In Katherine Hayles book Writing Machines Hayles discusses a Humument and the approach the author takes--or various approaches--to creating a new narrative from an old text. One approach Tom Phillips uses is obscuring varying amounts of text. This brings to mind the novel Catch-22 and Yossarian’s stint as a censor, at the beginning of the novel. Like Phillips, Yossarian reinvents the texts he is given--and the people who write them--by obscuring some text and leaving others. Further, like Phillips, Yossarian varies his approach to crossing out words--although for Phillips this takes the form of planning to revisit the same project, where Yossarian edits different letters in different ways, so that he is never revisiting or re-envisioning a particular text. One might say he is always re-imagining the letter form. Further, as compared to Phillips, Yossarian’s technique of revising is limited. He has a black pen he can use to cross out or scratch out words, where Phillips can cover text in pictures, or really any media he can imagine using. He can, however, add new words, which occasionally takes the form of rewriting the entire letter by crossing everything out, and adding some new, small statement. a “sense that every page offers multiple possibilities of treatment” (Hayles, 88).

Both Phillips and Yossarian participate in a resistance of the immateriality of words. For Phillips this comes out in emphasizing the materiality of choices in writing. His visual obscuring of some text and emphasis of other texts renders the storytelling process less transparent. He offers the options in an embodied state, while at the same time obscuring them, or rendering them inaccessible to the reader. Yossarian, too, renders the role of censorship more visible in the letters than it would have been if he had censored the expected information. Yossarian, instead, chooses to cross out articles, words that are seemingly above censorship, or perhaps too insignificant in value to be worth obscuring. On the other hand, he may create a particularly suggestive letter--that may have been mundane before censorship--by leaving nothing but the articles, so that it appears most of the content was either inappropriate or revealed too much.

The technique of visibly obscuring certain information also makes the reader “freshly aware that the character is never self-evidently on the page” (96), which can be seen in Catch-22 as well. There are characters writing these wartime letters within the World of Catch-22, but they are unavailable to us beyond our basic understanding that there is writing that is being obscured by Yossarian. This is less visceral than in Phillips work, where the text is present, but also covered beneath Phillips’ method of revealing and concealing, where we as readers of Catch-22 are asked to imagine, or understand that there are soldiers writing letters, but we are never given access to their actual letters, only to the construct that Yossarian creates.

Ultimately, Phillips work is a clearer, physical manifestation of obscuring and revealing texts, and embodying the the form of the book where Catch-22 embeds the layers of materiality into the imagined world of the text rather than rendering them physically present but unavailable. As a consequence, there is only so far the comparison between the two texts can be taken, especially since it is an imaginary character that Phillips is being compared to, rather than another author of a text. The texts aren’t perfectly paralleled, but there are definite similarities.

Engineered Persona

                                                         

             In his chapter behind the Blip, Fuller talks about the combined relationship of human and the computer specified by the term human computer interface, It is interesting that this work continues our effort to understand our place in the modern technological world. Fuller states that: “It should be asked what model of persona, what ‘human’ is engineered by the HCI” (12). He brings up the question of personhood that is assemblage and reshaped by our daily interaction with the digital world. His ideas agrees with and completes what we read previously by Clark’s Natural -Born Cyborgs , Clark confirmed that our brains do dovetail with the technology in a way that it changes itself. While Fuller in his effort to define a possible way to theorize the software systems, is finding out how exactly this intertwined relationship of human and machine works to create this new version of human that is engineered by it. We can imagine a reversed operation of programming a robot to be like human.

             Fuller Also discuses Deleuze and Guttari book, what is Philosophy? He considers it a way to understand software as a form of subjectivity. But then he argues that the new media is like the TV, which replaced Althussor’s State apparatus’ disciplinary in the church and the school. So, if we think from a Marxist view, can we be unconsciousness of being ruled by the machine? We think that we are free to navigate through the digital world but we are not aware that software’s are directing our navigation through its specific programming? And if according to the Marxist theory, there is always someone who knows of this determined direction would it be the programmer of the code. We are not actually going to be slave of the technology rather than obedient to the rule of the programmers, or they will be like us create the systems and then being subjected to it.        

      

           

    

Decentralization vs. Malware/"Skips vs. Technology"

I was watching a Regular Show marathon with my son over the break when “Skips vs. Technology” came on. This particular episode follows Skips, a white gorilla who skips everywhere he goes instead of walking or running, as he displays his adeptness at fixing everything from an arm severed in a war to a hole in the floor of a gazebo. The one thing that he encounters that he can’t fix, that he can’t even understand, is a computer. “Skips vs. Technology” has ties to just about the whole lot of what we’ve been discussing in New Media Theory since the semester began: there are animals, cyborgs, techne, prostheses, the Internet and an allusion to the ascendancy of protocol decentralization, the last taking a little under-the-surface digging, but it’s there.

Through “Skips vs. Technology,” we can understand the advantage of working in a decentralized, distributed network, which allows us to prevail over something like an “Error 220,” or what we could identify as Galloway’s “autonomous agent who does not listen to the chain of command,” that could completely destroy a centralized network. (38) If we look at how malware works, specifically virus and worm codes, we can deduce that if networks were organized in the NORAD model, “a centralized, hierarchical network,” the military protocol, the malware would succeed in disabling any network in which it is introduced simply by attacking the “command center.” (29) The Doom-Ma-Geddon Virus wouldn’t need to “digitize” every object in existence to be victorious. It would only have to take the command center in order to, well, take command.

Mordecai and Rigby’s computer is but a single hub that was victimized by the Doom-Ma-Geddon Virus, but the attack on the world outside of the room in which the computer was set up is easily thwarted. If Pops has a computer in his room, or if Muscle Man and High-Five Ghost have computers, the attack is of no consequence to them because they don’t operate in the same network. What’s necessary for the malware to spread is infected removable or movable media— discs, thumb drives and emails—that allows the malware to become communicable, and even that method of infection would maintain the locality of the malware long enough to allow the technomancers to work their magic on it. An error that people make on behalf of malware creators is the sending of chain mail. We like to share what we find on the Internet. If we accidentally send an infected email to only a few of our email contacts, well, there is the possibility of only a few destroyed networks, granted email platforms are now programmed to find malware and antivirus software can kill it before it becomes an infection. (The potential is still there, though.) However, if we’re the type of people who have thousands of email contacts with whom we share everything that we find, there is the potential of thousands of destroyed networks, with some networks having more significance than others. There are six degrees of separation is what’s often said. Each of us may be six people away from a very important person. I think I'm important...at least a little bit important, so if you decide to click on the "Send" button on a chain letter, let’s make sure that I’m not one of the six people you send it to...

In Protocol:  How Control Exists after Decentraliziation Alexander Galloway discusses the nature of the Internet. Galloway borrows Delueze and Guattari’s discussion of the rhizome to explain the decentralized nature of the Internet.  The Rhizome is a perfect object to use in any discussion of the Internet, so I will continue using that metaphor- but I am going to discuss the Internet in terms for how it functioned as a catalyst of social change in the uprisings in the Middle East.

Galloway explains that the Internet was designed primarily as a military tool and that it was decentralized in order to limit its ability to be damaged.  Galloway points out that “the simplest network diagram is the centralized network” wherein all of the nodes lead to a central hub.  I am reminded of the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” when thinking of the bicycle wheel like image of the centralized network.  A decentralized network is quite the opposite of this.  The decentralized network facilitates ‘work arounds’ (my words) in order to create a multiplicity of ways for one node to connect to another.

During the uprisings in Egypt the government sought to limit the peoples use of the Internet.  But, the Internet does not have an off button.  In order to limit Internet use, the Egyptian government went to the four largest Internet providers in the area and modified the code to take various isp’s off line.  If these things can be quantified then it has been argued that Egypt put approximately 93% of its Internet users off the grid.  Those that remained were the likes of the computers that measure the Egyptian stock market. 

Apparently cutting the Internet off in Egypt was relatively easy because there were only four isp providers.  In the United States many more companies would have to be dealt with in order to cut off the Internet.  While some members of congress have discussed creating an emergency off button for the Internet in case of an Internet emergency, this would be difficult logistically (Slate). 

In the case of the Egyptian government, I expect some crafty souls were able to work around the limitations.  But, ultimately the way that Egypt sought to turn of the Internet was very effective because they limited the kinds of websites that could be searched very drastically.  This case study makes an interesting case for the constructed nature of the Internet.  As long as it is free to run wild there is no beginning or end and it cannot practically be removed in a centralized way.  But, if you limit each individual’s ability to get to any given node they cannot get to another one regardless of the capacity that exists. 

Galloway does a nice way of describing the different technical jargon associated with TCP’s, DNS and IP’s.  A point being though that while the internet is decentralized and capable of creating a multiplicity of pathways to create communication, ultimately it can be turned off.  Spooky huh?

Word World

                In his article “Protocol: How Control exists after Decentralization” Alexander Galloway offers some interesting ways of thinking about conversations when he compares certain aspects of digital information networks to the protocols we use when beginning and ending a telephone call. Although I agree with Galloway’s description of conversational indicators for “let’s begin talking” and “let’s stop talking” as things such as “hello” and “I better get going”, but I think he misses something in highlighting only the indicative quality of these signifiers. In other words, it seems that although the phrase “hello how are you” could certainly act as an indicator for the start of a conversation it is still functioning within a language system of “differance” and ambiguity. I guess my concern for the move that Galloway makes in this section of the article is any attempt to pinpoint a function of language considering how language is contingent (as Galloway says) on a “science of meaning” which is always subject to perception. 

                In thinking through my difficulty with attempting to pinpoint particular functions of language I find this children’s TV show somewhat helpful (or at least amusing). In this video, language and object (signifier and signified) are intrinsically unified. An object’s “Thingly character” (as Heidegger would put it) now finds direct correlation with its name. In this show, one can see how the two worlds of communication that Galloway describes as distinctly separate (the digital and the human) now collide to the point that the “science of meaning” has become irrelevant. In this Derridean nightmare (or fantasy), a “tree” is a tree and a “truck” is a truck; language and essence are one and the same thing.

                How then does this help me think about language as a social indicator? I believe that this video illustrates the impossibility of even being able to conceive of language having a single or direct correspondence to the world or a system similar to Galloway’s centralized and decentralized networks. I think it is in this way that Galloway’s depiction of language as a conversational indicator bothered me because this is only one thing that the phrases are doing when spoken and received. The minute nuances in an introductory phrase may affect the entire tone of the conversation or they might even end the conversation before it has even begun. I believe these issues also serve to bolster Galloway’s delineation between the two modes of communication and the difficulty in comparing human language to computer networking and information storage and retrieval.

To the CLOUD!

In his chapter “Physical Media,” Alexander Galloway describes what exactly “distribution” is, as well as how protocol works within distributed networks.  A distributed network (like the Internet) has no central hub or node, but rather is made up of autonomous agents (entities, computers), between which information passes on pathways that vary significantly and are never predetermined. In addition, the autonomous agents that make up the distributed network operate “according to certain pre-agreed ‘scientific’ rules of the system” (38), not a chain of command.  Galloway marks the tremendous success of the Internet throughout the last few decades as a “shift,” quoting Branden Hookway who writes, “The shift is occurring across the spectrum of information technologies as we move from models of the global application of intelligence, with their universality and frictionless dispersal, to one of local applications, where intelligence is site-specific and fluid” (33).  Information and “intelligence” are available any time, to any person, in any place, because we have the Internet, and the possibilities for communication and intelligence sharing are only increasing with developments such as cloud computing.

We’ve all heard of these new “clouds” – from big names like Amazon and Apple – but it seems that the majority of folks out there don’t quite understand what “cloud computing” is and are therefore hesitant to use it.  However, I believe that as an extension of the distributed Internet network, “cloud” technology will catch on and become very widely used.

For those of you who don’t know, cloud computing delivers computing as a service rather than as a product, allowing for typically shared resources between “nodes” or “agents,” like software and information, to be provided as a utility across a network like the Internet.  Users who use cloud computing do not know the location of whatever computation services, applications, or data they are using.  Instead, these users access their cloud utilities through a web browser or mobile app while software and information are stored on servers elsewhere. 

I would venture to suggest that people who do understand what cloud computing and still choose not to use it do so because it makes their “stuff” intangible, in a way.  One would feel comfortable knowing that all of his music, documents, and software were at hand within his own personal computer, as opposed to having all his stuff stored on a server that he wouldn’t know the location of.  Apple is taking a hybrid approach to cloud use, which seems to be a good transition tool for people like this, as they allow data and music to be stored locally while simultaneously syncing them to their cloud.  This hybrid model is great because it allows for the user to experience the benefits – unlimited storage, syncing and organization services, back-up, added security and safety, and file access from any device or location as long as there is a connection – without fully giving up the comfort of local storage.

I guess the question becomes whether or not cloud computing is an extension of a very successful distributed network (the Internet).  We widely use the Internet for sharing and socializing, so why are we hesitant to “share” our stuff with the various clouds out there?  Perhaps “cloud” technology is a hybrid of the distributed network and centralized network in that users (instead of computers) become the nodes of the network but all information and data is stored in a central hub.

Behold a Pale Academician

Reading Galloway was at first like reading an academic William Cooper in that he subtly weaves in a kind of pseudo-conspiracy theory with his own interesting ideas about decentralization.  I’m specifically speaking here about his debatable claims that the internet spawned out of a United States military effort to avoid nuclear attack, and whether he is right or wrong about this point I could not say.  But what I can say is that the rhetorical power of statements such as these is interesting in and of itself, and I thought Galloway’s approach to the subject was provocative.

For those who aren’t aware, William Cooper is the author of a rather infamous book titled, Behold a Pale Horse.  In this book, Cooper claims to have been a member of the US Navy and to have gotten ahold of top secret information about governmental conspiracies.  His accusations were so wild to include things like accusations against Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which Cooper claimed that the president had signed a treaty with aliens…  OK, maybe I’m insulting Galloway by this comparison, but I in no way intend to.  I think there is a huge difference between the type of conspiracy theory within Behold a Pale Horse and the scholarship present in Galloway’s chapter “Physical Media,” but I think that both of these works have the potential to be equally anarchic, but in a good way.

Behold a Pale Horse was one of the books that brought the occult idea of the illuminati into the reading public’s attention.  Cooper strongly warns readers about the illuminati and the new world order, both of which represent a sort of heavily centralized control that could exert totalitarian force on a global scale—the threat of world domination.  So in a way, Cooper’s book is a push for decentralization in much the same way that Galloway’s work is.  I wonder what Galloway has been reading?