I wanted to call your attention to the DDI, a research group in Canada at SFU led by Wendy Chun. My lab here at USC is working with DDI on a large Digital Fluencies grant. They've got a good set of virtual talks coming this fall (including one by Wendy about her latest book that we'll read excerpts from this term) that you might want to check out.
What first caught my attention this week was Halpern’s description of the Eames-designed IBM display at the 1964 World Fair—the display’s virtual reality-esque qualities. “Viewers were lifted from the ground into a closed oval and entered a space of multiple screens that filled the field of vision” (Halpern, 342); “Inside this machine, the spectator was exposed not to any singular piece of content but to a perceptual field” (343). These are all processes of immersion central to VR, on which VR scholar Paul Roquet has recently said that immersion is “often just another word for enclosure. Once you strip away the claims to immediacy and presence that are made for VR, what’s left is a device that blocks perceptual access to the proximate world” (Roquet, The Immersive Enclosure, 2). Indeed, both Kepes and Eames’ vision for what is essentially a new episteme vis-à-vis a new concept of visual perception as landscape or environment at times sounds like an enclosure—perhaps because, for a start, it assumes an archive of data which, despite the seemingly infinite associations to be made from them, is still a fixed set of information, a “pre-recorded world” (Halpern, 337)? Ironically, the expansive vision of perception ends up feeling enclosed, limited.
Immersion or enclosure can evoke a certain disengagement or walling off from what is exterior. If this was in fact a corollary to midcentury understandings of digital media, McLuhan sees it. In the BBC interview, McLuhan is asked (around 13:00) about his predictions (in Understanding Media) on “the kind of life, the quality of feeling we’re going to have with the new alternation of our senses”—to which he mentions the (re-)rise of regional dialects in England and concludes that “this driving depth toward regional depth of culture is a normal feature of electronic forms because of circuitry that involves us deeper and deeper within ourselves…” While Kepes or the Eameses would purport that their visions of new media are expansive, McLuhan reminds us, true to his McLuhan self, that electronic media itself accounts for what is an increasing move towards the interior, the depths of ourselves—an enclosure? However, the renewed pride for regional dialects also meant the decline in standard English, which is potentially a positive fragmentation of (harmful) homogeneous notions of nation, identity, being.
Despite Vannebar Bush’s exhortations to use science and tech for the greater good, his grand drive towards a final stage of human knowledge via electronic media could also read as an enclosure in the sense of the Memex’s potential to offer that similar environment of the 1964 IBM display, where trails of saved data immerse the user. But while users enjoy the Memex space, we can ask, especially in light of Nakamura’s article, who is in actuality left out of this immersive usage, and what kinds of human work and labor go in to making such a perceptual technology possible.
In keeping with our class discussion last week, a recurring tension that arose in this week’s readings is the divide between the utopian promise of so-called “new media” and the often-dystopian systems that undergird that promise. In “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush writes extensively about the various technological innovations that might improve human life. Similarly, Orit Halpern’s “Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design” documents Gyorgy Kepes’ and Charles and Ray Eames’ optimism regarding the “emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media” (Halpern 328). What both of these articles largely gloss over is the way that these technologies frequently emerged from the military-industrial complex. Bush was a “primary organizer of the Manhattan Project” that produced atomic bombs during World War II, and Kepes was partially inspired to formulate a “new concept of visual perception” while partaking in US Department of Defense flights above Chicago (Bush 35; Halpern 329). Likewise, Fairchild Semiconductor, described by Lisa Nakamura in “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture" as "the most influential and pioneering electronics company in Silicon Valley's formative years," initially sold the majority of its product to the US military (Nakamura 920; 922). As such, all three of these readings serve as a valuable reminder – whether intentional or otherwise – that the fantasy of new media has always rested on structures and systems of militarism and extraction.
What these articles do not offer, however, is an extensive critique of that very fantasy. Admittedly, Nakamura does examine the propagandistic rhetoric that Fairchild mobilized to justify their exploitation of Diné women, but she appears to be somewhat less interested in the broader discourse that was used to justify and promote the production of electronics in the first place. In this regard, the two essays by Marshall McLuhan – “The Galaxy Reconfigured” and “The Medium is the Message” – might be read as exceptions. He actively interrogates Bush’s enthusiastic assertion that new technologies will expand the abilities of the human body. In a sense, McLuhan concurs, asserting that all media is an extension of the human senses (209). But he also contends that each new medium induces a “revolution in human perception” that often cannot be fully understood until the medium has become well-established (McLuhan 199). While McLuhan does not appear to view such revolutions as inherently negative outcomes, his essays at least acknowledge that the fantasy of new media is not without its consequences. New media will change and manipulate its users, just as its users change and manipulate it.
Perhaps due to his aversion to considering “content” at the expense of focusing on the medium itself, McLuhan’s analysis of new media’s impact does not really extend to the ideology embedded in the fantasy of new media. What strikes me about the readings for this week, though, is the way that a logic of preservation and access infuses so many of the inaugural moments in the development of new media and electronics. This is most obvious in Bush’s essay when he describes the “memex” – a sort of proto-computer – as a device that may “implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race” (46). The memex can record and store all human knowledge without error while ensuring that it is also easily accessible. This rhetoric of preservation recurs in the Fairchild propaganda described by Nakamura. Fairchild argued that the work of Diné women in their plant was remarkably similar to these women’s cultural experiences with weaving and other craftwork, thereby making them uniquely well-suited to the task. Nakamura writes, “Semiconductor manufacture was made to seem like an act of Navajo cultural preservation” (935). Yet, as it relates to Indigenous communities, the very notion of preservation is often deeply troubling, reflecting the desire of colonizers to preserve cultures that they believe are dead or dying. In “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Renato Rosaldo notes, “[A]gents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (107-108). This notion is at the heart of colonial institutions like the museum. For this very reason, I have found that, as a field, Indigenous studies often reject the notion of “preservation” in favor of concepts like “revitalization” or “adaptation.” To quote Robert Allen Jr. (Tlingit), “You only preserve things that are already dead.”
On the one hand, there is a certain irony to Bush’s conviction that a device like the memex will enable preservation considering contemporary concerns amongst archivists about digital loss and decay. On the other hand, the ideals of preservation and access still appear to inform new media in almost all of its varied manifestations, thereby imbricating it in a particular set of colonial logics. Bush’s entire essay assumes that – within the relationship between knowledge, the memex, and the user – all three parties are innately neutral. He does not account for the possibility that some knowledge is meant to decay and disappear just as some people are not meant to have instantaneous – or any – access to that knowledge. Moreover, it is not especially difficult to see how the underlying ideology that produced Bush’s optimism might have, in turn, influenced the actions of Fairchild Semiconductor. In other words, if preservation and access have historically been understood to be unalloyed goods offered by new media, then perhaps it is not all that surprising that an institution like Fairchild used these same concepts to rationalize the continued colonialist exploitation of Diné people and land.
Additional Citations:
Allen Jr., Robert. Personal communication. 3 September 2021.
Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations, vol. 26, 1989, pp. 107-122.
