Showing posts with label actor networks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label actor networks. Show all posts

Friday, July 5, 2013

Friending the Man of the Crowd



Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd" by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), first printed in 1923 (from Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar Allan Poe’s story fragment, “The Man of the Crowd” (published in 1840 when Poe was living between Baltimore, Richmond and Philadelphia), begins with the narrator peering out onto a London street from a café, making observations about passersby: typologies of urban dwellers (“the tribe of clerks,” the “race of swell pick-pockets”), divisions of the population into age, gender, race and ethnicity.  Finally, though, his gaze alights on an enigmatic character that eludes easy classification: “decrepit” and “feeble,” yet “he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged”; “without apparent aim,” yet characterized by “blood thirstiness” and armed with a “dagger”.  Seduced by these paradoxical attributes, Poe’s narrator follows the man until sunrise, without, though, gaining any insight into the man’s history, nor of his ultimate aims. 
            Within this brief fragment, we can see multiple approaches to the urban collide: the first, the assignation of types.  The second, an ethnographic approach premised on direct observation of a single individual walking the streets.  One attempts to make sense of the whole—to say something, in this case, about London’s (or Baltimore’s or Philadelphia’s) urban population and the growth of a heterosocial, public space in the mid-19th century (Walkowitz 1992).  The second, the specificity of the individual in a particular place: what one could call the “daily round” of the individual.  But both approaches prove inadequate to understanding the enigmatic man of the crowd. 
            But what if Poe’s narrator had tried a network approach?  What if one could show that the man of the crowd’s apparently aimless wanderings were, instead, the outlines of a networked city connecting multitudes of nodes consisting of places and people?  What if one could analyze those connections?  As many have shown, the city is, literally, the sum of its networks, assemblages of place and connection that are simultaneously larger and smaller than the geo-political boundaries of the urban (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010).  Within this concatenation, people and place can be connected in myriad ways: the “strong” and “weak” ties that form the basis of much of social network analysis, but also in the form of a variety of “latencies” that, as Haythornthwaite (2002: 389) suggests, multiply in the age information and communication technologies and add new potentials to the elaboration of the urban networks around us.  In a networked world, Poe’s narrator might be able to exploit these connections in order to connect to his man in the crowd and make sense of his world. 
            And, indeed, this is what happens all of the time in urban life.  Armed with various ICT’s (information and communication technologies), people trace complicated networks that include physical structures, transportation, socialites, technologies, economies and symbolic communications.  But by tweeting (or using me2day or yozm), posting to blogs, utilizing geolocational apps and uploading photos and videos, people multiply possibilities for place- and sense-making, mobilizing virtual connections that might open up new possibilities for physical or spatial connections, that might make the strange into the famiilar.   
           This is an important difference from Poe's time.  Poe's "man of the crowd" and Baudelaire's "flaneur" depend upon a uniquely urban condition: spending one's life surrounded by complete strangers.  On the other hand, in our ICT-inflected lives, nobody can be a "complete" stranger.  Rather, in the fuzzy logic of social media, people on the street present different quanta of latency--different potentialities of connection that we may or may not be able to exploit.  When we attend a rally and marvel at the disparate groups that (momentarily) cohere in a place, we're witnessing the activation of some of those latent ties, and, most probably, their rapid dissolution.  

Monday, July 4, 2011

multimedia city


It’s December of 2010 in Seoul. A woman in her 20’s has taken a seat in the part of the subway reserved for the elderly and physically disabled (noyak chwasŏk). An elderly man approaches, expecting her to relinquish the seat (yangbo) to him. Instead, she refuses. “I’m sitting here—sit somewhere else!” An argument ensues. As luck would have it, a passenger sitting across from the disturbance tapes the whole episode on his cell phone, and within a short time, uploads the video onto the Internet, where it quickly gets cross-posted across hundreds of forums and blogs. Some netizens find her cyworld account (a social media site ubiquitous in South Korea) and start blasting her with abuse until she’s forced to close it down. Others recognize her from school. Someone says that she’s pregnant—and that’s why she deserved the seat. Finally, more established new sources in Korea (e.g., Oh My News) pick up the story—contextualizing the disturbance against societal change in a way not dissimilar (and perhaps all too similar) to what the blogs had been saying just days before. The incident of “Rude-speech Girl” (panmal nyŏ) focuses critique on several perceived problems in Korean society: the alienation of the city, the generational divide, the replacement of the multi-generational household with the nuclear family. But it also opens a door onto a shifting, kaleidoscope city.

It’s been over ten years now since the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai introduced “mediascapes” to anthropology—or not exactly, since anthropologists had engaged media many times before (think Hortense Powdermaker’s work in Hollywood: the Dream Factory). That essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” opened up a productive inquiry into an urban ecumene that exceeded geo-political boundaries in significant “scapes” that linked (and decoupled) one place from another.

Built upon these disjunctures (which hardly form a simple, mechanical global 'infrastructure' in any case) are what I have called ‘mediascapes’ and 'ideoscapes', though the latter two are closely related landscapes of images. ‘Mediascapes’ refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre- electronic), their audience (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. (35)



With Appadurai as provocateur, anthropologists looked to the intersections of people and what Guy Debord called “society of the spectacle”: global media, journalism, internetworked communications. The anthropology of mediascapes as a cottage industry extended anthropological consciousness beyond locality into global spaces.

The city is key to this—indeed, as many have argued, the city’s modernity coincides with the birth of media. Accordingly, the city develops as a particular way of knowing, of desiring, of seeing and of being seen. Photography appears as “an important placebo to the looming problem of cultural memory” (McQuire 2008: 34). Media represents new “forms of cultural display” to a population forever estranged from the medieval city (38). The “imagined community” of the nation is said to be premised on the architecture of print media—as well as the media of the state.
But here is where the bundled metaphors of Appadurai’s mediascapes fall apart—so helpful to think about the extension 19th century modernity into the mass mediated urban of the 20th century. Haussmannization means the top-down structuring of the experience of the urban—mediascapes extend that logic of control to mass media. But what to make of “rude-speech girl”? Is the primary function of the social media here representational? Are they about the production of images of reality? Are these “mediascapes” tracing a kind of representational architecture?

Many assumptions about the functions of media are limited by—imprisoned in—their spatial metaphors. The “media city” appears as a series of overlays sitting on top of the physical city, where we “leave” the physical to enjoin the “virtual”. But the multimedia city can’t be reduced to a kind of nonce-space: it’s primary functions are relational, temporal, phatic. Likewise, “virtual” and “real” shift back and forth in a way that resists awkward, “cyberspace” metaphors from Web 1.0 days. Here, “real” and “virtual” endlessly interpellate each other—non-Euclidean topologies, perhaps. Finally, the power relations are a good deal murkier than the media of previous eras of modernity. To be sure, the “rude speech girl” incident shows capital in the ascendent, neo-liberal technologies penetrating deep into the cortex of everyday relationships. But that said, neat algebras of media producers, media consumers, of domination and resistance, fail to describe the messy scrum of productions, reproductions and para-productions. On the other hand, the fault lines revealed in this episode—between older and younger generations, between gender identities—remind us that we haven’t “transcended” anything; indeed, to assume that would be to fall back upon bankrupt, spatial metaphors. That is, far from some break with modernity, “rude speech girl” continues the frisson of modernity into new, recurvate technologies that double back onto older identities and relationships.

Anthropology of the Multimedia City

How do we come to grips with the multimedia city? On the one hand, “rude speech girl” resists totalizing representation—lines of flight extend and multiply media into fractal complexities that cannot be reduced to a single, authoritative account where ultimate significance can be “mapped” against physical and social space. On the other hand, “rude speech girl” is an excess of representation—images, discourse, endless commentary, infinite regress. Finally, “representation” here may be less important than the capacity of multimedia to connect people together: the formation of networks of strong, weak and virtual ties that momentarily congeal around the production/reproduction/dissemination of multimedia. In actually, all of those goals and media effects coincide in behaviors that are as much about the performance of the self as the representation of the other.

The only way to accomplish an anthropology of the multimedia city is to intervene in that efflorescence—the way to the multimedia city is through the multimedia city. When we “intervene” here, it is not to arrest the viral movement of social media, but simply to generate the possibilities for different connections against entropic fields that will proliferate endlessly before finally collapsing on themselves. Not, in other words, to become media “producers” but to generate nodal constellations against those media productions.

Ultimately, the goals of an anthropology of the multimedia city may seem merely tautological: the multimedia city itself. But there’s more to it than that: the production of difference against a field of meaning that is as much about connection as it is about disconnection. That is, people weigh-in, re-post, re-mix, link—but in ways that exclude critiques against a neo-liberal development that atomizes and alienates the human even as it connects people together in novel and profound ways. Anthropological responses should be to enjoin that circulation, but to do so through a critical context that mediates against the totalizations of capital.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McQuire, Scott (2008). Media City. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.


Cybernetics and Anthropology - Past and Present

 I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology - and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital.  ...