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Our new media technologies are more than just a tool. They have become part of us, part of the way we create, read and distribute information. Marshall McLuhan said that electric circuitry is “an extension of the central nervous system” (p.40) and he is still correct in this, decades after he said it.

Jenny Weight has proposed the concept of our trilogical relationship with new technology. “My creative life is pervaded by the apparatus; while ultimately I seek to communicate with fellow humans, to make this possible I ‘communicate’ with the apparatus first.” (Jenny Weight, p.413)

The once simple dialogue between the author and receiver of a text has been permanently altered by new media technologies. Although our technologies have aided us in furthering our conversations, they have inadvertently become part of it.

This blog is just the starting point of this topic. There are many links, amusing, interesting and intellectual, that connect to this theme. So start here, but don't end here.

Technosocial Relationships

The technosocial is all about relationships, “between human and computer, and between humans and mediated by the computer.” (Jenny Weight, p.414)

Our ‘textual conversations’ are no longer dialogical, with a sender and receiver of the information. Rather, they have developed into something new, something subtle.

Yet it is not something completely new, as technology is and always has been a product of human ingenuity and therefore part of our communicative lives. It is a human artefact. “It is incorporated into human lives and facilitates human activity.” (Jenny Weight, p. 415) A tool that has been created by us extends our reach, our sphere of influence and knowledge yet it is not separate nor alien from us. “Technologies must be understood as existing in relation with humans rather than as discrete objects.” (Jenny Weight, p.414) The technological apparatus is ultimately human.

Old Terms, New Concepts

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” (Marshall McLuhan, p.74-75)

Looking to the future through the rear-view mirror ultimately leads to misconceptions. We use outdated terms and concepts to describe something that cannot be described and considered in those terms. Such as a blog for example; it is considered to be an online diary, or discussion forum or a political soapbox, whereas in fact it is actually none of those things, yet it can take elements of each. Blogs, hypertext fiction, YouTube and Flickr are just a few examples of the new creative elements available online that are often described with old terms and therefore the unique nuance of each one is denied by this misguided description. New words, with the new concepts, take time to develop and living in this age of constant change we are not giving ourselves the chance to catch up and name everything. We are not giving ourselves breathing space.

Weight has introduced a new term for us to consider our relationship with our apparatus. “Were we to describe the apparatus as engaging in dialogue, we would anthropomorphicize its behaviour and capacity. Better, then, to introduce a new term, the trilogue, so we can acknowledge the communicative status of the apparatus without claiming too much for its conscious abilities” (Jenny Weight, p.415) The apparatus is something we can speak through, it aids our speech, but does not actively return the ideas, the dialogue. It passes it on to the receiver.

Placing the apparatus in this central position within human dialogue does seem unusual but Weight explains that although the machine is not conscious it “originates signs for someone else to interpret … It also reacts to (not the same thing as interprets) the signs originated by human interlocutors. It operates within the ‘intersubjective motivational context’ in which social interaction takes place.” (Weight, p.415) The apparatus lives within the sphere of social interaction, aids that social interaction yet is not an individual player within that sphere. It cannot exist without the human element manipulating it.

Conversations

Alan Sondheim in My Future is Your Aim admits that today, “being online usually means working with GUI, graphic user interfaces, which are well- and sometimes over-designed.” (Sondheim, p.375) The bare nuts and bolts of design and creation are removed and we are left with a smiling layer of interface that (sometimes) works with us to create our text. We are separated from the skeleton of conversation/interaction and instead must work through the beast.

“All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.” (McLuhan, p.26) In essence, the McLuhanesque argument promotes the idea that this beast of a machine, this apparatus, is not separate from us. While we cannot place it directly opposite us within a dialogical conversation, as mentioned earlier, because that would humanise it; neither can we separate it from our selves entirely.

“The core of my technosocial argument is that a trilogical relationship is formed when an apparatus mediates creative communication – the three partners in the technosocial undertaking are human programmer/artist, the executing apparatus, and the human interpreter.” (Weight, p.414) The apparatus is just an extension of ourselves that reaches out and helps us to communicate with each other.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

The machine, the apparatus is more than just a tool. It becomes alive when wielded by human consciousness. The user creates the machine. The user brings life to the machine. The user is the machine.

User Created

The apparatus is “a performative device of unique capacity, sensitivity and complexity, which encourages a wide range of human creativity, interpretation and, indeed, collaboration.” (Weight, p.416) These human characteristics are innate within the machine through its human users. Collaboration allows it to grow. Henry Jenkins central theme in Convergence Culture, fan bases develop, not everyone knows everything, each brings their specialist knowledge to the forum and the collective grows. The total is greater than the sum of its parts. Like bees.

“Now all the world’s a sage.” (McLuhan, p. 14)

Interpretation requires collaboration. “Interpreting the internet involves the communal construction of meaning, the public formation of identity” (Wilson et. al. p.524) Many, many conversations pass between senders and receivers through their machines to comprehend, argue, interpret and create bodies and worlds of knowledge.

Teaching the Machine

Meet Eliza.

Meet Alice.

“When a human encounters an apparently nonsensical text, the human will usually attempt to extrapolate some meaning through clues and cues. We may refer to other texts or previous experience. We might draw incredibly whimsical conclusions about meaning that do not stack up to anyone else. In other words, computers cannot read poetry; only humans can.” (Weight, p.420)

The more you talk with Eliza or Alice, the more they learn, the more they can seem human and have human conversations. Yet we realise that they are not human. We can only teach the machine so much. As Weight says, we can refer to the whimsical, speak in metaphor, pick up seemingly nonsensical clues. We can read poetry.

It is for this reason that a computer, an apparatus cannot be part of a dialogue. We can only give it so many human features. This is why the machine is displaced, pushed to the side into the trilogue, part of the conversation, the creation but not central to it.

Screen Mediated Moments

We do not write for the screen. We do not talk to the screen. We do not create for the screen. We do these things to get through the screen, to reach out to the person on the other side. “Writing for the apparatus alone is ultimately meaningless and non-communicative, since apparatuses are not interpreters. It is only in trilogical circumstances that the text-as-apparatus communicates.” (Weight, p.419-420) The technology increases our reach without the need to stretch out. The ‘text-as-apparatus’ does the stretching for us. It reaches through the screen, the message in the bottle, to explain what happened on this side.

Sue Thomas discusses Vannevar Bush in her text, The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises. She says that the distinction between the human and the machine, the body and the technological, is fading. We trade off that distinction every time we write an email, bid in Ebay, post on a forum, because every time we do that we allow “our data to become part of that organization’s knowledge base.” (Thomas, p.387-388)

Thomas also discusses comments made by Dion Hinchcliffe:

“One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it connects people so they can effortlessly participate in fluid conversations and dynamic information sharing. At the same time, computing devices are giving people permapresence on the Web through PDAs, phones, digital cameras, and a slew of other emerging devices.

Before now, you had to consciously go to cyberspace by sitting at a PC and looking at it through a window, in essence going to a place where you primarily observed and gathered knowledge. Not any more.” (Thomas, p.388-389)

“They have the Internet on Computers now?”

For a while it was imprisoned there on the computer with limited visiting hours in a set space. But the internet is leaving the computer. Wireless networks pervade our lives. Now with the touch of a button on my mobile phone I can connect to the internet while on the bus, in a movie, during tutorials. I have easy access everywhere that I cannot escape.

Online Learning

Tony Wilson and Huey Pyng Tan in Less Tangible Ways of Reading state that their thesis is “that this process of Internet-mediated meaning construction/consumption is seriously ‘play-full’.” (Wilson and Tan, p.397) It is this play-full element that allows us to explore and create in a conducive environment. Ludic, they call it. “The screen’s immediacy or ‘liveness’ attracts an audience’s attention, absorbing them in a ‘playable’… environment in cyberspace.” (Wilson et. al., p.525)

The internet is built to play on. A click here, a click there. Open a new window and play a quick game of text twist, while reading articles in the Human Computer Interaction Journal and checking your email. Like a bee, we flit from page to page, site to site, information to narrative to entertainment. This allows for a different type of thought pattern, a different way of learning and understanding information with both positive and negative effects. “Mid-narrative hypertext links on a web page inviting 'travel' to other items can mean stories being half-read, a cursory attention to content. Readers lose interest in the accuracy of anticipated outcomes, in their projections of narrative development:” (Wilson and Tan, p.403)

Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s understood then that the way we learn needs to change along with the technology. “Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.” (McLuhan, p.100) The need to go out and discover, learning along the way during the journey is more fruitful than memorising and learning by rote.

So Yesterday

Out with the old and in with the new. It seems that the concept of the newest idea, the latest information will become obsolete. “Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see... As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information.” (McLuhan, p.63) We barely have time to register the information before the newer information arrives. It is what we expect and demand in this ‘information age.’ So we may soon stop registering it altogether.

“Will the ‘new’ have any meaning in a world that is updated by the microsecond every time there is fresh activity in the system? Where smart objects know what we want before we have even thought of it ourselves?” (Sue Thomas, end of cyberspace, p.390) Our machine will customise the news bulletins to suit what stories we have previously viewed. They will sort through the imaginary piles of stories available on the web and proudly deliver (as much as a machine can) the pick of the crop into our inboxes for us to flick through and forget and the next wave arrives.

Amazon has a similar service where it suggests items you might be interested in, based on your last selection. It is services like these on the machine that make us realise its autonomous potential. It makes us consider the apparatus in a more active role rather than purely that of 'the tool'.

Online Creativity

Although the apparatus cannot read poetry, it can help write it. Computers and the Internet have allowed for an explosion in new forms of creativity, both individual (as in the sense of just you and your computer) and collaboratively. This new wave is partly facilitated by places online for this creativity and partly due to people hacking into their machines, understanding the way they work and using that knowledge in a creative form. “The phenomenal success of Flickr is one example of programmers socially engaged in technosocial creativity. The programmer/artist has peered inside the ‘black box’ and learned to manipulate it.” (Weight, p.416-417) The apparatus has become a partner in your creative endeavour.

Web 2.0: interactivity, sharing and collaboration on an unprecedented scale. It is everything the Internet was meant for. The active viewer/user. “If amateur photography in the twentieth century was defined by Kodak’s slogan, ‘You push the button, we do the rest’, then the slogan of Web 2.0 models of amateur creativity such as Flickr’s might be, ‘Here are the buttons, you do the rest.’” (Jean Burgess, p.3) New media technologies encourage (or even require) active participation from the user. You create your text/experience rather than reading/seeing/hearing about it in a top down broadcast medium. It is this opportunity to interact and "play" with your text that makes the new technologies exciting, usuable and approachable.

Blogging

Web log. Weblog. We blog. Blog. Blogging. Blogger. Blogspot.

The evolution of the blog, not only in terms of its name but also what it does and what it means. It also continues down different paths. Video Blog to Vlog. etc. Meredith Nelson claims that “blogs are making an important contribution to the pool of human intelligence and turning the Internet into a two-way discussion.” (Nelson, p.5)

But I feel it is more than two-way. This blog is in a sense two-way. Written by me for you. Each post is on a topic I have selected. This is true for a lot of blogs. Yet there are others, posts are written by different members of the group, often leading the discussion down different (and uncharted) paths. Comments steer the further posts, reigning them in or thrusting them out into new territory. Blogs have many different discussions occurring simultaneously. The discussion between members of the blog. The discussion between the blog as a whole and a visitor. This discussion between this blog and a similar blog; “bloggers are all watching each other.” (Nelson, p.7) The discussion between the links on the blog and the blog itself and what they say to each other, how they further the ideas of the blog.

The blog can be a multimedia starting point. A tip of the iceberg. We see ten per cent of an idea or many ideas and then are able to follow those ideas through link after link, until we have eventually created our own unique text. No one person will follow the same set of links or even in the same order. Each time you leave this page to go somewhere else you create your own order, your own series of il/logical connections.

Hypertext Fiction

The concept of creating your own text within set pieces of writing is one of the ideas behind hypertext fiction. “When one opens a hypertext fiction one is confronted with something not seen in the world of books, films or plays: choice, and a unique, potentially baffling, interface.” (James Pope, p.450) Choice and freedom: two of the traits of the internet embodied within a genre of fiction.

By putting creative fiction online we must realise that a book will no longer look like a book, nor will it behave like a book (Pope, p.450) James Pope calls it “remediation.” The original idea behind the book is still there (to tell a story, to create a character or a world) but it now has a different face. Pope warns that “although the book is still the main point of reference for fiction in the minds of most readers, hypertext fiction must be much more than print on a screen if it is to find its own audience.” (Pope, p.451)

Reconsidering the earlier argument, hypertext fiction cannot be read/viewed without the apparatus. The programs that run the stories, the layers of html and design formats on top of another produce a sleek looking page. “The reader of hypertext fiction is also a ‘user’ …insofar as he/she has to operate the interface before the narrative can come to life in the imagination. The interface cannot be ignored.” (Pope, p.456) The interface, the human parts of the machine that facilitate our conversation, aid us in creating and interpreting hypertext fiction. We can now read back to front, front to back and sideways as hypertext fiction is mostly like the old pick-a-path or a choose-your-own-adventure novel incorporating sounds, pictures, film clips as well as the text. But once again here, I am looking through the rear-view mirror at hypertext fiction, trying to compare it to what we know and what is comfortable and missing its nuance.

YouTube Story Project

YouTube Storytelling

“Today the mass audience …can be used as a creative, participating force.” (McLuhan, p.22) This is seen in the YouTube Story Project. This type of collaboration blurs the concept of authorship. It is not the creator/s that matter but rather the process of creation, working together, or against each other. Jenkins mentions that “the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.” (Henry Jenkins blog)

This idea of group storytelling corresponds back to Weight’s ‘trilogue’. “The trilogue blurs the distinction between ‘author’ and text’. So long as the apparatus itself is one of the active trilogical partners in textual performance, authorship ‘bleeds out’ from the programmer, and becomes an aspect of the ‘ontology’ of the text-as-apparatus itself.” (Weight, p.421) When the apparatus is employed notions of authorship blur, it is not just the ‘programmer/s’ that create the text but also the apparatus. Hence, authorship seeps out between each programmer and their machine. There is no single creator/programmer on the Internet. By facilitating collaborative projects we become more aware of the trilogical nature of creation.

The End of Old Technology?

“Will new media writing replace the standard book/page? Judging by demographics and usage, hardly. Will e-books replace the book? Again, unless electronic paper really gets off the ground, hardly. A physical book is a personal object that carries the marks of its being-read, from owner to owner; there’s no indication that this will be replaced. With temporary print media, on the other hand – newspapers, magazines, handouts, etc., the opposite is true; offline newspaper readership is going down quickly, while online is rising. There is also the issue of authority/authorization; blogs are rapidly becoming news sources themselves.” (Sondheim, p.378-379)

It is not the end of old technologies, merely a change in direction, a reconsidered approach to them. Considering the new technologies, they are becoming more and more ingrained in our lives. We no longer need to remember things, just Google it. Only the role of the new technologies in our creative lives needs to be flagged. We do not write for the machine, yet it is present in everything we do. We now have a trilogical approach to our work/play. We now have a screen mediated culture.

References

Jean Burgess: Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network.

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage, Gingko Press, 2000.

Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture, New York University Press, 2006.

Henry Jenkins: Confessions of an Aca-Fan

Meredith Nelson: The Blog Phenomenon and the Book Publishing Industry in Publishing Research Quarterly, pp. 3-26, Summer 2006.

James Pope: A Future for Hypertext Fiction in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol 12 (4) pp. 447-465, 2006.

Alan Sondheim: My Future is Your Own Aim in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol 12 (4) pp. 375-381, 2006.

Sue Thomas: The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol 12 (4) pp. 383-391, 2006.

Jenny Weight: I, Apparatus, You in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol 12(4) pp. 413-446, 2006.

Tony Wilson, Azizah Hamzah and Umi Khattab: The 'Cultural Technology of Clicking' in the Hypertext Era in New Media & Society, Vol 5(4) pp. 523-545, 2003.

Tony Wilson and Huey Pyng Tan: Less Tangible Ways of Reading in Information, Communication & Society, Vol 8(3) September pp. 394-416, 2005.