Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

Johanne Haaber Ihle graduated this fall from the MA program in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester with the stunning documentary Men of Words on the topic of Yemenite poetry. Packed in a burqa and carrying a camera (so I have been told), Ihle traveled into the vast mountains of Southern Yemen to the area of Yafi’ to record an ancient Yemenite tradition: a gathering of men, of poets, discussing and reflecting on current issues, politics, economics, social conditions and the local news and going ones via poetry. Clinging strongly to ancient oral traditions, at the same time the global media and communication streams have not gone unnoticed, even here in the localized context of Southern Yemen. Remarkable though – though not so remarkable as you first might think, as shall be explained later on – is that, in the light of increasing digitization and online media participation, the preferred means of recording and spreading these poetic discourses and reflections for Yemenite poets is the audio cassette. The specific media attributes of the cassette tape makes them into a strong moral weapon and communication and distribution device in a context of political and religious suppression and censorship.

As Ihle shows in her film, since the unification in 1990 of North and South Yemen, the country has been politically unstable. Poetry fulfills a very important function in the barren rural landscape, where illiteracy reigns and where television and radio (let alone the Internet) have not yet gained (much to any) ground. This is (next to the roughness of the mountains) due to socio-economic circumstances, but most of all due to political and religious conditions. For the rise of mass media has lead to fierce resistance from the side of the Muslim authorities (and amongst others to satellite dishes being shot of roofs as you can read here).

Ihle’s documentary is for a large part based on the book The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen by Flagg Miller, who gives an amazing analysis of the political and moral mediation practices that are at play in contemporary Arab poetry in a glocalized context. The book can almost in its entirety be read online at Google books here.

Ihle’s documentary focuses on the whole production or publishing process of Yemenite poetry, starting with the local context (the drought that plagued the farmers in Yafi’ last summer) and then going on to reflect upon the apprehension of this theme into poems during the gatherings. She then interviews one of the poets, who explains how the process further continues: the poet will write down his poem (often in response to another poet) and fax his poem to the other poet and/or to a singer, who will then send it back recorded on cassette. The cassette is then send to the shopkeeper. The poet does not make any money in this process, as Ihle lets the poet explain; poetry is a hobby, something one does next to their work and family life (the singer will however get paid a little by the poet). The film then shifts to Aden where Ihle goes on to interview an audio cassette shopkeeper, who explains that he holds a large collection of original tapes which are not for sale. He copies them and then sells the copies in his shop, where the customers can also listen to the cassettes. The shopkeeper is thus the first to profit from the poetry in this system. As the shopkeeper states, these cassettes, or better said the content on these cassettes, then spreads rapidly through pirated copies all over the Arab world and even beyond.

Ihle shows in her film how poets and both their recorded and oral poetry play an important role in Yemenite society: a poet reflects the public opinion. Where, as explained in the documentary, in the seventies love poetry was most popular, now poetry about current issues is preferred. Using cassettes offers a political medium to poets to spread their message and their commentary on the situation in Yemen. They are cheap and easy to copy and distribute. In this way cassettes play an important empowering role and function as vehicles for social change, giving poets an arena to reflect their opinions upon in an otherwise closed down public sphere dominated by controlled official media channels. Cassettes are a necessity in an environment where other new media, due to specific local circumstances and characteristics, not yet seem to have fully broken through. The cassette’s salient features thus form a bridge between the local orality and the global conversation. The use and mixing of different media in and for different contexts also becomes clear in Ihle’s documentary where in a few shots you see the poets filming each other with the cameras on their mobile phones during their recitations. 

Screenshot from Men of Words

The beauty and power of Men of Words lies in the fact that it not only gives you a short glimpse into the Yemenite society, environment and landscape, it also takes you on a tour into the world of Arabian Poetry, letting the different participants – the poet and the other people involved (the farmer, the poet’s peers, the shopkeeper and the client) – talk for themselves, explaining the process of poetry production and consumption and the strong role the oral tradition still plays in this respect. Ihle captured this process in a clear and coherent story, doing an excellent job on a subject that is difficult to get close to (especially being a foreign woman with a camera in a male-dominated Arab environment).

If you are interested in seeing Johanne’s film online, or want to get more information, you can drop her a line at johanneihle[at]hotmail[dot]com. She has been screening Men of Words in Copenhagen and Berlin and will be showing it in Cambridge this Thursday, December 17th. You can find more information about this screening here.

Society of the Query – Part 2: Gugerli, Fuller, Manovich, Ludovico, Bruno and Van ’t Hof

Part 1 of my notes on the Society of the Query conference can be found here.

David Gugerli a historian specialized in the philosophy of science gave a lecture on the history of databases and of data management as a signifying practice. In a Deleuzian fashion, he states, knowledge operates in distributed networks. The world is a database and database management systems are shaping our world. It is a very big market (think IBM, Oracle and Microsoft)  with a high level of client lock-in where people are very dependent on their data management systems. Before however (in old databases) data was structured in a hierarchical tree-system. In this way the structure of the database determined which questions could be asked. With the coming of the search and query language every possible combination of entries could be interpreted based on recombination and relation. This meant that interpretation of data became independent of the data structure and place. These new systems were highly efficient and made for new and unexpected questions. They were also more narrative based. Gugerli compares this rise of the relational database model with the rise of critical thinking in the 60’s. Critical thinkers like Barthes, Derrida and Foucault found that a literary work could be seen as a machine that can deliver interpretations. It is a galaxy of signifiers, it has no beginning and we can gain access to it in different ways, none of which is authorative. The interpretation of the text cannot be determined by its author, the interpretations the reader produces when reading are part of its meaning. These traits can also be seen in the development of database concepts: the cultural consequences of these changes are stupendous, according to Gugerli. They do not only influence the relation between author and text but effect any form of information processing in every format. This also has big societal consequences for it has changed our information processing and caused major changes in software structure. The search society and its idea of recombination operates in real time. This requires continued change management, Gugerli concludes, a permanent fluctuation of its composition, of its practices of search and query, which shows the importance of the underlying (relational) database system. The full text of Gugerli’s talk can be downloaded here

Matthew Fuller took a closer look in his talk at the alternative modalities of search and how to develop them. He states that search engines have a morphology, a scheme that generates body, they have different internal structures. Search engines can be seen as cultural machines, they connect information and knowledge. Fuller states that since the rationalization of culture is impossible, this explains the noisiness and the inaccuracy of search engines. Search engines also focus on the analysis of users and the identification of situations. This is an even more abstract process than mere personalization, where the user is not individuated but recognized as a force that produces information. As Fuller states, we need to think on the basis of populations of data producing subjects instead of on the basis of individuals. We need to focus on the dynamics and conditions of search engines. Fuller goes on to discuss different kind of search engines, in order to delve deeper into the morphology of search. Viewzi for instance adopted the aesthetics of the iPhone into a search engine, it makes maps of images and lets you see if they are linked in any way. Oamos views information search as an experience. It is not a full search engine but it uses results from a certain amount of search engines and it looks at relational information. Kartoo and Liveplasma are examples of network visualization interfaces. DAUM, NAVER (both Korean) and Directionless.info of context driven engines. With these examples Fuller gave a good overview of the multiple possibilities for search and the different possibilities for interface design. Fuller states that delving deeper into the complexities of the web and its users and reflecting this in its design is the challenge for the next wave of search.

Lev Manovich’s lecture focused on how we can learn from Google. How can the search engine design serve as a new methodology for cultural analysis, or, how can we use Google as a tool for cultural analysis? First of all he stresses it is important to look at the size of our data. Most of the time cultural analysis focuses on a very small sample of cultural production, where a search engine uses every accessible web document (and now Google also indexes Twitter and Facebook) offering much larger scale for analysis of contemporary cultural production and interpretation. Secondly, when it comes to categorization, mostly cultural objects are placed into small numbers of genres/categories. A search engine can make an analysis of each web document to generate its unique description (using 200+ signals). As Manovich states, although significant research in automatic classification of web pages into genres exist, Google does not use it, because it wants to give you any page that is most relevant. Thirdly, when it concerns “links”, traditionally cultural criticism gives an analysis of a small number of selective links (“influences”) between a given object/person and others. A search engine on the other hand gives a systematic consideration of all (explicitly defined) links between a given web page and other pages. Fourthly, Manovich states that what is very important in cultural production, is that it builds on the old, on old features (characteristics, attributes, dimensions), or a small number of subjectively selected features different from text to text. A search engine focuses on lots of features and can take the interaction with the user into consideration. Where traditionally in cultural analysis theoretical work does focus on reception, in practice it gives more an analysis of documents as experienced by a critic. Web analytics on the other hand can give a good analysis of user interactions with a web site. As Manovich states, cultural analysis looks from one critique, and is thus is not empirical, as it does not look at the user interactions with cultural products. Next, when it comes to zoomability, in cultural analysis the focus is mostly on a document, a creator, group, period or paradigm with highly uneven coverage. With Google search technology or Google trends the search patterns of billions of people over a number of years can be analyzed. Think of the possibilities of Google Earth and Google Street View. As Manovich states, software developed by the digital culture industry and also by the academy often contains innovative theoretical ideas about culture which are embedded in its design (i.e. what software does to calculate the results). However this design is often used to support an outdated (i.e. 20^th century) understanding of culture when it comes to search (looking for particular members of a set) or classification of culture into a small number of genres. Manovich understands the search technology as a new paradigm for cultural analysis: what if we take the principles from search engines, web analytics and Google trends (interactive visualization of patterns), and imbed them in new software tools for analysis? In this way we can extract features from each document in a set, instead of using the features to classify documents into a few classes, and we can visualize the patterns and the variability across a set. As Manovich concludes, the old search paradigm is based on knowing what you want to find, where the new search paradigm is based on finding relations. Manovich ends by asking: might Google take over the Humanities?

Alessandro Ludovico and Christophe Bruno both focused on the potential search engines offer to art, by both using search engines and by reflecting upon them (in an often critical and playful manner). Ludovico discusses his project Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI), in which he established a fake website about online marketing, and subscribed to the Google AddSense program, which lets you publish Google textual adds on your web site. After opening a bank account for the project, they developed a special software which would generate an unique IP address, simulating a user, and would make automatic clicks on the adds by Google. As Ludovico explained, it would be impossible to define a fraudulent click from a true one, making it hard for Google to ban them. Ludovico sees GWEI as a conceptual artwork, as a scientific experiment. Through this project they got a lot of attention in the media. As Ludovico concluded, the worst enemy of a giant is not another giant, it is a parasite. If enough parasites would suck out enough money, it will suck the giant empty. Ludovico wants to dissect, decode and expose these giants through conceptual artworks and theories in order to create cultural anti-bodies. Christophe Bruno also discussed some of his recent artworks or Google hacks. He mentioned Ephiphanies,  a Google Poetry hack which he developed (based on Joyce’s walks in Dublin during which Joyce would collect random sentences overheard). Keywords typed into the Ephiphanies machine will collect random sentences from Google and send them back to the program to form a new poetical structure. Poet Ton van ’t Hof gave a short introduction on Flarf, a cut-up technique using Google search results, rearranging them to make a new text. As Van ‘t Hof explains, these kind of cut-up techniques are not new, as they have been used before in the 1920s by the Surrealists, and in the 50s and 60s by for instance Burroughs. As Van ‘t Hof states, its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to ‘the exploration of the inappropriate in all its guises’. The idea behind Flarf is to mine the internet with odd search terms and then to distill them into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, or plays on other texts. According to Van ‘t Hof the genre is very popular now and would not have existed without Internet or without Google.

Society of the Query – Part 1: Lovink, Boutang, Pasquinelli and Numerico

Last month the Institute of Network Cultures organized a two day conference entitled Society of the Query. Below you can find a wrap-up of the notes I took during the conference. More elaborate blog entries focusing on each of the lectures separately can be found here and you can also take a look at the video recordings here.

Subtitled Stop searching start questioning, the Society of the Query conference was soon nick-named the anti-Google conference, though its focus was a little bit different. The underlying idea was to take a critical look at Google and its dominance in the digital domain, as a way to start thinking about ways to conceptualize the idea of search, and to think about its theoretical background. In order to achieve this goal, the Institute of Network Cultures brought together people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds, academics, tech people, artists, media critics, to discuss the politics and culture and the philosophy and aesthetics of the search and search engines. As Geert Lovink, the main organizer states in his opening talk, the (sub)title of the conference was dedicated to the American Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote about the rise of the search paradigm and asked the question what the long-term implications would be of this search dominance. Hence the motto of the conference ‘stop searching, start questioning.’ What are the wider consequences of the rise of search in everyday life, of surfing as the dominant activity on the Web? As Lovink states, the Internet is still widely under theorized: we need some new ideas and theories to reflect upon this issue. Lovink’s aim is to develop a cultural theory of search. To achieve this we should (also) focus on alternative (search) models, for through the alternatives we can also come to a better understanding of the present situation and how to deal with Google.

From the perspective of critique (anti-trust, legal issues) we can consider from which point of view to take on this giant. What exactly defines our problem with Google, is it (justified) fear, is it envy? What disturbs us so much about Google itself? Whatever the problem, as Lovink says, we should not let Google become an obsession. We should not underestimate our influence when it comes to the power we have to develop political, aesthetic and cultural concepts that can undermine this giant. In this respect Lovink feels theory and criticism have a much larger role to play. Research, alternatives interfaces, and artistic interpretations all contribute to a cultural flow that could push things into another direction.

The first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, from France, recently wrote a book entitled Cognitive Capitalism. The main question he asks during his talk is whether it is possible to escape the monopoly of Google. For the dominant position of Google is growing each year. Exactly why is Google so popular, he asks. According to Boutang this mainly has to do with the increasing number of services Google offers. The problem is that these services are increasingly being perceived as being new ‘commons’ or services that should be public state services. Hence we are not only afraid of Google’s monopoly but even more afraid of Google becoming (being?) a rent seeker of our own collective intelligence, exploiting us as producers of knowledge. In a way Google’s platform can thus be seen as a form of cognitive capitalism, as a factory for the commoditization of knowledge.

Boutang describes what in his view can be seen as the economic model of Google. Google creates a neo- or meta-market on top of a society of personal data, of singularities (pollen). The counterintuitive part of this model is that it needs some ‘free’ or ‘gratis’ space in order to be able to aggregate some added value in another field. You need some non-market driven services to aggregate money. ‘Free’ is thus an inescapable part of the model. Who is working for Google? We are. By our contribution (clicking, surfing) we pollinate. Google offers us a platform, a hub. What Google sells is thus not only a space for publicity but also the network itself in real time. And this is the strength of Google: it offers you a platform of free services and lets you through these services again contribute to the platform: it functions as an economy of contribution which you add to by pollination. What Google sells to firms is not knowledge as a good but the possibility to enter into the market. In the realm of cognitive capitalism a shift has thus occurred from the sphere of marketable input and output to the sphere of human pollination. As Boutang states, this naturally creates a problem. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as a true capitalist, is able to capture this value created in the net by building platforms that function like agricultures or hives. In this way, Boutang says, Google is emblematic of the “communism of capitalism”. We need to understand that the basics of our economy have changed. And this raises some important questions: Is it possible to free the click workers? Can a search engine increase our autonomy? Should we think about a nationalization of Google? (where Google imitated the public model of knowledge?) And what about the privacy issue? And should we protect the peer to peer networks?

The next speaker, Matteo Pasquinelli, an Italian media critic, starts his talk by stating that knowledge is easy to replicate, since it is non-competitative or non-rival. Where we have embraced the network as a new kind of space for social interaction and self organization, the digital sphere at the same time also amplifies competition. The digital matrix multiplied everything, cooperation as well as monopoly. Pasquinelli wonders whether knowledge is (still) really non-competitive, with the monopolistic colonization of the digital sphere by Google. Referring to Nicolas Carr, he states that the hearth of Google is the page rank algorithm. With this algorithm, Google mines the intelligence that is in the number of links. The greater amount of links to a site, the greater its knowledge. And clicking on the links makes the system smarter, Pasquinelli states, referring again to the diagram of cognitive capitalism. In this sense the digital sphere can no longer be satisfyingly analyzed in the context of ‘the good people and the evil empire’ in the  Foucaltian, biopolitical idea of control and the big brother paradigm. Where Google produces value in a new way, Pasquinelli states we cannot use these old conceptual tools to describe this process. We should not focus on control but on value and on how this value is produced, accumulated and re-appropriated by us. Pasquinelli asks whether it is possible to do critical network thinking? And what notion of value do we need with that? How can we describe the value of the node, of the way Google organizes the fluid, liquid flow of data through its algorithm? It is an economic flow of values that circulates on the Internet and offline. What is the value of the network? How do we valorize the level of pollination and valorization, now that the value of circulation is much higher than the value of production?

Google’s income comes from advertising. But as Pasquinelli states, Google is exploiting cultural capital with this. What about the copyright question when free culture and free cooperation feeds Google? Social production and the idea of free knowledge propagated by thinkers like Lawrence Lessig are quite naïve, Pasquinelli states, because they do not grasp the whole value system around knowledge and the way our free contributions add value to the system. We need to think about new business models that look into this exploitation which also entails a dematerialization of traditional commodities. With this crisis of the traditional commodity and product (everything free) comes the rise of a new monopoly, a monopoly of space instead of a monopoly of the product: Google monopolizes the metadata space. We are faced with a liquid matrix which makes it very difficult to challenge Google. Pasquinelli asks whether we could not create an open-source page-rank algorithm. Whatever we create, it has to relate to the way Google extracts value. Pasquinelli ends his talk by proposing that maybe the model of CrossRef might be an alternative, or creating a page rank based on trust.

Teresa Numerico, from the university of Rome, gave a very interesting talk on cybernetics, search engines and resistance. With the metaphor of cybernetics, mechanical devices can be described in terms of biological organisms. They are able to self-organize themselves as if they could interact and exchange messages with the environment. In this way we can interpret machines as vehicles of messages (input or output) without questioning what happens with them. Numerico goes deeper into the system of cybernetics as developed by Norbert Wiener. According to Wiener, messages between man and machine, between machines and man and between machines and machines are destined to play an ever-increasing role. Communication can thus be seen as interactive, as the collective possibility of interacting. According to Wiener, information cannot be stored. If we store it, we will depreciate its value, where information is more a matter of process than of storage. Numerico also discusses Joseph Licklider and his ideas concerning the library of the future, consisting of a new form of collecting, of controlling and monitoring the processing of information. After discussing Plato’s Meno dilemma, Numerico describes the elements of a search engine and what makes them similar to the cybernetics metaphor. For the ranking algorithm hypnotizes the self-organization within the network. Google gives us a cognitive pattern or framework that is very strong, which is also shown by research into the information behavior of the researcher of the future (Jan 2008), which shows that horizontal information seeking is all around. Numerico combines this cybernetic search engine perspective with Foucault’s idea of the archeology of knowledge and the definition of the archive. It is obvious that the archive of a society is part of the culture of that civilization. At the same time we now have no control over the meaning of the archive as it is being created. The question is however what we value more, control or communication? Numerico ends by suggesting some actions for resistance against cognitive control (in a Deleuzian fashion):

-Be creative not communicative

-Choose ‘pourparles’ instead of communication

-Close the devices (every now and then)

-Live without leaving (too many) digital traces

-Do not interpret people and the world only according to their digital representations

-Forget or delete digital memories

-Express the living culture; in Fahrenheit 451 people learnt books by hearth

 Other things we might do according to Numerico:

-Stimulate cross generation information literacy and education

-Encourage variation. Variation is the key-factor for the transmission of knowledge and culture: variation vs. standardization: support all different searching technologies. For we need to have different perspectives on technology

-Asses trust and authority by checking a multiple sources through a cross-mediation effort.

Numerico stresses that we should stimulate difference and variation in the creation of the archive by a double-strategy consisting of both logging off on the one side and creating alternatives on the other. She ends by stating that conversation also needs time and relaxation, something we should probably be focusing on more.

Strange Manuscripts

Where I discussed the concept of post literacy (described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’) before (after which John Connell wrote a nice reply on his blog, followed by some insightful comments), I have grown more interested in asemic writing in combination with visual communication. Wikipedia gives a very nice definition and characterization of asemic writing, where it states for instance that the interpretation or meaning giving to asemic writing lies not within the writing (containing no semantic content) but with (-in) the viewer, in which respect it can be compared with abstract art: ‘with the non specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art’.

Two manuscripts, one old and one not quite so old, have been brought to my attention lately (thanks to drabkikker) in which the language and writing has (until now) been undeciphered. The first and oldest one, the Voynich manuscript (named after its discoverer Wilfrid M. Voynich), probably written in the 15^th or 16^th century, has already been called one of the greatest mysteries in the world (see for instance here) and still puzzles cryptographers all over the world. The Voynich manuscript is also heavily illustrated, amongst others with – as vividly described – ‘tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts than hydraulic contraptions’. Judge for yourself underneath.

Although many theories exist about the origin, history and meaning of the manuscript, some believe it is a hoax and the manuscript contains no meaningful information in any way. But on another level, this might not be the most important ‘message’ the work has to convey. Looked at it as a work of art, it is a beautiful and fascinating work, with a very concise, fair and lovely script as you can see for yourself here, were you can actually download the whole manuscript as a PDF. Its mystery and unclear meaning is in this case what makes it meaningful to the viewer as interpreter, as ‘meaning-searcher’.

A more recent manuscript is the Codex Seraphinianus, an equally amazing book with fantastic absurdist surreal pictures and an also still undeciphered alphabet and language. It depicts an imaginary world and was written and illustrated in 1978 by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini. The codex is a sort of visual encyclopedia, a transcendental experience into a fantastic genius mind. I like the way Serafini seems to have actually stated, according to Wikipedia, that the script of the Codex is asemic, ‘that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the ‘reader’ is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.’

And still… Although the author claims the script in the codex is asemic and it contains no meaning, the manuscript stays a fascinating enigma for many people. It is exactly the lack of meaning, meaning as or in a void, that triggers the imagination.

This vacuum of meaning creates potential: it creates a space for interpretation and functions as a reflection of our search for patterns and meaning. It thus offers a meta level in a way, similar to what abstract art does: it is about the search for meaning, about wanting to discover the secret context and inherent patterns in the structure of the text, like in a way abstract art is a reflection on art itself. Asemic writing can thus be seen as a form of meta-writing, or abstract writing. And this is what makes it so interesting and filled with meaning: its reflection (through means of the interpretational intent of the viewer) on what language is, and on the function of language as a means or medium of communication.

Post Literacy

The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and analyze) written words. Media literacy, the equally broad term used to expand the concept of literacy, is mostly used to describe the capability to analyze, decode and criticize the manifold messages incorporated in the different (digital) media. Media literacy has with the growing popularity of online communication, again become a much debated topic and an interest of educational reformers. Post literacy, as a concept, incorporates media literacy but pushes the idea even further, to a future where text no longer is perceived as the dominant medium. According to postliteracy.org, post literacy focuses on the other (medial) means of communicating messages, exploring ‘visual, interactive, computational and textual literacies’. As they state, to be able to decipher the (often hidden) messages in multimedia communication, polymodal literacy is needed. This creation of a polymodal literacy is a necessity in today’s society, where the advance of the Internet has lead to an enormous rise in the use of multi(-digital-)media communication, transcending the explicit focus on text inherited from the print era. As postliteracy.org states on its website:

“Postliteracy.org is a response to the relationship that people in the twenty-first century have to literacy and shifting modes of communication. The Web has evolved from a text-based technology to one focused on graphic display and visual layout. Multimedia content largely privileges visual over verbal content.”

Exploring the concept of post literacy in a very practical manner, postliteracy.org is using steganography and online deciphering software to post multimedia puzzles with hidden messages for you to solve (as a means to further develop your post literacy level), as you can see here.

As Doug Johnson states, the interest in multimedia and the concept of post literacy has grown due to the increased use of small and portable video and movie playing devices, further pushing the dominant textual media into a supporting role. This demise of the power of textual media reminds us of a foregone past, showing similarities with preliterate (oral) societies in which, as Wikipedia states, people have ‘not yet discovered how to read and write’, the difference being that ‘a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication.’ As Walter Ong describes in Orality and Literacy, in the transformation from a preliterate to a literate society, the capability to write and read had to be acquired, in a similar fashion as one learns to use a tool. According to Ong this fundamental transformation also meant a shift in the way we think and structure thoughts. Mike Ridley is very much interested in this change in how we think, triggered by the use of different media, and in the influence this media use has on the way our brain functions (some even state that the way we process information in today’s information overloaded society has lead to our brains looking ever more like those of schizophrenics, giving rise to ponderings about a new schizophrenic society and schizophrenic ways of thinking). But Ridley wants to stress not the negative connotations surrounding post literacy, which focus on the decline of textual communication and reading, where he wants to emphasize the inherent strengths of both orality and literacy, to see what the potential of a post literate society could be.

As Dough Johnson remarks, the increased use of media other than textual (especially in an online environment) combined with the fact that we, as recent studies have shown, read differently online, might mean we are heading towards a post literate society faster than we think. Although Johnson states that he does still see a role for textual media and communication, in his definition of a post literate society, people choose to use the other media as their main means of communication, they have a preference for them or, as he states ‘The post literate’s need for extended works or larger amounts of information is met through visual and/or auditory formats.’

This development described by Johnson and others can be seen as closely connected to the research that is being conducted on new ways of data visualization, in which graphic or figurative representations of large amounts of data are used to get an overview of and deeper insight into complex and huge information compounds and objects, constructing a way of dealing with information overload and representing it in a non-textual manner. As Wikipedia states, the primary goal of data visualizations is ‘to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means’. The necessity of these kinds of tools or representations in a way illustrates the short-fall of textual communication in the online environment (in some occasions). Where information is ever more superfluous and the need to grasp large amounts of data (especially in science) ever more important, other media might be more convenient.

Doug Johnson looks at the way the move towards post literacy is influencing books and the way we use them (online), noting the rise of comics and graphic novels, (or think for instance of the popularity of Manga and role-playing games which increasingly use complex narrative structures in a non-textual manner). He then goes on to denote what the coming of a post literate net-generation means for the future (post literate) library. One of the most important point Johnson makes is that we need to get away from and look critically at our bias towards print, which is prejudicing our literacy skills when compared with our other media knowledge and apprehension. He sees the ‘return’ to a post literate society as a natural development towards a more multisensory way of communication:

“But I would argue that post literacy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.”

John Connell responds to Johnson in a post in which he emphasizes the continuing importance of text, even in an online environment. Although he agrees with Johnson concerning the lack of attention for other forms of literacy, he does state that ‘the debate should not be about print but about the utility, beauty, strength and continued resilience of text in its multifarious contexts, whether on paper or on any other medium.’ This is actually a very interesting point that he makes, to take a closer look at and investigate how text ‘mixes’ with other media, and how it is perceived and consumed in the context of other (digital) media. How does the interaction between text and other media change the way we analyze and interpret the message inherent in this multimedia format, which then in a way transcends the mere textual medium?

Mike Ridley perhaps captures the full meaning of post literacy best (agreeing more with Johnson than with Connell where it comes to the dominance of text) in his definition, in which he says that ‘post literacy is the phrase used to capture the possibility of rich human communication that exceeds (and hence replaces) visible language (writing and reading) as the dominant means of the understanding and exchange of ideas.” Ridley introduces here an important aspect I feel has been missing in the above discussion, focusing mainly on post literacy and the consumer side of multimedia communication. For as I believe, to be able to communicate in a post-textual manner, the producers of these new forms of online communication also need to become post literate.

One way to think about the idea of a post-literate-writer (a contradiction in terminus) or a post textual content producer, is to reflect upon ideas that transcend the concept of media, focusing rather on (the development towards) a single medium or on the disappearance of media as such. As Kiene Brillenburg Wurth states in her article Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry (referring to Friedrich Kittler), the Internet is leading to ‘the end of medial compartmentalization’. She cites Kittler saying:

“(…) If the optical fibre network reduces all formerly separate data flows to one standardized digital series of numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers nothing is impossible. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, memory, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself.”

This closely resembles Mark Amerika’s idea of ‘the artist as the medium’, through which the different communication streams flow, as he states ‘the artist is the medium or instrument, and the networked space of flows play this instrument to facilitate the development of creative compositions’ (Meta/Data,19). This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do.

As Brillenburg states, with the coming of digital art, the idea (or the myth) of separate and sustainable media with their own specifics or ‘essence’ is destroyed. She refers to the 19^th century connotation of a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which one tried to connect the different media. However, as she states, the Gesamtkunstwerk has been ‘evolving into the kind of aural-visual-verbal computer games and multi-sensory interactive art works that have now grown so familiar to us.’ Brillenburg thinks the idea or concept of multimedia is no longer sufficient to describe the new forms of digital media communication that are taking place online, and she proposes to use the term intermediality instead, which can incorporate better the different ways in which media ‘contaminate’ each other, as a way to describe the ‘in-between’ of media. As she describes it:

“Intermediality projects not simply a ‘together-art’ or any other continuation of nineteenth-century Gesamtkunst, but a criss-crossing between and mutual infusion of different medial modalities. Words become like colours, colours like words, texts like buildings and spaces, sounds are spatially heard – such contaminations date back not so much to Wagner’s utopian view of the arts united, but to those avant-garde experiments that questioned the respective identities and conditions of possibility of the different art forms.”

For me this summarizes quite clearly how the move towards a post literate society is not only about being able to analyze and interpret polymodal ways of communicating, but also about being able to produce these forms of communication in a good (and comprehensible) way. Not only can we be seen moving towards a society in which the consumption of media is increasingly becoming post literate, the digital media producer, artist, or even scholar, is also increasingly working in a mixed medial manner. Like Mark Amerika remarks when he states that he lets the media flow through him (or her) this means the online content producer will be using media less and less as separate entities. Although these post literate characteristics of mixing media are mostly seen in visual arts, we are also increasingly seeing multimedial (or intermedial) writers, poets (the focus of Brillenburg’s analysis) and even scholars, who are less biased towards text, using different media in a natural and even unconscious way (emphasizing the flow) like for instance Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) or Mark Amerika have been doing in their scholarly and/or artistic works. It might be interesting to reflect upon what the influence of these ways of post literate thinking and (more important perhaps) of post textual doing, might be on the production and consumption of scholarly books. What kind of consequences might these developments have for the way scholars operate in a digital environment, using new digital media to communicate their research? It would be equally interesting to think about what a post literate (or post-textual) humanities field would look like, a form of humanities scholarship in which text would no longer be the dominant choice for transferring or communication research. Maybe the experiments Lev Manovich has been doing with digital humanities and data visualization, and his emphasis on a new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’, are a good example of what a post literate, post textual or polymodal humanities might start off from.

Information Dramatization

 

Over the last couple of years (how time flies…) I have come across a fair amount of good movies and clips that try to grasp in one way or another some of the aspects of the information revolution we are and have been witnessing around us. From simply trying to state what is information to movies on the rise of the Internet and new means of mass communication, these visualizations all try to communicate and translate (often in an educational manner) this common feeling of change into a more compressed timeframe, for which the movie clip offers a very suitable format. I have collected some of the finest clips and want to post them here today, for your lazy Sunday feeling. If you know of any other, please let me know.

 

The first two clips I encountered only recently via Information Aesthetics, a vey nice weblog which aims to ‘explore the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization’. The first movie draws heavily on Marshall Mc Luhan’s ‘medium is the message’, whilst the second is influenced by Claude Shannon’s noise redundancy principles. The second movie is created by Charles and Ray Eames and contains some very beautiful and poetic visuals, especially after the beginning, so stay tuned. (I’m not able to stream it, so you can find it here)

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a nice overview (using pictograms) of the history of the Internet and Internet communication, take a look at the movie underneath, created by graphic designer Melih Bilgil.

 

 

 

 

 

The next two movies were created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology form Kansas State University. The first one, ‘Information r/evolution‘ explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information’. The second one ‘The machine is Us/ing Us, gives a nice wrap up of the whole Web 2.0 development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, most widely known I guess, the ‘Did you know?’ series on the ‘progression of information technology’, which has known many versions since its creation by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod.

 

 

If you are interested in or want to know more about the history of visual communication, do take a look at this amazing website, which tries to cover the whole history from cave drawings to computer mediated communication. With lots and lots of beautiful pictures.