rather than an oral and more or less private one.  We now write to one another the things that we previously only said to one another, and this has produced a new kind of writing that tries to represent textually the kinds of colloquial talk that has never before found a significant place in formal writing.  This new colloquial writing is not merely a corruption of more traditional formal modes of writing.  It is a mode of writing unto itself, with its own grammars and technicalities.  It is not necessarily good, of course, but that is not exactly the point.  After all, the colloquial talk that is now being made textual through new media writing was not often of tremendous value either.

This textualization of our colloquial talk is significant, however, because it begins to blur the boundary between the colloquial and the formal.  If there was once a strong distinction between the ways that people spoke and the ways that they wrote, a strong distinction between colloquial speech and formal writing, this distinction is now increasingly obscured as both the colloquial and the formal become a matter of textuality.  After all, people now text gossip to each other and blog their lives to each other and write their school assignments or professional documents all at the same time and on the same device.  These activities are just different windows in the virtual space of the same monitor.  There is no longer a strong spacial or temporal separation between formal and informal communication, so it should come as no surprise that the two begin to bleed into one another.

Not only do new textual media blur the distinction between formal and informal writing, however, they also blur the distinction between textuality and other forms of media, as text becomes only one of many elements that are combined in the space of the screen in order to communicate, something to be combined with emoticons and embedded audio-visual material and hyperlinks and other such media.  Though this is not exactly new, as even the earliest written texts have incorporated illustrations, what is new is that these additional media are no longer intended only to support or to enhance or to explicate the text.  Instead, they are now understood as having equivalent or even greater significance than the text, where the primary medium is audio or visual, and the text is included merely as a caption or a label.

It is the blurring of these two distinctions, between the colloquial and the formal and between textuality and other media, that I think is the real source of anxiety for most educators, even if they have not yet recognized it.  What they perceive as a degradation in their students’ ability to write properly is in actuality a shift in the very idea of what constitutes proper writing and even a shift in what constitutes the proper role of writing.  They advocate a return to rote grammar and spelling in the schools without realizing that writing well in the context of new media may well require very different kinds of propriety altogether, very different approaches to rhetoric and persuasion, very different understandings of style and tone.

Now, let me be as clear as I can.  I am very definitely not suggesting that the writing going on through new media is good writing simply because it writes in new and different ways.  My experience with most new media writing is that, when it is intended still to be the primary mode of communication, it is as horrible as most writing has always been, and when it is being subordinated to other kinds of media, it is usually a good deal worse.  Simple novelty of form and purpose should not at all obscure the fact that this kind of writing is mostly characterized by cliche, incoherence, and general sloppiness, but this is not merely an effect of adopting one standard of technical propriety over another.  It is an effect of having few models of good writing within the newly adopted standards of technical propriety, models that teachers and schools are too fixated on grammar to provide.

Let me take emoticons as an example. I have no essential objections to emoticons, neither in themselves nor as an example of visual elements being introduced to a textual medium.  My objection to emoticons is that they are usually the visual equivalent of a textual cliche.  They say only very little, and they say it in only a very simplistic way, which makes them suitable for only certain kinds of writing, for those kinds of writing that are the equivalents of our colloquial speech, which often do not require anything more than simple and uncomplicated modes of expression.  Rather than just objecting to all such visual elements in a text, however, I would suggest that teachers should be providing models that combine visual elements with written text more effectively, models that signal a more formal or thoughtful use of these visual elements without necessarily making recourse to traditional writing conventions.

They could, for example, show how a still primarily textual piece might include audio or video or photographs or hyperlinks to material that explicates its subject more effectively than words could alone.  They could show how text might be superimposed as commentary on a video or on a series of photographs or on an electronic text in order to make a close reading of these media.  They could show how text might be voiced, or combined with music, or laid over visuals in order to produce a certain stylistic or tonal quality.  In short, they could address emoticons, not as a failure to understand formal grammar, but as a failure to understand the visual possibilities of which emoticons are only the most banal example.

This does not devalue the role of formal grammar.  Many of our grammatical conventions exist because they help us to communicate more clearly and more easily.  They are not essential, to be sure, and they can and should change over time, but that does not alter the fact that they are useful as conventions of communication.  What I am suggesting is merely that the value of these conventions needs to be modeled in the context of writing that is relevant to students because it also models the ways in which their media enables them to write.  I am suggesting that we need to write new media well, to encourage others to write it well, and to learn from others who are writing it well, and I am suggesting that this requires us to discover and develop and artculate and share new conventions that will enable this kind of writing, even if these new conventions take some of what they need from good old fashioned grammar.

I almost always finish the books that I begin, but Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has just become the latest exception.

I have written about this book in the past.  I mentioned it first in a post on database as narrative limit and then again more recently in a post on the nature of the digital object, and I have been forcing myself to read it, in fits and starts between other things, for something like a year now.  It was given to me by my friend Don Moore almost two years ago, and I made two or three ineffectual attempts to begin it before I really got started in the first place, so I feel that I have given it every opportunity to engage me.  If it has failed to do so, I can now put it aside without any damage to my conscience.

My difficulty with the book has nothing to do with its argument.  Though I do often find myself disagreeing with Manovich, I generally enjoy reading a position that challenges my own, so long as it is thoughtful and well articulated, which Manovich’s generally is.  The trouble is that his writing is utterly lacking in style and rhetorical interest.  Manovich may be intelligent, and he may be insightful, and he may offer an interestingly aesthetic approach to the question of how to understand new media, but he is an awful writer, period.  His diction is painfully deliberate.  His sentence structure is monotonous.  His tone reminds me of nothing so much as the textual equivalent of any adult who happens to talk in a Peanuts cartoon.  Every time I begin to read him I am seized by the insurmountable urge to read something, anything, else.

Perhaps the real problem, however, and I am willing to concede this in Manovich’s defense, is that I have been spoiled by the thinkers that I usually read.  To read Jacques Derrida, for example, or Emmanuel Levinas, or Jean-Luc Marion, or Roland Barthes, or Ivan Illich, to name only a few of my favourites, is to be immersed in a aesthetic experience as well as an intellectual one.  These writers attend as much to their language and to their style as they do  their content, the one reinforcing the other.  Perhaps it is only their virtuosity that has made Manovich so unendurable to me.  I will admit the possibility.  Even so, I am finished with Manovich.

I read an interview with Werner Herzog in the Globe and Mail this morning.  I love Herzog, not just his films, of which I have seen too few, but his persona as a director, and the interview provides some fabulous examples of this persona at work.  For example, how many Hollywood directors are capable of an observation this articulate and this profound:  “I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can’t fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude.”  If more of our directors were capable of this kind of thoughtful reflection, if more of them were capable of articulating themselves half so well, perhaps we would have more films worth watching.

Since I posted on the work of writing in the age of digital replication, I have begun, finally, to read Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, part of which relates to what I was addressing in that post.   My argument was essentially that a digital copy of a digital object “is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy,” but Manovich proposes, among his several principles of new media, a principle of variability, which states that “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite variations.”

What Manovich means by this is that the same digital object can be, and often is, altered and modified according to the specifications of each user, so that each user has, at least in potential, access to many variations of the same digital object.  For example, the digital object of this post will be used to produce many variant digital objects by different users.  Some will read it through one or another feed reader.  Some will read it through this site itself.  Some will see it first in a search engine’s display.  These people will be using various browsers, various graphics drivers, and various operating systems.  All of these things will manipulate the original digital object and create a variation of it for the end users.

Now, Manovich’s principle and my own are not mutually exclusive, but they do emphasize two apparently opposing characteristics of the digital object, and they do raise the question of how exactly digital objects are related to the copies and the variations that are made from them.  In this respect, I would suggest that it is necessary to refine the idea of the copy as such, whether it is being used to describe digital objects or physical ones, and I would argue that every copy is distinct from its source object both in space and in time.  Whatever continuity there may be in the content of the object, in the words or the code or the images that it bears, it is always temporally and spatially discontinuous from every other copy.  Whether I am printing a new edition of a book or copying a file for a friend, the copy is always discontinuous from its original.

This distinction may seem obvious, but it is necessary to insist on it in order to realize the difference between how digital objects relate to their copies as opposed to how physical objects do so.  When I take a physical object, I can mark it, individualize it, make it more unique.  When I do so, I create an object that is new, in a very real sense, but one that is not temporally and spatially discontinuous with the one that it replaced.  When I add notes in its margins, or spill coffee on it, or put a dedication on its flyleaf, or bend the corners of its pages to mark my place, I make that object different from the object that it was, but this object is not discontinuous in time and space from the previous object.  This is what allows the user to fetishize the physical object, what makes it available to the user as an object of nostalgia or obsession. It is a new and unique object, but it is physically and historically continuous with the object of the user’s memory.  It takes a place in history.  It is, in fact, entirely irreplaceable.

When I make changes to a digital object, however, these changes do not modify an object that remains continuous with the one that was changed.  Instead, they always create an entirely new digital object.  There is never any way for the digital object to be changed except to be created as entirely new.  It can only be the source for a new object that is in every case entirely discontinuous spatially and temporally from the one that preceded it, and this new object can only be identical with the source object or not.  It has no other way to appear.  There will never be the digital equivalent of coffee stains or bent corners, because any such interventions become embodied in the new object itself.  Even if it replaces the object that preceded it, it is a new and discontinuous object.  Even if it maintains a history of the changes that have been made to it, it is a new and discontinuous object.

It is precisely because digital objects function in this way that they can be made identical, producing copies that are able to replace their originals in every respect.  One copy is a good as another.  So long as they are copies, any one will do.  This is why, while it is still possible to fetishize the function and the history of a digital object, it is never possible to fetishize one copy of this digital object over another.  It is possible for me to have nostalgia for a digital song or computer program, but one copy of these objects will always be as good to me as another, because they will always be entirely interchangeable.  They will never have dog ears or creases or stains that make them identifiably mine and identifiably a part of my history.  They will always remain invisible to my memory and to my history and to my nostalgia.

What Manovich’s principle of variability recognizes, therefore, is the ability of a particular digital object to be manipulated endlessly, but what it fails to recognize is that these manipulations are not variations of the original digital object at all, but entirely new digital objects in themselves.  Though they have used the original object as a source, they are no longer continuous with it spatially or temporally.  In other words, exactly counter to what I quoted from Manovich in my opening paragraph, a new media object is indeed fixed once and for all, however many further objects might use it as a source.  It cannot, as Manovich claims, exist in potentially infinite variations.  It can only be a source for a potentially infinite set of new objects.  While a physical object might potentially exist in many ways as it becomes subject to the alterations of time and space, this is precisely the thing that the digital object can never do.

I have always regarded it as positive that the internet as a medium permits its users a greater degree of active participation than most other media, but during the discussion at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, I found myself questioning this assumption.  We had just finished watching The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and we were asking why the war in Vietnam had produced such a strong and sustained opposition while the war in Iraq has not generated a similar level of response.  After all, the activists of today have technological advantages that those opposing the Vietnam War did not, and these technologies should theoretically enable them to network and to share information far more easily and far more effectively.  Perhaps, I suggested to the group, the more active experience of using a computer actually dissuades people from becoming active in more practical ways, so that they respond to an issue by signing an online petition, or by writing a blog post, or by sending a mass email, or by contributing to some relief fund, but they never make the transition from internet activism to physical activism.  Their drive to engage in issues becomes satisfied through the monitor and never finds expression beyond it.

To be clear, I am not at all arguing that real activism cannot be accomplished online.  I am merely suggesting that the internet often allows people to engage with issues in ways that provide only the illusion of activism and that it frequently functions to satisfy the need for active involvement in political issues without really addressing these issues beyond the level of the monitor.  Rather than enabling activism, the internet comes to replace it, limiting the ways in which people are willing to be politically active.

The answer to this problem is obviously not to abandon the internet as a tool for activism, because it is simply too effective a means for communicating and networking and organizing and raising awareness.  The answer may, however, involve reimagining how we use the internet and how we promote activism through it, so that we do not content ourselves with online petitions that nobody sees at the expense of actually feeding the hungry, defending the oppressed, and protesting injustice.  I am not sure that I have any specific suggestions as to how this might be accomplished, but I would encourage you, the next time you are confronted by a cause in your online wanderings, to see what it is exactly that you are being asked to do.  Is it the kind of activism that stops at the monitor, or is it the kind that only begins there in order to go much further?

Despite my grandiose aspirations, I only managed to see two of the Guelph Festival of Moving Media films this past weekend:  Burma VJ, which I will discuss further when I introduce the documentary film course that I will be teaching in January, and Rip: A Remix Manifesto, which I will take up now.

Rip explores the music of mash-up artist Girl Talk as a way of introducing questions about intellectual property.  It is  not intended to add much new to the subject, focusing instead on raising awareness among those who have not yet been exposed to it, so those who are already familiar with the issues will find it a little simplistic.  Its tone is openly rhetorical, as you might expect from a manifesto, most often preferring the engaging generalization to the subtle argument, but it is usually able to convey the essential ideas nevertheless.

A good example of its approach can be found with its section on the history of copyright law.  It gives a brief explanation of the first copyright law formed in England and an equally brief explanation of the most recent copyright law, but it is content to pass over the details of these acts and to ignore the many legislative and legal interventions that contributed to the transition from one to the other.  The audience is clearly shown that copyright has been vastly extended over the past few hundred years, but it is not given the details of how this extension occurred.  So, while newcomers to the question of intellectual property may very well find this idea provocative, there is little that would enable them to develop an informed opinion or to locate themselves with respect to the current legal questions and legislative initiatives before the courts and legislatures.  The film is a good introduction in many ways, to be sure, but it is always only an introduction.

Even as an introductory tool, however, the film has its short comings.  For example, it does not distinguish very well between the acts of ripping. mixing, and burning, each of which poses very different legal and artistic questions, even at a very basic level.  It is one thing for me to make a copy of someone else’s work, another thing for me to alter that work for my own ends, and another thing again for me to produce and distribute this work for other people, but all of these things are lumped together in the film, and this sometime results in some poor reasoning and some false conclusions.

The film also focuses too heavily on intellectual property in music and film, touching only very briefly on the more serious aspects of intellectual property, like the patenting of living material, the length of patents on potentially life-saving drugs and other medical technologies, and the copyrighting of material that materially pertains to the ability of people to make a living or exercise freedom of speech.  These oversights are perhaps to be expected in a film that is using a musician as a case study, but they have tendency to reduce the intellectual property debate to the question of artistic and cultural freedom when much more material things are also at stake.

Despite these problems, the film is generally successful in raising the central ideas of the intellectual property debate, and it does include one section that I found quite profound.  The section is set in Brazil, where the government has decided that it will not respect United States copyright law but will allow and even foster the creative reuse of cultural artifacts.  In this context, the film quotes the  Cannibal Manifesto by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, and suggests that cannibalism might be a useful metaphor for understanding the creative process, where the artists of the present cannibalize the artists of the past in order to take the strength of the past into themselves.

This idea is attractive to me.  Though I have encountered it before with respect to how writers make use of one another’s writing, I have never made the fairly obvious move of extending it to the creative process generally, and I had never understood how political an image it actually is.  After all, this discourse of cannibalism is being used by a Brazilian to oppose a European culture that has been imposed on him, and doing so by making use of that European culture’s long history of regarding his native culture in terms of savagery and cannibalism.  The film itself mostly passes over these political implications, but there are some interesting correlations between the kinds of cultural impositions made by the European colonizers on the native inhabitants of Brazil and those being made by today’s big media cultural colonizers on most of the world, and if the figure of the cannibal consumes the body of the enemy in order to take the enemy’s strength, all the while playing through and against the enemy’s stereotype of the savage, there is a very real sense, I think, in which today’s open culture movement might want to regard itself as cannibalistic.