Learning ubiquity

Over the course of this paper, I have found that when faced with arguments such as Heidegger's notion of readiness-to-hand (98) and its implications for the ways we (don't) think about the technology we live with, and perhaps especially Luhman's posthuman insistence that society is no longer a "human" one (5), I find it the most natural thing in the world to struggle with these concepts for a few hours, maybe a couple of days, and then at the end of it suddenly retcon my own knowledge from a snide "what is this heresy?" to an equally superior "well obviously".

Growing up between the '90s and early 2000s, I was involved in the social revolutions of email, instant messaging programs, social network websites and downloadable music and movies. I have lived through one of the largest cultural paradigm-changes in history, have been on both sides of what we now know as the digital divide, and as ubiquity continues to colonise and settle in all regions of our cultural database, I have to wonder if my attitude is simply a coping mechanism, the result of some overlooked repository of internalised technophobia breaking the surface of my unconscious, goaded out by data that threatens to rewrite my cognitive map.

Have I learnt effectively? And am I the only one whose values are pre-ubiquity in a post-ubiquity world? The warnings of police to online daters following a woman's gang-rape after agreeing to meet somebody she met on Tinder directly regurgitate rape culture's victim-blaming rhetoric, which far precedes the concept of ubiquitous media. Is media too ready-to-hand (Heidegger, 98) for us to responsibly use without juggling a job and dense philosophical study, even if "we" are the police, the government - the people who design this media?

Who is learning, and learning what?

Bottles and bus stops

09/11/2014, 2:50pm. Bus stop. Sun-induced heat. Bus is due but has not arrived. Lack of water bottle.

 

Tension builds.

09/11/2014, 3:05 pm. Bus arrives - on the other side of the road, completing its route from the city. I suppose this means it will soon come around again to this stop and finally "arrive".

Really wishing I'd brought my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:15 pm. Bus still has yet to "arrive", despite the fact that I saw it across the road ten minutes ago, and it only comes once an hour, said hour supposedly beginning and ending every ten minutes to the hour. Why is it late? Did I miss an automated text? I do not possess this information. 

The information that I do possess is that this bus should have arrived at 2:50pm, as it clearly states on the timetable. We don't even have a digital timetable here; we only have one of the plastic ones skewered on a pole. That is also information I have ready-to-hand. 

I have decided that, at this point, the next bus is due in half an hour anyway ("due"), so I may as well risk going back to the house and getting my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:22 pm. It has been four minutes since I returned with my water bottle, and the bus has now finally arrived, after standing for half an hour in anticipation of said arrival. 

As I board, I wonder if this crisis might have been averted if my facebook profile was public rather than private, if I allowed Google to track my location, if I had made myself more accessible, allowed myself to be fully encapsulated by the various arcane algorithms and unexplained profit margins that enclose my position within the traffic of the social network. If only I had embraced ubiquity more fully.

Wherever ubiquity is, it's not on my bus route.

Lametti vs World of Warcraft

Lametti points out that "Apple has built its highly successful business model around incompatibility" (216). Hinting towards an era where the Cloud replaces the Internet - or perhaps more accurately, towards an era where Clouds replaced the Internet - as the primary site of public discourse and private data storage, the future according to Lametti will most likely be one full of gatekeepers, paywalls and segregation, propping up a system of neoliberal privatisation that will be as ubiquitous as the media that facilitate its effects.

Lametti also notes that the deregulated Internet allowed for "file sharing and mash-ups" (203) to emerge as dominant, definitive and most importantly collaborative forms of self-expression online - Lametti predicts that this will all disappear with the dominance of the Cloud.

However, taking the example of "machinima" content created by World of Warcraft players, we can see contemporary parallels that seem somewhat less bleak. Celebrated by the community and actively encouraged by Activision Blizzard, "machinimation" involves using a program to extract models from WoW as files and then manipulate them, along with other video editing techniques, to create an original piece of art.

Generally humorous and inherently subversive, machinimation seems to actively undermine Activision Blizzard's monopoly over its own content, politically, economically and legally. And yet, Activision Blizzard encourages this practice, as it provides a source of free advertising, strengthens bonds within the community, and makes them look like benevolent overlords.

It is also a source of free labour, much like the numerous and popular "let's play" YouTube channels. Even Jane McGonigal, champion of gamification, insists that people not be paid for their efforts, because then people would only ever do things for money (232). 

While the example of WoW's paratextual environment provides an alternative version of the future to Lametti's privatised nightmare, perhaps the prospect of glorified unpaid labour is not that much better.

Rationally paranoid

According to Harper, certain paranoid behaviours can be rationalised in certain contexts. For example: people who belong to minority groups may express "paranoid" beliefs about society, but given the systematic persecution that minority groups face on a daily basis, these beliefs are perhaps less paranoid and more reasonable conclusions drawn from personal experience. Even websites that use surveillance methods for their users' supposed benefit, such as dating sites, do not necessarily store their users' personal information responsibly, as with this case in Texas.

Modern media such as facebook and instagram ensure that it is not only minorities and disgruntled online dating folk who have reason to believe they are being monitored and watched in ways that make them uncomfortable; Andrejevic's example of "Room Raiders" suggests that anybody could be targeted by surveilling forces at work in society - and that we are the ones targeting ourselves. It seems that we not only enjoy watching other people being exposed (often with humiliating results and an end-goal of public shaming for humorous effect), but we actually enjoy being exposed as well.



It may be tempting to conclude that the modern media-savvy netizen is not so much paranoid as exhibitionist, one who bares their soul openly with no thought to the consequences. But this ignores the fact that our online personas are carefully constructed. This is something that Andrejevic suggests we are very savvy about, the constructedness of virtual self, and that we are constantly aware of this norm of image-control when online. Rather than a case of paranoia or exhibitionism, I would say it is having a sense of control: we enjoy it when we feel able to mediate ourselves online, and feel upset when the information we want control over is in somebody else's hands.

Toys Are Us

After reading Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal, in which a broad plan for “saving the world” is outlined through the deployment and cultural up-taking of ubiquitous gaming (my phrasing), the readings for this week took on an interesting slant, because Tamagotchis and Furbies are not simply robots; they are specifically toys. If we identify a toy as “a tool that is used for playing games with, both Tamagotchis and Furbies make a lot more sense than if they are simply "sociable robots", which could conceivably be autonomous in their actions and responses, geared towards a very broad, general concept of what is “sociable”; a toy robot's actions responses will always be designed to both respond to and constitute the rules of the game that is to be played. And the game one plays with these toys is a game of caring for a living being, or a being that is “alive enough”.

What makes it a game, according to Jane McGonigal’s line of thinking, is the arbitrary and voluntary basis of this undertaking on behalf of the “player”: we do not need to care for a Furby, but we do so anyway because caring is what Furbies exist to have done to them by us. By this logic, it seems as though all toys and games are systems that use "players" to perform themselves, rather than the players performing the game.

But factoring into this Clark’s suggestion that, rather than the human brain preceding the technology it invented, the two are and have always been caught up in a reciprocal, ongoing developmental cycle without which neither could exist, it is not so much a question of whether we are playing the game or the game is playing us; rather, it is the question of whether there has ever been any other state of affairs, and if this is not precisely how we human beings have become what we currently are.

Utopiastarter

Kickstarter, Pledgeme, Indiegogo - if cyberlibertarians ever wanted a poster-child for the new millennium, surely this is it: direct interaction between producers and consumers of goods with no government interference, all done online. When the myth of the free internet is invoked, it is crowd-funding models like these that are often paraded out as examples of how we're already there, the house of tomorrow, today.

Whether the infamous potato salad Kickstarter is a stealthy satirical social experiment or simply somebody seeing an opportunity and taking it, it may point to some kind of chronic illness within our society that this Kickstarter project could even exist. But we can still interrogate the idea of "freedom" using it as an example. Yes, we are indeed free to fund the creation of a potato salad (the goal was $10; the amount raised at the time of posting is $55,492), but what kind of freedom is that? It is a distinctly libertarian freedom, because supposedly this is the kind of thing that a (decent) government would prohibit people from funding, and perhaps even from offering up as a good to begin with, because it is, as the old expression goes, daylight robbery.

If this is the kind of freedom we can look forward to in the coming media-made utopia, it is also important to note that these crowdfunding platforms are not self-sufficient, which is to say that without our particular economic system (capitalism) and market as conditions, they could not work. They work because they fill an operational niche, not because they necessarily represent a new paradigm that can stand on its own. In this sense, it is perhaps comforting to think that potato salad Kickstarters will not become the new normal, although at least in cyberlibertarian terms, this may also mean that utopia is something the likes of which we will never truly know.

Society does not contain human beings. In other news, Facebook owns your soul.

Today, while engaging in an act of hyper-reading while finishing the 10 pages of Moeller I had left over from yesterday, I came across a petition to stop facebook's messenger app from doing ... something. Accessing photos and making calls on your behalf or something insidious like that. I signed the petition like a good little sheep, and was immediately challenged by someone on facebook.



After a refreshingly rational mini-debate, I reflected upon my decision and reasoned that, since I'm still using facebook and have been for the past five-ish years, and have known about privacy issues all that time, it's a bit rich of me in some ways to be protesting the very functionality that I am happy enough to be complicit in the legitimising process of.



The idea that "only communication can communicate", paired with the concept of society no longer containing human beings, goes hand-in-hand with this sort of tension over ubiquity. Yes, we know that our apps and email accounts don't technically belong to us and that by their very design they infiltrate as much of our "private lives" as possible, that even if in practice the majority of people who use said media are not having their private lives constantly ravaged by the NSA, Illuminati or church of Scientology, the potential for it is very much real. We also know that we have very little insight as to the mechanics of Facebook or Gmail, unless we're involved in the field of web design or can write code. We know that we, humans, are not a part of this communication. And knowing that, we use it anyway.

Systems theory may bring a gut reaction of "begone vile misanthrope" at first glance, but perhaps the concept of a society without human beings is one that we accepted quite some time ago, and are (happily or not) content to see the continued autopoiesis of indefinitely.

Heidegger follow-up: Desein for living (in ignorance)

If Desein is "a being whose being is an issue for them", and therefore the way we become Desein is by being concerned with ourselves and the world around us ...

What does this have to do with making media ready-to-hand?

I mean aside from the obvious: if we're not concerned with how/whether the media we're using works, we can shift our concern to what we want to get done with it instead. The idea of a seamless media experience is appealing on the grounds of being unobtrusive in our pursuit of performing tasks with media as our equipment. Take the example of the lumberjack who wants to cut down a tree, very reasonably so: if their axe is in working condition then they can concern themselves with tree-cutting, rather than the axe. If the axe is not in working condition, or if it's missing when they need it for cutting trees with, then their concern shifts to the axe. And that's not convenient.



Here is the issue: we're not using axes. We're using electronic media. We aren't using "crude" technology; we're using technology so sophisticated that we don't know (most of us) how it works, how to fix it if it breaks, or how to make it. Therefore, we rely on other people making it for us. (We probably rely on other people to make axes for us as well, but bear with me here.)

And who's making it? Microsoft are making it. Apple are making it. Google are making it. Billion-dollar multinational conglomerates are not only in charge of producing this equipment; they also own it.

Which is the issue with using Heidegger to inform a design philosophy for ubiquitous media: Desein is all about being concerned with ourselves and the world, but the impetus behind ubiquity seems to create an experience of non-concern, like the people here:

None of these people give two expletives about how any of this stuff works, or where it comes from - or who it belongs to. The Microsoft Windows logo is nowhere to be seen on any of these interfaces they're using, and that is the embodiment of my concern here: that by employing Heidegger's theory of Desein to inform the design of a seamless and invisible ubiquity, it is also a design that makes ownership - or lack thereof - of this media ready-to-hand, invisible, none of our concern. Which is fine, until something goes wrong and suddenly our subscriptions and terms of use and allotted installations per device become present-to-hand, and we realise that ignorance is anything but bliss.

Just some paranoia for us to chew on while working on that book review.

(Basically I'm saying that it's incredibly suspicious that while the designers of ubiquity like Heidegger for his whole Desein thing they also seem to be trying to engineer a world in which nobody is actually Desein. Just to clear that up.)

Heidegger and tools: a tertiary-educated guess

I have spent the last four hours reading Heidegger on tools and "worldhood". Did I understand any of it? You be the judge.

Let's say I am one of those soulless drones in the Visa Paywave ad and I "want" to buy lunch, insofar as mindless automatons can be said to "want" anything. But this very mindlessness, while exaggerated, represents the world as seen from the position of Desein, an identity defined by the execution of behaviour in an environment - or, in Heidegger's terminology, Being.

Equipment is required for Desein to have meaning, because meaning is function, and function is founded on invisibility. Here, what is ready-to-hand (invisible) is my Visa Paywave card: I need it to perform my action of buying lunch that defines me as Desein. The equipment (card, Eftpos machine) is invisible, and Desein is therefore stable.



But then some mouth-breathing plebeian tries to buy their lunch with cash.



This act of blasphemy destroys the social order and plunges the Western World into anomic chaos.



More importantly: Desein (still me) recognises the cash, and as such the cash that is to the other Desein (gangster rapper Obama) ready-to-hand is to me and every other Visa Paywave-reliant Desein present-to-hand, because it has become visible in its lack of functionality, exposing the relational network of functionality assigned to all equipment in this scenario. The spell is broken, and equipment is now obvious rather than ubiquitous.

And the implications for ubiquitous media? Our interaction with the environment comes from an a-priori understanding that we can and do interact with it, in specific ways, for specific reasons, and through specific media. The concept of Desein rests on the assumption that we do what we do without "noticing" - if we notice, then both Desein and design are ruined by being made obvious (present-at-hand), and we are thrown into chaos because we are our functioning-ness.

Heidegg(er) what you're saying

Was this helpful? I don't know. It sounds helpful so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

Interfassbender

I'll just get this out of the way: this week's readings went more or less totally over my head.

Then I found the best part of Prometheus:

Are advertisements a kind of interface? Indirect promotional "advertisements" such as this do exist in order to "provoke activities and behaviours probabilistically, rather than mechanically" (7-8). It is not a sure thing that we will go and see Prometheus after watching this clip, but I'll admit, it's fairly likely. It's a good ad/interface for Prometheus.

Except that Prometheus is not what's being advertised. Not really.

Here, Prometheus is not represented directly, only hinted at - Nusselder's talk of metaphors and digital information travels fairly well in this scenario, in that this ad can "help us to imagine and represent the information" (16) without actually showing it to us or giving us direct access to it. But why? One might assume it's a matter of technical limitations; surely if digital information could connect us to artifacts in "the real world" we'd want that. I certainly want the film being "advertised" rather than the actual film, because the actual film was an inferior carbon-copy of Alien.

But Nusselder argues that interface design is all about desire, and specifically desire for things that aren't real: "The purpose of a technological medium is hence to obfusticate itself as a medium and to claim a real presence" (28) - in other words, the metaphorical claims to be literal: The David 8 claims to be not an ad for Prometheus, but a thing in and of itself.

Or perhaps an "experience" as opposed to a "thing" (Drucker, 10). Perhaps The David 8 is less of an "interface" for Prometheus than it is an interface for itself, in which "interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing" (Galloway, 31).

Or perhaps it's just false advertising.

Ubiquity

It is a matter of dependency that lends a sceptical air to the ongoing debate about ubiquity, the question of how much is too much. Greenfield’s “everyware” (15) and Gershenfeld’s “Internet-0” (78) both offer the potential for a “seamless” media experience, in which such luxuries as having an episode of Game of Thrones follow you around the house through internet-connected wallpaper if you want to head downstairs to put on dinner while keeping tabs on how little Jon Snow still knows become a reality. But as McCullough points out: “… we can observe plenty of annoyance in the form of petty information pollution” (15) – do we really need, or want, to be so seamlessly connected to everything that customised ads will pop up on the insides of our internet-connected glasses while walking (or, Heaven forbid, driving) past a Bluetooth-enabled billboard?

And that’s without even considering the potential for hacking into somebody’s internet-connected wallpaper, or kitchen sink, or duvet – the locks on our doors could be hacked, giving new meaning to the term “keylogging”. In the ubiquitous media future, will our clothes require antivirus protection? A convenient ubiquitous computing future is also one that requires IT knowledge to be widespread to navigate it safely – the user becomes responsible for knowing far too much, and the issue of information “pollution” becomes “overload”.

Jonathan Grudin highlights some of these practical issues by observing technology used in boardroom meetings, and the temporal difference between transitory “face-to-face” interactions and social cues and those made permanent and (potentially) public by recording/surveillance media. Ubiquity offers a future in which everything is useable and everyone a user, but the catch is that everyone is also everything – if this is Deuze’s concept of the immersive “media life” (138), then it follows that every user can also be used, anywhere, anytime, by anyone.

(Grudin Article: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1145/585597.585618)