Ian Hill's Seminar Blog

I found the most compelling section of the first half of Miller and Slater’s Trini internet ethnography to be their brief description of “expansive potential,” a sub-category of “dynamics of objectification,” owing to their preview of a utopian cyber-Catholicism based in computer interconnectivity where the Internet “is the truest image and instrument of God’s purpose for humanity” (13). However, as Miller and Slater’s book unfolds through the first four chapters, the “expansive potential” for Trini internet use does not seem very expansive at all. Rather, Miller and Slater go to great lengths to demonstrate that Trini internet practice seems to reify traditional societal norms already prevalent. In chapter three, for instance, the relationships developed through internet use seem neither utopian nor dystopian, but as the authors admit, “mundane and unselfconscious” (13). As I read chapters three and four, I was on the lookout for Trinidadians “glimps[ing] quite new things to be,” but these “new things” always resembled banal models of already normative behavior, like finding different types of employment and/or enjoying, on occasion, internet anonymity. Thus, given the banality of Trinidadians “novel” use of internet technology, I was not surprised to read that Miller and Slater never reprise the concept of “expansive potential” in the first half of their book.

As a result of their lack of addressing this sub-element of one of their main dynamic categories, I wonder how useful “expansive potential” is for their project as a whole. It seems to be somewhat antithetical to the majority of Miller and Slater’s research in the first half of their book, because they concentrate on depicting Trini internet usage in practice rather than futuristic models of behavior. So, as Miller and Slater highlight family interconnectivity, internet dating practice, liming, etc, none of these practices points toward Trinis becoming anything radically new, whether utopian or dystopian. Life in general for Trinis, as Miller and Slater portray it, seems to go on pretty much as it had before, only with the internet as a novel and important communication technology that replaces telephony and letter writing.

As a result of the lack of empirical support for “expansive potential,” this category does not seem useful and/or applicable to their study in the first half of the book, since the “quite new things” that people/spaces may become are already normative. Furthermore, when speculating about long-term relationships between cousins communicating via the internet, Miller and Slater write: “the time depth of our study is too shallow for confident predictions” (60). If their study lacks “time depth,” then I don’t understand how they can expect to defend a category of analysis that depends on expansive time and speculation about future technology use. Also, Miller and Slater make other claims that seem to disparage any rigorous study of “expansive potential”: “We simply cannot predict the future impact of the Internet except to suggest that the impact is likely to be different in each of these diverse areas [commerce, religion, and nationalism]” (53). Thus, it already seems like Trini internet use, despite its newness, is already “mundane and taken for granted” (14).

The lack of support for “expansive potential” throughout the first half of their book also made me sensitive to how little the two authors reprise the other main dynamics highlighted in the introduction. On occasion, Miller and Slater would point out how a certain aspect of Trini internet use corroborates one of their “dynamics,” but this usually seems more of an afterthought than a guiding principle, which is surprising given the emphasis the two writers put on the dynamics at the beginning of the book.

Posted by ianhill2 at 09:46 AM | Permalink

Ian Hill
2/19/07
SPCM 529
Dr. Sandvig
The Bar Code and the Ghost in the Machine: Alternative Uses of Inducive Technology and the Force of Machine Rhetoric
Copy the image of the bar code, reproduce it on stickers with your laser printer, stick them over consumer products’ UPC (universal pricing code) tags, “purchase” products for a small fraction of stores’ intended prices, repeat process, disseminate the alternative bar codes. George Grinsted describes this phenomenon of bar code fabrication:
ReCode’s [a barcode fabrication website] appropriation of the humble
barcode was an attempt to highlight corporate crime through a humorous
parody of Priceline.com’s ‘name your own price’ website . . . Consumers
could use the website to print out replacement barcodes for goods they
believed were overpriced. Armed with their replacement barcodes,
consumers could cover a product’s real barcode and check out, preferably
using a self-service checkout, Despite the creators of Re-Code being under
threat from Wal-mart attorneys and suspending their site’s service a
simple Google search for ‘Cracking Barcodes’ shows that the techniques
used by Re-Code are still available and in use. (109)
According to the Re-Code.com website on February 13, 2007, “The site is temporarily down while we decide how to deal with the latest threat from Wal-mart attorneys.” However, the two other similar barcode fabrication manuals that Grinsted cites are still accessible: totse.com and addict3d.org.
Thesis: Technological apparatuses have rhetorical force; one way to observe this force is to examine how the designed properties of apparatuses suggest alternative uses for technology to the user. Or, In order to explore how technological objects possess rhetorical force, I will engage in a rhetorical analysis of barcode technology.
This alternative contextual methodology does not imply that traditional concepts of rhetorical context do not matter or that rhetorical context does not determine technology practice; neither does it intend to justify any type of technological determinism or centrism.
I also do not intend to suggest that machines possess agency, in the human sense by anthropomorphizing them with a power of rhetorical inventiveness. As Elaine Scarry writes, “The conception that artifacts create people is right. The conception that that creative power originates in the artifact is wrong. Only the second half of the total arc of action is being seen” (311).
Context thus evokes obvious determining facets of machine rhetoric. For example, in this study contextual dimensions such as Priceline.com’s motto: “Name your own price,” have immediate bearing on this project. However, machines have rhetorical power through the design of their engineering specs and through their physical operation in the presence of operators. The ghost in the machine—the ghost of the designer—with a kind of half-agency (initial agency combined with a loss of agency once a technology is released to the public), communicates ideas to future innovating designers that the original designer did not know he/she produced. Hence, the context on which I will focus is strictly technological because I want to show the machines in themselves are rhetorical: machines suggest alternative uses of themselves to innovative users, so this study brackets off traditional questions of context to explore the rhetorical force of the apparatus. [insert photos of car/washer and barcodes] In other words, the design and functioning machine alter the behavior of users by putting their bodies to work producing new machines; machines induce action in humans.

Background/History

Barcode technology combines telematic and optoelectronic systems. Paul Virilio defines telematic as “the set of technologies and services using both information technology and telecommunications for collecting, storing, processing and communicating information,” and optoelectronic as “the branch of technology involving the convergence of optical and electronic technology and concerned with generation, processing and detection of optical signals that represent electrical quantities; major areas of application include communications and computing” (152 and 151).
[Insert history here]
Theory Section

At this introductory point I see multiple course readings applying to this project: To demonstrate some other examples of machine rhetoric, I can look at the unintended ramifications of technology design/use by using TV, radio, telephones, internet, etc. Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all provide examples, and all three also provide some analysis of why/how those technologies suggested their alternative uses. I’m not too familiar with the books we haven’t read yet, but if they analyze alternative uses for technology, they are obviously relevant. I’ll check out those books/authors you mentioned in class too.
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry makes some cogent arguments about how “the interior structure of the artifact” possesses a certain amount of force that affects the behavior of an object’s user. She does not make specific references to her theories’ applicability to technological artifacts, but they still have implicit relevance since her theories apply to all objects that humans find useful in a process whereby artifacts become sites of human projection and reciprocation. The two sites of projection and reciprocation, in Scarry’s model, demonstrate the force artifacts possess to affect human behavior: “In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object . . . for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers” (307, emphasis hers). She terms the artifacts “lever” and “fulcrum”:
in order to underscore that it is itself only a midpoint in total action: the
act of human creation includes both the creating of the object and the
object’s recreating of human being, and it is only because of the second
that the first is undertaken: that ‘recreating’ action is accomplished by the
human makers and must be included in any account of the phenomenon of
making . . . the object . . . is invested with the power of creating and exists
only to complete this task of recreating us . . . (310).
Scarry also offers several other descriptions of this process: “the made object is simply the made-locus across which the power of creation is magnified and redirected back onto its human agents who are now caught up in the cascade of self-revision they have themselves authored” (323). Furthermore, “The object-as-lever also exposes . . . its nonimmunity from its own action. The imagination’s object is not simply to alter the external world, or to alter the human being in his or her full array of capacities and needs, but also and more specifically, to alter the power of alteration itself, to act on and continually revise the nature of creating” (324). Thus, first “an existing object, by recreating the maker, itself necessitates a new act of objectified projection . . . Second, just as the sentient needs and acuities are projected into objects, so objects themselves contain both capacities and needs that sponsor additional artifacts” (321). Scarry turns to invention to explain herself: “An invention may have a latent power that suggest a new application and so requires a new modification of the original invention” (321, emphasis hers). For example, “as the bodily lens of the eye is projected in a camera, eventually a new kind of camera that can enter into the interior of the human body (and film the events of conception, the passage of blood through the heart, or the action of the retina)” (321). Thus, Scarry describes the latent power as one of suggestion: the machine suggests further creation.
Fischer includes a number of relevant concepts in the introduction to Calling America.
In Television, Raymond Williams demonstrates how the ghosts in the machines of communication technologies suggest alternative uses. He concludes that the “social history of broadcasting” that he relates in the opening pages of the book “can be discussed on its own, at the levels of practice and principle. Yet it is unrealistic to extract from it another and perhaps more decisive process, through which, in particular economic situations, a set of scattered technical devices became an applied technology and then a social technology” (18). Williams then suggests two examples of how political economic regimes use broadcasting technology: “A fascist regime might quickly see the use of broadcasting for direct political and social control. But that, in any case, was when the technology had already been developed elsewhere. In capitalistic democracies, the thrust for conversion from scattered techniques to a technology was not political but economic” (18). “Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content . . . it is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content” (18-19, emphasis his). Thus, economic pressures molded British broadcasting in a capitalistic fashion, but the entertainment content that came to dominate the culture of broadcasting came about due to broadcasters appropriation of radio and television for alternative uses not envisioned by the systems’ creators.
This process of appropriating communication technology for alternate uses is also visible in Williams’s description of user interaction with commercial broadcasting. Although corporations and broadcasters attempted to regulate radio and television behavior in Britain, not all viewers and listeners were passive absorbers of entertainment. Rather, radio and television technology suggested alternate uses to whom “controllers and programmers” considered “subjects”: if [viewers] were exposed by need in new ways, they were also exposed to certain uncontrollable opportunities. This complicated interaction is still very much in the process of working itself out” (134). In other words, “A controlled intention became an uncontrolled effect” (134-135). An apparatuses original design thus has determining effects on how a population uses technology both intended and unexpected. On one hand, the “element of intention is fundamental, but it is not exclusive. Original intention corresponds with the known or desired practices of a particular social group, and the pace and scale of development will be radically affected by that group’s specific intentions and its relative strength” (132). On the other hand, “at many subsequent stages other social groups, sometimes with other intentions or at least with different scales of priority, will adopt and develop the technology, often with different purposes and effects. Further, there will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention” (132-133). To demonstrate his point, Williams turns to the alternative uses for explosives in both industry and warfare, but his more salient example points out the participatory democratic uses that have developed from television technology, like the televised town-meeting that “is a radically alternative definition of the relations between ‘broadcasters’ and ‘viewers’” (137). In turn, Williams sees the redefinition of technology practice as a place of social action: “whether the theory and the practice can be changed will depend not on the fixed properties of its institutions, but on a continually renewable social action and struggle” (138). The suggested uses of television technology thus have a certain amount of creative power that can alter human society by providing technology users with the impetus to alter and redefine the power relations that produced the original apparatus with the producers’ requisite intentions.
Toward bar code theory: In “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin writes: “What matters . . . is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (233). DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer’ celebrates Benjamin’s famous essay, and reproduces the above quotation multiple times, including the back cover. The editing of this book also reinforces the cogency of barcode fabrication and Benjamin’s essay by positioning the above quotation directly after Grinsted’s previously-quoted description of this “appropriated technology.”

Barcode Rhetorical Analysis

This section will concentrate on barcode technology and assume a “black box” user-familiarity with computer sticker printing and large stores’ self-service check out lanes. It will not be a training manual in barcode fabrication, but it will show that the key to barcoding’s black box is readily available online, in addition to the more restricted specialist environments of academic and professional engineering. Though barcode fabrication may be complex, they can be produced by following the directions, like cooking up a gourmet meal from recipes. Everyone could collaborate.
So what does the barcode suggest in its design? Rigidity/repetitiveness in its code combined with simplicity in its design, ubiquity, consumerism, etc. This section will be the heart of the paper.

Conclusion: Machine Rhetoric

The combination of barcodes with computer sticker printing has propelled the following social actions, or the current context. The fabrication of barcodes has become legitimated by specialists and tacitly approved by our legal apparatus: The IEEE and Indiana University websites show how the fabrication of barcodes has become institutionalized. Furthermore, Legal disclaimers absolve the barcode fabrication websites from liability for thieving/producing (depending on one’s position) collaborators.
Bar code technology has undergone further radical transformation with the combination of its design with radio technology to produce the controversial RFID movement as commercialized by the VeriChip corporation (www.verichipcorp.com).

Bibliography

“As an Art - HOW TO CRACK, by Bengaly, A TUTORIAL.” Addict3d.org. Accessed 2/13/07. .
Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Reflections. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978. 220-238.
Douglas
Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Grinstead, George. “Appropriated Technology Wiki.” DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer.’ New York: Autonomedia, 2005. 106-109.
Re-Code.com: .
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schutz, Pit. “The Producer as Power User.” DATA browser 02: Engineering Culture: On ‘The Author as (Digital) Producer.’ New York: Autonomedia, 2005. 111-125.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Verso, 1997.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Image Credits
“Barcode Number 5.” Area 10 Math and Technology Project. .

Posted by ianhill2 at 09:02 PM | Permalink

Overall, I think Claude Fischer’s decline argument in chapter four of America Calling lacks rigor. In particular, Fischer writes in circles regarding the role of rural political economy in determining the abandonment of telephones between 1920 and 1940 by farm subscribers. Fischer rejects several general claims (declining interest in the technology, the agricultural crisis, telephone subscription rates, unstable independent phone companies, and industry anti-farmer collaboration) that explain the decrease in telephone subscription, but concludes his decline narrative by amalgamating these different claims: “Perhaps the best conclusion that can be drawn from these testimonies is that the disinterest of the large companies, the poor quality of many mutuals’ service, and the increasing availability of other means of communication set the conditions for the decline of rural telephony, which was then triggered by decreasing farm income and increasing real costs” (103). Fischer’s thus rejects a number of claims only to argue for their combination; he presents no new argument.

However, Fischer’s subsequent statistical analysis of the decline narrative ends up supporting these same general claims, but even though he supports the other general claims, he ends up reiterating the importance of financial strain over and over again so that he seems to emphasize this one claim over all the others. The financial argument becomes dominant. For example, he writes: “Within this technical and political economy, financial strains led many American farmers to abandon their telephones,” and “Faced with reduced incomes and higher real costs after 1920, many disconnected their telephones” (104 and 105). This only serves to demonstrate that all technology consumption probably declined during the Depression as depicted by the decline of automobile ownership, in general, in the early 1930s at almost the exact same rate as telephone ownership according to his graph on p. 44.

Furthermore, Fischer’s statistical analysis seems to blind him to other socio-historical and technological factors that may have led farmers to give up their phones, such as the ramifications of the Depression for rural mobility and the necessity of transportation. As the Depression forced farmers off the land in search of alternate stable or seasonal employment, they would no longer have use for telephones, whereas their need for transportation increased. Also, the great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in full swing at this point. If they had phones on the farm, they would have abandoned them, and if they re-subscribed in the cities, then they would contribute to rising urban telephone usage. The same is true of “Okies” relocating to cities on the west coast. Thus, for many farmers, transportation was more important than telephony, “a luxury, a disposable good,” as Fischer aptly comments (114).

Thus, Fischer’s concentration on users’ consumption of telephone service, as a method, perhaps leads him to downplay the role of the Depression in causing the decline of usage among farmers, even as he makes multiple arguments for the importance of financial stress in causing the decline. It is a conflicted narrative that asserts multiple determining factors while returning again and again to an economic argument.

Posted by ianhill2 at 03:54 PM | Permalink

After the boy wonder Walter J. Willenborg became the toast of the town, the many amateur radio operators throughout the U.S. became even more enamored of their new hobby, and they began communicating their satisfaction among themselves with their homemade equipment. At the same time, even increasing numbers of amateurs began tinkering with household objects at hand to construct their own sets from rolled newspapers, “old cans, umbrella ribs, discarded bottles, and various other articles” (198). To this new amateur class, radio technology mostly served as a method to talk about sports, bicker, and play practical jokes. However, “This was an active, committed, and participatory audience,” an audience that consisted of self-made operators (205). Tom(Swift)Foolery and the occasional heroism of operators like Jack Binns gave way to the transmission of increasing amounts of serious content. News of election results gave way to critiques of government. News of sporting events gave way to news of social injustice. “A revolutionary social phenomenon was emerging. A large radio audience was taking shape whose attitude and involvement were unlike those of other, traditionally passive, audiences” (205). The radio offered a brand new participatory communication technology that only cost a pile of household garbage and a power source to buy into, despite the competing claims of commercial entrepreneurs like Marconi, Stone, De Forest, and Fessenden.

As much as these entrepreneurs tried to turn radio into a business, the almost free access to the technology granted by its conviviality foiled their attempts at every turn. Why would anyone pay for a product that their nine-year-old son could construct in the basement? However, future attempts by the giant telecommunications giants like GE, Bell, and Western Union proved somewhat successful as they adapted radio to their own business models by marketing inexpensive pre-assembled radio sets and advertiser-driven entertainment broadcasting. What happened to the great inventors? Marconi, driven to commercial defeat by the amateur operators, never stopped tinkering and earned a living by working for the London social elite, broadcasting their garden parties to friends in Wolverhampton. P.T. Barnum hired De Forest to broadcast a circus variety show. Fessenden got a job with the Navy.

The U.S. Navy never got a handle on wireless broadcasting. The constant pranks of ragamuffin amateur operators, the dunderheaded operators who squeaked through basic training, and the Navy’s inability to overcome patent regulations, despite their best efforts at thievery, led naval communications experts to abandon wireless audio technology for a much more promising technology: televisual communication.

Despite worries that the radio spectrum would become a miasma of anarchic cacophony, amateur and commercial practice became self-regulated: the interpersonal communications of various random operators, the commercial entertainment funded by the culture industry, and the emergency communication needed by local and national authorities all found plenty of bandwidth on what is now known as CB, broadband, shortwave, am, fm, and the innumerable channels taken up by remote control garage door openers. Free access to radio technology and mass communication never bowed down to corporate or military pressure, so we can all build our sets out of newspapers and umbrellas and start communicating.

Posted by ianhill2 at 09:59 AM | Permalink