[Produced in conjunction with Dr. Christopher Voparil's Ethics After Postmodernism course; Spring 2012, Union Institute and University]
With the exception of the electric light, there never has been a technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “The medium is the message.” The computer is almost all process. There are, for example, no “great computers,” as there are great writers, painters, or musicians. There are “great programs” and “great programmers,” but their greatness lies in their ingenuity either in simulating a human function or in creating new possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume. (Postman, 1993, p. 118)
The nature of identity construction,
due largely to the promotion of new communication technologies, has escaped our
traditional notions. Should a climate of “almost all process” replace more
common modes of representation, individuals may find identification with
others, and the seeking of commonalities, a task rendered more difficult due to
technological capabilities. This discussion will embrace introduce and
illustrate what may be an improvement on the climate of illegimitization of
individual identity at work in the mass media in the 1970s and 1980s: the
popularization of platforms such as MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook have allowed
individuals an ability to define and provide finite information about
themselves, their views, and identities, beyond dynamics established by postmodern
definitions.
Technopoly,
Convergence, and the Power of Technological Literacy
Tim
Berners-Lee, the developer primarily responsible for the creation of the World
Wide Web, described his intention in establishing a global network of
communication: “the original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative
medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write” (cited by
Richardson, 2006, p. 1). In J. Bolter’s chapter “Theory and Practice in new
Media Studies” (2003), questions related to the origin of identity, and the
means by which one’s identity may effect social change (p. 19): “the idea that
technologies could work as autonomous agents of social change has been
explicitly rejected by cultural studies and by Marxist critics since Raymond
Williams (1975). From the perspectives of such critics, it is society that
develops and molds new technologies to meet its cultural or economic needs.”
While few would dispute that Berners-Lee’s “collaborative medium” has come into
existence, as the Internet has become a pervasive spring of information,
bubbling up in many directions and locations, Bolter’s chicken-or-the-egg
dilemma questions technology as an “autonomous agents of social change.” Does
technology itself have an “autonomous” ability to be a forum in which
individuals may construct their identity through their actions, or does is
technology created to fulfill existing means of human expression?
Technology
is a profitable and important industry; since the conception of the original
home computers, producers have sought to distribute on a regular basis updated
products with additional features and innovative functionality. Separate study
of the extent to which the evolution of technology has enabled individuals to
create their own applications and software modifications—including the open-source
software movement—may focus on the integration of retailers, investors, and
those willing to create new implementations of existing technology. This
discussion regards the participation of individuals in the World Wide Web who
possess no specific set of technical knowledge, but are rather consumers of the
platforms made available to general participants of online collaboration. Do
individuals’ use of online collaborative platforms for expression represent
works of autonomous expression separate from the technology utilized, or are
those platforms fulfilling a human need for the original creation and ownership
of identity that had been, until recently, previously unavailable on such a
wide scale?
In
this country, technology has become a pervasive element of our environment: at
home, at work, or in transit, computers allow unprecedented access to
information. Recent Internet usage statistics identify almost three-quarters of
the population of North America, and globally, almost 33% of the world
population, as regular users of the Internet (Miniwatts, 2012, table 1). One
survey in the United States found 93% of students ages 12-17 are regular users
of the Internet, and 64% of those create public content to post on the Internet
(Lenhart, Madden, Magill & Smith, 2007, p. 2)—statistics from before the
popularization of Facebook, and prior to the invention of Twitter. Disregarding
demographic identifications, it is important to understand that populations’
access to the Internet will continue to grow; between 2000 and 2012, Internet
access grew by over 500% globally (Miniwatts, 2012, table 1).
While the collaborative nature of
Berners-Lee’s vision evolves on a daily basis with the creation of each new web
site and Internet application, an individual using the Internet may be
challenged to master and harness a steady stream of information, and,
simultaneously, digest and participate in interaction with other individuals.
Maintaining a clear understanding of how information and collaboration are to
work together, and, separately, recognizing different delivery methods for the
information and collaboration available on the Internet, individual Internet
users should feel challenged to understand their own relationship and
understanding of technology. Beyond understanding how a web page can appear on
a computer screen, educators and students alike need encouragement to gain an
understanding about the personal and original information that exists about
them on the Internet.
Our
understanding of technology—what it is, how to use it, and how to learn from
it—is important, as it allows us access to information, and may provide us the
ability to complete new and unique tasks. According to an interdisciplinary
2002 report, “technological literacy” may be defined as “three interdependent
dimensions—knowledge, ways of thinking and acting, and capabilities… Like
literacy in reading, mathematics, science, or history, the goal of
technological literacy is to provide people with the tools to participate
intelligently and thoughtfully in the world around them” (Committee on
Technological Literacy, National Academy of Engineering, National Research
Council, 2002, p. 3). This interaction with the “world around” individuals who embrace
skills of technological literacy are, by this definition, empowered, “intelligently
and thoughtfully,” through which the consumption of information is a rhetorical
and educative act—supported by likely only some degree of synchronous human
contact.
Jenkins
(2006) identifies a “participation gap” (p. 23) among those who use
technologies; whether individuals may be identified as digital immigrants or
digital natives does not matter unless application and use of technology is
evident. “Throughout the 1990s, the primary question was one of access. Today,
most Americans have some limited access to the Internet… through the public
library or the local school… As long as the focus remains on access, reform
remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about
participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices”
(Jenkins, p. 23). Understanding our opportunities to participate in the
creation of information on the Internet is critical to a new understanding of
technology in education; the Internet is the first and only global, participatory
medium, and its volume of information will continue to grow exponentially.
Individuals need to stay aware of ways to create new content using technology;
students and educators, regardless of their pedagogical focus, need to
understand how technology is changing our culture. “Convergence” is a term to
define how “the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and
its use is eroding” (Pool, 1983, as cited by Jenkins, 2006, p. 10). Technology
has helped change how specific streams of information are received and
utilized, and convergence is a term to help identify these changes. This
erosion is important to a variety of theorists and scholars, as well as to
those who seek a more clear understanding of the relationship between mass
media and technological literacy.
Neil
Postman (1993), in discussing the use of technology as a means to more
efficiently access a greater quantity of information, discusses the importance
of “control mechanisms [that] are needed to cope with new information” (p. 72).
Using an example of courses that are excluded from an educational institution’s
catalogue (p. 74), Postman (1993) structures an argument that identifies a
technological climate in which information “is no longer controllable, [and] a
general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs” (p. 72). He
defines “technopoly” as having “at its aim a grand reductionism in which human
life must find its meaning in machinery and technique… the submission of all
forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” (p. 52).
Previously, technology was viewed in society as a ‘means to an end,’ a tool
with which tasks may be accomplished, challenges faced, obstacles tackled. Individuals’
identities are at risk through what Postman names as a “grand reductionism,” as
the installation of meaning into actions and the generation of rhetoric renders
individual characteristics less important, in an environment in which “psychic
tranquility and social purpose” are at stake.
Should
Postman’s “technopoly” characterize present-day relationships between
individuals and the platforms which they utilize to communicate, use of and
interpretation of language becomes an important quality of creative and
personal expression. “Unlike broadcast
television or film, then, “resistant reading” is not the only available
strategy for digital media, because individual practitioners can produce their
own alternative forms. And unlike the theorists of film and television, at
least some new media theorists have the opportunity to become new media
practitioners” (Bolter, p. 23). The ‘resistance reading’ Bolter describes an
informational climate in which individuals participate and evaluate content they
and others have created; the collaboration between individual “practicioners”
is critical to Bolter’s characterization. Knowing the process necessary to
create a MySpace or Facebook page is valuable; more valuable is an individual’s
conscious, substantial, and purposeful participation within these networks. Even
more desirable is an understanding of how writers and others may help establish
norms of practice for new communication platforms.
Trends in how we use technologies to
create and share information are important, for individuals may continue to
embrace new ways to communicate with each other, with their communities, and
with our world. Neil Postman (1993) guards against the dissolution of
individuals’ original narratives, in an environment in which characteristics of
identity are surrendered. The ethical disaster of “technopoly” is a crisis of
representation; Postman described it as a
… story without
a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic
advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological
progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest
stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical
expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce
functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly. (p.
179)
This reliance on
individuals’ “technical expertise” may be well-represented by the definition of
technological literacy discussed in the previous section. Does this set of
skills—of methods of definition through online communication platforms—only
fulfill Postman’s nightmarish vision of sublimation, from being a society that
values personal expression, to one that seeks to “produce functionaries”?
Detailed comparison of online communication platforms—a comparison to include
Facebook, Twitter, and Google applications—may yeild useful analysis of each
site, for its ability to promote “efficiency, interest, and economic advance”
exclusively.
With basic technological knowledge,
individuals are likely to make choices regarding their expression and
identification, within the confines of a given platform: even prior to the
World Wide Web, thousands of individuals used home computers to communicate via
telephone modems and both commerical and homegrown bulletin board services. As
these platforms have evolved, individuals have participated in each
manifestation of online communication—and have helped refine future products
and applications. While present-day software may request users’ participation
in constructive criticism towards the revision of future products, little
technological literacy is required in the exchange: the feedback provided is
essential towards the continuation of a commodity, a full marketplace of
technological challenge and innovation.
The role of the individual in both
the construction and propagation digital communication platforms is critical:
the climate of identity construction in this effort is increasingly
complicated. In “Differance,” Derrida explores the value of definition, of
seeing “the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of
its characteristics—signification as the differance
of temporization” (p. 9). What is present and what is real to an individual
becomes a question of presence and recognition, of symbols and language.
Seeking the origin of language and speech, Derrida’s action of differance is theoretical and linguistic:
it is “the name we might give to the ‘active,’ moving discord of different
forces, and of differences of forces” (p. 18). While the interpretation of
individuals’ actions through the formal and symbolic study in the “human
sciences” may aid in understanding mythopoetics, Derrida’s coined term differance is itself a duality, one with
a “strange cleavage” (p. 19). While Derrida’s characterization keeps both what
is “economical and non-economical, the same and the entirely other”
simultaneously—one cannot be part of both the technologically-enabled and the
luddite crowds. Derrida’s primary concern seems to be observers’ over-reaching
perceptions and assumptions in the construction of knowledge and meaning: “the
‘unconscious’,” as a metaphysical example, “is no more a ‘thing’ than it is any
other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness”
(p. 21).
Should our abilities to establish
and acknowledge our differences—what is “the same and the entirely other”—in
our online rhetoric, individuals’ success may yield abilities of language and
expression. The “postmodern condition” described by Derrida may be an
individual’s ability, through perception, however skewed and enlightened by
previous experience, to come no closer to an explicit understanding of meaning,
either through aesthetic illumination or mythic (perhaps epic) repetition. Bolter
(2003) wondered if, upon the advent of our improved electronic communication
technologies, scholars would “be willing to redefine scholarship to include the
multilinear structures of hypertext or (what may be even more radical) the
multiplicity of representational modes afforded by digital multimedia? There
are powerful institutional forces working against change: for example, the
tenure system in the United States, which recognizes printed books and articles
as the highest forms of scholarly production. But would anything lead us to
expect change?” (p. 23). If scholars of humanities, philosophy, and critical
theory were to answer Bolter’s call, and endorse and “expect change” from this,
our continuing revolution in our economic, technological, and informational
climate, those scholars might discover the need for change within themselves,
of how they comprehend the intellectual activities of humans these days: there
is at work both a pervasive hypertextuality as well as a new culture of
identity construction.
Cornered
by attempts to describe the integration of poststructural interpretation of
television, Bolter (2003) asserts that a redefinition of critical media theory,
after Derrida, has become necessary, due to technology: “many of the qualities
that the poststructuralists had been claiming for print—the instability and the
intertextuality of the text, the loss of authority of the author, and the
changed relationship between author, text, and reader—were realized in a
literal or operational way in the computer” (p. 18). While the difference between individuals may
continue to provide a theoretical framework for the construction of identity in
the present-day public sphere, Bolter supports a reconception for tenets of
identity construction because of, and in recognition of, technology’s
influence: a new ‘condition’ for our identification and exchange of unique
expression.
The characterization of the public
sphere, and the means by which marginalization based on recognition of identity
continues to take place, is important to a variety of thinkers across
disciplines. Cornel West (1994), in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,”
establishes a valuable framework for the publicity of identity, one that,
through technology, has only become more pervasive: a theory and mode of inquiry
he names “demystification” (p. 76).
Demystification tries to keep track
of the complex dynamics of institutional other related
power structures in order to
disclose options and alternatives for tranformative praxis; it also attempts to grasp the way in which
representational strategies are creative responses to novel circumstances and conditions. In this way, the
central role of human agency (always
enacted under circumstances not of one’s choosing)—be it in the critic, artist
or constituency and audience—is
accented (p. 76).
West’s framework
for a theoretical demystification of identity came as the Internet, and a new
connectivity of expression, was still in its infancy: the “complex dynamics” of
online chat were yet to evolve fully, and the transmission of images and voices
across digital connections was just beginning a new form of archiving, for the
extension and creation of human knowledge.West’s theory of demystification is
important to an understanding of our present-day methods of identity creation:
the “complex dynamics” of power at work in our spheres of discourse and
expression has challenged what West named as “the central role of human
agency.” No matter the roles or groups we choose to adopt as our own, the means
by which our identities are shared have continued to weather “novel
circumstances and conditions”—namely, the rise of unprecedented means of human
communication and expression. The demystification, and full ‘tracking’ of the
relationships of power and authority Cornel
West’s “New Cultural Politics of Difference”: “distinct articulations of
talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align
themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized and disorganized people
in order to empower and enable social action.”
Redefining the
Function of Authority and the Construction of Knowledge
In Lyotard’s two-fold construction
of knowledge, efficiency and performativity become criteria for what knowledge
and experience humanity may consider legitimate and useful, of value and
meaning: “Power is not only good performativity, but also effective
verification and good verdicts” (p. 47). An individual’s relationship to
technology is critical in Lyotard’s human world of inquiry, a world built of
procedural explorations and critical, selective knowledge consumption—actions
our information networks have come to excel at performing. Lyotard appears to
predict the movement during the last decades of the twentieth century in
support of vocational education in American public high schools, as well as the
rise of community college enrollment during this decade and the last: he
predicts knowledge “will be served “a la carte” to adults who are either
already working or expect to be, for the purpose of improving their skills and
chances of promotion, but also to help them acquire information, languages, and
language games allowing them both to widen their occupational horizons and to
articulate their technical and ethical experience” (p. 49). Our immersion in
the “language games” of another—the intersection of individual narratives,
which are likely (if anything) to hold power on a mystical plane—comes
alongside the responsibility of knowledge.
Here, I am intrigued by the value
Lyotard places on dissensus as the root of innovation, not innovation
itself—paralogy—and how our present culture does, or doesn’t, assimilate or
stomp out dissensus, the “pragmatics of knowledge” (p. 61). Lyotard found the
moments when scientists (and governments) appear on television to announce ‘discoveries’
likely to be efforts that make “epic” (p. 10) the knowledge-finder’s narrative;
these moments are important not for human ego but for the transmission of
knowledge. While university policies are central to Lyotard’s discussion, the
nature and method of human inquiry, and changes to the construction of
knowledge through technology may be one of Lyotard’s most notable insights. In
my research area, music, productive dissensus—brought about by new ways of
producing, distributing, and making money from original music—is alive and
well, and was a large part of why Wikipedia went black yesterday, as content
providers seek more control over the distribution and resale of recorded media.
Lawmakers were trying to save a dying industry, one built around record stores
and not digital virtualization, in trying to wrangle up those who peddle or
simply pass around freely copyrighted content: a new pragmatics of knowledge.
Should the “author function […]
disappear […] in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once
again function according to another mode” (Foucault, p. 119), we that seek to
build our own creative expression and fictionalization of our experience, our
authority to do so is, in Foucault’s view, trumped by our narrative’s historical
impact. The stories we tell, however fictional, if not spoken with an authority
that appears inaccessible in Foucault’s characterization, may merely relish and
reiterate what has been said before. Foucault’s most succinct delineation of
this may be on page 113: those who write fiction are locked in step with
“jurisdictional and institutional” systems, and are not, in fact, “spontaneous
attribution” but doomed to production through a “series of specific and complex
operations”. These, his first and third points regarding authorship and
‘authority’ on p. 113, combine to establish a sense of Foucault’s assessment of
the relationship between the creative artist and their subject in seeking a
more meaningful society; the artist’s fictional representation of our
limitations and conscriptions as a whole may be part of what Foucault is
guarded against—that institutions and systems may come to represent themselves
a commodification of expression, a means to which no end is apparent.
Technology and
the Language of Identity Construction
A dilemma similar to that of the
parallel between subjectification of the individual and traditional power
dynamism exists in the construction of identity, as feminism, a specific
ideological movement, has suffered from the fragmentation of groups based on
sub-categorization and individual details (p. 166). Butler seeks the
acknowledgement of a metaphysical centrality and “psychic center” to gender,
calling necessary a total reconceptualization of identity categories, one that
supports the language that we use, and have available. In this call, Butler
hopes we may find our identities constructed using language that itself
constitutes “a site of permanent openness and resignifiability” (p. 166); this
“site” within one’s self-concept is critical to this extension and evolution of
feminist identity, and the development of useful and salient critical theory.
In her 1990 essay, Butler advocates not for a blanketed
postmodern nature to identity, but for the subjection of “notions of the body
and materiality to a deconstructive critique” (p. 168). Butler calls for a
situation in which our physicality remains at the core of the construction of
gender, but rests prior to any preconception or categorization: that the terms
we use to define our identities might more fully take root in a mobilization of identity, the
fulfillment of which is “productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative” (p. 168). This latter term
would become utilized by scholars and theorists, to encapsulate Butler’s
reconceptualization of gender and identity; in a 2011 video interview, Butler
further defined the characteristic of performative identity as “producing a
series of effects […] our acting or our role-playing is crucial to the gender
that we are and the gender that we present to the world” (Butler, Feb. 2011).
These “effects” of our identity, our behavior and our choices, may not
necessarily be in line with previous, institutionalized concepts of gender, but
specific and unique to individuals.
Butler identifies the construction
of identity as a process of experience and as having its own significability,
to the individual at hand as well as the institutions that individual functions
within and around. “I think there is a real question for me about how such
gender norms get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt
them and to overcome the police function. It’s my view that gender is
culturally formed, but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom” (Butler, Feb.
2011). Within this “domain” rests responsibility for Butler’s construction of
identity, beyond contextualization and categorization.
One example of Butler’s centrality
of the body to her construction of identity came through in remarks she
delivered on October 23, 2011, in Washington Square Park in New York City, in
support of the Occupy Movement. In striking irony, Butler delivered her message
through the a “human microphone,” or “people’s mic” technique employed at
Occupy Movement sites, to subvert regulations that prohibit electric
amplification. In this poetic speech, Butler’s call for physicality in protest
illuminates and gives example to supplement her theoretical framework
established decades earlier: “It
matters/that as bodies/we arrive together in public/As bodies we suffer/we
require food/and shelter/and as bodies we require one another/in dependence/and
desire/So this is/a politics of the public body” (Butler, Oct. 2011).
Conclusion: The
Ethics of Identity Construction in the 21st Century
What
“cultural protocols and practices” surround secondary students’ use of the
Internet, or their cell phone? The rituals and habits that develop around the
use of technology may become critical elements of students’ and educators’
identities. Sufficiently represented by
web sites and social networking profiles, technology users can exist, interact,
and share information in new, individual, unique venues: daily profile updates
on social networking sites, blogging, and other Internet applications allow
students to generate information almost constantly.
Discussing
Jenkins’ (2006) “participation gap,” it is important to remember that the
media—or, the streams of public information available—evolved during the
twentieth century in a predominantly linear fashion. Newspaper reporters’ stories
appeared in newspapers, and television broadcasters appeared on television.
These streams of information, while requiring users’ participation, created a
one-way network of information delivery.
But once again, this has not been all that is needed. When you think about how the Web is today and dream about how it might be, you must, as always, consider both technology and people. Future technology should be smarter and more powerful, of course. But you cannot ethically turn your attention to developing it without also listening to those people who don't use the Web at all, or who could use it if only it were different in some way… The Web has been largely designed by the developed world for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all. (Berners-Lee, 2008, para. 15)
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