Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Digital Play, Politics and Epistemology

    Good looking conference at Utrecht University courtesy of the Centre for the Study of Digital Games and Play, 7Scenes and the Waag Society. Here’s what the organizers have to say about it:

    With the advent of digital and mobile technologies scientific knowledge production has changed profoundly. As interactive, affordable, networked and ubiquitous technologies they invite people to engage with, alter and probe scientific ‘facts’. Play is essential to think about this new kind of engagement with science. It offers citizens powerful ways to become involved with and knowledgeable about scientific practices and offers subversive and exciting possibilities to actively contribute to and transform them. During this conference we therefore want to look at current citizen science developments through the lens of play. We will explore how the playful potential of digital media and cultures strengthen citizen’s scientific engagement and knowledge about their environment; and how the relationship between professional and laymen knowledge production is shifting through the ludic use of digital technologies.

    Although the conference is invitation only for the first two days (25/26th June) there is an open public event on the 27th in Amsterdam featuring keynotes from, amongst others, Jeffrey Warren.

  • Technophilia and Ecotechincs

    Nothing like a few blended terms to help grasp some hazy Stieglerian concepts. Technophilia is the name of a blog ran by the Extitute of Philosophy & Technology at Bristol UWE. Sam Kinsley’s last two posts on digital studies and the techno-anthropological virtual are worth reading. That is, if you want to understand how Bernard Stiegler sees the world through transindividuated inorganic organised beings (sorry). Ecotechnics is a blog by James Ash, lecturer in Media at Northumbria University (although trained as a human geographer). He’s also been struck by the Stiegler virus and talks of epiphylogensis and determinism in a recent post.

  • Bernard Stiegler and ‘Transindividuation’

    Collective minds, cross-generational knowledges, historical practices and symbolic systems. All of these come to constitute what Bernard Stiegler calls a process of ‘transindividuation’. He talks about the concept at length in the first instalment of his seminal Technics and Time series (The Fault of Epimetheus). The retention of human traces (previously forgotten) in a digital landscape point to some ethical dilemmas. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin’s The Ethics of Forgetting […] (2005) paper speaks loudly to Stiegler’s carrying of Gilbert Simondon’s ‘transindividual’.

  • Battle For the Internet

    The Guardian have been running a series all week entitled; ‘Battle for the internet‘, taking a look at the new frontiers of the web. So far the most interesting article posted in the series focused on ‘walled gardens’ – closed computer hardware (mainly Apple’s new stable of mobile products) with restricted operability. That is, a growing range of devices such as the iPad that limit user ability to dig down into code, run non-authorised software, or curate their own, self-verified programs.

    The fulcrum of the piece was the antagonism between ‘generative’ devices (those that can be programmed to do more than they were set-up to do) and ‘reductive’ devices (as above, those that limit/deny programmability by the user). Mobile smartphones, by and large, fall into the latter category. Jonathan Zittrain‘s book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008) shapes this argument.

    The obvious question, then, if mobile smartphones are results of a ‘tethering’ process (Zittrain 2008) designed to limit program operability to those screened and sold through App stores or other similar marketplaces, is; why is this necessary? What do smartphone manufacturer’s have to gain from, in effect, reducing their product’s usability? And, does this reduce a product’s value?

    Of course, it’s easy to simply say this is a case of Apple (and others) wanting to profit from their own success. The brand itself has swollen in worth, even since the mid-noughties, and despite Steve Job’s death remains a technological powerhouse. It’s App Store – combined with its iPad – represents the frontier of it’s business currently. In securitizing the use of the latter through the former, Apple have bricked up large swathes of internet usage behind its rather menacing walls. In operating with such impunity, Apple have managed to attain a level of online policing unknown to, or uncharacteristic of Western democracies, and much more akin to online modus operandi of the Chinese Communist Party, Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party or Iranian Government. This – rather than mere profit – becomes a greater concern for global web usage.

    There’s also a great quote from journalist and author, John Battelle on the ‘unstoppable’ mobile nature of the web:

    “The PC-based HTML web is hopelessly behind mobile in any number of ways,” he [Battelle] wrote on his blog. “It has no eyes (camera), no ears (audio input), no sense of place (GPS/location data). Why would anyone want to invest in a web that’s deaf, dumb, blind, and stuck in one place?”

    Whilst the quote itself draws on the hapless PC to elucidate the absurdity of a ‘non-sensing’ platform (slow, clunky, vulnerable, flawed), on the whole, the article lauds it as some sort of biblical feature pre-dating the narrowed confines of web 2.0. Of course, this is doubly untrue. Firstly, the PC-based HTML web can indeed sense in all the noted ways. It still has eyes (web-cams), ears and a sense of place (however fixed and immobile).  And secondly, the continued investment in mobile technology (aka web 2.0) is predicated on open, expansive, experiences. Only Apple and other pretenders seem to gain from the walled garden effect. The challenge, like Zittrain notes, is to traverse these boundaries in ways that cast open the future of the web.

  • Le Havre

    Went to see Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film Le Havre earlier this week; a heart-warming story of a young African migrant and a shoeshiner in the French port of Le Havre.

    Although unfamiliar with Kaurismäki, his film displayed a similar aesthetic to the work of Sylvain Chomet (Belleville Rendez-vous, The Illusionist), despite not sharing that lusty, frantic animated touch of Chomet’s  feature films. Without revealing too much of the storyline, the lead character – Marcel Marx – is a struggling boot polisher and former Parisian bohemian. Upon stumbling across a young escapee from a failed asylum attempt (Idrissa), Marx proceeds to care for the boy. But with the story hitting city-wide headlines, local police detective Monet follows their every move. Melancholic characters (Marx’s partner Arletty, fellow shoeshiner Chang), juicy cinematography and dry comic exchanges make for a fluid feature-length.  Upon discovering Idrissa has a remaining family member in the UK, Marx commits himself to finding the money needed for their reunion. With Arletty in hospital with cancer, Marx puts on a charity gig with Le Havre rock legend Little Bob; stumping up the money for his supposedly safe (but nonetheless illegal) passage across the Atlantic from fishing trawler to fishing trawler. Snopping Monet tips Marx off when it matters; Idrissa is presumed to have made his journey with success, and Arletty overcomes her illness.

    Having watched last night’s Newsnight with a short piece on the French election, this film is released at a rather sensitive time. After the shootings in Toulouse; an event exposing the somewhat fractious political state in the country,  Kaurismäki has succeeded in distilling some distinctly universal themes in national politics; namely those of citizenship, borders, and (illegal) asylum. It was of little coincidence Kaurismäki chose the port of Le Havre; depicted as a gritty, working-class city defined through it’s close network of work/drink relationships played out against an equally cinematic/metronomic background of daily coastal life. The sensitive, selfless nature of Kaurismäki’s lead character, Marx, make for a subtle rebuttal to those that recklessly stoke patriotic pride in the face of genuine humanitarian action. The film explores the warming nature of the latter against the mindless naivety of the former.