6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
[Part 5]
This is true to the point of banality. And I rather suspect you've heard this point been made many a time in the last decade or two.
Has the internet been around for two decades already? Gosh. The kids today must be all confused! Not with the internet, mind (to them, it's always been around), but with the genre of internet newliness.
By this, I mean the constant fascination with all the new things one can do with the internet. It's as if some part of our culture got stuck in 1993 and the glorious amazement with this new thing that just arrived.
Now, I'm all for 1990s cyberoptimism, but it comes a point in every culture's life where things stop being new and start to have brutal political, social, cultural and economic consequences. And where the language to describe these no longer new things change in accordance to this.
So, without further ado, I'm going to manifest a statement:
The internet is as revolutionary a force for social change as the process of industrialization. And it is no longer new - it has, in fact, had over two decades of brutal, ruthless, ceaseless, overwhelming and subversive effect on the world we live in. It has ravaged, transformed, made inprofitable and in any other imaginable way made the practices that depended on a few, well ordered and well controlled monopoly medias that much harder to maintain. It has empowered people and disempowered elites, and will continue to do so until we no longer recognize the monopoly of communication we call the past.
This statement can be read in either one of two ways. It can either be read as a radical political statement amounting to a declaration of war on the old order, or as a matter of fact statement without any political underpinnings whatsoever.
The difference between these two readings is not subtle, not trivial and not hard to detect in effect.
We can restate this difference as such: either you see the internet as a threat, or as a set of useful tools for getting communication done. And it tends to be that this 'either' is very depending on your relation to the old monopolies. If you're a part of them, it's very much a threat; if you're suddenly liberated from them, it's not.
We can restate this difference again: either you think it's a good thing that humans from all over the world suddenly have access to a very large percentage of the accumulated cultural heritage of the world, or you don't.
The truly radical thing about this is that it is the "don't" position that's the radical position. The sane, rational and analytical part of the world just concludes that, yep, the internet is here, and it has been around for two decades, and the only thing that will make it not be around anymore is a major infrastructural catastrophy or an all out nuclear war. The "well, let's see what we can do with this thing now that the kids have all grown up with it" position is not radical, not political and most of all not new - it's the default mode of anyone born after the age of informational empire.
When you have to commit large acts of sabotage or bring out the nukes - that's when the word 'radical' is appropriate.
For all the rest - file sharing, community building, blogging, cryptohacking, remixing, chatting, making friends, crossing borders, expanding the cultural and social horizons of billions, enabling the emergence of new cultural forms that both includes and transcends those of the past - well. We're living in a world where that is an everyday occurrence, and in truth most of you wouldn't recognize a world where this wasn't so.
The internet is a radical transformer. But it is not radical - it is, de facto. And what we do with it is up to us. So let's make it into something epic, shall we?
I'll see you again tomorrow for part seven.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Saturday, January 5, 2013
5 of 95: Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of many voices
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
[Part 4]
One of the features of these theses is that they relate grammatically to each other. This makes for a bit of hermeneutics - or, as it is called by regular folks, looking at what the previous thesis had to say for itself: Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
'This', as you can see, relates the open, natural and uncontrived human voice.
Where does 'this' leave us, then?
Humans.
Voices.
Human voices.
Have you ever heard yourself played back at you? You never really sound right, and there's always that feeling that other people tolerate rather than listen to your voice. That the thing sounding through the air can't possibly be you, no matter how much you rationally know that it is indeed you.
Have no fear. First off, the strangeness is caused by you being used to hearing yourself from the inside. If you manage to keep listening to yourself long enough, the strangeness will disappear and you'll get some distance to yourself. And, secondly, what other people hear is not even remotely as wrong as what you hear - they just hear you, and they moreover know you from the unmistakable sound of, well, youness.
Younicode.
This - indeed, 'this' - is a source of hope. Because if you can get used to the strangeness of having a voice, then you can get used to the even stranger notion of using it in unison, cooperation or educational cordial disagreement with other voices.
The reason this is a source of hope is less hopeful, though. The reason for this being a source of hope is that people don't.
We've danced around a couple of concepts these last few days, and I feel it's been enough indirection for us to go straight at them. Not to worry - you already know these words, without knowing it yet. They are, in fact, three aspects of the same idea.
Spectacle, normalization, alienation.
The society of the spectacle is the society we live in. Where our main mode of interaction is with images and items rather than people; where it is more important to live up to the image of what it means to be a true x [true man/woman/christian/liberal/whatever] than it is to be human. Where it matters more what choices you make in regards to consumption rather than morality - indeed, where the notion of morality is subsumed into the notion of consumer habits.
It's immoral to eat meat, you know? Only vegans possess the true ethos of the ethical. - Or any other image one might put up, for that matter. In the spectacle, the image is of greater importance than people, and thus it tends to turn out that discussions on ethics attack and defend various images rather than try to help actually existing human beings.
Consume ethics. Consume the image.
Normalization is what happens when a large number of people are expected to conform to the same norm. What happens is, inevitably, that some pass flawlessly, some fail, and most fall somewhere in between with various degrees of anxiety. Where the main question in mind is - am I good enough?
Most of you will remember this from school. Most likely, from the experience of preparing for, doing and having done a test of some kind, and not knowing how it went. While preparing for it, you worry that you won't pass; while doing it, you constantly think about what kind of answer is given by such people who pass these tests, and try to conform to this image of passing people; and afterward, you most likely remember your answers and endlessly ponder what you could have done differently to perform better.
Normalization is this whole process of preparing, playacting and worrying. This process in and of itself changes you more than the actual test itself - if it works, it transforms you into someone who prepares, performs and succeeds at predetermined things. If it doesn't work - oh, it always works. And it's always at work.
People are very acute when it comes to picking up who does and doesn't live up to the standard.
Alienation, thus, lastly. When your thoughts and actions don't conform, you're alienated. You do things, but they don't seem right - they are not you, as it were. You go to work, go through the motions of being a worker, all the while thinking that this is not what you do - or, rather, that the image acted out by you is not an image of you, and that the charade you put is only endured by yourself out of social necessity.
I.e. one has to have a job. And having a job means doing strange, incomprehensible shit that only serves to make someone else money, with you serving as a very replaceable part.
If we, with these concepts in mind, return to the notion of the human voice, we get a rather bleak picture. First off, the spectacle teaches us that the image is more important than the reality of the thing - that it is indeed better to appear than to be. Then, we're thrown into a long process of trying to adapt to an external norm that doesn't give too much of a damn about whether you succeed or not, and more often than not cannot be bothered to give you the tools you need to adapt. And, lastly, even if you happen to succeed in this endeavor, you'll find yourself alienated from your actually existing acting self, enduring your daily life as if you didn't matter.
Image, adaptation, discontent. Spectacle, normalization, alienation.
What place does the human voice have in a society where humans are instrumentalized to the point of not needing voices anymore?
It is a source of hope that people recognize each other by the sound of each other's voices. It means that there's still a possibility of cutting through the normalized spectacle of alienation and saying something to the effect of:
Hi!
I'll see you again tomorrow for part six. Do take a gander over to Les and Eli for their thoughts on this thesis.
[Part 4]
One of the features of these theses is that they relate grammatically to each other. This makes for a bit of hermeneutics - or, as it is called by regular folks, looking at what the previous thesis had to say for itself: Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
'This', as you can see, relates the open, natural and uncontrived human voice.
Where does 'this' leave us, then?
Humans.
Voices.
Human voices.
Have you ever heard yourself played back at you? You never really sound right, and there's always that feeling that other people tolerate rather than listen to your voice. That the thing sounding through the air can't possibly be you, no matter how much you rationally know that it is indeed you.
Have no fear. First off, the strangeness is caused by you being used to hearing yourself from the inside. If you manage to keep listening to yourself long enough, the strangeness will disappear and you'll get some distance to yourself. And, secondly, what other people hear is not even remotely as wrong as what you hear - they just hear you, and they moreover know you from the unmistakable sound of, well, youness.
Younicode.
This - indeed, 'this' - is a source of hope. Because if you can get used to the strangeness of having a voice, then you can get used to the even stranger notion of using it in unison, cooperation or educational cordial disagreement with other voices.
The reason this is a source of hope is less hopeful, though. The reason for this being a source of hope is that people don't.
We've danced around a couple of concepts these last few days, and I feel it's been enough indirection for us to go straight at them. Not to worry - you already know these words, without knowing it yet. They are, in fact, three aspects of the same idea.
Spectacle, normalization, alienation.
The society of the spectacle is the society we live in. Where our main mode of interaction is with images and items rather than people; where it is more important to live up to the image of what it means to be a true x [true man/woman/christian/liberal/whatever] than it is to be human. Where it matters more what choices you make in regards to consumption rather than morality - indeed, where the notion of morality is subsumed into the notion of consumer habits.
It's immoral to eat meat, you know? Only vegans possess the true ethos of the ethical. - Or any other image one might put up, for that matter. In the spectacle, the image is of greater importance than people, and thus it tends to turn out that discussions on ethics attack and defend various images rather than try to help actually existing human beings.
Consume ethics. Consume the image.
Normalization is what happens when a large number of people are expected to conform to the same norm. What happens is, inevitably, that some pass flawlessly, some fail, and most fall somewhere in between with various degrees of anxiety. Where the main question in mind is - am I good enough?
Most of you will remember this from school. Most likely, from the experience of preparing for, doing and having done a test of some kind, and not knowing how it went. While preparing for it, you worry that you won't pass; while doing it, you constantly think about what kind of answer is given by such people who pass these tests, and try to conform to this image of passing people; and afterward, you most likely remember your answers and endlessly ponder what you could have done differently to perform better.
Normalization is this whole process of preparing, playacting and worrying. This process in and of itself changes you more than the actual test itself - if it works, it transforms you into someone who prepares, performs and succeeds at predetermined things. If it doesn't work - oh, it always works. And it's always at work.
People are very acute when it comes to picking up who does and doesn't live up to the standard.
Alienation, thus, lastly. When your thoughts and actions don't conform, you're alienated. You do things, but they don't seem right - they are not you, as it were. You go to work, go through the motions of being a worker, all the while thinking that this is not what you do - or, rather, that the image acted out by you is not an image of you, and that the charade you put is only endured by yourself out of social necessity.
I.e. one has to have a job. And having a job means doing strange, incomprehensible shit that only serves to make someone else money, with you serving as a very replaceable part.
If we, with these concepts in mind, return to the notion of the human voice, we get a rather bleak picture. First off, the spectacle teaches us that the image is more important than the reality of the thing - that it is indeed better to appear than to be. Then, we're thrown into a long process of trying to adapt to an external norm that doesn't give too much of a damn about whether you succeed or not, and more often than not cannot be bothered to give you the tools you need to adapt. And, lastly, even if you happen to succeed in this endeavor, you'll find yourself alienated from your actually existing acting self, enduring your daily life as if you didn't matter.
Image, adaptation, discontent. Spectacle, normalization, alienation.
What place does the human voice have in a society where humans are instrumentalized to the point of not needing voices anymore?
It is a source of hope that people recognize each other by the sound of each other's voices. It means that there's still a possibility of cutting through the normalized spectacle of alienation and saying something to the effect of:
Hi!
I'll see you again tomorrow for part six. Do take a gander over to Les and Eli for their thoughts on this thesis.
Friday, January 4, 2013
And it is out of that inaccessible tower
I recently read a post. You can read it too, hyperlink style.
The reason I read it because someone brought it to my attention. And they did it using this quote: "Most argument[s] aren’t rational, they’re just clashes of opposing power centers."
Which is a lot more true than it should be.
The author describes the current ragefest that religious people and atheists are mutually engaged in. How the one side calls the other ignorant, irrational and a whole host of other things. How the discussions between them really ever only touches the surface, and the two sides are mutually refusing to address the real issues.
The title, "Terrain Pt II", makes me think of a plain where there are two towers. Two towers whose inhabitants are fervently at work building up ever better and better cannons to fire at each other, and are so busy with this that they miss two things: the point and each other.
Because, you see, the two towers lie too far from each other to be within cannon shot. And, thus, all the cannony buildup only leads to a lot of wasted effort and a lot of wasted rhetorical prowess.
I find that this is true for many a conflict in our present. Left vs right, conservative vs progressive, PC vs Mac, hammer vs screwdriver - there's a lot of towerbuilding and mutual cannoneering going on that really won't do more than making sure that the sellers of gunpowder stay in business for yet another year.
And they always use the same cannons, too. It's always the good, the true and the beautiful on the own side, and the bad, false and ugly on the other. In some cases, you can just switch the names around and get cheers from both sides; in other cases, you have to be a tad bit more subtle about it. But the general principle is the same: apply the god terms, add fire, back away and watch the fireworks.
This is, more or less, always a waste of time, space and gunpowder. Sure, you can get into it and get some fine-tuning of your atrophied "your mom" muscles, but let's face it: they're atrophied because you don't like to use them and have found a way to live your life without them.
Or have you?
This I ponder myself. It would be a shame to find myself locked in a tower of my own making, to be sure. -
The reason I read it because someone brought it to my attention. And they did it using this quote: "Most argument[s] aren’t rational, they’re just clashes of opposing power centers."
Which is a lot more true than it should be.The author describes the current ragefest that religious people and atheists are mutually engaged in. How the one side calls the other ignorant, irrational and a whole host of other things. How the discussions between them really ever only touches the surface, and the two sides are mutually refusing to address the real issues.
The title, "Terrain Pt II", makes me think of a plain where there are two towers. Two towers whose inhabitants are fervently at work building up ever better and better cannons to fire at each other, and are so busy with this that they miss two things: the point and each other.
Because, you see, the two towers lie too far from each other to be within cannon shot. And, thus, all the cannony buildup only leads to a lot of wasted effort and a lot of wasted rhetorical prowess.
I find that this is true for many a conflict in our present. Left vs right, conservative vs progressive, PC vs Mac, hammer vs screwdriver - there's a lot of towerbuilding and mutual cannoneering going on that really won't do more than making sure that the sellers of gunpowder stay in business for yet another year.
And they always use the same cannons, too. It's always the good, the true and the beautiful on the own side, and the bad, false and ugly on the other. In some cases, you can just switch the names around and get cheers from both sides; in other cases, you have to be a tad bit more subtle about it. But the general principle is the same: apply the god terms, add fire, back away and watch the fireworks.
This is, more or less, always a waste of time, space and gunpowder. Sure, you can get into it and get some fine-tuning of your atrophied "your mom" muscles, but let's face it: they're atrophied because you don't like to use them and have found a way to live your life without them.
Or have you?
This I ponder myself. It would be a shame to find myself locked in a tower of my own making, to be sure. -
4 of 95: Pushing upstairs - these are my intentions
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
[Part 3]
Humans form communities. About everything. Music, ideas, software, cats, particular humans - you name it, and there's a community about it.
This in and of itself is not as surprising as it should be. Therefore, it's time for a short detour back in time. Not because I doubt your knowledge about history, but because the point I want to make will be made more clear if we go back to the beginning.
In the beginning, there were mammoths. Huge mammoths. Huge enough that if any one guy wanted to fight them, they'd be at a tremendous disadvantage. They'd just stare at each other for a moment, and then the mammoth would do what mammoths do best: be huge.
Clearly, one on one-battles favors the mammoths. They are too huge to fail.
But. If that one guy gathers some other guys and makes the fight into a cooperative venture, then suddenly there's a fighting chance. Where the one guy just had the option to run, the community had the option of digging a huge hole and then lure the mammoth into it.
As you can see, size only matters up to a point.
Jumping ahead a bit, we have agriculture. The biggest advantage of agriculture over mammoth-hunting is not that it produces more food, but that it allows the community to do more than one thing. That is, once the farming process is set in motion, there's enough food to allow for non-farming occupations. Thus, toolmaking, pottery, shipwrighting and so on could happen - but only for as long as the community as a whole held together. If the toolmakers and the farmers didn't get along, the toolmakers didn't get any food and the farmers didn't get any tools.
Cooperation is a powerful tool.
This goes on for quite a while. We could write a small tome on the history of cooperation through the ages, but I think you've gotten around to the notion that people working together can produce miracles. If and only if they get around to actually work together.
Enter capitalism.
Now, if you've spent any time at all with economists, you know their standard rant about free enterprise, freely entered agreements and free markets. If one spends too long around them, one might start to think that their idealized notion of rational free agents roaming about the world has anything to do with what happens in the world we live in. Which is a bad idea - almost as bad as getting into a one-on-one fight with a mammoth.
What actually happens in actually existing capitalism is that people get reduced to consumer patterns. Everything about their identity - what they eat, wear, listen to, read etc - is translated into the logic of consumerism. Everything is available on the market, marketed and assigned a recommended prize range.
If you're not in that prize range, then that identity is not for you. However strongly you might feel about it, and however natural the identification with it might be.
This is not the natural state of things. This is what happens when the channels of communication are monopolized by commercial interests trying to become interesting in order to commercialize. This is what happens when the logic of the market is allowed to colonize too much of what it means to be human.
You, as a consumer, are not part of a community. You are an individual playing at and paying into the image of a community, and once you stop the playact, you're out. If your worth as a human is defined by how much you've spent on making yourself appear to fit in to the malformed culture of market values - then your value is zero once you stop paying your daily fees.
Being part of a team of hunters taking on a mammoth is a communal experience. Feeling alone at an overpriced cinema with equally overprized popcorn as you only prize - isn't.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
I may not have told you until now, but this is my default approach to Twitter. I'm not there to sell things, not there to drive home a point, not there to do anything else than to just say random shit with random people in a voice that - because it is devoid of externally impressed motives - is as human as one can be.
And, to be honest - I'd much rather make unintelligible subtweets about the Horse with my friends than wonder about if I should buy this thing or that.
It might not be the most profitable thing I could do. But, then again: why would I want to autotune myself to the tune of what the market wants out of me? Why choose commodity when there's community?
I'll see you again tomorrow for part five. Do pay Les a visit - she has this most beautiful voice. Or call upon Eli for a piece of information theory.
[Part 3]
Humans form communities. About everything. Music, ideas, software, cats, particular humans - you name it, and there's a community about it.
This in and of itself is not as surprising as it should be. Therefore, it's time for a short detour back in time. Not because I doubt your knowledge about history, but because the point I want to make will be made more clear if we go back to the beginning.
In the beginning, there were mammoths. Huge mammoths. Huge enough that if any one guy wanted to fight them, they'd be at a tremendous disadvantage. They'd just stare at each other for a moment, and then the mammoth would do what mammoths do best: be huge.
Clearly, one on one-battles favors the mammoths. They are too huge to fail.
But. If that one guy gathers some other guys and makes the fight into a cooperative venture, then suddenly there's a fighting chance. Where the one guy just had the option to run, the community had the option of digging a huge hole and then lure the mammoth into it.
As you can see, size only matters up to a point.
Jumping ahead a bit, we have agriculture. The biggest advantage of agriculture over mammoth-hunting is not that it produces more food, but that it allows the community to do more than one thing. That is, once the farming process is set in motion, there's enough food to allow for non-farming occupations. Thus, toolmaking, pottery, shipwrighting and so on could happen - but only for as long as the community as a whole held together. If the toolmakers and the farmers didn't get along, the toolmakers didn't get any food and the farmers didn't get any tools.
Cooperation is a powerful tool.
This goes on for quite a while. We could write a small tome on the history of cooperation through the ages, but I think you've gotten around to the notion that people working together can produce miracles. If and only if they get around to actually work together.
Enter capitalism.
Now, if you've spent any time at all with economists, you know their standard rant about free enterprise, freely entered agreements and free markets. If one spends too long around them, one might start to think that their idealized notion of rational free agents roaming about the world has anything to do with what happens in the world we live in. Which is a bad idea - almost as bad as getting into a one-on-one fight with a mammoth.
What actually happens in actually existing capitalism is that people get reduced to consumer patterns. Everything about their identity - what they eat, wear, listen to, read etc - is translated into the logic of consumerism. Everything is available on the market, marketed and assigned a recommended prize range.
If you're not in that prize range, then that identity is not for you. However strongly you might feel about it, and however natural the identification with it might be.
This is not the natural state of things. This is what happens when the channels of communication are monopolized by commercial interests trying to become interesting in order to commercialize. This is what happens when the logic of the market is allowed to colonize too much of what it means to be human.
You, as a consumer, are not part of a community. You are an individual playing at and paying into the image of a community, and once you stop the playact, you're out. If your worth as a human is defined by how much you've spent on making yourself appear to fit in to the malformed culture of market values - then your value is zero once you stop paying your daily fees.
Being part of a team of hunters taking on a mammoth is a communal experience. Feeling alone at an overpriced cinema with equally overprized popcorn as you only prize - isn't.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
I may not have told you until now, but this is my default approach to Twitter. I'm not there to sell things, not there to drive home a point, not there to do anything else than to just say random shit with random people in a voice that - because it is devoid of externally impressed motives - is as human as one can be.
And, to be honest - I'd much rather make unintelligible subtweets about the Horse with my friends than wonder about if I should buy this thing or that.
It might not be the most profitable thing I could do. But, then again: why would I want to autotune myself to the tune of what the market wants out of me? Why choose commodity when there's community?
I'll see you again tomorrow for part five. Do pay Les a visit - she has this most beautiful voice. Or call upon Eli for a piece of information theory.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
3 of 95: Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my number, so call me, maybe?
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
(Part 2)
When doing the obligatory preparatory research for this post (sometimes referred to as "procrastination"), I ran into some old timey television commercials. I wanted to see them in order to get a sense of where the old times where at, and how much they contrasted to the world of today.
To my surprise, my research showed that the world of 1950/60s seemed to be dominated by sex, drugs, kids and breakfasts. Or, as it is also called, traditional family values.
I did what any enthusiastic non-researcher do: I instantly shared my results on Twitter. And the following discussions, thoughts and lines of inquiry were far more interesting than what I originally had in mind. Conversations about communication, underground signal systems and gay rights. In that order.
Conversations among human beings sound human. Unless they don't.
A continuation of the logic of a few channels talking to a large number of people, is that a large number of people start to think in the same way. Not in identical ways, mind, but in similar enough ways that they can be predicted, controlled and marketed to.
So if these commercials were anything to go by, the world was dominated by families where the main activity of the day were breakfast and snacking. Mostly cereals and processed chocolate, by the looks of it, and there were no question in anyone's mind about who did the kitchenwork. Or that the only proper way to go about life was, indeed, the family life.
A life where drugs (mostly sugar, cigarettes and alcohol), kids and breakfasts (with drugs) were the stuff that made up the essence of always.
I'm now imagining you're thinking two things. Two questions. To answer the first: kids do come from somewhere. And to answer the second: no, not all actually existing people were like that.
But there were enough force behind the thought that family life was the way to do life that the notion of doing something else became a non-option. Of all the possible ways a human can live, the happily married family (wo)man were the first and foremost in the heads of communities, politicians and marketers.
You can imagine that this was less than optimal for those who did not desire the happy family life. Like, for instance, homosexuals, who for obvious reasons don't quite view the institution of heterosexual marriage as quite the thing. But in the lack of alternative visions, and moreover of ways of communicating with those who shared these alternative visions, many were forced into submitting to these present imperfect images of the perfect.
One of the side effects of the channels of communication becoming more abundant, is that the number of alternative lives (life alternatives) have increased. Not due to anything changing in the human being - I find it hard to believe that humanity have become any more horny, depraved, desperate or deranged recently than it has ever been - but due to the fact that people can talk to each other rather than with and through the mediated image of what an ideal citizen/consumer ought to be. Suddenly, it's both possible and within reach to do something else.
Whatever that else might be. There's more than one way to be human these days, and more ways than one to have a socially acceptable conversation. Conversations between persons who sound quite more human now than the recorded voices from the 50s and 60s.
Which is why I'm going to end today's session with this link. Not only to justify the title, but also to give you something to feast your thoughts on - the difference between what is supposed to be and what is.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part four. Or head over to Les for more options of resistance. Or to Eli for some humanity.
(Part 2)
When doing the obligatory preparatory research for this post (sometimes referred to as "procrastination"), I ran into some old timey television commercials. I wanted to see them in order to get a sense of where the old times where at, and how much they contrasted to the world of today.
To my surprise, my research showed that the world of 1950/60s seemed to be dominated by sex, drugs, kids and breakfasts. Or, as it is also called, traditional family values.
I did what any enthusiastic non-researcher do: I instantly shared my results on Twitter. And the following discussions, thoughts and lines of inquiry were far more interesting than what I originally had in mind. Conversations about communication, underground signal systems and gay rights. In that order.
Conversations among human beings sound human. Unless they don't.
A continuation of the logic of a few channels talking to a large number of people, is that a large number of people start to think in the same way. Not in identical ways, mind, but in similar enough ways that they can be predicted, controlled and marketed to.
So if these commercials were anything to go by, the world was dominated by families where the main activity of the day were breakfast and snacking. Mostly cereals and processed chocolate, by the looks of it, and there were no question in anyone's mind about who did the kitchenwork. Or that the only proper way to go about life was, indeed, the family life.
A life where drugs (mostly sugar, cigarettes and alcohol), kids and breakfasts (with drugs) were the stuff that made up the essence of always.
I'm now imagining you're thinking two things. Two questions. To answer the first: kids do come from somewhere. And to answer the second: no, not all actually existing people were like that.
But there were enough force behind the thought that family life was the way to do life that the notion of doing something else became a non-option. Of all the possible ways a human can live, the happily married family (wo)man were the first and foremost in the heads of communities, politicians and marketers.
You can imagine that this was less than optimal for those who did not desire the happy family life. Like, for instance, homosexuals, who for obvious reasons don't quite view the institution of heterosexual marriage as quite the thing. But in the lack of alternative visions, and moreover of ways of communicating with those who shared these alternative visions, many were forced into submitting to these present imperfect images of the perfect.
One of the side effects of the channels of communication becoming more abundant, is that the number of alternative lives (life alternatives) have increased. Not due to anything changing in the human being - I find it hard to believe that humanity have become any more horny, depraved, desperate or deranged recently than it has ever been - but due to the fact that people can talk to each other rather than with and through the mediated image of what an ideal citizen/consumer ought to be. Suddenly, it's both possible and within reach to do something else.
Whatever that else might be. There's more than one way to be human these days, and more ways than one to have a socially acceptable conversation. Conversations between persons who sound quite more human now than the recorded voices from the 50s and 60s.
Which is why I'm going to end today's session with this link. Not only to justify the title, but also to give you something to feast your thoughts on - the difference between what is supposed to be and what is.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part four. Or head over to Les for more options of resistance. Or to Eli for some humanity.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
2 of 95: Dear [Mr/Mrs/Ms] [customername], you've won our personal [target audience message #5]
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
(Part 1)
We do not live in a Borg collective. We are not cyborgs telepathically linked to each other with the latent ability to instantly and at all times hear the thoughts of our peers. And our peers cannot hear our thoughts, no matter how intent they might be.
Clearly, there are limits to our current state of communicative ability.
In order to cope with these limits, various strategies have been devised. Most of them makes use of these very same limitations. Since it can safely be assumed that perfect Borg connectivity will not be achieved within the time frame relevant to human communication, the general lack of available information in an average human being's life has been brutally exploited throughout the ages.
If we skip a whole range of historical permutations on this theme, we eventually find ourselves pondering advertising. (There's some interesting things to be said about these permutations, to be sure. They'll return later on.)
Now, we might think we know what advertising is about. We've all seen it, been bored by it, laughed at it, switched channels at it and in general accepted that the world we live in is saturated with it. But as with all things familiar, advertising looks a lot less familiar of one gives it a definition. So, without further ado:
Advertising is the art of making people buy things they wouldn't buy otherwise.
If you're anything like me at all, you'll probably hear this phrase repeated in the back of your head every time you see an ad from now on. "They're trying to sell me something, and they're doing it like this? Who do they think I am, anyway?"
Most likely, a target demographic.
The limits to communication goes both ways. On the one hand, the limited amount of things you know about the world is a useful thing when it comes to pushing you around. On the other hand, the limited amount of information available on you means that some sort of shortcut has to be used. At least if the ambition is to sell to more people than you.
The shortcut is the use of target demographics. A picture of something that looks kinda like you, only without individual features and with the distinct undertone that you and everyone you know might well be reduced to one single image.
Now, as a strategy for dealing with limited knowledge, this is not a bad way to go about it. It is physically impossible for an actually existing human being to know every other human being, so some sort of thought process along the lines of "all asians look alike" will inevitably have to happen. You cannot know all christians, but you can make the reasonable assumption that they think Jesus the Christ is some sort of a good guy. You cannot know all Harry Potter fans, but you can make the reasonable assumption that they know who Hermoine is. -
In short, what is the minimal amount of common ground needed in order to make sure that the fact that I don't know anything about you doesn't matter when I try to sell you things?
This is how marketers, politicians and other humans who wanted/needed/had to communicate with a large number of people at once went about it. For the longest of times. Even today, there are binders full of women.
If you're thinking the words "means of discursive production" right now, then you're on the right track. Because the means of reaching a large number of people were traditionally limited to a few actors (newspapers, television stations, radio brodcasts etc), the discourse had to follow suit. Be vague, be unspecific - talk to the image of a human rather than a human.
"Hey, you, woman! Buy our stuff! It's for women, you are a woman. Womanly stuff for womans like you!"
There's a strange circularity to this. On the one hand, it was necessary to go about it this way. On the other hand, the only reason they got away with it is because there were no alternatives.
There is now. You're reading one of them right now. The fact that these words can come from my remote corner of the world to your reading eyes without me paying a fortune for it is proof enough that something has changed in the recent time.
Which brings us back (from the Borg collective, through the annals of history, through the social conditions of mass communication, -) to you and me. In more ways than one.
First off - hi! Nice to meet you. :)
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. We can talk to each other, instead of having to listen to rich people talking at what some market analyst thinks we are. We can talk, laugh, conspire - and we can get down to business and do business, bypassing the whole mechanism of advertisement and central-to-periphery communication.
We're not in a Borg collective yet. But the limits of knowledge and communication have changed, and this is not a change that happens without further changes. Conversations, markets, humans -
I'll see you again tomorrow for part three. Or read Les and Eli or Jakob for more thoughts on thesis #2.
(Part 1)
We do not live in a Borg collective. We are not cyborgs telepathically linked to each other with the latent ability to instantly and at all times hear the thoughts of our peers. And our peers cannot hear our thoughts, no matter how intent they might be.
Clearly, there are limits to our current state of communicative ability.
In order to cope with these limits, various strategies have been devised. Most of them makes use of these very same limitations. Since it can safely be assumed that perfect Borg connectivity will not be achieved within the time frame relevant to human communication, the general lack of available information in an average human being's life has been brutally exploited throughout the ages.
If we skip a whole range of historical permutations on this theme, we eventually find ourselves pondering advertising. (There's some interesting things to be said about these permutations, to be sure. They'll return later on.)
Now, we might think we know what advertising is about. We've all seen it, been bored by it, laughed at it, switched channels at it and in general accepted that the world we live in is saturated with it. But as with all things familiar, advertising looks a lot less familiar of one gives it a definition. So, without further ado:
Advertising is the art of making people buy things they wouldn't buy otherwise.
If you're anything like me at all, you'll probably hear this phrase repeated in the back of your head every time you see an ad from now on. "They're trying to sell me something, and they're doing it like this? Who do they think I am, anyway?"
Most likely, a target demographic.
The limits to communication goes both ways. On the one hand, the limited amount of things you know about the world is a useful thing when it comes to pushing you around. On the other hand, the limited amount of information available on you means that some sort of shortcut has to be used. At least if the ambition is to sell to more people than you.
The shortcut is the use of target demographics. A picture of something that looks kinda like you, only without individual features and with the distinct undertone that you and everyone you know might well be reduced to one single image.
Now, as a strategy for dealing with limited knowledge, this is not a bad way to go about it. It is physically impossible for an actually existing human being to know every other human being, so some sort of thought process along the lines of "all asians look alike" will inevitably have to happen. You cannot know all christians, but you can make the reasonable assumption that they think Jesus the Christ is some sort of a good guy. You cannot know all Harry Potter fans, but you can make the reasonable assumption that they know who Hermoine is. -
In short, what is the minimal amount of common ground needed in order to make sure that the fact that I don't know anything about you doesn't matter when I try to sell you things?
This is how marketers, politicians and other humans who wanted/needed/had to communicate with a large number of people at once went about it. For the longest of times. Even today, there are binders full of women.
If you're thinking the words "means of discursive production" right now, then you're on the right track. Because the means of reaching a large number of people were traditionally limited to a few actors (newspapers, television stations, radio brodcasts etc), the discourse had to follow suit. Be vague, be unspecific - talk to the image of a human rather than a human.
"Hey, you, woman! Buy our stuff! It's for women, you are a woman. Womanly stuff for womans like you!"
There's a strange circularity to this. On the one hand, it was necessary to go about it this way. On the other hand, the only reason they got away with it is because there were no alternatives.
There is now. You're reading one of them right now. The fact that these words can come from my remote corner of the world to your reading eyes without me paying a fortune for it is proof enough that something has changed in the recent time.
Which brings us back (from the Borg collective, through the annals of history, through the social conditions of mass communication, -) to you and me. In more ways than one.
First off - hi! Nice to meet you. :)
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. We can talk to each other, instead of having to listen to rich people talking at what some market analyst thinks we are. We can talk, laugh, conspire - and we can get down to business and do business, bypassing the whole mechanism of advertisement and central-to-periphery communication.
We're not in a Borg collective yet. But the limits of knowledge and communication have changed, and this is not a change that happens without further changes. Conversations, markets, humans -
I'll see you again tomorrow for part three. Or read Les and Eli or Jakob for more thoughts on thesis #2.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
1 of 95: Introduction, method and why capitalism isn't dead yet
1. Markets are conversations.
This first thesis is three things. It's straightforward. It's a thing that's going to wreck all kinds of havoc upon all manner of things once you get around to thinking about it. And it's something that we are going to return to quite often in the months to come.
A strange thing about humans is that it really does not work that very well to just tell them something. It may be the most straightforward thing in the world, but you just can't make humans become fully human if you go straight to the point. Not because they are stupid in any way, but because they are human, and therefore process information and the world in general through the human mind.
And the human mind is all creative detours.
So. Instead of going on about markets, I'm going to play on your humanity and take the indirect route to what it means that markets are conversations.
Whenever I teach my nonstudents, I tell them to go about the whole process of citation by doing it as if they related two random people talking to each other. In the age old style of intellectual attribution known as "he said, and then she said".
This I do for two reasons. The one being that since they are indeed non-students, I can go about it any way I can get away with. No rules, regulations or retroactvely raging rulefollowing review ruckus - just the teaching of stuff. The other reason being that I want to make the act of saying "and then Foucault said this interesting thing I've been thinking about" a little less formal than it tends to be. A little less of getting the details right and a little more of getting the right details.
I of course don't tell them this. They are too busy grokking the Foucault to realize that they are grokking the Foucault, and it would be cruel to ruin their learning experience by pointing out how much they've learnt.
But in taking this shortcut, I do something heretic: I remind them that behind the Name there's just a guy, and that the difference between talking about this one guy and this other guy is less than written convention would make you believe.
So. Markets are conversations. What's that all about?
Well, it's people talking to each other, pretty much. Person A talks as if he wants to buy something, person B talks as if she wants to sell something. If and when they talk to each other, a transaction might occur, depending on the talk and the talkees.
There's a catch to this, though. Or, rather, two. And they are major enough to warrant their own introduction here in this first introductory post. They are - don't hit me for stating the obvious - capitalism and the modes/means of discursive production.
Capitalism is a societal way of being. It's described in different ways by different authors ("they say"), but the one brutal fact of it we need to focus on here is that the only thing you need to do in order to fulfill your role as a productive member of society is to make money. It doesn't matter how, when, why or with what level of theological intent - making money is the sine qua non. Without that, you are either nothing or less than nothing.
If you happen to be unemployed at the moment of reading, you know what I'm on about.
The productive means of discourse (conversations/communication) are what you would expect them to be. Anything that can make discourse happen. Pencils, typewriters, smoke signals, small mouth noises - take your pick. The modes are how these means are typically used, in terms of genres, formats, rituals, technical standards and the like.
The best example is of course the newspaper. Discourse could in theory happen in any number of ways, but due to historical circumstances, untold millions of people have started off their morning ritual by reading The News. Out of every communicative tool humanity has at its disposal, the newspaper reigned supreme for centuries.
Until it didn't.
I'm going to have a general theme in the parts to come, and that is that the market capitalism of the twentieth century was an exception, rather than the necessary and logical conclusion to the development of the western world. While we will not see the end of mass produced good for mass produced markets any time soon (we all need that daily bread, after all) we will see that the changes in the modes and means of discursive production brings with it changes in the way we do discourse.
Naturally. Wouldn't be much of a change otherwise, now would it?
What characterized the means of getting in touch with large audiences in the 20th century was that it was hard and expensive, and generally demanded blood, sweat, tears and toil in order to be worth it. If you wanted to reach a hundred people, you had to write a note a hundred times and deliver it to each and every one of these persons. Manually.
As of writing these words, I have 1181 followers on Twitter. Compare the one method with the other, and you will very soon think something along the lines of: how did ordinary people voice their opinion back in the days?
They mostly didn't. Couldn't. Limited by the means of production. And so we return once again to the statement: markets are conversations.
When the one side cannot speak, the word "conversation" is seldom used.
The way I will go about it from here on out I the same way I go about it with my non-students. Indirect. Going through the motions of how humans learn about things: by spending time in proximity to the ideas in question and questioning the ideas in proximity.
Without having to go all formal about it.
See you all again tomorrow for part 2 of 95. Or visit some of my cowriters for more thoughts on #1. Such as Les. Or Eli. Or Jakob.
This first thesis is three things. It's straightforward. It's a thing that's going to wreck all kinds of havoc upon all manner of things once you get around to thinking about it. And it's something that we are going to return to quite often in the months to come.
A strange thing about humans is that it really does not work that very well to just tell them something. It may be the most straightforward thing in the world, but you just can't make humans become fully human if you go straight to the point. Not because they are stupid in any way, but because they are human, and therefore process information and the world in general through the human mind.
And the human mind is all creative detours.
So. Instead of going on about markets, I'm going to play on your humanity and take the indirect route to what it means that markets are conversations.
Whenever I teach my nonstudents, I tell them to go about the whole process of citation by doing it as if they related two random people talking to each other. In the age old style of intellectual attribution known as "he said, and then she said".
This I do for two reasons. The one being that since they are indeed non-students, I can go about it any way I can get away with. No rules, regulations or retroactvely raging rulefollowing review ruckus - just the teaching of stuff. The other reason being that I want to make the act of saying "and then Foucault said this interesting thing I've been thinking about" a little less formal than it tends to be. A little less of getting the details right and a little more of getting the right details.
I of course don't tell them this. They are too busy grokking the Foucault to realize that they are grokking the Foucault, and it would be cruel to ruin their learning experience by pointing out how much they've learnt.
But in taking this shortcut, I do something heretic: I remind them that behind the Name there's just a guy, and that the difference between talking about this one guy and this other guy is less than written convention would make you believe.
So. Markets are conversations. What's that all about?
Well, it's people talking to each other, pretty much. Person A talks as if he wants to buy something, person B talks as if she wants to sell something. If and when they talk to each other, a transaction might occur, depending on the talk and the talkees.
There's a catch to this, though. Or, rather, two. And they are major enough to warrant their own introduction here in this first introductory post. They are - don't hit me for stating the obvious - capitalism and the modes/means of discursive production.
Capitalism is a societal way of being. It's described in different ways by different authors ("they say"), but the one brutal fact of it we need to focus on here is that the only thing you need to do in order to fulfill your role as a productive member of society is to make money. It doesn't matter how, when, why or with what level of theological intent - making money is the sine qua non. Without that, you are either nothing or less than nothing.
If you happen to be unemployed at the moment of reading, you know what I'm on about.
The productive means of discourse (conversations/communication) are what you would expect them to be. Anything that can make discourse happen. Pencils, typewriters, smoke signals, small mouth noises - take your pick. The modes are how these means are typically used, in terms of genres, formats, rituals, technical standards and the like.
The best example is of course the newspaper. Discourse could in theory happen in any number of ways, but due to historical circumstances, untold millions of people have started off their morning ritual by reading The News. Out of every communicative tool humanity has at its disposal, the newspaper reigned supreme for centuries.
Until it didn't.
I'm going to have a general theme in the parts to come, and that is that the market capitalism of the twentieth century was an exception, rather than the necessary and logical conclusion to the development of the western world. While we will not see the end of mass produced good for mass produced markets any time soon (we all need that daily bread, after all) we will see that the changes in the modes and means of discursive production brings with it changes in the way we do discourse.
Naturally. Wouldn't be much of a change otherwise, now would it?
What characterized the means of getting in touch with large audiences in the 20th century was that it was hard and expensive, and generally demanded blood, sweat, tears and toil in order to be worth it. If you wanted to reach a hundred people, you had to write a note a hundred times and deliver it to each and every one of these persons. Manually.
As of writing these words, I have 1181 followers on Twitter. Compare the one method with the other, and you will very soon think something along the lines of: how did ordinary people voice their opinion back in the days?
They mostly didn't. Couldn't. Limited by the means of production. And so we return once again to the statement: markets are conversations.
When the one side cannot speak, the word "conversation" is seldom used.
The way I will go about it from here on out I the same way I go about it with my non-students. Indirect. Going through the motions of how humans learn about things: by spending time in proximity to the ideas in question and questioning the ideas in proximity.
Without having to go all formal about it.
See you all again tomorrow for part 2 of 95. Or visit some of my cowriters for more thoughts on #1. Such as Les. Or Eli. Or Jakob.
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