Google Culture

“‘Tis just like a summer bird cage in a garden – the birds that are without despair to get in, and all the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear that they shall never get out”. Falmineo, The White Devil, Act 1, Scene 2, 48-52.

Contemporary Contexts

“Through the fragmented selves presented by patients and through theories that stress the decentered subject, contemporary psychology confronts what is left out of theories of the unitary self. Now, it must ask, What is the self when it functions as society? What is the self when it divides its labours among its constituent “alters”. Those burdened by post-traumatic stress disorders suffer these questions; here I have suggested that inhabitants of virtual communities play with them”. (Turkle, 1995, p. 259)

By 2006 the Internet had featured more advanced variations on Turkle’s (1995) communities. The ability to upload documents, files, images and films effectively up-turned the traditional top-down mediascape. Internet content was now provided (mostly free) by individuals and groups whose lifestyle, specialist, and professional websites and blogs were already pre-tuned by Google to accept, or, ‘host’, as if by magic, incoming targeted advertising that would neatly blend in with the kind of ‘real’ content no advertising division could come up with. The process encapsulated the post-Capitalist lurch that had begun in the 1990s and which now outsourced traditional in-house paid jobs to what had suddenly become the ‘Global citizenry’. Just as the most popular television programmes such – as Big Brother – became increasingly reliant on non-professional performers following non-scripted scenarios, so the post-Capitalist business formulae seemed increasingly dependent on what had been the ‘failed’ Socialist principles of engagement, commitment, belief, authenticity and that now figured social net-working as perhaps the only reliable means of getting ahead.

That form of networking takes many forms, of course. They all, however, rely on very traditional epistemological certainties that uncomfortably equate (quick) vision with (total) knowledge. As Denzin (1996) would have it,

“Everyday life and our consciousness and interpretations of that life are filtered through and defined by the cinematic apparatus, that structure that brings life, as Noel Burch (1990) argues, to those shadows that define daily existence. Krug (1992: 60) elaborates, ‘the intersection of experience and cultural forms is the site where the (postmodern) self is articulated linguistically and formally’. This intersection is aesthetic, talking the self into existence through a cultural form, like a home video, a family photograph…as visual ethnographers of the post-modern visual, cinematic culture (see Harper, 1994) we study our own and other’s intersections with these visual texts, showing how they give and produce meaning for ourselves and others”. (Denzin, 1996, p. 208)

Howevermuch users become familiar with the real uncertainties of this form of communication in general, implicit and important trusts in the communication process are therefore still made that assume and often demand traditional forms of authentication. ‘Advances’ in technology – whether it be mobile telephony, Avatars or My Space – seem to rest their epistemological cases on the veracity of the digital image, that, despite postmodern actualities, truths still weld the signified with the signifier.

At the time of writing, for example, LonelyGirl 13 had become a global website favourite, a natural ‘find’ that chartered the daily activities – or not – of a real teenager, but one, it seemed, without a name, a home a history, or even a marketing source. The mystery of her identity oddly added to the popularity of ‘her’ website and as with ‘Madeleine’, the girl’s perceived anonymity seemed to be a guarantor of her authenticity. Regular visitors to the website, however, became quickly and literally dis-illusioned when it was revealed (by the policing mainstream media) that LonelyGirl 13 was in fact a pure fabrication, a narrative construct like any other that was designed by graduating film students who were now employing the new technologies to test-market a new character for what they hoped would be their first Hollywood film. LonelyGirl 13 was revealed to be a New Zealand actress named Jessica Rose (sic) living in Los Angeles. Scottie Ferguson’s naïve faith in the epistemological claims of the visible world, and those in authority whose confident and powerful rhetorics engineer such faith, is a lesson for all of us who remain affectively attached to our own and others’ Avatars that similarly reside in ‘portals’ which we assume will be there tomorrow. Where identity is now more than ever created by language (Turkle, 1995), so, in the digital scenario, it becomes itself a regressive text, exposed to the push-pull and, perhaps worse, indifference, of the global panspectron readership. Protean fluidity, appearance and disappearance, the permanent and impermanent, seem applicable to every ’body’ in the Internet, except, of course, the Internet itself. Indeed, it is interesting in itself how and why the Internet has appropriated religious vocabularies – windows, portals, hosting, convert, Avatars – and that, in the patterned arrangement of text and picture icons, websites, forum and blogs are visually comparative to the illuminations commonly found in Medieval Biblical manuscripts.

5.7 …“just a little scary”

As noted, the exposure of LonelyGirl 13 as a fake by the mainstream media was further evidence of the testing relationship developing between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, with the former often asserting its more paternal persona over and above its more slippery renegade challenger which it tolerates, charms, appropriates and, as in this case, quickly cheats upon. The rhetorical tussle for newsworthiness, for the ‘presence’ of an authentic, legitimate corporate identity is itself a feature of Jacobean dramaturgy, a dance of intrigue, legal posturing and evasive corporate marketeering all designed to capture the trust and long-term commitment of the watching millions.

Dodgeball allows transient mobile-users to create – or try to create – their own live communities by hailing members to a specific locale for a social get-together. Such users can thereby fabricate their own personalised Global Villages, create their social-geographic environments, all made possible by the Global Surveillance Network and, hopefully, the on-line presence of one’s own beguiling Avatar. The new technological possibilities, however, also give rise to the awkward possibility that, one can just as easily not be invited to such ‘events’.

The Second-Life simulacrum is an open-space of limitless possibilities, events, meetings, and variegated lifestyles. Formed in 2003 by Philip Rosedale, members sign on in the form of fully formed personas and proceed to form their own version of life’s best opportunities. As one resident, ‘MrBeef911’, would report to Stuart Jeffries (2006), “I work in a day care centre for children, in Texas. My Avatar is a big yellow triceratops: I am a “furry”…My Second Life feels more real than my real life; it’s the one where I feel pain. Today I’ve spent about $100 (real dollars). I bought a dungeon for my piece of land, but donated it to someone else. I spend most of my time n the furry bath houses – I was actually born a homosexual dragon”. (The Guardian, Oct, 7^th 2006, p. 21)

The virtual possibility of staking out territory recycles familiar myths of Manifest Destiny when real house mortgages are increasing at alarming rates (by way of ironic elaboration of our discussion of urban representation in Vertigo (1958), Second-Life emerges from numerous servers as housed in a warehouse south of San Francisco). But as fifteen-year old ‘Vince Vacira’ would have it,

“…I still have trouble with the layout of the land…it’s just a bunch of random places you teleport to. The best thing about SL is the ability to make anything, just by shaping it with computer tools. But I have to admit, the chance to make real money was a big draw too.” (The Guardian, Oct, 7^th 2006, p. 21)

Second-Life might, therefore, celebrate the protean possibilities in postmodern culture of the kind earlier noted in Turkle (1995), but the one human identity which most of its inhabitants are likely to share – whether they be Furries or not – is that of Capitalist land grabber and/or consumer, and at the real cost of $72 a year. The ideal citizen is encouraged thereafter to join the growing market economy by spending and earning ‘Linden’ Dollars in what looks like the final word on ‘free-trade market’. What makes the Second-Life scenario even more compelling is that its Linden Dollars are immediately convertible to UK pounds and U.S dollars at the on-line currency exchange points. Other points of contact with the alternative real world have included the 2006 pre-Congressional Election town-hall interview with Democrat Mark Warner, a live-relay of concert by Hedron from Glasgow (the leading song was I Need You), and, to convey to students how his patients suffer, a recreation by a California psychiatrist of schizophrenic hallucinations. Such reports give rise to knowing cynical accounts, largely, of course, from the mainstream media for whom ‘California’ has become a knowing shorthand code for geographic and psychological instability. Defenders of Second-Life and, by extension, the playful consequence-free experimentation opportunities that the Internet in general seems to offer, forward the argument that such play is a vital stage of psychological development that allows for the emergence of Erikson’s “core self”. As Turkle (1995) would have it,

“Erikson developed these ideas about the importance of a moratorium during the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, the notion corresponded to a common understanding of what “the college years” were about. Today, the idea of the college years as a consequence-free time-out seems of another era. But if our culture no longer offers an adolescent moratorium, virtual communities often do. It is part of what makes them seem so attractive.” (Turkle, WHITHER PSYCHOANALYSIS IN COMPUTER CULTURE, 2004)

The more permanent aspect of the Internet, however, might also suggest that it serves merely to hold its users in a permanent stage of adolescence, a moratorium of indefinite length, where selves, identities and personae can be adopted, diffused, eliminated and reformulated in a continual cycle of ‘renewal’, trapped in a Lacanian vertigo of deferred identity in which the “core self” is always assumed but remains a renegade Ideal.

One “core self” which of course becomes predominate is that of consumer. Touching ever deeper into further postmodern vertigo, the Second-Life townscape, for example, is said to become more real as it gets increasingly populated by loaded product placements and advertising billboards from the ‘real’ world (The Guardian, 2006). That ‘real-world’ of city life – New York, London, Paris – once the preserve of a nominal citizen – is quickly being transformed into a veritable stage for 24/7 marketing strategies. Companies such as Clear Channel Outdoor are merging the stable distinction between subject and object in ways that Scottie Ferguson’s flâneur might find untenable to his ‘hard-headed’ understanding of reality. Already, outdoor signs send digital ‘coupons’ to passing cell phones and can address their ‘owners’ directly by their name (the cell phone in this respect has become a databank, a mechanism more for those marketeers looking in than for those wanting to communicate out). Examples abound of what such marketeers call “interaction”: in London, video clips and sample tracks from Coldplay’s album X&Y were downloaded by 20, 000 people from strategically placed posters in rail terminals; in Paris, sample coupons of the fragrance Hypnose were similarly downloaded, this time from bus-shelter signs; back in London in autumn 2005 fashion retailer New Look used small electronic devices embedded in billboards – known as ‘Hypertags’ – that sent digital discount vouchers via infrared and Bluetooth which, conveniently, could be then spent in adjacent stores

What were fixed-based billboards are now, through LED and LCD digital technology, transformable over time and crucially informed of the consumer identity of passing pedestrian traffic. In fact, as this book was going to press, the writer would pass such developments on the streets of East Berlin. The London advertising agency Posterscope, for example now leads with trials (95% successful) of a billboard that changes its content depending on the gender of the person standing in front of it. In a manner that isn’t so distinct from Gavin Elster’s elaborate epistemological trick against Scottie Ferguson, urban dwellers thereby become benignly ‘punck’d’, specifically subject to surrounding and beguiling Jacobean intrigues that assume to mirror and answer ‘their’ changing desires and needs as potential customers. Concepts such as external and internal quickly become unstable (or, from a Marxist perspective on late-Capitalism, wholly predictable) as the surrounding cityscape envelopes and embeds its populations within commercial simulacra that constantly frames and thereby legitimises identity and as an exclusively consumer one. As TIME reporter Michael Brunton would jocularly reflect,

“For now, the advertiser knows only your number. Before too long, though, it could know your name too. Pretty cool stuff – and maybe just a little scary” (TIME Magazine, April, 24^th, 2006, pp. 48-50)

The dissolution of orthodox distinctions between media content and supporting advertising further intensifies with the parallel development of what is known as ‘Bumvertizing’, that is, the actual presence of ‘real’ people – we could call them ‘Madeleines’ – who are employed to perform for ‘real’ certain specific lifestyle cultures through the positive use of specific brand products, whether that might be on a bus, a street corner or what some might assume would be a ‘private’ party. We should be reminded at this point of Jane Schleuter’s Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (1979) in which the metafictional character,

““…whether he be game-playing, role-playing, or involved in any number of variations, possesses two distinct fictive identities, between which we are forced to distinguish, accepting one of the fictive identities as “real” and the other as “fictive”. At times the metafictional character is the embodiment of one portion of its duality, and at other times is the embodiment of the other portion. Ultimately, though, these two aspects of reality and illusion are both embodied in the same character, giving the playwright the perfect opportunity to confuse them once he has distinguished them”” (West, 1991, p. 171)

Developments across the ‘public’ sphere – or the Google Culture – now make dramaturgs of politicians, marketeers and public relations operatives. The line that once distinguished between the stage area and audience now diffuses into a metafictional Jacobean game distinguished by personal intrigues, epistemological uncertainty and conceptual confusion that often second-guesses possible Surreal comment.

Indeed, building on Turkle (1995), the Internet itself as a whole has, it seems, to have quickly appropriated all the technical features, dual tones, collective intrigues and dramatic challenges of the classic Jacobean text. Multiple windows, domain names, digital enhancements, Avatars and community portals collectively encourage a “Narrative sequencing (that) emphasises shifts in knowledge and challenges identification…” (Berry, 1972), wherein, “the notion of ‘character’ no longer assumes an entity capable of absolute definition…” (Berry, 1972), and where there exists “…a deliberate policy of favouring multiple viewpoints rather than one in particular…” (Lomax, 1991) As Turkle (1995) would additionally observe,

“It is fitting that the story of the technology that is bringing postmodernism down to earth itself refuses modernist resolutions and requires an openness to multiple viewpoints” (Turkle, 1995, p. 268)

In more sinister terms, however, it can also imply and in fact encourage a “…dark criticism of social morality…” (Smith, 1991), a profound sense of “instability (that) is turning accepted concepts inside out…” (Lomax, 1984) and how, “Man’s pre-occupation with outward appearances instead of moral realities has led to the chaotic world…” (Dallby, 1972).

Since the Rodney King beatings of the early 1990s, the prevailing existence of mobile telephony has made every social space a potential Jacobean scenario, an opportunity to immediately record, transmit and now distribute images of interpersonal exchanges that can quickly degenerate into conflicts, but which subsequently become areas of major interpretative contest about what ‘actually happened’. Much like sports commentators emoting over the freeze-frames of a falling football player, the shared ‘discussion’ – as marshalled then by mainstream media – effectively turns the recorded event into an elaborate contest over clashing interpretations over what everybody can ‘see’ but whose meaning becomes diffused or, perhaps worse, easily genred and its participants stereotyped. The ascription of motivation and then character definition (usually with the urgent compression of commercial time, exclusively ‘good’ or irretrievably ‘bad’) emerge from juxtaposing narrative assumptions as based on highly vivid images as ‘caught’ by ‘dis-interested’ on-lookers. Images based on the assumed verities of the visual truth – satellite images of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example – become, with repetition, quickly problematic and epistemologically unstable, at which awkward point journalistic ‘inquiry’ quickly departs for other fields of interest, further points of vertiginous visual deferment.

This rhetorical process across competing media is suggestive of one further feature of Jacobean dramaturgy – that is the prevailing emphasis “…on the relationship between those controlling the action and those who are controlled…” (Lomax, 1984), a feature that is explicit in the work of both Webster and Hitchcock. Control over social meaning impacts on ones sense of identity, an uncomfortable fact which Hitchcock’s main characters and Scottie Ferguson, in particular, must learn to acknowledge. It’s truth, however, does generate that character’s growing pull towards “freedom, power and colour” that once, it seems, to have been his right. Brown’s (1987) accounting of society as rhetorical textual practice isn’t without relevance, since,

“The dominant classes in early industrial society sought to get their inferiors to do what they wanted them to do. In contemporary society, elites try to make their subordinates be what they want them to be.” (Brown, 1987, p. 52)

However, with emergence of digital technologies – the sudden profusion of self-regulating forums, lifestyle communities and blogs (20, 000 a day in late 2006) – hails and tempts each individual user as a potential ‘elite’ manager, or perhaps best, a tribal elder, who can create subordinate members in and around such ‘communities’ and forums. Late-Capitalism, where the gap between the rich and the poor had never been so wide, had created in the form of the Internet, as if in unconscious need of its own urgent survival, a self-regulating panopticon of dizzying proportions, where both the unemployed and underemployed could find some space to monitor and marshal themselves into pseudo (unpaid) working relationships ‘with’ others. This is, of course, in contradistinction to the more spirited account from Turkle (1995) for whom virtuality “…need not be a prison. It can be a raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom” (Turkle, 1995, p. 63).

Now in the 21^st Century, if there is a single meta-narrative that infuses Internet activity, media discussion generally, and beyond that, much social discourse, it is a persuasive angst and tussle over the nature of meaning, power and identity.”

Andrew Keen on Google Killing Culture: