Digital Aesthetics (Theory, Culture and Society Series)

Rating:
Summary: BEING AESTHETIC VERSUS BEING DIGITAL
Review: The digital explosion is ushering in a frightening future built upon transnational structures of power and greed presided over by the high priests of technology and management. But it is not too late to fight for an alternative future shaped not by the corporate cyborg but by aesthetics, the "pursuit of an ethical mode of being ... despite the conditions in which we find ourselves" of "being digital".

Sean Cubitt spits in the face of the digerati (a species of Cyclops who rule in the land of the blind masses) who foresee an infinitely expanding seamless web of information into which all humankind and industry must disappear. Reader in Video and Media Studies at the Liverpool John Moraes University, Cubitt dives into the multi-disciplinary welter of knowledge architectures to distill hard truths from the technobabble of the technotopians. "The fastest and widest impact that computers have had is in deepening the class structures of contemporary society on a global scale ... the demolition, not just of jobs, of communities and of cultures, but of hope itself as a direct or indirect effect of the electronics communication that have enabled the entirely destructive expansion of finance capital," he writes.

Resistance to and subversion of the "matrix", the technetronic, computer-mediated space dreamed up by sci-fi writer William Gibson in which giant corporations call the shots, offered by hackers, crackers and phreaks is an infantile reaction to a global technology which "while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance", Cubitt points out.

His book, a critique of the hard-sell of the digital revolution, is a mine of information as Cubitt apprehends the linkages between technological developments and their consequences for human society.

The problem of the promised utopia is that communication is reduced to aggression, command, power and submission. The matrix, into which the corporations want everyone and everything jacked in, is coded for the re-engineering of the human soul. The synergistic corporation is the actually existing cyborg, "not an assemblage of people but a machine ensemble ...a massive processing machine whose employees and consumers are its biochips", he warns.

The attack on extant cultures is multi-pronged. At the level of language, English is the standard, "oppressor" language of the Net, eroding the core role of other languages and cultural contexts. "Corporate culture responds to micro-cultural resistance with target marketing." And the designers of the Macintosh and Windows WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) interface further saw that "images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does" in combination with the expansion of the global market.

Cubitt analyses the process and aesthetics of reading since the human-computer interface allows the infinite generation of texts capable of varied readings. The traditional private and public experience of reading is replaced by the playful, the fantasy. This suits the digerati who foist an illusion of heightened individualism ("the user is in control") and mass personalization on consumers of the digital myth.

Transvestitism and tourism are the features of the Net, much lauded but in truth symptomatic of the shifting, fragmentation and disintegration of the self, Cubitt notes. The new individualism is a projection of the corporate cyborg. Control remains in the hands of the elite who code the heart and confines of the technologies bequeathed to users who are integrated into command heirarchies.

The creation of libraries was followed by the development of systems of classification of information. The synthetic Colon Classification cataloguing system developed by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 became the founding principle of mechanical systems of information retrieval, the grandparent of Internet search engines and similar knowledge architectures, "no longer dependent on humanist mnemonic culture". Memory fails, and so does meaning, when everything is reduced to an eternal now in real time.

The individual is in danger of losing all privacy with the creation of databases which render him as a "data image" or a "data self". The "real" self is reduced to "mere" writing in binary code, a ghost in the machine. Bizarre forms of desocialisation appear in cyber cultures, community is sacrificed for competition. "To restore the social requires dismantling the binary to build a concept of mediation between presence and absence ... the materiality of media, people and their objects", Cubitt suggests.

He pours cold water on the prophecies of cyber-theologians who deny mortality, the post-humanists and transhumanists who speak of erasing the body and de-materializing the complex human processes of socialization in their fantasies of "downloading the meat-mind into the matrix" and being "human as program or human in programs".

As Cubitt makes his radical analysis of the histories and contributions of poetry, philosophy, art, radio, cinema, video, space technologies, remote sensing and the Hubble telescope, he unveils the magical braid running through it all. "Between the data records and its interpreters there always lies the work of manipulation," he warns. It has to do with the degradation of all "material", including "nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature and human nature itself" to consumable commodities.

The digitally controlled play-world promises coherence and universalisation, homogenization. It leads to hyper-individualization and dispersion in cyberspace and "the sociality of images and implicitly of shared experience" is lost.

Digital aesthetics, concerned with the question of the future and the whole field of possibilities, suggests that the utopian question cannot be resolved by moving inexorably towards a corporatised technotopia. It must emerge from the shadow of corporate culture, that consciousness industry whose objective is to create brand identity adhered to by synergistic personalities forged through the introduction of play into work, masquerades, role-plays, simulations and alter egos, Cubitt says.

Digital aesthetics must break "the grip of the networked society's culture of selves", refuse being retrofitted into the corporate cyborg and "reinvent the machineries, the processes and selves of human-machine communication", Cubitt states. Thus the foundations for an evolutionary future which is genuinely global and democratic and outside the administered boundaries of the synergistic corporation can be laid. Is humanity up to this challenge? (the end)

Rating:
Summary: for rabid intellectuals only
Review: This book is an incredibly elitist rabid intellectual rant, highly opinionated and abstract that were it written by a student it would be judged to be incoherent.Do you know what diegesis means?...becuase i couldn't find it even in a good dictionary.and that's just the tip of the iceberg. As an attempt to communicate it is lousy except to about 10 people in the world who might describe it as a rattling good read...name dropping practically every sentence,showing off prodigious intellectual prowess at the expense of communication.Are you a lecturer? Do you want to ruin the lives of your students? Then tell them to read this.