Because i feel like it, and not because i think I'm spectacular, i've also included the post that i completed on Kittler who discusses extremely exciting and optimistic topics including our personal subservience to technology and how we're all manipulated by the media power structures that surround us. Yes. General happy sh*t.
On KIttler: Resistance is (not) futile
Kittler only adds to the list of scholars who have so kindly dashed any of my naive dreams regarding individualism and finding my own path in life and replaced them within apparatuses (apparitii? I want to say), statistical models and now within the notions of transcendental capitalism and power structures in which Rupert Murdoch-like characters are the norm. Life, in general, is really looking up.
Technology has irreversibly altered our consciousness and the way that we have come to live. Not that this is anything new, technology such as the wheel, around 3,500 B.C changed the way people thought about distance and placed themselves in the world just as the internet and Google has changed the way that we are able to connect with one another and how we consider time and space. While people create technology, this select group is tiny in comparison to the rest of the population who use, or are subservient to, (depending on your perspective) that technology. The people who create technology would appear to be the ultimate power players. And yet, are they really? Without the rest of us to buy into their technology, their technology is rendered useless. Without a capitalist medium through which to offer their technology, their technology cannot be marketed, or accessed by the general public. Even when new technology attempts to break free of the models that it seeks to change and improve, via feedback, the newer technology only becomes absorbed by the power structure of the existing technology. As the technology industry burgeons, it becomes increasingly apparent that all these forms of technology are dependent upon one another (just think how the ipod alone was able to spurn a whole range of 'i-technologies') and because of this are all reliant upon economic models and power structures that support the capitalist aims of a given media.
If one is to consider that writing is a medium through which we unavoidably leave a trace of ourselves, the fact that writing is subsumed to these power structures and economic models means that we, as people, are mere pawns in the capitalist game of technology. Technology is apparently rendering our imagination and hallucinatory capacity useless. We no longer want to dream or think outside of the sphere of possibility because technology can do it for us... Technology can be programmed to produce things that the designers might think we want, and maybe our wants are confined within the capabilities of what a machine can do, however, I think the purpose of dreaming and imagination has to do with a search for satisfaction and a desire for something that cannot be articulated or made tangible. I am yet to find a machine that pre-emptively fulfils any want that I may have (although the fact that I am rather technologically inept may have something to do with this). There are some things that go on in my brain that would be difficult to form in any medium, not only because I would struggle to articulate my hallucinations adequately enough for reproduction but because I don't think my hallucinations are only 'things', that is, they are not necessarily tangible or visible but something else (here, my inability to articulate what I mean is obvious). Technological determinism seems to simplify the hallucinatory capabilities of the individual and pre-emptively assumes that technology can cater to these rather under-rated possibilities of thought and sensation that might not be able to be mechanically reproduced (I'm thinking of smell and taste specifically here).
There will always be rule breakers, those who question and challenge the bounds that technology places upon us, whether in writing or in music or in any medium. I think Lisa Samuels is challenging the standardisation of writing, not only by contemplating the canon but also in the de-constructive work she is doing with 'gap scans'. Scratchers changed the way that Edison's phonograph worked in order to create a new type of music and were able to do so precisely because they were on the periphery of the capitalist model that had been established for music at the time which I think is pretty cool. Banksy contests the boundary between what is art and what is considered the defacement of public property though I think it is interesting how his popularity (and how capitalism has used such popularity) might be contrary to his own ideology regarding being outside the 'establishment'. Resistance will always be managed and re-apsorbed into the system that it threatens, however I wouldn't be so pessimistic to suggest that resistance is futile. The fact that technology continues to develop reflects the ever-changing notions of the authentic and the inauthentic and how people are pushing and changing boundaries, forming new networks or making older ones larger. There is still a human element to technology and it is perhaps the most important aspect to it... Without human input, technology is only idle chips and bits of plastic and copper wire. We are what makes technology.
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