For example, what are we to make of McLuhan's various observations about the "hotness" or "coldness" of particular media? (I must confess that his entire definition of this concept, about whether the medium completely engages one's perceptual system or not, seems nonsensical to me; he believes that print, for example, does so, but a telephone conversation does not, which seems difficult to support). McLuhan is a very electronic-savvy commentator, but seems to think that the major use of computers should (or would be) automating tasks previously performed by people, the old "computers as slaves" metaphor, without stopping to think about what new media are enabled by computers. If McLuhan thinks that text, by its nature, is "hot" and engages all the sense, but that a telephone conversation must be "cold", then what would he make of an IRC channel or a MUD, in which we have the form of a telephone conversation (or, more commonly, a cocktail party), yet it is in print? This seems a transitional form that is quite poorly supported by McLuhan's analytic tools.
Yet on the other hand, McLuhan's understanding of all media as extending the sensorium are right on target---his ideas about modern media constituting a worldwide sensory and nervous system seem much more apropos when talking about fundamentally many-to-many, real-time, interactive systems such as the net than they do when talking about, e.g., broadcast television. A MUD conversation is not a pipeline of information, which McLuhan would fully agree with, and the form of the medium often really is its own message; special social conventions have arisen to support the form irrespective of the content, for example.
Similarly, Horkheimer & Adorno's enormous rant about modern media being, first and foremost, an instrument of deception and control seems to assume that all media are mass media, e.g., one-to-many, noninteractive, broadcast-oriented, and that any media that are not are nonetheless completely co-opted by those that are. (Since their style of argumentation seems to be to make assertions without any reference to outside citations or sources of information, it's difficult to know whether they really have support for many of these assertions, but that's beside the point.) Many of the things they say are deeply cynical and deeply mistrustful of most people (they may, nonetheless, be right, alas), but they might learn a lot by examining the cultures that have arisen in a medium where it is far easier for noncommercial speech and minority voices to be heard. (Whether this medium will continue to be so in the future, of course, is questionable---given that commercial speech tends to crowd out noncommercial speech and given the rise of advertising on the net.)
It's not clear whether reader-response theory
[1
2
3
4
5]
is a help or a hindrance to analyzing networked forms of communication. On the one hand,
it tends to assume a single, fixed, static text for its analysis, which is rarely the case
in those media which most characterize the net. (Even electronic mail, which tends to be
relatively permanent, which has a definite author, and which has a prior medium---namely
hardcopy mail---to fall back upon for analysis, doesn't quite fit, becuase a great deal of
electronic mail is both highly conversational and addressed many-to-many, hence resembling
a cocktail-party conversation more than an authoriative text that brooks no questions from
its readers. And media with fewer historical precedents, such as MUDs, fit even less well.)
On the other hand, reader-response theory does assume that the readers of a text are
interacting with it in a fundamental way, rather than receiving a single known message from
it. Such interaction is usually predicated to be alternate readings of the text, which
can certainly happen on the net, but the net also allows direct questioning of the
producer of the text in a way that more traditional written media often do not.
Useful non-net observations
Meanwhile, others have made observations that, while not targeted to the net (often they
predated the net), are nonetheless useful in reasoning about the ways in which people use
the net and the sociology of its various media.
For example, even though Eisenstein thought his most important contribution was the theory of the visual overtone, his fondness for assaultive cinema seems to foreshadow the popular sport of flaming on the net. In both cases, inflammatory rhetoritic is employed to produce an emotional effect and hopefully convince its recipients; there are many mailing lists and newsgroups in which assaultive behavior seems to be the dominant form.
Similarly, Appadurai's ideas about cultural imperialism seem relevant to the current situation on the global internet, although one might argue that the net tends more to expose underlying cultural differences (such as when US and Japanese ideas about pornography intersect.)
I found Baudry's comments about the whole idea of the moving camera very illuminating. When film was young, the dominant approach to using it was to use the previous medium's styles (the last-war phenomenon). This effectively meant a static camera staring at a proscenium arch while a play was performed. Eventually, however, it became apparent that the real power of the camera was exposed (ahem) when it could move. In a similar fashion, much of the real power of automation was not exposed until networks came into being; static, centralized mainframes never realized the sort of communicative, associational, and collaborative freedom made possible by even simple computers and an underlying network infrastructure.
When de Certeau talks about reading, he uses a metaphor of poaching (as does Jenkins in Textual Poachers and elsewhere, of course). He views readers as active participants in the text---quite unlike many others who equate reading with passivity in the style of Eisenstein's passive, Pavlovian viewers. Such active readership is even more true in an environment like the net, where the text talks back---it is rarely static. Instead, readers can become enmeshed in conversations with the text's authors, and can also determine (via hypertext systems) which part of an existing text they wish to perceive next. Reading without participation is almost impossible on the net---not only is getting and giving feedback on the text so easy that barriers to activity (as opposed to passivity) are reduced to next to nothing, but in many media (such as newsgroups and hypertext Web documents), the reader must actively "pull" the media to himself to read it at all.
Furthermore, de Certeau's talk about networks of antidiscipline is a fundamentally optimistic and net-aligned viewpoint, focusing as it does on the "everyday practices by which users manufacture their own styles" [Armand]. Such a description is entirely appropriate to a medium which is constantly evolving both new sociology and new social mores, and which can empower individuals at least as easily as it can help implement Foucault's nets of surveillance.
Althusser and his various commentators [0 1 2 ] would have a field day with the net. The first thing that would probably come of their analysis is an understanding of some of the recent Federal tendencies toward its regulation; in part, they would argue, the net threatens the political status quo because it does not reproduce its own means of production. Its fundamentally egalitarian mechanism of operation (at least for those who are already connected) is not a natural match to capitalistic credos (consider the difficulty of making money on the net and the fundamental resistance displayed by most of the net to commercial activities, commercial speech, and paying for anything); neither is a natural match to Federalist central control (indeed, the underlying communications protocols were deliberately crafted to resist such control).
The Glasgow Group showed that only authorized representatives were generally ever allowed to speak on television; this is one of the fundamental messages from Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent as well, in which he points out that any viewpoint differing significantly from the commonly-accepted status quo will be impossible to present due to the medium's emphasis on short sound bites (which are insufficient to advance any sort of argument). Given that the net allows a huge variety of viewpoints and tends not to privilege any of them (though this is changing with the rise of commercial Web publishes and an increasing percentage of commercial speach), the Glasgow Group would probably agree with the Marxist views of Althussian analysis. Similarly, Gledhill's Pleasurable Negotiations, in its examination of feminist analysis, would tend to support the view that, despite the relative lack of strictly feminist (or even female) viewpoints in the net at current, the net tends to support the sort of negotiation and appropriate often employed in so-called feminine spaces.
Computer-informed criticism
We come now to explicitly computer-informed (hence recent) criticism. Two of the most
obvious are Brenda Laurel's Computers as
Theater and Henry Jenkins' look at
videogames. Both of these sources tend to view interaction with the computer as a
hermetic system: one where the user is interacting with a computer qua computer, rather
than using the computer as the implementation of a fundamentally interpersonal
communicative system. Hence, while their comments are certainly valid and useful when
thinking about computers in general as systems to which one may apply literary analysis,
they do not take the net in general and the phenomena around it as their central concern.
In part, this is due to the timing of these. For example, Computers as Theater was published in 1991, a time when the net was well-known to computer scientists, but had not yet really permeated public consciousness. Thus, even though Laurel was clearly using the net then, she was not viewing it as an organizing force in determining how people's interactions with computers might change. There seem to be few analyses along these lines, even these days; I contend that this is a subject that bears closer inspection.
Lenny Foner Last modified: Wed Apr 3 01:18:14 1996