In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, which takes the “circuit of culture” approach by looking at how representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation are recursive. We need to update this model to incorporate a sense of social justice, as the above video is pushing for, and also the ecological dimension of production. It’s not just that conflict minerals are a problem in the supply chain, there is also disposal and externalization of the toxic byproduct resulting from built-in obsolescence (you know, what happens to your computer or iPod after you upgrade it).

Wired has a bunch of smart guys ruminating about the the iPad’s impact on computing. As to be expected in Wired, there is a dearth of discussion about the impact of obsolescence on the environment. On a separate note, with so many brilliant minds in the room, surpassingly only one person made an intelligent comment: Steven Johnson (author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software ). You can read a snip below, but essentially he points to the fundamental contradiction between technological access and corporate gatekeepers. If we want a truly ecological gadget–that is, one that is open, shareable and hence designed to evolve the way that ecosystems are–than DRM and copyright are going to have to be radically reconsidered. In the end, I don’t believe we can reconcile a closed system (the current regime of intellectual property) and an open system like the Internet. One will have to give.

For more on the iPad’s DRM issues, check out defectivebydesign.org.

13 of the Brightest Tech Minds Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet | Magazine:

The End of an Era

“But then something extraordinary happened. The personal computer proved to be more than just a fancy calculator. It turned out to be a device for doing things with words. Each milestone in computation and connectivity unleashed a new wave of textual breakthroughs: Early networks gave rise to email and Usenet; the Mac UI made reading text on the screen tolerable; the Internet platform (and the NeXT development environment) made it possible for one man to invent a universal hypertext system; Google harnessed distributed computing to make the entire Web searchable in microseconds; and thanks to Wi-Fi and cellular networks, along with hardware miniaturization, we can now download a novel to an ebook in 10 seconds.

It has been an exhilarating ride, but it is coming to an end, and that magical experience of instantly pulling Middlemarch out of the ether and onto your Kindle suggests why: Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the “universal book”: a handheld reading device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era, it’s no longer technology holding us back from realizing that vision; it’s the copyright holders.”

In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the oncoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is ‘progress.’ What we seek, in the end, is Utopia. In the endless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present.

Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid

A) The David Lynch Phone

B) The Terminator Phone

C) The Ladies and Gentlemen We’re Floating in Space Phone

Anyhow, I like Dmitry Orlov‘s take on economics and observations about collapsing empires (Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects). What follows is a snip from his blog in which he discusses in an interview, among other things, the decline of technology as a result of resource depletion, and the fate of space programs.

ClubOrlov: Marketing in a Small Town – Interview No. 3:

DD: Recently on CNN there was a report about the U.S. mission to the moon. The Indians are planning to land there in 2020, the Russians and Americans in 2025, and the Chinese in 2030. I think that the popularity of conspiracy theories about the staging of those events is that we find it hard to imagine that we can not repeat the achievements of three decades ago without a huge effort. Meanwhile, examples similar to the lunar program are starting to occur more and more frequently. Experts say that Russia has lost the ability to produce modern weapons on a large scale for quite trivial reasons, such as lack of sufficiently skilled metalworkers, because the system of training them has collapsed. How justified are we in fearing that we (the world in general, not just Russia) are starting to slip back in time in terms of technology?

DO: In the end, the history of human trips to space will engender new myths: the primitive idols of the future will not be winged, but will sit astride rockets dressed in spacesuits. These trips were only possible thanks to large-scale industrial systems based on the use of fossil hydrocarbons, reserves which have already been exhausted, on average, about half. It will not be possible to exhaust them completely: the technological rollback has already started. It starts long before a particular resource is completely exhausted. To maintain homeostatic equilibrium, an industrial system requires a continuous flow of investment, and in order for this to happen capital must continually be created. If, say, the profitability of a coal mine is inversely proportional to shaft depth, it is enough to get to a depth at which the income is not sufficient to continue to update equipment, and the mine will close, regardless of how much coal there is left in it. But such a rational approach is rarely taken. Rather than make a difficult but timely decision, everyone begins to economize on safety, defer repairs, take on debt and so on. Periodically, the idea comes up that the situation can be improved if only everyone would show more zeal or ingenuity. We certainly all need some level of technology, and we all ought to stop to think hard which technologies can be sustained at a continually decreasing level of extraction of various natural resources. Instantly the thought occurs that aerospace technologies will not make it onto this list.

Cribbing another post from BoingBoing: Cory Doctorow posted the above video as a complaint against a lazy plot device. But I suspect dead cell phones in plot lines to be part of a greater anxiety, and began to craft a response in my mind, but bingo! the commenter Tdawwg nailed it. Without further ado:

Maybe this issue points to a problem with plot-heavy storytelling in an increasingly deterministic, mapped-out, known, surveilled, mechanistic, etc., world.

Think of a similar genre, the Wanted Man-Technothriller: Enemy of the State is an early example from the nineties. In these films, endless (and endlessly tiring) instances must be concocted whereby the harried protagonist just barely manages to slip by the evil conspiracymongers’ (or corporation’s, or gubbmint rogue death squad, or….) Nefarious Web of Ubiquitous Surveillance. Whereas if we’re to accept the central premise of the film, that there exists a They Who Are Evil And All-Powerful, They’d have fucked the hero three ways to Sunday in reel one: but somehow the hero always always slips past the ever-tightening net of surveillance and control.

In the suspense-horror case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to plug into the Grid (loss of safety and security); in the technothriller case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to jack out of the Grid (loss of freedom and agency). And since these aren’t so much reflective or exploratory arty films, but plot-heavy popcorn summer blockbusters or the reliable, cheap thrills of contemporary horror flicks, so these completely stupid, adventitious reasons for tech failure keep popping up.

Thinking more about it, I really like how the clips above make technology the real monster-threat of the films. Good stuff.

Antero Alli, a fellow traveler in the realm of the DIY spiritual underground, has an interesting commentary about the impact of immersive media, something I had not thought about. He says, below, that the loss of dream memeory is an amputation of the imagination caused by allowing devices to imagine for us. This is similar to McLuhan’s claim that whenever we transport our senses into mediation we end up cutting off our own bodily senses.

Reality Sandwich | Information Bombs and the Canary in the Coal Mine: A Talk with Antero Alli:

In this hypermedia saturated culture, especially with people born in the early ‘80s on, I think there is a certain imagination lobotomy that has occurred where the external media technologies and sources have gradually usurped the poetic genius or our innate ability to image their own realities. So we succumb to images more gorgeous, interesting, fascinating, or compelling than we can create out of our own imaginations. So the imagination dies, it withers — imagination death or soul loss is involved. I think part of also what gets lost is dream recall.

Personally I don’t really think that it’s that people don’t dream, but that they’ve lost dream recall. There’s an association in my mind between the loss of dream recall and power loss in people’s lives. People losing power, losing the ability to influence the world in ways that are meaningful to them. So power loss, loss of dream recall, loss of imagination are all tied into a larger cultural epidemic resulting from this acceleration of media technology and its interface with human consciousness. Especially any kind of immersion software like video gaming, VR technology, and sometimes even films and television and other kinds of media too, where it just overwhelms and sabotages or takes over the individual imagination.

… Imagination is the new canary in the cultural coal mine; imagination death precedes loss of the soul.

Portals (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) have enabled guided Internet experiences, but Disney now takes it one step further. Its new Netpal notebook computer is entirely a computerized Disney environment. From ZDNet:

Developed with parents and kids in mind, the Disney Netpal has a reinforced mechanical design and, naturally, a Disney user interface. In addition to “more than 40 robust parental control options,” the Netpal sports an 8.9-in. LCD display, Wi-Fi, Windows XP Home and kid-friendly software featuring Disney characters.

I suspect these designer-brand net computers will be the wave of the future. We’ll move from generalized branded operating systems, such as Apple, Microsoft or Google, to more specifically designed interfaces that reflect particular styles and brand loyalty. Just as the skateboard industry has a variety of designer and custom boards, I foresee a slew of custom net systems. But I imagine that for now they will be mostly from high end (that is, well-endowed) corporate media brands (I’m sure Warner Brothers has one in the works), because the front-end design aspect must be prohibitive.

Is this Disney’s answer to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and its XO Laptop? Probably not, but it’s instructive to compare the two systems. Though the XO has its own custom operating system, it is open source, a guaruntee required by founder Nicholas Negroponte. Consider the 5 guiding principles of OLPC:

1. Child ownership

2. Low ages. Both hardware and software are designed for elementary school children ages 6–12.

3. Saturation

4. Connection

5. Free and open source

Also compare the high-minded mission of the OLPC with Disney. Guess which one cites radical educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire as the inspiration for its interface? Perhaps only the Magic Kingdom’s dungeon guards would recognize these names.

It should be said this is not a clear case of good vs. evil. OLPC has its detractors and there is one particularly disturbing anecdote concerning a comment made (before the OLPC program was developed) by Negroponte during a radio interview with neo-Luddite Chellis Glendenning. When his utopian vision of the digital world was challenged by the fact that computer hardware production was causing babies to be born without brains in Mexico, he said it didn’t matter. The toxic waste of computer manufacturing and disposal remains a blind-spot enabled by its outsourcing from the core to the periphery and from lack of sufficient dialog about the problem.

PS Interesting how Disney’s deliberately amateurish Netpal intro video is intended to make it feel personal and endearing as opposed to cold and flashy. Where’s the magic?

Brain Represents Tools As Temporary Body Parts, Study Confirms:

Researchers have what they say is the first direct proof of a very old idea: that when we use a tool—even for just a few minutes—it changes the way our brain represents the size of our body. In other words, the tool becomes a part of what is known in psychology as our body schema, according to a report published in the June 23rd issue of Current Biology.

I’m glad the issue of conflict minerals is seeing the light of day– literally. As this video depicts, minerals important for our communications infrastructure are often mined by children in conflict zones. Many of the materials that go into the manufacture and out with the disposal of computers, cell phones, etc. are devastating to the “global majorities” (those who actually comprise the majority of the world’s population, but are denied access to the benefits of global capitalism). I think that if we are to take seriously the idea of the transformation of consciousness as a result of communications technology, then we should also critically engage the world system that produces such devices. I’m not suggesting that it should be one or the other (that is no phones versus economic and ecological justice), yet I believe we need to turn the screws on the technology companies to behave more responsibly when they make products, and for us to be wiser consumers. Furthermore, we should think twice about tossing the old cell phone considering the hardship that went into producing its material reality.

This leads to a broader question concerning some of the Utopian thinking about communications technology: is it possible if such futures as the singularity occur, will artificial intelligence be able to gage the issue of social and ecological justice? Currently the programs that buy and sell commodities on international markets are the least interested in such concerns. How will computers sense the livelihood at the root of their own production?