Week 3 - Eurocentric media theory - Core Post 2 (Hyejoo)

Gómez-Peña’s essay was like a breath of fresh air after the four other chapters, as he reminds us of the various racial, socioeconomic, material, and even infrastructural realities underlying any new digital technology and its theoretical engagement. Even before a user approaches an interface, there is a preexisting discursive environment that shapes the way the user interacts with it. Digital technologies are also objects in and of themselves, commodities and even decorations, as Gómez-Peña recounts how his family’s color TV was a middle-class status marker, and that the function of any new gadget “was as much pragmatic as it was social, ritual, sentimental and aesthetic” (4).

 

The concerns of Manovich, Bolter and Grusin (and Murray to some extent) potentially betray a desire to keep the rhetoric around new media technology in the realm of lofty “high theory.” While the continuations they track are undoubtedly insightful (and I agree with a lot of their comparisons), it is interesting to note how the lineage of new media for Bolter and Grusin are the European, Renaissance ideas of perception. And for Manovich, new media is a parallel to modern art after WW2, by which he basically means Western modern art. Early computational technology and the internet began with the American military after all, and the writers are situated in inevitably Eurocentric academia. But they eagerly link digital media to specifically Western art and even the metaphorical conceptions of digital media to continental philosophy (Murray mentioning Deleuze and Guattari, TNMR 9). In contrast to Gómez-Peña’s essay, perhaps we see the discourse around media theory itself manifesting here—the theorist approaches new media technology with the eagerness to legitimize new objects of analysis by the traditions of Western art. Responding to Gómez-Peña’s “draft of a manifesto” (9), we may need to politicize the theoretical debate itself.

 

The trap is falling into a linear-genealogical conception of new media as possessing a European root. More compelling to me in such series of continuations, however, is the link to cinema (which is also not inherently Western). At least in the introductory works here the link to cinema is only briefly mentioned. Stone talks about it in contrast to the electronic interface based on cinema’s lack of haptic interaction, but we could debate that cinema also allows for an interactive virtuality (à la Deleuze’s concept of the virtual image, for example). Regardless, the theorists’ tracings of new media converge on a crucial idea—that new media’s construction of information systems is heavily predicated on visual systems. Media informs how to understand and cohere reality by directing how to perceive and look at reality.

 

Which is why the study of aesthetics, too, remains so key in further critiquing new media’s ambitions and concepts: the “Old West” rhetoric mentioned by Gómez-Peña is also expanded on in Wendy Chun’s analysis of cyberspace as a literary invention, oft riddled with Orientalist imagery, then visualized in movies like a frontier space (“Orienting the Future” in Control and Freedom). Stone also problematizes the gendered logics behind computing technology. But again, considering Gómez-Peña, we are reminded that technology is also often simply objects, practical things to buy, and also markers of capital (recall the “Are you a Mac or are you a PC?” slogans). There is a whole social and material world informing the theoretical possibilities limning the interface.