Technology In Practice -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 3

TECHNOLOGY IN PRACTICE

Question Answered: #2 Do what are described as ‘new media’ technologies entail ‘new theory’ to account for their possible effects? Describe the extent to which ideas of the ‘posthuman’ inform this debate.

Early studies into communications systems centred upon the transmission models developed by Lasswell (1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), which positioned message senders and recipients in relation to a medium enabling communication. Messages, consisting of signs operating within a language of connotation, are encoded onto a medium by a sender to provoke specific ‘meaning’ when successfully decoded by the recipient. Encoding is informed not only by the intention of the sender, but also by the nature of the medium. In a manner akin to Norbert Weiner’s (1948) conception of cybernetic machines, the unsuccessful receipt of messages, manifesting as noise, is accommodated by the system in order to improve the chances of successful communication. Existing as both a linguistic (semantic) process and a material instantiation, media of transmission thus involves both the technological and the institutional within themselves. Robert Babe (2000) recognizes this duality as reflecting a distinction between the arts (cultural studies) and the social sciences (political economy) (18-19). Conceptions of media originating with Stuart Hall begin to displace these earlier models. Hall’s concern was to expand the potential for agency on the part of message recipients (audiences). Audiences were not passive vessels into which the content of communications processes was poured. Hall argues that the traditional conception of the communication process as a loop is limited due to the linear simplicity of its constituent feedback systems. Instead, he offers a model, based in Marx’s Grundrisse and in Capital, which conceives of communication as a “process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.” (1980 128). Hierarchies of meaning relative to what Hall calls the “dominant cultural order” may be invoked at each stage in this process, and are neither “univocal nor uncontested” (134). Thus, the process of communication between sender and audience involves a discursive relationship in which the decoding or reception of an encoded message is a spectrum of consensus which provokes “social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.” Reception of a message, therefore, involves performative rules “which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another” (134). Hall’s examination of television in “Encoding/Decoding” (1980) illustrates this idea. While institutional structures inform the production of television shows, the system of audience ratings foundational to commercial television serves to position the audience within a hierarchy of relational strategies which both enable and disable the degree of agency they can express within this system.

Fundamentally, ‘new media’ challenge older conceptions of media due to the technologies which enable them. Old media can be understood to adhere to older understandings (i.e., theory) of their operation for the simple reason that such understandings reflected the technologies which enabled them. Print and broadcast media are both defined by the systems which create and distribute their ‘content’. Printing is a physical configuration of equipment for (re)production whose demands – for example, capital to purchase printers and the space necessary for their operation, the size and weight of the machinery itself – orient the medium around a hegemony of interests which can be understood as ‘sender’. Likewise, the cost of ‘content’ creation for broadcast media such as radio and television orients these media around sites of production and reception, whose “crucial ratio between them” will foster, according to Richard Dienst, “intense competition between interests, sometimes of outright class struggle” (1994 7). The printing (or broadcasting) house can be controlled, manipulated, and censored by means of the discretion and the interaction of these interests. The technical nature of these media (specifically, the exact manner in which electromagnetic frequency modulation is exploited to produce a signal which may be received) further substantiates the transmission model for communications media. New media, on the other hand, can be seen to fundamentally alter the manner in which sites of (re)production come to alter and inform the significations produced through communication (i.e., the ‘meaning’ of the message). Social media – as well as redeployments of ‘old’ media such as television and film – as enabled by digital mobile telephony signals a relocation of the printing house, as it were, into the site of media reception. The relocation alters the ontology of any notion of subjectivity, itself admittedly undermined by post-structural theories which do not figure ‘subjects’ to be either unified or coherent entities.

Video and computer games signal the most obvious need to develop the critical tradition in a manner not fully anticipated by older models of communication theory. Most importantly, the relationship between game designers, players, and games does not fully accord with models centred upon sender, receiver, and medium. Despite this fact, it is possible to trace a continuation of the distinction in the study of media into humanistic and empirical methodological approaches in contemporary criticism of videogames. The ontology of digital gaming centres on a player’s performance of a role as represented by their screen avatar (Waggoner 2009), regardless of whether or not this performance is explicitly rendered into a narrative (Galloway 2006, Aarseth 1997), within behavioural rules imposed by the game designers (Barr et al 2007). This process of player anticipation of the roles expected with the game is described as ritualistic by Gazzard and Peacock (2011) and others (Harviainen 2012, Harviainen & Lieberoth 2012). Depending on the nature of a particular game, this role can be as simple as staying “alive” or performing some other task abstracting the will of the player into the procedural confines of the game mechanics, or it can involve participating within a broad fictional narrative. In this latter instance, a good game can be defined as one in which both the game mechanics and the story are loved more or less equally. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is the game interface itself (strategy, puzzle games). As a hybrid between the interface for interaction with the medium and the principle site for the generation of player affect, the avatar is the means for instrumentalising the player’s will at the same time as it is itself often an object for the player’s affections (Wolfendale 2007). Simultaneously illusion, instrument, and interface, the avatar conflates the various conceptions of representation in digital media as defined by Lev Manovich (2001). It is in the capacity of information to be figured as an embodied virtuality that videogames and other ‘new media’ can be rationalized. Videogames are thus ultimately defined by player agency, which is itself determined by the spectrum of possible player activities allowed by the set of rules governing the activities made possible by a game world and the procedural interactions thus allowed and provoked. Indeed, the very nature of videogames as an interactive, computationally-bound medium ensures that players contribute to the significations generated by a game. However, this agency must be understood with the proper perspective. While the capacity for agency differs between games as player activity is restricted relative to the game rules, the affect which players feel toward the game world reflects their capacity to inflict their will upon it in a manner contingent with the procedural logic established by the game’s fiction and understood within the technological limitations which enable a game. Arguably, the ‘message’ of a game play event is not the ‘meaning’ of the event, but rather the affect produced in and among players.

In this capacity, it is easy for critics schooled in the close reading strategies typical of ‘old media’ to be misled by the superficial content depicted in videogames. ‘Violent’ videogames such as the Grand Theft Auto and Doom franchises, for example, are often condemned for the nature of the actions available to players.[i] While such criticism often implicates ‘violent’ games in the social problems they depict by desensitising audiences to actions contingent with those problems, this line of thinking ignores what Manovich describes as the variable, iterative, and transcodable nature of digital media (2001 27). The process of transcoding is illustrated by the adaptation of the shooting/killing mechanic from ‘violent’ videogames into other functions. Such games use the affect produced by game mechanics commonly associated with ‘violence’ – firing a weapon at an enemy in order to remove it from play – to provoke different significations relative to the affective relationship. For example, the Christian game Catechumen (2000) utilizes game mechanics consistent with the ‘first-person shooter’ genre, but alters the representational result of firing a gun from ‘killing an enemy’ to ‘saving a soul’. Similar substitutions manifest in Team Fortress 2 (2007) which, in certain instances, replaces all representations of violence with ‘cute’ versions (instead of blood and gore, exploding bodies are full of candy and ballons, for example), as well as Portal (2007), in which the player’s ‘gun’ transubstantiates (re-embodies) the player him- or herself into the role of the bullet in order not to ‘witness’ killing, as it were, but rather to solve problems involving spatial geometry and Newtonian physics, and the ‘dubstep gun’ in Saints Row IV (2013),which causes enemies to dance uncontrollably in time with music positioned as simultaneously diegetic and non-diegetic. In each instance, the affect produced by player activity is substantively the same despite antithetical representational differences between games. Communication theories which model ‘messages’ sent and received do not properly account for these differences.

Ian Bogost forwards a model in which video games can be rationalized in terms of the forms of the procedural rhetoric which they present to players. In Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007), Bogost presents a model for understanding videogames which merges the material and the symbolic. Grounding his thought in the mathematical philosophy of Alain Badiou, Bogost figures ‘the message’ of digital media to consist of a fundamental multiplicity centred upon processes of quantification and calculation. Unlike traditional communication models, this conception seeks to understand digital interactive media not in terms of broad systemic relationships but rather by means of the small procedural interventions which, viewed as an aggregate and in relation to each other, come to govern larger systems. Rather than being a relatively stable object whose meaning is causally informed by the recipient’s relation to the sender, digital media such as videogames operationalize this relationship in a dynamic manner. Audiences may respond in a capacity fully expected and thus invoked by the designer – ostensibly signalling the successful uptake of a message. However, as Michael Nitsche (2008) and Jesper Juul (2005) have elaborated, players may engage in actions not at all anticipated by game designers. Indeed, the very nature of digital media as interactive and iterative renders them as “systems open for transgressive, emergent gameplay” (Nitsche 28).The multiplicity of possible responses to a given digital ‘text’ suggests to Bogost that absolute meanings cannot be encoded into digital communication processes in the manner suggested by earlier communication models. Instead of invoking encoded meanings, “procedural rhetoric is particularly devoted to representing, communicating, or persuading the player toward a particular biased point of view” (Bogost, Persuasive Games 135) within the framework of a spectrum of possible player responses, the meaning of each response being conditioned by the relation of that response to the overall pattern of responses enabled by a particular operation.

Thus, it might seem natural to view the programming code produced by videogame designers as a quite literal manifestation of Hall’s communications model: a sender encoding a message which is received in a multitude of ways by an audience negotiating a hierarchy of dominant meanings. However, this interpretation does not allow for the reciprocal creation of videogame ‘messages’ among game producers and players. Many games, either formally or not, allow players to modify and create game elements which can, in turn, be objects for consumption by other players or cooption by the game’s ‘official’ designers. This activity can effect changes at both the ‘textual’ level (an object produced in a game may alter symbolic relations structured in/by the game) and the meta-textual level  in which the player operates (an object produced in a game can be sold for material value, i.e., money, in the ‘real’ world). Also, there are numerous instances where audience ‘misreadings’ – player activity which transgresses the manifest intention of game rules or willfully creates new gameplay activities unintended by game designers – have been subsequently incorporated as ‘official’ elements of the game. Espen Aarseth (2003), for example, outlines the manner in which the “rocket jump” – using the negative damage feedback produced by an exploding weapon to positively assist player mobility and enable access to areas within the game otherwise unavailable to players – was adopted by game designers as an ‘official’ characteristic of the ‘first-person shooter’ game genre after emerging from unanticipated player activity. Mia Consalvo (2007) examines the manner in which instances of purposefully-transgressive player activity indicate patterns of agency within a virtual space of value generation which she describes as “gaming capital” (4). In this capacity, cheating serves to reorient the relationships between games, game designers, and players. An incident often cited (Aarseth 2007) in this respect occurred when a programming bug in the multiplayer online game Ultima Online resulted in a player being able to murder the ruler of the game’s fictional world, a character who was controlled by the game’s principle designer and who served as an interface mechanic by which players were motivated toward specific goals and forms of gameplay; rather than punish the player for transgressing the established rules, the game designer chose to integrate this event into the game itself. Furthermore, some games are structurally enabled by player participation, or even the polyvalent interactions among numerous players in relation to each other, and do not present signification, as such, as distinct from this activity. As Castronova (2005) notes in relation to the economic effects of virtual economies, procedural rules highlighting the player generation of activity are especially prevalent in online games which involve thousands of players simultaneously. Not only do such games allow for player-generated sources of value generation, but the economies which have emerged in parallel with such games can be seen to structure and inform both gameplay and games themselves. Finally, game designers modify their output relative to feedback in terms not only of commercial market forces and players expressing their opinions, but also through the quantification of game play through the capturing of player activity from within the game itself, data which Normoyle et al (2012) refer to as player metrics. Indeed, despite the liberatory potential inherent to interactivity, videogames – and digital media, more broadly – enable a level of user surveillance only dreamed of by the hegemonic interests, such as television advertisers, foundational to the production of ‘old media’. This capacity for surveillance, coterminous with the processes of digital mediation, betrays the altered subjectivities which ‘new media’ present in challenge to theories of communication which predate their emergence.    

A degree of accord can be seen to exist between the medium of videogames, and ‘new media’ more generally, and conceptions of post- or transhumanism. Arguing in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that “the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman” (4), Katherine Hayles postulates that computer simulation best instantiates the “embodied virtuality” which she presents in contradiction to the de-materialization of information fundamental to transmission theories of communication. Grounding her thought in Friedrich Kittler’s notion that “technologies of inscription are media when they are perceived as mediating” (26) and Donna Haraway’s conception of informatics as “technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development” (29), Hayles adheres to the technological determinism of transmission theories while rejecting their linear and rigid structure. She presents a McLuhanesque argument in which the dematerialization of information – indeed, of all matter into information – is a partial illusion invoked by “an epistemological shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence”. The illusory nature of such processes of dematerialization obscures the impossibility of material reconstruction from disembodied information and minimizes the dynamic relationship between agents within a communication process. In other words, theories of communication which dematerialize information deploy incomplete models of the totality of relations between entities positioned within and acting upon an event of communication. This notion of pattern and randomness, echoing theories from quantum physics concerning the fields of probability which determine the material existence of the world, “fundamentally alter[s] the relation of signified to signifier” (30). Unlike the ‘message’ of the transmission model, informatics construct the signifier as a multitude, a “chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes” in which “[a] signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level” (31). Access to the codes of signification, which Hayles describes as “pattern recognition” (39) whose literacy is enabled by “credentialing practices” (40; see also Stiegler 130), conditions and is conditioned by the technologies constituting the media environment. The development and interplay of these technologies mutually structures all entities within what Kittler’s (extrapolating from McLuhan) terminology could be described as a “media ecology”, including those individuals or agents which participate in the creation and consumption of media.

Hayles’s conception resonates with other invocations of posthuman subjectivity. By positioning the human subject in a determinate relation to the technological means by which phenomena exterior to unassisted perception are brought forth (in a Heideggerian manner) into human understanding, Don Ihde (2002) expands the realm of visuality to include all phenomenological events mediated by technological processes (43). In a manner similar to the interactive user participation foundational to ‘new media’ such as software and videogames, Ihde’s model for mediation inserts the observer into the syntax of the observed (60). Invoking Bruno Latour’s examination of instrumental subjectivity as stated in “On Technical Mediation” (1994), Ihde thus involves the interplay between technological determination and human agency in terms of a third space generated by the cohabitation of the two agencies (2002 93-95). This third space can be further described by Haraway’s conception of cyborgs as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991 149). Like Ihde and Latour, Haraway seeks to avoid understanding identities in essentialist terms. Identity can be understood, in a sense, as itself a cyborg hybridising agency and determination by exterior forces (161ff). ‘New media’ centred upon computational procedures also invoke an examination of the posthuman subject inaugurated by McLuhan’s (1994) conception of the media functioning as extensions of the human nervous system. Stiegler (2009) argues that such processes of exteriorization “constitute the industrialization of memory at all of its levels” (99). This externalized memory functions in thrall to developments related to speed. By eliminating delays and inefficiencies, the boundaries which interface processes of technological mediation from that which is mediated are dissolved as information becomes “inseparable from its organization” (107). Valuation of information in this context is informed by systems of access, which in turn constitute as subject those individuals or agents which create a ‘circuit of access’ with the information in question.

Paul Virilio’s (2000, 1997, 1989) notion of the contraction of the modern subject into patterns of communication quantised and defined by a society which increasingly internalises and normalises military functions traces the manner in which quantification serves as the vehicle for the realization and production of truth. While Virilio’s reliance on phenomenology disavows for him the authenticity of virtual worlds, other scholars (Hansen 2006, Fors & Jakobsson 2002, Murray & Sixsmith 1999) have successfully adapted phenomenological methodology to the study of virtual worlds and ‘new media’. Numbers are the principle tools by which subjects come to understand and love their own bodies and those of others. Bodies are measured and rationalised in order to improve weaknesses and maximise strengths, and to define subjects within a social and political hierarchy. For Virilio, quantification is a means of visibility which reveals the truth of an object or event to be nothing more than the tautological result of a logistical apparatus (the processes and technologies of rational humanism) which instrumentalises such information into functions allowing possession and control. Predictions about the future can then be made based on a linear extension from these numerically-constituted entities, a process which Virilio equates to a gun sight targeting the destruction of an enemy in the future (1989; see also Crogan 2008, 158-9). In this capacity, processes of quantification and calculation can be understood to extend a haptic character to vision and visibility. Calculation grants visibility to the invisible as unknown data – future events, probable outcomes, ‘hidden’ truths – is extrapolated from what is known for the purposes of administration and control. This conception of visibility originating as a military technology enabled by calculation has direct parallel with digital gaming, which often fetishises and quantifies representations of violence and often deploys military conquest as a gameplay mechanic. For Virilio, synthetic optics enabled by computerization and calculation permit “the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual” signaled by “the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle already largely contested elsewhere” (1994 60).

As a conclusion to this present brief examination, the example of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) will serve to tersely illustrate the manifest synergy between human and interface for the creation and reception of media which have come to define the ‘posthuman’ as described above. CRGPs require the player to process and manage a significant amount of information, as the representation of nearly everything in the game – objects, the abilities and descriptive statistics of non-player characters and enemies, behavioural patterns – is quantified not only to allow the computer to execute game rules, but for that numerical representation to be presented to players who interpret this information to “numerically optimise” their avatar’s progression through whatever goals the game presents to the player. Extending Jenkins and Fuller’s (1995) suggestion that game avatars function akin to cursors in conventional computer interfaces, merging the will of the participatory user with the disembodiment of materiality into its virtual form as information, numerical representation can be understood as not only embodying the virtualized agents which it replaces but as mirroring the development of subjectivity within technological society. The conception of an embodied camera/interface, described as an apparatus by Morris (2002) and defined largely in terms of its virtuality rather than by the hardware components which allow player interaction (Jørgensen 2012), is best exemplified by games which use a first-person perspective and thus combine control of the representational output presented by the system with the means of interaction in a manner embodying an otherwise absent avatar. In this regard, the game interface of CRPGs is itself a self-referential component of play, acting somewhat like Manovich’s embodied virtual cameras in digital games, in which “cinematic perception functions as the subject [of games] in its own right” (2001, 85) by placing viewing and perspective functions under the player’s control. Avatars in CRPGs embody the player in a dual manner: visually onscreen, and through a numerical matrix which operates in a manner made explicit to the player and enframes in procedural terms the reified instantiation of the will of the player into the fabric of the medium in both material and immaterial terms. This conception of virtual embodiment, readily applicable to the theories of ‘new media’ informed by the posthuman subjectivities as outlined above, ably illustrates the manner in which the technologies which enable ‘new media’ serve to challenge traditional conceptions of communication processes.

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[i] See, for example, Cassie Rodenberg, “Grant Theft Auto V makes it cool to pick up – even kill – prostitutes” published 27 December, 2013 in The Guardian.