PXII. Digital Expressivity, Digital Credibility

The digital production, reproduction, publication, circulation, and annotation of texts, as well as the ongoing convergence via digitization of existing media formats and archives, and other emerging social and collaborative practices empowered by digital networks are transforming more than the conditions of discursive and especially textual expressivity. Just as significantly, digitality is transforming the conditions by means of which the universe of expressed information is organized and presented as relatively worthy in the face of our conspicuously limited attentions, as well as authorized and recommended as relatively trustworthy in the face of our conspicuously unlimited vulnerability to error and abuse. All of this is just to say, the ongoing digitization of textuality transforms the terms of both textual expressivity and the terms in which credibility subsequently attaches to texts in the world. Digitality alters the terms of both textual creativity and selectivity.

Consider how the vanishingly small cost of the digital reproduction of texts, and the ease of the instantaneous global publication and distribution of such texts on digital networks like the World Wide Web have profoundly altered the traditional constraints represented by the old mechanical bottleneck of the relatively higher historical cost of copying and circulating physical press-printed texts, even while “copyright” remains for now the privileged location for the adjudication of social disputes about the proper support of creative work.

Since computers generate at any rate an ephemeral “copy” of a text any time it is accessed at all, then in the domain of digital networks simply attending to a text is usually, after a fashion, to copy it. And, indeed, given the ever more widespread practice of the publication of annotations and commentary on online texts, often more or less in “real-time,” “reading” in the digital domain can be a practice in which consumption, production, and reproduction are all continuous, even collapsed into a single act. In a breathtakingly short space of time, recent technological developments have called into question even the most basic assumptions that have historically accrued and become “natural” concerning the role of copyright in the support, calculation, and preservation of creative value.

These developments have been, to say the least, an occasion for panic among established authorities in the so-called “culture industry” – the film and recording industries and mainstream broadcast media networks, for example. The last few years have borne witness to absurd extensions of the legal term of copyright enforcement, draconian and comically ineffectual crackdowns on file-trading practices, paranoid policing of the public circulation of corporate trademarks, severe limitations on the fair use of published work on which researchers and artists have traditionally relied to increase the sum of human knowledge, and an ongoing corporate denigration of the role of an informational or cultural commons as an ongoing provocation and as an archive to which creative and innovative work makes almost inevitable recourse. Under these circumstances copyright regimes often seem not only to fail to promote the innovation for which they were initially implemented but in an important sense to actively and even devastatingly frustrate that innovation.

Meanwhile, the ease with which content can now be published and circulated via digital networks has inspired such an altogether unprecedented outpouring of creativity, innovative work, and freely available content it has become increasingly difficult to justify the conventional wisdom that the protection of copyright is necessary to promote innovative work in the first place.

Clay Shirky has pointed out that creative people often seem to crave attention in a way that publishers rarely grasp properly in its full force and significance. But “[p]rior to the [arrival of the] internet,” he writes, “this [never] ma[d]e much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities – even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.”

The threat of the Web to traditional publishers was already palpable to nearly everyone by the 1990s, but it was still widely assumed that something recognizably like conventional publishers might provide a kind of functional filtering through the deliriously swelling mass of free content to the more relevant, reliable, excellent, or original works interred within, a service still well worth paying for. But this assumption, too, is now giving way before the sheer torrent of good or at any rate good-enough work that is still proliferating endlessly on line.

More interesting to me by far, however, are the folk practices of ranking, classification, and association facilitated by digital networks and social software called “folksonomies” (a portmanteau compressing the phrase “folk taxonomy,” coined by Thomas Vander Wal ). Folksonomic reputation aggregators, online tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices, wikis that solicit both contributions of free content but also solicit their own interminable revision, clarification, editing and fact-checking, are all beginning to provide a glimpse of the ways in which the Web as a space of free expressivity might come to provide a comparable space of cheap credibility, reliability, and reputation.

The publishing, recording, film and broadcasting industries have long functioned not only to produce and distribute cultural work, but to focus and assess the tidal movements of mass attention on the ongoing swell of that work. Confronted with charges of indecency and disruption, representatives of the mass-culture industries have usually been quite content to insist that they hold up a mirror that reflects the world as it is rather than imposing any vision of their own upon it and for which they might be accountable. But confronted instead with the noisy explosion of inexhaustible expressivity from their once relatively captive, comparatively passive broadcast audiences (even granting the fully agentic possibilities of critical and subversive receptivity available to consumers of mass-culture), an expressivity that actually reflects more and more of this world over which they have smugly presided so long, it is amusing indeed to observe the eagerness and passion with which the monoliths of the culture industry will now offer up an altogether contradictory self-congratulatory fable proposing instead their indispensable role as “gatekeepers” in heaven-only-knows-what presumably civilizing mission, directing worthy cultural material to the grateful masses as a way to account for, not to mention maintain, the extraordinary authority and wealth they have shored up so far.

Needless to say, this rather surreally implausible retroactive re-invention of the mainstream media, communications, and information industries is not one that has compelled an assent comparable to the force of the case for their indispensability back when the means of mass-cultural production, the presses, the studios, the broadcast towers, and the like really were concentrated more or less in the hands of so few.

And needless to say neither is it exactly lost on me that these forces whose motions I am discerning and documenting and responding to in this moment might threaten to sweep me off of my feet just as well. To the extent that I take seriously the force of folksonomic social practices in digital networked cultures what will it finally mean to have participated as I am, here and now, in a professionalizing ritual of publication, before a community of scholars into whose company I would thereby achieve membership, empowered through this specialized publication precisely to confer judgments of credibility and worth on textual productions across culture as my professional, professorial vocation?

I have already mentioned that the writing of a dissertation is never only the scene of writing it seems to be, but is always also in its heart of hearts a ritual of professionalization. And I will be the first to admit that I am a person who behaves badly in scenes of interpellation. It’s not that I don’t crave the intelligibility conferred by a Good Call, but it’s just that I am flighty and lazy and easily distracted. Not to mention that I suspect nearly everyone of being an Undercover Cop. “You!”s ring out from the crowd, interminably, from all directions, all of them irresistibly glamorous, and turning, turning, turning to take in their salutation and demand I find myself too dizzy and too dazzled to be too docile, really.

Richard Rorty has proposed that the best function for the American “literary” professoriate is “to stir things up, to make our society feel guilty, to keep it off balance,” but then ruefully concedes that “nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public.” As it happens, I can cheerfully affirm this as a description in broad strokes of quite a lot that I want to see happening in my own writing and pedagogy. The academy, Rorty intones, “cannot say that the taxpayers employ us to make sure that their children will think differently than they do[, even if, s]omewhere deep down, everybody – even the average taxpayer – knows that that is one of the things colleges and universities are for.”

Quite apart from the fact that it is always an appealing idea as far as I'm concerned to affirm the indispensability of a location in culture that lives for poetry and pleasure, it occurs to me this is also a role for the “humanistic” academy (that part of higher education not reducible to vocational training or scientific research) that does not look to be too readily displaced by digital networked folksonomic practices of credible amateur scholarship in projects to obtain reproducible results and warranted descriptions, while looking at once eminently complementary to digital networked practices of expressivity in projects of self-creation hungry for professional attentions and support.

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