The Un-Symposium: Week Eleven
Again, my rough, unedited notes:
Carry over questions:
Why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web?
Adrian:
- You freely donate your information to Facebook and they on sell this to other companies and we don’t see a cent – this is a flaw of the system.
- We’re used to the idea of the Internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
Elliott:
- Importance to recognise the difference between mediation and protocol.
- Internet is democratic because everyone has access to those protocols
- In order for it not to be democratic, it would have to be mediated, with some kind of mediator
- These mediators exist: the Great Firewall of China, a limited mode of engagement
- Because of these protocols there are inclinations towards certain behaviours
- It is still democratic, but in a limited way, so he’s drawing on the technological determinism argument in a way from the previous week
Jasmine:
- Galloway is saying that the internet as this decentralised system is actually highly controlled, and the evidence lies in the protocols
- He talks about the difference between centralised, decentralised and distributed networks, where the nodes can interact with each other no matter how far apart they are
- If protocol was centralised and hierarchised, it would fail. It operates on this idea of mobility and flexibility, it’s a protocol
Brian:
- TCIP: radical, anarchic, any node can talk to any other node
- Versus: the DNS, which is totally hierarchical
- Galloway is looking at how power works in this new system in terms of modes of control that can operate
- We’re not in a free-for-all system, which is a common yet mythical perception
- How does resistance work into this system?
- Brian is a Union member, but we don’t live in an industrial world anymore, there’s protocol for how you can strike/take industrial action, resistance is limited. How do you resist if you think you’re being exploited? How do you work against that if you’re in the less-powerful position?
Adrian:
- I’m not convinced the Internet was that democratic to start with, partly because it arose in the Californian first-world, partly because it’s predominantly English
- Also because it came out of academia. Humanities: engrained culture, of critique. We don’t have a culture of building, more of dismantling.
- Fan of email culture, started on academic email lists in the 1990s. There was a protocol: how you introduced yourself, how you responded to people etc. It was very social, but perhaps not very democratic – we spent a lot of time arguing over stuff
- Galloway is important: his argument is that 400 years ago, we had this notion of authority based on sovereignty (eg. Catholicism and the Pope). Non-negotiable one-way power relationship.
- Then we have the notion of political agency and those kinds of thing, the rise of bureaucracy. The notion of surveillance – the policing of things – which require regimes to measure and evaluate all the time.
- Galloway’s argument is that this is in decline.
- Third model: protocological model. We have these assumptions about shared stuff, responsibility is distributed. Manners: social manners are a protocol (a word to describe the way communication should happen between two things). RMIT has a protocol office.
- Let’s shift the surveillance out of it, and figure out a series of protocols.
- Protocol is the basis of the web. This is how we get gift-economies. It makes material social practices.
- A key issue is how self-aware we are of this at any one time. Adrian won’t use Facebook other than for his students because he thinks they’re immoral
- WWWC (W3C): RFC: request for comment. Anybody can respond and comment on these, and if what you write makes sense it will be included in the standard.
- Came up with domain names because numbers were hard to remember. If you know numbers, you don’t need DNS
Galloway notes that the future is already here but not uniformly distributed (paraphrasing William Gibson). How does this apply to a network like the Internet?
Jasmine:
- He’s talking about this in relation to the idea of periodisation, which helps us to identify major cultural and technological shifts in terms of time periods. A lot of these occur over many years, and there’s overlap between old and more recent forms
- Jasmine uses example of participatory culture: flourished through social media but also real practices and behaviours
- Participatory culture has been brought back to life through bottom-up modes of practice such as social media, etc.
- More of a re-shaping of old forms in new contexts, and this is a continual process
- The physical book is still very valid even though we have e-books as well – they exist alongside each other
- Manovich also talks about that idea in his reading. It’s also a process of restructuring old forms rather than replacing them
Brian:
- Snowden revelations. You internalise the idea that someone might be spying on you, and modify your behaviour according to these suspicions – for example, altering what you might say on Facebook in relation to issues of accountability and evidence
Elliott:
- Even though these technologies aren’t equally distributed, there are ways in which we are working towards this
Adrian:
- I’m materialist, the way I take this is as it’s already here. Going back to technological determinism – don’t want it to be this idea that TD is absolute.
- Once you have cars, as a future we have roads, carparks, freeways. There’s no compelling reason to have a car initially because none of these infrastructures exist. They’re for early adopters who want a toy to show off – they’re grossly useless in the real world.
- The cultural thing doesn’t really account for why cars became popular
- The telephone: used to distribute music concerts to people initially, never conceptualised as a means of conversation between geographically separate individuals
- Fordist ideas: protocols
- How does this apply to the Internet? Pierre Levi. Has this idea of the virtual and the actual. At any moment at time, anything has before it a set of possible futures. Only some of these virtual futures will come to be – these are the actual. The virtual is true, but what comes to be is real. The further away in time we are, the more possible futures exist. The idea that the virtual is a false real thing (Adrian disagrees with this)
This week’s questions:
- Do the algorithms of a database change the nature of what is defined as narrative?
- How can databases changing notions ‘traditional narratives’?
- How can narratives emerge from databases?
- Why do some media objects explicitly follow database logic while others do not?
- Can the paradigm and the syntagm e more the same than opposites in new media?
Cowbird is a gift-economy. You create an account and contribute a story (photo and page of text). What’s amazing about Cowbird is that it’s intimate and highly confessional. It’s a database, a collection, a list. He’s built a system that allows people to add tiny bits. Because it’s a database, you can navigate by topic, tag, age, date, geographical locations. It’s a small-world network, a scale-free network, a platform that allows people to contribute stuff. We separate out content from presentation in databases. Presentation is key to databases. Narratives are intentional cause and effect sequences.
