Call for Papers

Call for Papers: ’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines‘

Symposium, 29 January 2010, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom.

****** Deadline for submission: 25 November 2009 ******

Sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s “Beyond Text” programme, http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/SLI.shtml

’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines‘ is a free, interdisciplinary one-day symposium hosted by the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. It aims to bring together postgraduate students, academics and practitioners whose work relates to the mediation of memory. The symposium will be held Friday 29th January 2010.

Current postgraduate students are invited to submit abstracts of papers and presentations for one of three panel discussions, each based on an element of the title: Monuments, Machines and Madeleines. The symposium hopes to examine these interconnected aspects of the mediation of memory through a variety of academic approaches, including – but not limited to – anthropology, archaeology, archival studies, art history, cultural studies and cultural theory, geography, history, linguistics, literary studies and criticism, psychology, the sciences, sociology and theology. See below for more detail about the purpose of each panel and suggested themes for submission.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be emailed to m5symposium@googlemail.com by 25th November 2009. Applicants should include their names, details of their institution and phase of study, and indicate for which panel they consider their paper most relevant.

Panel 1: Monuments
We purposefully memorialise ourselves and others, our achievements and cataclysms, through the production and archiving of material structures and objects, including architecture, artworks, music, text, museums and archives. What roles do these objects and institutions fulfil within our personal, familial, social and cultural lives? What is their significance in narratives of the past—for example in memoirs, oral history interviews, or in traditional cultures and societies? This panel investigates both the relationship between the construction of memorial objects and modes of remembrance, and also the processes of creating, transmitting, storing and memorialising narratives through objects of memory.

Suggested themes:
- The postmodern memory institution
- Processes of commissioning
- Public and personal narratives of remembrance
- Monuments as sites of identity
- The archive as a site of power
- Remembering and forgetting

Panel 2: Machines
Plato’s accusation in The Phaedrus that the technology of writing, “will create forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, because they will not use their memories,” acknowledges that mediating technologies alter processes of remembering. Plato, of course, overlooks the benefits of such supplements to memory—the irony of such a statement is that we are only aware Plato said this because he wrote it down. Similar controversies abound regarding newer technologies such as photography, video, phonography and the Web. In a highly technologised society, where gadgetry is fetishised and innovation relentless, such memory devices will continue to proliferate. This section of the symposium investigates the effects of the delegation of memory to machines —technologies in a larger sense — upon human experience and its consequences for our personal and public past.

Suggested themes:
- Duplication and distribution: the ephemerality of the digital
- Machines as metaphors for memory
- Capture and loss: the future limits of memory machines
- The status of oral testimony
- Authenticity: media as witness

Panel 3: Madeleines
Proust’s madeleine cake famously triggers his narrator’s memory, involuntarily inducing a sudden and intense recollection of a specific time and place through associations with sensory experience. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all can transport us instantly. The vivid, uncanny memories connected with such sensory triggers are produced entirely through chance associations and as such differ from intended memorial objects. This element of the symposium explores how such sensory encounters and chance remembrances inter-relate as well as the wider ways in which unintentional sites of memory participate in the constitution of our lifeworld.

Suggested themes:
- Psychology, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, Sensory and synaesthetic experience
- Revelation and epiphany
- Film, music, literature as memory trigger
- Memories of place: architecture and landscape
- Unintended and accidental sites of memory
- Introspective recollection
- The capture of sensory experience

Stephen Fry: The internet and Me

Stephen Fry was talking technology on Radio 4 yesterday, and some of the highlights have been transcribed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm

Since Fry's probably more responsible than anyone else for taking Twitter over the tipping point and into the popular consciousness (in the UK at least), his views are worth having. Among his more piercing points, he talks of web snobbery, and in particular the platform migration of early adopters as the great unwashed swarm in (FB, is for example, now "low rent").

Interestingly, he defends txt spk, pointing out that when paper and ink were expensive in the 17/18C, words were at a premium: "letters were, as they say, crossed. You'd look at them writing horizontally and then there'd be vertical lines all the way down and round the margins. And 'your' is 'YR', you know just as it is in a text. It's exactly the same point - you're compressing." I might also say that compressed language allows quicker expression; literally less time for the word to get from the brain to the page, which helps keep the flow of thought. See also, Pepys' diaries written in shorthand - when the pen was the primary mode of inscription it was the cheapest and easiest way to get words out.

And here, on the metaphysics of presence, he talks of being able to have a proper conversation by email because all the bodily interaction is absent: "As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly." The writer A.S. Byatt made a similar point at the Digital Lives conference I attended last month. There she said that she preferred to give interviews via email, because there “you can have a real conversation.” All of which perhaps flies in the face of Dreyfus' worries about telepresence and the absence of bodies; maybe I need to read Derrida after all, which is something I'd been trying to avoid.

Later, a riposte to the dystopians: "I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn't congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel - about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead."

Good stuff.

Links, links, links

1. Another from AlertBox, this time tips on Blog Usability:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

2. An article from the NY Times, 2002 "TECHNOLOGY; A Rift Among Bloggers" about the reaction of the "veteran" bloggers (Kottke et al) to the insurgence of "war bloggers". Kottke compares it to hating seeing your favourite band go overground (''It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else") - a tone which certainly comes through in Blood's book (which I'm rereading - a posting on that to follow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10BLOG.html?ex=1024286400&en=e399bdc149d15532&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

3. An online article by psychologist John M. Grohol, entitled "Psychology of Blogs (Weblogs): Everything Old is New Again" - talks a little about the analogue, but not as useful as title suggests as he talks more about the similarities between blogs and online mailinglists than anything else. Also has links to other early articles about the psychology of blogging by the same author - not the most heavyweight of insights, useful though ...

http://psychcentral.com/blogs/blog_new.htm

4. An article by Travers, Uni. Washington, entitled "Blog Invasion! What Are They? Where Did They Come From?". A good source of references.

http://homepage.mac.com/dtraversscott/Academics/BlogHistory/index.html

5. Nielman Reports is a (student?) journal hosted at Harvard, looks like lots of articles about blogging as it relates to journalism:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.aspx

6. Article from Wired announcing the demise of the blog in the face of Twitter, FB, etc. So soon?!

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

7. Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" 2008, figures and analysis:

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

More links

Another few links from Jakob Nielsen at Alertbox:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html

Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.

"Primates on Facebook" (Economist article, 26 Feb 09)

Just to archive this link: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775

It's to an Economist article which quotes findings that although the average number of friends on FB is 120, the intimate circles of friends people are regularly, actively, in contact (Men=7, Women=10) is no bigger than pre-social-networking:

Quote: "people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

Social networking as social broadcasting...

Initial thoughts on Langdon Winner’s “constitution” of sociotechnical order

Winner’s neo-luddite approaches to technology are quite refreshing as an antidote to the cyberbole of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, etc. I don’t think I agree with him, but his point of view is certainly worth airing. In the “Whale and the Reactor,” he proclaims: “Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society” (20). On pp. 95-6, he elaborates:

“Dreams of instant liberation from centralized social control have accompanied virtually every important new technological system introduced during the past century and a half. The emancipation proposed by decentralist philosophers as a deliberate goal requiring long, arduous social struggle has been upheld by technological optimists as a condition to be realized simply by adopting a new gadget. This strange mania ... is alive and well among those who celebrate the advent of the computer revolution.”

Given that these comments were made in 1986, when the net was limited to universities and the Web was yet to come, and thus before the explosion of Web2.0 type stuff, they will now seem either utterly prescient or slightly misguided, dependent on your attitude as to how revolutionary blogs, etc. are (i.e. luddite or technophile?). The answer, of course will lie somewhere in between, but for the moment, I just wanted to get down a few initial thoughts on some solid claims Winner makes on pp. 47-8 of that book, about the nature of the “distinctive institutional patterns” he sees as having been created by modern industrial production over the last couple of centuries. This “de facto ... constitution of sorts,” (a “sociotechnical order”) and the way it relates to relationship to concepts of “membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice,” is presented by the identification of five primary traits, and I wanted to examine each of these briefly (and only as a first pass!) in relation to the modern Web environment. Basically, the thinking is, that these are five testable claims about an established order, which if the current “revolution” is really revolutionary, should be substantially effected or transformed by this new technology.

1. The first of Winner’s claims is that “technologies of transportation and communication ... facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers. Largely unchecked by effective countervailing influences, there has been an extraordinary centralization of social control in large business corporations, bureaucracies, and the military. It has seemed an expedient, rational way of doing things. Without anyone having explicitly chosen it, dependency upon highly centralized organizations has gradually become a dominant social form.”

RESPONSE: Certainly the Web has assisted in the the production of information/comment outwith those established centres, promoting self-publication and new modes of political discussion. Wikipedia, which I do think is a truly wonderful example of the potential of this technology, opens the knowledge-base of the encyclopedia to anyone with a laptop, web browser and web connection, self-regulated by its own community. Political blogs allow scrutiny of events like the Rather controversy which the mainstream media might have glossed over (the potential effect of which is easily – and often – overstated, of course). But hasn’t the Web also been a source of further growth in the means of control of those pre-exisiting centres (I’m thinking of new means of government snooping introduced by legislation like the Patriot Act in the US), also the fact that Google, by being so important to the functioning of these distributed centres, has itself become a fearfully large central organization. Maybe the positioning of the centres is changing, the organizations evolving, but when we look at the current battle over the T&Cs of ownership of content currently raging around Facebook, we might wonder whether we are becoming more or less centralized...

2. Secondly, Winner identifies “a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations. Over the past century more and more people have found themselves living and working within technology-based institutions that previous generations would have called gigantic. Justified by impressive economies of scale and, economies or not, always an expression of the power that accrues to very large organizations, this gigantism has become an accustomed feature in the material and social settings of everyday life.”

RESPONSE: The Web definitely does not buck this trend. From home-working, distance-learning, etc. (and regardless of the efficacy of these), we can see that the need for physical proximity to the organization is lessened, hence the number of people who can be subsumed into the organization is increased (at least potentially). Indeed, this ability to increase the efficiency and effective size of associations, is often cited as one of the most powerful aspects of the Web...

3. “Third is the way in which the rational arrangement of sociotechnical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority. Legitimized by the felt need to do things in what seems to be the most efficient, productive way, human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns that involve taking orders and giving orders along an elaborate chain of command.”

RESPONSE: Here, using the Wikipedia example, we might on the face of it see an organization without a hierarchy, in the traditional sense – but who is actually adding to it? Certainly not most of the people who use it, so is there hierarchy there? Again, using the example of the political blogs, are they challenging the traditional power structures in a substantially different form from the traditional letter to the MP or Newspaper? Is the hierarchy of the working environment being changed through the use of collaborative media? Hmmm ...

4. “Fourth is the tendency of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and eliminate other varieties of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftwork; technologies of modern agribusiness made small-scale farming all but impossible; high-speed transportation crowded out slower means of getting about. It is not merely that useful devices and techniques of earlier periods have been rendered extinct, but also that patterns of social existence and individual experience that employed these tools have vanished as living realities.”

RESPONSE: Well, firstly, email/blogging/social-networking has perhaps impacted on traditional forms of communication like letter, phone, etc. As a nice example, a friend of mine, Catriona, recently (4th March) posted a FB status wondering, “if facebook is really that great. whatever happened to picking up the phone?", to which another friend, Chris (5th March), responds with humour:

“That's a bit unfair to the old F-book, methinks... I mean, when was the last time YOU just rang somebody out of the blue?? These days, as I've come to understand it, that's just poor etiquette. It's kind of like complaining: "Whatever happened to sending carrier pigeons?" Answer: "It's just not the done thing anymore." I mean, confronted with a carrier pigeon--or a telephone call for that matter--I'm just not sure I'd know what to do!” [NOTE: I’ll check that it’s ok to use this with both people involved – if not, I’ll remove it].

But we are all still keeping in touch in some manner, aren't we?! And in McLuhan’s sense of “retrieval,” can’t we see the return of some features of communication that were lost in previous modes – for example, instant messaging and social networking is much more immediate than a letter, which retrieves some of the immediacy of face-to-face conversation which was lost while we were tethered to the letter as a primary means of written communication over distance. The Internet, in fact, remediates many media to retrieve some characteristics lost in their analogue modes (e.g., youtube is television but with the instant right to reply, broadcast becomes less one-directional). So I would probably assent that the Web does propagate this tendency in one sense, but in remediating so many other media, it perhaps retrieves more than it obsolesces. Further, I don’t think we’re led blindly into losing these “living realities,” I believe we accept losses and gains in a flux of negotiation based on costs and benefits to our primary concerns – to use the example of Paul Levinson in “Digital McLuhan,” the invention of the window to let light into buildings might have led to a loss of privacy, but we soon invented curtains!

5. Finally, in what has become a rather long posting, Winner advises as the fifth attribute of this de facto sociotechnical constitution: “the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them. Human needs, markets, and political institutions that might regulate technology-based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems.”

RESPONSE: Winner gives the example of advertising as one means by which organizations sway opinion to suit them, but we might also include lobby groups, etc. Here, the big corps of the Web and computing in general (Microsoft, Google, et al) certainly don’t seem any more averse to using these means to their own ends than traditional organizations. If we look at the content of the Web environment, though, does increased potential for public scrutinization of organizations and public-sphere conversation outside of traditional big mainstream media, increase the scope for us to recognize and react to these influences? Maybe ...

The Onion Review's Latest Sony Gadget

After yesterday's treatise (which on reflection probably overran the boundaries of what is comfortable to read in this electronic form), I thought I'd post something for fun - as a first attempt to expand the function of this blog. I found this video, created by the spot-on "The Onion" on Kevin Arthur's blog at Question Technology.

Truly magnificent, but WARNING, CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE!!!


Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Sh*t That Doesn't F**king Work