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.

Ancient texts in new worlds

I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.

 

The colophon states amongst others:

 

Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze

Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White

Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black

 

 

Codex in Crisis, an adaptation of Grafton’s article Future Reading. Digitization and its discontents, previously published in The New Yorker, is published by The Crumpled Press, who, as they state on their website, perish to publish. Their business model revolves around the production of ‘custom cut, bone folded, hand sewn pamphlets and books’ for the real bibliophile. And they are beautiful.

 

The contents itself are equally inspiring. Anthony Grafton, who is Professor of History at Princeton University, and is a specialist in the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies and Historiography, published amongst others, books on The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

 

Codex in Crisis concentrates on the history and development of the book as format, medium and conceptual idea. Grafton spook about his book during an interview held with him about a week ago as part of the Historisch Café (historical café) series organized amongst others by Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. The talk was entitled ‘Would Erasmus use Google’, and focused on the book and its relationship to the accelerated world we live in today in which changes are going faster than we could ever have imagined before. Referring to his previously published article, Grafton talked about how he holds The New Yorker in high regard, jokingly calling it one of the last magazines where they actually read what they publish and where they work with a whole lot of smart and alert people.

 

Grafton’s main focus is on how the situation for books and reading texts has changed the last years. This shift has had some major implications where at the moment the newspaper is dying in the US and staff is being sacked en masse in US publishing industries. The world of publishing and bookselling is in uproar: only a few major players survived; Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Borders, that’s it, and Borders is almost bankrupt. Simultaneously we are seeing the rise of eBook readers. As Grafton remarks, they are only getting better and better. But their development will be like the codex to the scroll. We won’t get rid of the old format just like that, but Grafton does foresee a development in which the main thing we are going to be reading in the near future is electronic text. This will bring major changes, not only in reading but also in our consciousness.

Referring to an UK eBook survey, Grafton remarks that scholars spend on average 8 minutes with an online article. The online medium is very well amenable to what is called power skimming: your eyes just scan the text and don’t really process. We get lots of information, but we have no clue.

In the US the bookstore has been driven out. Grafton’s surprise at seeing so much bookstores of all shapes and sizes in Amsterdam makes him to conclude that their must be more of a reading culture in Europe than in the US. The decline in reading culture has been going hand in hand with the rise of a gaming culture, where according to Grafton every male under 30 in the US plays games for at least 2 hours a day. This effects not only their way of reading but it is also a form of competition in time spend for leisure.

Grafton also sees the changes taking place within the library itself. In the library nobody reads books anymore, it is increasingly filled with fast computers. And a café.

The new kind of reading is an interactive way of reading. Students still read intensely says Grafton, but the level is lower than two generations ago. The GI bill generation, which transformed the universities and made them radically more democratic, saw the rise of Catholics and Jews in universities, who came to college because they now could. There are real changes to be seen, says Grafton, in current student and university culture. He claims that for instance Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien is simply found to hard to follow for students nowadays. And that’s a worry. The students do write better according to Grafton, but they don’t read as well anymore.

 When asked what he is aiming at with his book, Grafton responds his goal was to state his worries but also his exhilaration about the new possibilities for the book. The idea of the universal library, which is never going to happen of course, was what Google and its comrades promised to create. But one of the first problems was that there were not an estimated 30, but 100 million books in the world. Another problem is that although you can find a lot of content via Google, you can not access it all. It is searchable, but that does not mean it is all available. In this way Google could be seen as a live catalogue. They are fast and at the same time incredibly secretive. This explains Robert Darnton’s stance in a recent article in The New York Review of Books. Darnton, whom Grafton calls an eloquent and brilliant guy, is currently head librarian of the Harvard libraries. But he is also a diplomat. Harvard library is digitized by Google, but what Google will not do is guarantee that it will never charge any money to have access to the books. That is why Harvard is breaking off their deal with Google: they want the guarantee of free content. This is another reason why we will never have an universal library since not all the libraries are or will be working together with Google. And what about the books that Google is not interested in: Third World country books for instance. Those cultures are neglected. If it will be anything, it will be a universal Western (plus Russian) library.

 

Grafton is however a huge enthusiast of digitizing books and the possibilities this offers for research, information retrieval and teaching. The thing that worries him though is again the reading. Online reading is interactive, and thus distracting: you move in irrational paths. In a novel on paper there are no links, no distractions. Will you still have writers that write these kinds of static, thick books if people don’t read these books anymore? Writing will change with reading. But, history has shown us also that no system of publication was capable of ruining every kind of book writing production.

 

What about the analogy of history? Johannes Trithemius said that the printed book was going to ruin writing; only copying is really reading, reading means reading aloud and printing was going to destroy that contemplative and meditative form of reading. But forms of Benedictine writing and reading survived and even improved in the print world. And as it survived the move from script to print so Grafton hopes it will also make the present shift.

 

But do we still write just as well? Look at the rising use of emoticons. Emails are shorter and shorter. The online medium is not suited for that. The email isn’t the letter. The scroll still exists, as does the manuscript, but they are not what they were. Grafton’s aim is not to be totally reactionary and he does also see a lot of good coming from online forms of communication. The rise of political blogs and interactive communication is wholly good and its influence on politics is great.

 

The book is an incredible easy and convenient system. Links are nothing; they are ephemeral, where footnotes are a rich standard. After a year more than half of the links are no longer working. This is a big problem, without upkeep electronic texts don’t survive.

 

Grafton concludes by stating that notwithstanding the current developments, more books are being published and sold than ever before. But nobody is reading them.

 

Turning back to Codex in Crisis. Although I enjoyed reading the book very much, my critique of the book (or rather of the adapted essay) has to do with the, to my opinion, lack of truly opinionated argumentation from the side of the writer. I applaud his deliberation of all the different arguments pro and con the current development of the book both concerning its preproduction and mental conceivement, its birth as content depicted on a certain carrier (be it print, scroll or screen), its frequently simultaneous production or publication by a publisher, printer or the writer itself, its postproduction and dissemination into the world of reading and readers, and its consumption and role in communal coffee shops or social media sites, depicted in an amazingly concise stream of thoughts which is at the same time filled with anecdotal and detailistic reminiscences. One might even call me a big fan of this kind of overview writing, in which the scholar summarizes, analyses and distills main trends and developments, covers simultaneous occurrences and clears up conceptual difficulties.

 

Anthony Grafton does all this in his fine little booklet, but he does leave me somewhat expectant in the end. But maybe this has more to do with my own misperceptions and hopes that such an outstanding scholar may have the answer or may offer a clear path out of the problems that face the book in its present and future forms. But Grafton does not offer such an answer and of course he doesn’t, how could he, he is foremost a scholar and not a visionary and praise him for that. He is a historian, not a weather forecaster.

 

Another small comment has to do with the conservative stance his critique towards the new online book culture sometimes takes. Although he does downgrade his own critique frequently when considering the other side of the coin, his description of the (lack of) possibilities of the format of the weblog and his meager depiction of the possibilities that Open Access offers to the Humanities, strike me as a little outdated, but that might again be my own predisposition. But his conservatism in this respect does not annoy me in the way other writers and thinkers can, mainly because he gives clear examples and argumentations where, according to him, the main problems of the digital medium lie when compared to the past print situation. He only wants to preserve what is good in tradition in the middle of all this innovation going on. Grafton hopes the future will be a hybrid one, in which a laptop stands next to a pile of magazines and a stack of books, which the scholar can browse simultaneously accompanied by a nice coffee confined in one of the newly designed communal focused city libraries. This corresponds to Grafton’s feelings of melancholia towards an increasingly lost past (“It’s an old story, quiet and reassuring: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom”) but also to his excitement (though of course critical) about the new possibilities the digital world offers the book.

 

Codex in Crisis offers no question mark and no solution, only memories and hopes for a better future.

 

Future Visions

I recently encountered some very nice speculative movies, giving their future visions on the development of the Internet and social media. Go check out the emergence of EPIC, Prometeus and Spirit!

 

 

“Experience is the new reality”

 

(Thanks to Bernardo and Brave New World)

 

PROMETEUS – THE NEW MEDIA REVOLUTION

 

EPIC 2014