Lit Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture (cont.)

Chapter 2: Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture
-In the era of the Beat generation and the Merry Pranksters, the social ideals of the New Communalists and the products of the Cold War technocracy were merged in the San Francisco LSD scene. Trips Festivals created spaces in which the technological and the social came together in ecstatic communal experiences marked by lights, images, and music brought about through electronic media, as well as LSD. These experiences integrated those who attended into a single techno-biological system:

Far from asserting direct control over events, he [Brand] had built an environment, a happening, a laboratory. He had set forth the conditions under which a system might evolve and flower, and he had stocked the biological and social worlds of those who entered that system with technologies that allowed them to feel as though the boundaries between the social and the biological, between their minds and their bodies, and between themselves and their friends, were highly permeable. He had helped found a new tribe of technology-loving Indians, artistic engineers of the self.

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Chapter 3: The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology
-Brand's desire to merge systems theory and New Communalist politics resulted in the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog, a disperse project offering products such as books, camping gear, and blueprints for houses and machines for those migrating to form communes in the hills of New Mexico and Colorado.
-The Catalog reflected both the technological and scientific achievements of the time as well as the acid-drenched, Eastern religion-inspired hippie movement. In addition, the contributions of its readers established a network forum enhanced by mobility between several countercultural, academic, and technological communities.
-Collaboration of disparate, disembodied communities, small-scale personal and informational technology that supported the development of individual consciousness and ecstatic communion.

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory- as via government, big business, formal education, church- has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog (Brand, inside cover of the Catalog).

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In comparing the Whole Earth Catalog to current Internet culture, the following snippets are particularly of note:
-both a reflection of and a doorway to the world
-nomadic technocratism
-interactive elements increase commitment, as well as involvement.
-by publishing financial accounts, Whole Earth was also viewed as "open source"
-appropriation by the subculture(s) for the purposes of transformation of the superculture- does this succeed? Dominated by white, affluent, educated population...

Lit Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Fred Turner)

Chapter 1: The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor
-Sacio and the Free Speech Movement of the 60s opposed the mechanization of society through the guise of the university, the military, and information technologies.
-30 years later, what was once a threat was now a promise of liberation, expressed through the evolving personalization of the Internet.
-Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in proclamation of the liberating nature of the Internet for overthrowing the bureaucracy. Social revolution?
-Esther Dyson believed that the Internet would become a digital marketplace that would allow consumers and corporations to negotiate equally, thus dissolving the tyranny of corporate hierarchies (Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age).
-Kevin Kelly believed we were moving toward a "computational metaphor" in human understanding, in which the universe is a computer according to a new vocabulary that is now emerging.
-Disembodiment: dehumanization or equality?

The Forgotten Openness of the Closed World
-Post WWII era was dominated by a "closed world discourse", in which both the individual mind and the military were viewed as mechanized tools of control- cognitive psychology began utilizing the computational metaphor to describe the human brain, and in the military plans and operations were visually rendered through computer programming.
-Though this mechanization of society is exactly what students of the 60's rebelled against, at the time this discourse allowed for a quite flexible and creative style of research. This led to the rise of the military industrial complex and interdisciplinary collaboration.
-In the pursuit of military technology, scientists and researchers from many disciplines devised a new language with which to communicate.

-Humans and machines in collaboration within a larger, fluid socio-technical system- a "feedback system" that was then extended to human biology and society.
-This led to the deveopment of cybernetics (Norbert Wiener)- "the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society".
-In this frame, the media is viewed as a "servomechanism" that maintains the homeostasis of society through a feedback system of messages.
-Though computers threatened automation of people and society, they also brought hope for the possibility of a more democratic creation of order.


The Countercultural Embrace of Technology and Consciousness
-In the eyes of the left, the computational metaphor was one designed to create and maintain an unfeeling "technocracy" (Roszak).
-Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine envisioned a world in which the technocratic elite are bent on designing man as an automaton whose proper functions will be controlled by the machine.
-In the postwar period, thanks in large part to research grants funded by the military, university enrollment exploded.
-Two forms of counterculture emerged in the 1960's: the New Left, which struggled for civil rights, free speech and voter registration (outward political action); and cold war-era culture marked by Zen Buddhism, Beat writings, action painting, and psychedelic drugs (inward consciousness and communalism).
-The New Communalists, contrary to the New Left, embraced the communal and egalitarian potential of cybernetics.
The New Left worked within the political structure in order to achieve their goals of establishing a true community and ending alienation. The New Communalists, however, believed political activism to be beside the point- that true community existed outside of traditional notions of chains of command. True community was to be found when transcendence from "the myth of objective consciousness" was achieved, and individual selves transformed.
-Charles Reich's The Greening of America detailed 3 historical stages of socioeconomic consciousness:
1. agriculture: farmers and small businessmen
2. industrial bureaucracies: society organized through complex organizations and new technologies of control and communication.
3. beaureaucratically levelled communities: harmonious collaborations working to end technocratic institutions.
-In this vein, if the mind is to be the source of change, then the sharing of information is a crucial step in that process- an "ebb and flow of communication".

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This well explains the history of perceptions regarding information technologies. With this history in mind, it would be interesting to gauge the current perception of the Internet as it becomes increasingly a site for both interactivity/communication/community-building and corporate schemas, economically entrenched but intellectually dispersed.

On one end we have open source collaboration, but on the other we have the rise of a hegemonic Google institution. Somewhere in the middle lie social networking services such as Facebook and Myspace. In the ephemeral space of the Internet, however, time and power work together to allow for immediate collective awareness and consequent action. The trick is in the hook- for instance, Facebook alienated its users with the implementation of the News Feed, to the extent that its users collectively organized in protest. However, this collective organization would not have been possible WITHOUT Facebook, and in this way they are institutionalized. This happens when certain Internet systems become integrated in the daily functioning of individuals in society. To disengage from these systems would be to disengage with a symbolic structure of one's membership in her community.

If we are to examine Internet culture through the lens of Reich, it would seem we exist still in the second level of consciousness. If a counterculture exists on the Internet, it could do so in two ways: by utilizing the existing social institutions of the Internet to spread awareness and make political statements, or to abandon the existing institutions altogether in favor of a back-to-cyberspace approach of creating communal sites in which individuals work to raise their own consciousnesses and fulfill their human potentials.

Lit Review: Managing Visibility, Intimacy, and Focus in Online Critical Ethnography (LeBesco)

Focus: Studying communication about fat identification (on the Internet).

Method: Downloaded posts and threads, participated in the community, made community aware of her status as researcher.

Theory: Critical ethnographic approach that sought to challenge mainstream political and social discourse about fat bodies.

Points of Consideration: Changes in embodiment allowed for by the use of technology; alternative model of personhood (observing communicative processes and social interaction, as opposed to individualistic narratives); the "cybernetic shape of information technologies" as a political arena.

Questions Raised: How are bodies and identities "policed" in internet forums? How does the design of Internet space affect deployments of power?

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Many of those with whom I've discussed the political and cultural potential of the internet believe that the lack of face-to-face interaction renders individuals essentially isolated. However, is it not possible that meaning can be created irrespective of time and space? That you or I could psychically connect through the sharing of information and ideas across immense distances?

Identity projection, or "egocasting" (see Christine Rosen), allows for an enormous amount of social creativity and identity play. In this arena, the body exists apart from the mind- a condition which may be extraordinarily appealing for those who undergo consistent prejudice and discrimination instigated by their physical forms.

Lit Review: Mediating Ethnography: Objectivity and the Making of Ethnographies of the Internet

“To skilled online players, it’s easier to fake flesh-world personae than to maintain a consistent long-term online presence.” (Mortensen and Walker)

Pros:
• In an Internet setting, the ethnographer can “lurk” and thus be rendered invisible- enhanced objectivity. This position is usually also socially acceptable.
• However, lurking for the sake of ethnography may not be quite as acceptable- some information can only be learnt through the processes of interaction and participation, but this is also often made easier on the Internet.

Cons:
• Community on the Internet as illusory; research proving computer-mediated communication is not rich enough to sustain meaningful relationships.
• Rapidly evolving pace of technology poses many challenges to fixing an ethnographic work to a particularly meaningful time.
• Virtual fieldwork can be exhausting and overwhelming, highly uncertain.
• Blogging poses the challenge of blurring the distinction between the field and the writing up.

Some Questions...
• How to interpret and describe a textual landscape that is constantly expanding and being altered?
• Rather than transcribing and textualizing a community, the ethnographer is instead faced with the problem of justification- what, truly, can we add to something that describes itself better than we could?
• Mediated communication is defined by a distancing variable- in this case, the textuality and lack of presence associated with the Internet. Might this be at the root of such distrust, so many privacy concerns, so much misrepresentation?

Some ideas raised: videotape users, log chat sessions, network diagrams.
• Focus on the debates concerning multiple identities and dynamic communities, rather than traditional over-fetishised notions of community.
• Network ethnography relies on Social Network Analysis techniques (Howard)- the Internet makes this easier- mechanical objectivity.
• Wakeford: 3 types of online textualized activities: information spaces (WWW), communication spaces (listservs), and interaction spaces (AIM, IRC)
• Mason and Dicks: Ethnographic Hypermedia Environment works with notions of authorship, as the reader is granted agency in navigation and restructuring of the hypertext ethnography.

• Making an objective claim relies on knowledge of objects, which is informed by the kinds of claims one wishes to make.Thus, the production of ethnographic knowledge, particularly on the Internet, must be considered in the context of the ethnographer’s assumptions. Basic theoretical assumptions about anthropology may be at stake: society, the self, nature/culture distinctions. The Internet is not exotic, ‘net ethnographers do not hold position or special access…search engines hold more power. So the power of the ethnographer is in the investigatory and intersubjective potentials… telling the stories, explicating vocabularies, delineating new forms of group structure and communication.

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The blogging is a good start, I like presenting my process and making connections between ideas. However, this article was a bit of a downer. What is the point? Do cultures even exist on the Internet? Perhaps I should discard the notion of "culture" altogether, and concentrate on human interaction. True interaction is embodied, but you don't need a body for that. All you need is an embodied mind, and not even full concentration at that.

A past paper I wrote grappled endlessly with the concept of the "real". Is the Internet "reality". Can computer-mediated communication come close to face to face interaction. Etcetera etcetera. On and on. Making distinctions. Trying to make distinctions. Everything is distinctions, muddy, muddy, muddy distinctions, and this virtual arena is no different. And by that I mean it's just different. I think I'm going to settle on that: this novel form of communication and connection. Not culture, but communitas.

I think I should make a little project of creating a network diagram, and see where that leads me... maybe overlapping multiple communities/multiple identities...