Category: digital studies

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Bernard Stiegler [video] – Digital Studies as an organology of the mind

Bernard Stiegler recently gave a talk at the Institute for Digital Media Culture and Aesthetics  (ICAM) at Leuphana furthering his exploration of the idea of Digital Studies. Stiegler provides some really nice discussion of his reading of phenomenology, in particular his advancement of Husserl’s scheme of retention/protention. He moves on to (broadly) reiterate some of the key parts of his argument in Taking Care.

In the introduction to Stiegler’s talk, Goetz Bachmann offers some interesting observations and context to Stiegler’s work, which is nice. Bachmann was one of the members of the Goldsmiths Cultural Studies team that has hosted annual Stiegler’s Professorial seminars there.

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Why should sociologists [and geographers] study digital media?

Deborah Lupton recently wrote a blog post asking, and answering, the question: why should sociologists study digital media? Her answers are interesting, and are couched in the framework for a book project Lupton is working on around digital sociology for next year. What I idly wondered when reading through the list of answers Lupton provides is: would these make sense for geographers if we replace ‘the social’ with something like ‘space and place’ or ‘the spatial’?

Here’s Lupton’s bulleted list of answers:

  • Social life is increasingly being configured through and with digital media.
  • What counts as ‘the social’ is increasingly framed via digital media.
  • Digital media use and practice is structured through gender, social class, geographical location, education, race/ethnicity and age, all social categories with which sociologists have traditionally been interested.
  • Digital media are integral parts of contemporary social networks and social institutions such as the family, the workplace, the education system, the healthcare system, the mass media and the economy, again phenomena that have long been foci for sociological research and theorising.
  • Digital media configure concepts of selfhood, social relationships, embodiment, human/nonhuman relations, space and time – all relevant to sociological inquiry.
  • Digital media have instituted new forms of power relations.
  • Digital media have become central to issues of measure and value.
  • Digital media offer alternative ways of practising sociology: of researching, teaching and disseminating research.
  • Digital media are important both to ‘public sociology’ (engaging with people outside of academia) and ‘private sociology’ (personal identities and practices as sociologists).
  • Digital media challenge sociologists’ role as pre-eminent social researchers: sociologists need to address this.
  • Digital media technologies can contribute to ‘live sociology’ and ‘inventive methods’, or new, creative ways of practising sociology.

There is a hint of disciplinary anxiety about some of this, which is understandable given the contemporary state of academia, but even so I can’t help thinking these questions could be more broadly framed as ‘why social scientists should study digital media’.

Anyway, to answer my own idle question about substituting the focus on ‘the social’ with that of ‘the spatial'”¦ this might work to a lesser or greater extent for some of these questions. As intimated by my comment above, some of the questions are just as much the concern of human geographers (and anthropologists, historians, scholars of politics and international relations [and so on] for that matter) as they are of sociologists. So here’s my attempt at a complementary list of geographically focused answers to the question ‘why should geographers and other social scientists study digital media?’:

  • Space & place and the social are increasingly being (re)configured with and through digital media.
  • What counts as ‘the social’, ‘culture’, ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ are increasingly being framed via digital media.
  • Digital media use and practice is structured through gender, social class, topographical location, contexts of place, education, race/ethnicity and age, all social and spatial categories with which social scientists have traditionally been interested.
  • Digital media are integral parts of contemporary social and spatial networks and social institutions such as the family, the workplace, the education system, the healthcare system, the mass media and the economy, again phenomena that have long been foci for social sciences research and theorising.
  • Digital media (re)configure concepts of selfhood, social relationships, embodiment, human/nonhuman relations, space and time – all relevant to research concerning society and space.
  • Digital media have instituted new forms of power relations.
  • Digital media have become central to issues of measure and value.
  • Digital media offer alternative ways of practising scholarship: of researching, teaching and disseminating research.
  • Digital media are important both to ‘public scholarship’, as engaging with people outside of academia, and ‘private scholarship’, involving personal identities and practices as social scientists.
  • Digital media challenge social scientists’ role as pre-eminent social researchers: we all need to address this.
  • Digital media technologies can contribute to ‘live’ research and ‘inventive methods’, or new, creative ways of practising social science.

I think Lupton provides really good answers to the question of why any scholar should study digital media, they certainly motivate many of my interests in that field.

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Reblog > Being and Space

Over on the technophilia blog, my former colleague and friend Patrick Crogan has written a really insightful piece in response to the general reading of Stiegler I offer in my recent paper The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies. Following on from my rather quick explanation of Stiegler’s use of the concept of technicity, Patrick brings a nuanced gloss on Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger in Technics and Time 1 – please read on below.

I would like to note, as I did in the acknowledgements of the article, that my own engagement with Stiegler’s work and the broader (post)phenomenological understandings of the human-technology relation comes from sustained, very rewarding, discussions with Patrick, whose own insightful work, expertise and translations have been invaluable.

Being and Space

Sam Kinsley, former colleague and technophilia, now at Exeter Uni, recently published ‘The Matter of “Virtual” Geography’ in Progress in Human Geography. It gives a comprehensive overview of the history of formulations of virtual spaces and realities since the heady days of the 1990s articulations of cyberspace, up to recent approaches to ideas of coded and networked spatialities. Sam perceptively mobilises Stiegler’s work including his use of Simondon and Heidegger to propose a way of describing and analysing digitally enabled spatial and temporal refigurations of contemporary existence and sociality.

I wanted to add a gloss on this mobilisation of Stiegler’s notion of technicity, as a point that seemed to me to touch on an important element in Stiegler’s critical adoption of Heidegger’s Being and Time – hence the ‘Being and Space’ title. Sam has this to say about Stiegler’s positioning of humans as always already preceded by technics in a way:

“Culture”, he writes, “can accordingly be thought of as metastable systems of retention, of exteriorized thought: ‘A new born child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [data, images, writing and so on] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely, constitutes the world as world’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 9, original emphasis). The ongoing creation of shared knowledge, and thus a shared memory and history, is in large part mediated by technology (with the notable exceptions of practices of oral history and storytelling).”

Absolutely, and here Stiegler’s take on and taking from Heidegger’ notion of Dasein’s ‘throwness’ is evident. Dasein, the being for whom its being is a question, ‘falls’ into time, and encounters a facticity already there. This paradoxical futurity of what precedes Dasein in a sense programmes (though this word is evocative much more of Stiegler’s Heidegger than Heidegger) the questioning of being that characterises Dasein, along with the tension between an intratemporal business with everyday things seeking to avoid the question and an authentic encounter with it via (in Heidegger) an assuming of the heritage of the collective past as pro-genitor and horizon of Dasein’s future possibilities.

In the latter part of Technics and Time 1 Stiegler ‘deals with’ Heidegger, identifying this notion of a throwness into an already existent facticity as his major insight, while also identifying quite precisely the point in Being and Time  (at a certain moment in the famous chapter on historicality and temporality) where Heidegger turns away from the implications of this constitutive factical technicity of Dasein and towards the more problematic notion of a history of being as expressed in the community of the volk  – the community – thought separately as a spiritual continuity, somehow transcendent from a facticity now relegated to the status of intratemporal covering over of the former. For Stiegler, as Sam’s account indicates, technics is an irreducible dimension of individual and collective being and any ‘authentic’ reflection or encounter with the question of one’s being, or of being in general (in philosophy, religion, politics etc) develops on the basis of and out of conditions that are factical, that pre-exist s/he reflecting, and that also make possible the transmission and communication of that reflecting to others to come after.

One more note: the oral history and storytelling that is part of the the “ongoing creation of shared knowledge” Sam describes is also mediated technically, if not ‘technologically’ (but perhaps today few instances of mediation passes completely to one side of the pervasive electronic media milieu). Oral transmission is always part of a linguistic technicity; it is always undertaken in conjunction with certain rituals and gestures associated with the cultural event of story recital; and often these will include the production of graphics of various kinds, rupestral, sand-painting, bodily inscription and so forth. That minds retain these forms and conventions and rites testifies to the profound interdependence of organic and non-organic spatial memory supports in the maintenance and evolution of individual and cultural identity.

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The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies

I have been meaning to write a quick post about this for a while, so this is a ‘late’ announcement”¦

A few months ago I wrote about having two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available online on the Progress web pages. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However,  I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.

“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies” revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.

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Reblog > Self-quantification researcher network

Deborah Lupton has blogged about the creation of a self-quantification researcher network:

Heather Patterson of New York University and I have set up a self-quantification and self-tracking research network. This forum is intended for anyone interested in the social, cultural, political, legal or ethical aspects of wearable technology, biosensors, digital health, mobile health, big data and algorithms, ubiquitous computing or similar topics.

Messages appropriate for the list include but are not limited to the following:
“¢ Announcements of upcoming events/conferences/talks/seminars;
“¢ Announcements of new or forthcoming publications;
“¢ Invitations for research collaborations;
“¢ Calls for conference or contributions to edited books or journals;
“¢ Information about requests for grant proposals;
“¢ Announcements for job openings that may be of interest to list members;
“¢ Pointers to information on new, interesting innovations in this research area; and
“¢ General comments or questions about relevant topics.
We welcome researchers of all disciplines, including media and cultural studies, internet studies, information privacy law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, information science, business, medicine, and engineering; as well as colleagues working in advocacy, government, and industry. Please contact Heather at hp33[at]nyu.edu if you would like to join the list.

Sounds great!

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Municipal memory?

The 20th century is the century of the industrialisation, the conservation and the transmission–that is, the selection–of memory. This industrialisation becomes concretized in the generalisation of the production of industrial temporal objects (phonograms, films, radio and television programs, etc)
[Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Time of Cinema. On the “New World” and “Cultural Exception”‘, p. 106.].

Following on from the post I made a few months ago, providing a version of a paper entitled ‘memory programmes‘ that I gave at the “Conditions of Mediation” conference at Birkbeck in June, I wanted to share some thoughts I have included in a recent submission around the theme of the ‘industrialisation of memory’, following Stiegler (as above), and the discourses of the ‘smart city’. I play around with the suggestion of the formation of a ‘municipal memory‘, which could be considered one of the cornerstones of what Nigel Thrift has diagnosed as “Lifeworld Inc.“.

Continue reading “Municipal memory?”

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Border Bumping

While the lines drawn on maps, policed at crossings and customs posts, can apparently clearly delineate a border, other technologies that can also (be used to) place us, on one side of a border or another, may ebb and flow with atmospheric, material and technical differences. In particular, the relatively well known tendency for the cellular mobile phone system to record the location of a given device (via triangulation) as some distance from the actual physical location has been interrogated and played with by artists and activists alike.

One such meditation on the vagaries of the locational capabilities of the GSM system is the Border Bumping project. Julian Oliver has played around with how we traverse borders by examining how phones register with the network and redrawing a map of the borders accordingly. Oliver has created an app that lets owners of Android phones contribute to the project.

Here’s a nice video exploring ‘Border Bumping’:

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Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future – Matt Wilson

Matt Wilson has blogged that he has an interesting new paper coming out in a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography. See below:

Thanks to the invitation and editorship of Seraphim Alvanides and Kate Pangbourne, I’m happy to share the preprint of a forthcoming article in a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography: Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future. The preprint copy is available here.Wilson, Matthew W. forthcoming. “Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future.” Journal of Transport Geography.

Abstract:
Arguably, there have been few shifts in the GISciences so paradigmatic as the emergence of locationally-aware mobile devices. GISc researchers in the US have witnessed these changes in just the last crop of PhD students, with topics on location-based services, the geoweb, volunteered geographic information and neogeography, somewhat eclipsing earlier, trendy topics on web-based GIS and interactive digital cartography. Indeed, there are new important players in GISc, with training in and outside of Geography, with backgrounds as diverse as the engineering/computational sciences and the digital humanities as well as critical human geographies. Mobilities researchers, qualitative GIS scholars, cyberinfrastructural scientists, and social and cultural geographers have configured research programs around the proliferation of locationally-aware devices and the ‘big data’ that have emerged from them. In this viewpoint, I shall outline these diverse developments and sketch what I argue are the foundational issues that comprise a research agenda with and about geospatial technologies in the location-aware future: technological development, the social life of data, and the everyday practices around mobile digital devices.

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Reblog > Drones, sport and ‘eventization’

Last month Patrick Crogan wrote a great, pithy blogpost about the conduct and conceptualisation of war in relation to the relentless gaze of drones arrayed with computer vision technologies that originate from professional sports video analysis. Folding together Derek Gregory’s recent detailed reading of Gregoire Chemayou’s ‘Theorie du Drone’, the work of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and Bernard Stiegler’s theorisation of the industrialisation of memory, Patrick highlights how software systems embedded within the complex surveillance and attacking capabilities of drones that are becoming quasi-autonomous are operating in the very constitution of the events of war, not merely reacting or functioning as equipment, but proactively producing events. Reproduced below…

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This post is to start some ideas circulating from work I am increasingly becoming preoccupied with concerning military robotics and AI, as a particular (and also particularly important, in many ways) case of automatizing technologies emerging today. This is a big topic attracting an increasing amount of critical attention, notably from people like Derek Gregory (whose Geographical Imaginations blog is a treasure trove of insights, lines of inquiry and links on much of the work going on round this topic), and Lucy Suchman who is part of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and brings a critical STS perspective to drones and robotics on her Robot Futures blog.

NFL

I’m reading French CNRS researcher Gregoire Chamayou’s Théorie du drone, a book which has made a powerful start on the task of philosophically (as he has it) interrogating the introduction of these new weapons systems which are transforming the conduct, conceptualisation and horizon of war, politics and the technocultural global future today. Many riches in there, but I just read (p. 61) that the U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, looking for ways to deal with the oceans of video data collected by drones constantly overflying territory with unblinking eyes, obtained a version of software developed by ESPN and used in their coverage of American football. The software provides for the selection and indexing of clips from the multiple camera coverage of football games to enable their rapid recall and use in the analysis of plays which (as anyone who watches NFL or College football coverage knows takes up much more time than the play itself in any given broadcast). The software is able to archive footage (from the current or previous games) in a manner that makes it immediately available to the program director in compiling material for comparative analysis, illustration of player performance or tactical/strategic traits of a team, etc. The player and the key play can be systematically broken down, tracked in time, identified as exceptional or part of a broader play style, and so forth.

These capacities are precisely what makes the software desirable to the US Air Force inasmuch as the strategic development of drone operations deals with effectively the same analytical problem: the player and the key play, the insurgent/terrorist and the key act (IED, ambush, etc).  The masses of video surveillance of the vast ‘gridded’ space of battlespace, a vast ‘arena’ similarly zoned in precisely measurable slices (but in 3D) must be selectable, taggable and recoverable in such a way to be usable in the review of drone operations. And the logic (or logistic as Virilio would immediately gloss it) of this treatment of ‘battlespace’ is realised in what has recently emerged unofficially from the Obama administration-Pentagon interface as the emerging strategic deployment of drones by the CIA (which runs a significant and un-reported proportion of drone operations globally). This targeting strategy is based precisely on pattern analysis both in tracking known suspected enemies of the state and in identifying what are called ‘signature targets’ (the signature referring to a ‘data signature’ of otherwise unidentified individuals, one that matches the movements and associations of a known insurgent/terrorist – see Gregory’s post on this in Geographic Imaginations ).

The ethical and juridical-political dimensions of this strategy are coming under increasing and much-needed scrutiny (more to come on this). As a media/games theorist, the striking thing about this felicitous mutuality of affordances between pro sport mediatisation technics and those in development for the conduct of drone operations is the reorientation to space it not only metaphorically suggests (war, become game now steering the metaphoric vehicle back in the other direction) but enacts through an ‘eventization’ (Stiegler) operating in the very constitution of the ‘event’ of war or counter-insurgency (or what James Der Derian called ‘post war warring’) . While there are many complicit actors benefiting from the profitable mediatized evolution of American football into a protracted, advertising friendly broadcast, no such ‘partnership’ exists between key players ‘on the ground’ and those re-processing their data trails.

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Bernard Stiegler on MOOCs and education

The website Inriality has published a brief interview, in French, with Bernard Stiegler on the theme of the digital requiring us to, collectively – as a society, rethink education. In particular, Stiegler addresses the idea and implementation of MOOCs, with the charge that current uses of the technology are insufficient–being primarily concerned with distribution–and do not play to the strengths of networked technologies as a medium: namely interaction. Stiegler’s contention is that the digital is principally a means, or ‘affordance’, of research behaviour and in this way challenges us to rethink education as a more inquisitive and discursive endeavour, in which we encourage one another as peers (in the sense that, for example, the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge production and dissemination is ‘peer review’). He seems to suggest a fairly institutional approach, with the research-intensive university as its model.

Please find below a translation of the interview. I have followed usual conventions of adding clarifications or original French terms in square brackets. I have retained the links included in the original interview, which largely point to French language websites, with the exception of having changed the link to the French wikipedia article on Stiegler to the article in English.

Bernard Stiegler: “The digital obliges us to rethink education”

To introduce our series devoted to the theme of “how the digital changes education”, we asked the philosopher Bernard Stiegler* to reposition the debate in a broader context, that of our societies and their future…

* Bernard Stiegler teaches philosophy at the universities of Compiègne and London, he is president of the Ars Industrialis Association, he is Director of the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou Centre, and he is a member of the National Council for the Digital.

Why must education change?

Education must change because knowledge has changed. This profound change is visible in the sciences such as mathematics, astrophysics and nanoscience to name but a few… It is also true in the realm of language as in knowledge, insofar as Google is upsetting the traditional structures [of language] as shown notably by Frederic Kaplan.

And it’s not just academic knowledge that is changed in this way: our know-how [savoir-faire] is being revised, by the ecosystem of fablabs for example, and this is equally so with our life skills [savoir-vivre], they are both simultaneously destroyed by social networks and rebuilt on those new foundations…

In passing, I note that my position concerning all technics is that it must be considered as both good and bad [–a pharmakon]. A technique cannot be good when it has not been cultivated, it requires a purpose, a technique is wrong if we are not educated in it. We are therefore obliged to rethink education, because the digital changes all forms of knowledge, including family education.

Why should familial education be rethought?

Quite simply because it is difficult for parents to educate their children in the digital age! So this area is worth giving thought to because it is actually a very big problem, which risks being poisoned by massive anti-digital reactions that the Snowden case, and others, seem to attract. There is a fear, I think, that the positivity that surrounded Internet until recently will be compromised in the near future.

What can we expect from the MOOC platforms for delivering open courses over the Internet?

I am actively interested in MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses], particularly in the key group [cadre] that includes Plan FUN (France Universités Numérique ~ France Digital Universities) – having myself experienced this type of platform for over three years (see www.pharmakon.fr).

On the theme of MOOCs, I have noticed that the [pedagogical] problem is often taken the wrong way round. The process is this: we have [existing] courses and use the digital domain for their distribution. This is indeed necessary but not sufficient, because digital technology is primarily a research tool – which includes even philosophy.

I am a philosopher – that is my job – and on a day-to-day basis [au quotidien] I work on many textual sources: the digital has completely changed the way I work. I produce further texts, and not at all in the same way. I share them on networks with many people that I frequently have never [physically] encountered. Intellectual objects themselves are profoundly changed…

As a consequence, in the case of MOOCs and within the framework of higher education, it should be understood that MOOCs can only be properly developed through research activity. I have therefore undertaken to petition the Ministry [of Education?] to support those research activities – in large numbers and in all disciplines – specifically devoted to the digital in a given discipline. In all disciplines, it is no longer possible to conduct research as in the past.

In summary, it is necessary to conduct research on digital technology at the very same time it transforms knowledge itself, and precisely because it is an instrument to conduct research and communicate about it. I think we need to mount institutional responses to these issues.

What support mechanisms are best suited to these developments?

We need to create rapid [knowledge/technology] transfer processes [processus de transfert rapide], of an entirely new kind(1). I work at the Compiègne University of Technology, which has had a [knowledge/technology] transfer centre since its establishment – for about 40 years. We believe that this is a basic function of a university. But it also requires new models, such as the one we offer here at the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI) at the Georges Pompidou Centre, on the theme of contributive research.

This framework for research and action also reaches beyond the academic sphere, with the ability to involve teachers and pupils, for example. So there may be transfer across the scholarly world, which has great need of the digital…

What do you think about digital technologies in schools?

The introduction of digital technologies [du numérique] into schools is certainly a good thing… but the reality is that what goes into schools today with digital technologies is the market! Digital knowledge [la savoir numérique] comes from the universities and not the market. But as universities themselves do not produce it, there is a gap that the market comes to fill.

It is therefore necessary to create action-research processes [processus de recherche-action] that would produce very quick [knowledge/technology] transfer and acculturation [l’acculturation]. Support processes that bring together parents, teachers, elected officials…

More generally, most of the value of this contributory approach rests outside the field of education, in particular economically, with vocational training etc.

What relationship do you establish between education and the economy?

I recently spoke about this at the ministry [of education?]: knowledge and education, more generally rational knowledge, only works if it is exposed to critique that enables Reason. This applies to many areas where the logical argument is central, and which range from political debate, art criticism to [legal] justice… This practice of argumentation is formalized with the advent of a technics of publishing – writing – that made the comparison of points of view possible. Everyone knows that the printing press proliferated this phenomenon and its influence on science, economics and modern democracy was crucial. Thus the digital as a new space for publishing enables radically new capabilities.

One can, for example, create a television channel – which I have done with my wife, without technical difficulties and without any investment. In the online school that I have created more than 17,000 people are interested in courses, seminars and summer schools, thousands of people have regularly visited the collection of courses since its creation, and a hundred researchers from fifteen different countries have participated in the online seminars and the summer school… This is possible precisely because the digital opens out public debate. And I emphasize that science is primarily a public debate – between peers.

It seems necessary to me to open today a new organology of knowledge [organologie des savoirs]. This is because the digital tools used in this field are designed and owned by major economic players, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook … I use them but of course they are insufficient. For example, they do not allow you to organize and trace the confrontation of ideas – even though the processes of categorisation that are fundamental to science are based in such disputation, and the computer is primarily a technology for categorisation. Search engines that are capable of mapping, creating historiographies and organising responses [to research] that could nurture debate constitute the future of the web and should become the basic tools of a digital university.

It seems very likely to me that the reinvention of digital tools from an educational perspective will lead to a reinvention of the web itself. Because it is the debate – of ideas, knowledge , businesses , etc. – Which is the source of dynamism and progress. That’s why I think Europe should aim to support a new industrial politics based on digital a new politics of education.

Translation notes

1. I am not familiar with the term ‘transfert’ but the use of ‘transfert de technologie’ seems to map on to what is called technology transfer in the anglophone academy, thus I have made the assumption that ‘transfert’ gestures towards something like knowledge or technology transfer. I use this translation throughout.