PXIII. What We Talk About When We Talk About “New” Media

Typically, when theorists speak of “new” media they mean to denote by the term digital media in particular. And since digital media are in fact still consolidating their hold over the formation, archiving, circulation and communication of information today in ways that demand serious scrutiny, I will mostly be sticking to that understanding myself through what follows. But it is important to remember all the same that there are always newer new media bubbling up in the froth for which the enabling technologies, working assumptions, and expected effects are likely to be importantly different from the ones that preoccupy our attentions for now.

Like the dissertation itself, my blog-posts have often registered the preoccupying tug of tantalizing developments emerging out of but somewhat perpendicular to what are commonly called the “New” Media –- that is to say, digital networked information and communications technologies. I am beginning to think of these emerging technologies, capacities, and quandaries as the “Next-New” or a “Newer-New” Media: And by these I would mean to describe media formations arising especially from the conjunction of digital networks with reproductive and therapeutic/enhancement medicine and bio-technologies, with nanoscale sensors and biometric surveillance techniques, from contentious legal debates about biopiracy and the patenting of genetic information, from the re-articulation of legal rights-bearing consensual subjects into “experimental” subjects embedded in bioremedial networks of medical information and environmental risk-assessment, and from a stew of comparable developments.

There will be (or certainly should be) significant differences in the discussion of media and surveillance, depending on whether one wants to focus on issues of digital encryption or on biometrics instead. There will be differences in the discussion of media and intellectual property, depending on whether one wants to focus on the copyright of digital texts or on the patenting genetic information. There will be differences in the discussion of media and the manufacture of consent, depending on whether one wants to focus on the consolidation of broadcast media, the rise of social software tools and practices, or the mandated use of neuroceuticals on the basis of public medical information and prevailing therapeutic opinions.

While these bio-media networks and technologies are all arising out of the legal, cultural, technical outburst of digital media technologies and the still emerging personal and public prosthetic practices these are incubating to this day, it seems to me that even as they are taking up digital media and networks as their own point of departure they are transforming this already unsteady terrain in unexpected and for now powerfully unpredictable ways.

Honestly, to the extent that “new” media really are expected to be something new, it is hard to imagine a temperament less suited in some ways to think about these impacts than philosophers and critical theorists. Philosophy paints its Hegelian gray on gray, after all, only when a form of life has grown cold. And true to form, even relatively recent and influential “new” media theory often seems somewhat quaint in its assumptions quite soon after it has been written.

Consider two relatively recent academic anthologies, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, published in 1999, and The New Media Reader, published in 2003. Both volumes represent efforts to do more than survey the scene of new media criticism as a given field, but in an important sense to constitute and stabilize that field as a scholarly discourse in the first place.

The introductions to these volumes seem to be especially freighted with anxiety, together with appealing compensatory moments of reckless daring. They have the keen self-consciousness of inaugural moments, not only as jumping off points for the complex and wonderfully idiosyncratic books they happen to preface, but as the possible constructive beginnings of something that might, with luck, take on a broader kind of cultural and institutional life. There are times when it feels as though the authors of these anxious and hopeful introductions were hunched over their writing desks bravely trying to ignore all the while the grand pianos suspended above their heads as they wrote.

“Introductions to collections of essays about digital culture generally begin by justifying the perverse,” rather perversely begins the very first sentence of Peter Lunenfeld’s “Introduction” to the volume he also edited, The Digital Dialectic. Later in the essay he describes the dilemma with which he finds media criticism is grappling quite bluntly, maintaining that “the digital is difficult to delineate because of its relative freshness.” Later still he amplifies this point, arguing that “theory demands from its objects a certain stability, [but… t]he pressures of the market and the innovations of the laboratory combine to make stability impossible within the practice of digital media.”

His opening paragraph ends quite programmatically: “At this moment, digital culture has been so thoroughly hyped in every forum from television to academic journals to the World Wide Web that new commentaries need justification less than they require the kind of logic and style we demand of serious discourse on anything else.” But just what kind of logic and style will satisfy his demand for “seriousness” here? Between his initial conjuration of perversity and his eventual demand for seriousness, Lunenfeld squints his eyes suspiciously at efforts at criticism that “offer models, exemplars, and/or apologias.” Given the inherent instability of its object, and his dissatisfaction with so many of the conventional strategies through which criticism typically takes its measure of distance to scrutinize its objects in all seriousness, what does Lunenfeld offer up as a useful alternative?

Lunenfeld proposes a “serious” digital media criticism that would “lodge [itself] in the dialectic.” This he defines promisingly but a bit broadly as “grounding the insights of theory in the constraints of practice.” Unfortunately, Lunenfeld devotes most of what remains of his essay to interesting but mostly straightforwardly descriptive historical surveys of the terms “digital” and “dialectic”and is never as clear as I would like him to be about just how the suggestion that the media critic “lodge oneself in the dialectic” finally plays out so differently in critical practice than the exercises in hype and self-justification that worry him elsewhere, whether such a more dialectical criticism is uniquely exemplified in the critical practice of the admittedly very satisfying and provocative essays that follow in the volume, or just why these more dialectical methods, if that is what they are, really finally are “serious” in ways alternate critical essays about digital media presumably are not.

In the absence of more specifics, the term “dialectic” seems to provide an occasion to mistake as a rigorous and therefore serious methodology a broadly recurring ritual of interpretation that finds its way into most of the essays of the volume. In this characteristic gesture, a rather exhilarated technophilic hype that inspires deranging false hopes is arrayed against a countervailing disasterbatory technophobia that inspires unhelpful panic, passivity, or banal consumerism. Or, in a closely complementary variant, a dream of technoconstituted superhumanization via prosthetic augmentation is distinguished from a dread of technoconstituted dehumanization via subordination to monstrous automated systems. The critic effuses compellingly about these pathological extremes for some time, highlighting the quirks of their adherents and the wildly unrealistic predictions and preoccupations they inevitably seem to inspire, noting the ways in which they confuse one’s perceptions of present prosthetic practices or the ways in which they seduce one into falsely teleological accounts of technological development. In closing, the critic goes on to locate himself at a more moderate or ironical remove from each of these extremes, and then sounds a cautionary note about just how irresistible hyperbole finally turns out to be where technological discourse is concerned.

This moment of the repudiation of both technophilia and technophobia, by the way, has come to represent perhaps the definitive gesture through which technocritical discourse announces itself as such at this point. Believe me, I am too well aware of the extent to which my own moves can be said to genuflect in the general direction of this basic strategy of reading to seem too dismissive in identifying it in others. But I am skeptical that this general sensibility, however indispensable it may be, constitutes a methodological resource sufficiently consolidating to overcome the anxieties of media critics in a moment of disciplinary foundation, especially as they contemplate the ineradicably mercurial aspects of their objects of fascination.

In his Introduction to The New Media Reader, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” Lev Manovich registers a comparable sense of occasion as did Lunenfeld in his own. The appearance of the volume for which he contributes the Introduction represents, Manovich proposes, “a milestone in the history of a new field,” and one that inspires as the ambitions of his essay, first, “the theoretical challenge of defining what new media actually is,” as well as “sketch[ing] the history of the field” itself.

“If we are to look at any modern cultural field sociologically,” Manovich suggests, one will do well to “[measure] its standing by the number and the importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications, conferences, and so on.” There is little doubt for me that the “sociological” in this formulation is functioning as Manovich’s version of the “seriousness” Lunenfeld pined after himself. And it seems likely that, again, as for Lunenfeld, the appeal of such seriousness for Manovich is the special legitimation he hopes it might confer in its scientificity on a discipline that is not only a fledgling one, but one for which the objects are especially inscrutable in their conspicuous instability.

Where Lunenfeld seems ultimately to retreat into the highly philosophically respectable but rather broad conceptual generality of the dialectic as his own critical foothold against the radically mercurial character of the technical, figural, textual prosthetic practices that constitute the shifting field of digital networked media, Manovich seems to retreat instead into the comparable respectability of a scientificity of documentary detail.

That this is a characteristic gesture for Manovich rather than simply a conceit that organizes the initial throat-clearing moves in his Introduction is quite clear when he goes on to define new media precisely through a forceful distinction of it from what he calls “cyberculture” or cybercultural studies. This he defines as “the study of various social phenomena associated with Internet and other new [?] forms of network communication.” But what he goes on to italicize about sense of the cyberculture is its “emphasis on… social phenomena.” In this, he insists, “cyberculture does not directly deal with new cultural objects enabled by network communications technologies.” And from this conspicuous contrast comes Manovich’s definition of new media studies: “The study of these objects is the domain of new media.”

This fetishization of the describable object bespeaks the lure of a more scientific respectability for media criticism in Manovich, I would suggest. But the “objects” of new media are, if they are anything at all, incorrigible shape-shifters.

While I agree that a documentary registration of contemporary prosthetic practices of research, invention, training, use, re-appropriation, figuration, and collaboration should certainly be indispensable to a living and relevant technocriticism of digital networked information, communication, and media technologies, it seems to me especially problematic to fix these documentary energies only on objects treated reductively as artifacts rather than as multiform personal and public practices. Such a commitment would seem to me to threaten to impoverish media critics either to the role of musty archivists for long or recently dead media forms or to that of bleeding-edge hipsters uncritically fixated on evanescing media forms, most of which will likewise boil off into marginality before the new media documentarian could find critical purchase in them in any case. Or, as Manovich puts the point himself, “as most artists c[o]me to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by [no more than] their fetishism of [the] latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues."

But it is unclear just how Manovich would provide a Royal Road to such “deeper” issues by his lights. His very interesting discussions of the technical capacities of contemporary technologies seem at their best to flutter at the edge of the kind of obsolescence which we already expect from our best technical manuals, while other quite useful observations of his seem to rely for their force on a concern with precisely the “social phenomena” he programmatically disdains elsewhere (as when he discusses the role of a still-prevalent star-system in his accounting of the differing levels of automation employed in the production of feature films as against video games).

Again, I will ruefully leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern, denigrate, and deride the many moments in the pages that follow this, my own prefatory gesture, in which I will go on to exhibit all of the frailties I lament here and much worse myself as I sketch my surveys of the developmental scene as a technical and figural ferment, and propose my own immodest interventions into our sense of it.

One quite promising methodology Manovich briefly discusses in his introduction, and which I would be pleased to model better in my own work, is the theory of media archeology proposed by Erkki Huhtamo (who provides an example of this work in his contribution of an essay to Peter Lunenfeld’s Digital Dialectic volume).

Huhtamo suggests that “underneath the changing surface of machine culture there are tenacious and long-lived undercurrents, or ‘master-discourses,’ that get activated from time to time, particularly during moments of crisis or rupture.”

One might imagine a discursive treasury of technocultural “tropes." Obvious candidates for inclusion in such a tropic archive would be Icarus, the Philosopher's Stone, the immortal elixir, Frankenstein, the robot slave, the paperless office, gray goo. But strategic and figural resources more specific to particular technical discourses (the end-to-end principle is an example) demand attention from the technocultural archaeologist as well.

These tropes rather messily accumulate for Huhtamo over the course of technological developments around both realized and even merely imagined technologies, and provide an archive of potential solutions to technical problems as well as to problems of meaning to which people can make recourse in their ongoing search for ways to make sense of their techniques and their tools.

Manovich criticizes the “limitations of thinking about new media in terms of historically recurrent aesthetic strategies and ideological tropes,” even while recognizing the suggestiveness of such a critical practice. “While ideological tropes indeed seem to be re-appearing rather regularly,” he admits, “many aesthetic strategies may only reappear two or three times.” Further, he continues, “some strategies and/or tropes can be already found in the first part of the nineteenth century while others only make their appearance much more recently.” But even granting these points it is not immediately clear how Manovich’s subsequent claim follows from these qualifications. “In order for this approach to be truly useful,” he concludes, “it would insufficient to simply name the strategies and tropes and to record the moments of their appearance; instead, we would have to develop a much more comprehensive analysis.”

It is true that a tropic “archaeology” of the kind Huhtamo seems to propose would very likely fail to meet such a sweeping standard of analytic generality, but it does not seem right to accuse it of any fixated particularity (a limitation to which Manovich’s own methodological emphasis seems to me rather more susceptible in fact). I think such a tropic archaeology might be especially useful for discerning the ways in which the assumptions, policy language, customs, and regulation of emerging technologies will often rely on the selective reappropriation of forms associated with developmentally proximate technologies (or tropes that have fastened to technologies from contemporaneous but altogether different practical domains).

I have already mentioned as an example of these developmental complexities the ways in which the policies that are emerging to grapple with the disruptive impact of digital reproduction, publication, and distribution tools on intellectual property will reverberate into the subsequent discussion of the patenting of genetic information in ways that are as likely to befuddle as to illuminate practice. The same could be said about discussions of biometric surveillance to the extent that they might be shaped by prior discourses about encryption technologies. So too attitudes and arguments inspired by emerging neuroceutical and genetic medical therapies that one might expect to express a consistent outlook of either tolerance or hostility to medical “enhancement” in general, will often diverge quite radically according to what are perceived as their differing associations with the politics of the so-called war on drugs or the politics of reproductive choice, respectively, even when these associations are scientifically utterly superficial.

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