Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Prosthetics, language and presence

1. As we have discussed in different classes, we have used metaphors to understand what is currently happening in the age of technology: the computer emulates the human brain; the virtual space emulates imagination and creativity; prosthetics (as shown in Sobchack and Stone) is the way in which we explain the notion of an epoch in which technology is the extension of social and human experience. Indeed, those metaphors are only ways to explain something that cannot be explained with new words or concepts. If this is the case, should we think about new manners to talk about technology and its influence on social relations? What should be the foundations of this language that helps us explain what happens in the realm of the virtual, the physical and their boundaries?

2. There was a part in Stone’s article that made me think about our discussion of the Virtual and the Physical space: “In cyberspace you are everywhere and somewhere and nowhere, but almost never here in the positivst sense.” After all our readings and discussions so far I thought I had understood that the “virtual” space was an extension of the “physical” space (I’m not trying to be too simplistic here because these concepts bring several philosophical considerations that need to be carefully revised). My point is that embodiment seems to become a problematic aspect in these virtual-vs-physical discussions. What is a body when we consider these conceptual divisions? What are physical and virtual bodies?

3. Something fascinating about Dixon’s chapter is his discussion on presence in contrast to liveness: “presence is about interest and command of attention, not space or liveness.” (p. 132)  It is possible to think that on the internet we are “asynchronous” performers (think of youtube videos, blogposts, etc) and “live” performers (Skype?).  I wonder whether the way we interact on internet is more based on “presence” than on the experience of a space in the virtual realm.

Discussion Lead – Stone, Sobchack, Dixon

1) In ‘A Leg to Stand On’ it is quite clear that Sobchack is in no way offended by metaphor of ‘technology as prosthesis’ – however she finds it rather incomplete. In my understanding and reading of this chapter I found myself questioning my own usage of the term prosthetic in terms of technology. I caught myself in my own work romanticizing the term and fetishizing it, similar to those she is discussing, I found myself reevaluating my own language as I have with many things over the course of my academic career, to find better suited words to describe the ways in which we use technology and how we have become connected to and with technology in this day and age. Although I have not found a new term in my own language, I will be refraining from metaphor after reading this. But this aside, what I find most helpful about this article is the idea that the metaphor of ‘technology as prosthesis’ removes agency, lived experience, and embodiment from the amputee body. The amputee body becomes invisible and silenced by the representation of the prosthetic as having agency. This metaphor also privileges the whole physical body, rather than a body compiled of ‘parts.’
In this metaphor we see the prosthetic receive specific types of agency, Sobchack refers to popular culture examples to explain this concept – “as an effect of the prosthetic’s amputation and displacement from its mundane context, the animate and volitional human beings who use prosthetic technology disappear into the background – passive, if not completely invisible – and the prosthetic is seen to have a will and life of its own… For example, Alison Landsberg, in “Prosthetic Memory,” cites an Edison film, made as early as 1908, called The Thieving Hand in which an armless beggar is provided with a prosthetic arm that once belonged to a thief and, against his will – but not the arm’s – starts stealing” (211). But I’m curious to see what the class thinks about the physical body losing its own agency in both the metaphor and popular culture examples of the prosthetic and prosthetic technologies, because a technological prosthesis is something that acts as an extension of the body while an actual prosthesis is a part of the body.

2) In the piece Split Subjects Not Atoms I’d like to focus on this argument that Stone posits of power relations and location technologies. To continue on this line of thought, Stone suggests that digital technologies change the ways in which governmental institutions or the government more broadly, display power over our bodies or tries and maintain control over bodies. Our bodies exist in multiple locations (and are no longer fixed objects) and therefor governments “[respond] to [this] fragmentation of their subjects [by developing] a hypertrophy of location technologies. These [technologies] work by fixing people in place in a fiduciary sense, by creating a paper trail that attaches to a particularized physical body; for example, social security numbers, passports, and street addresses.” I’d like to probe this a little bit in terms of surveillance as well as power and/or perceived power. Thinking also about technologies as not only digital and what this means in the terms of this class.

3) While going through Dixon’s chapter entitled ‘Liveness’ I must pose the question, is this all to say that reproduction is not authentic? Continuing this line of questioning, What does it mean to be authentic, to have authenticity, or even exist authentically? [Even going back to the discuss we had about the virtual and the actual — which we struggled to define.] 3b) What about media involvement — does this devalue the liveness of something?
3c) As I continued reading I also started to again approach some ideas of seeing and the visual. The section entitled Ontologies of Media made me think of film in terms of our eyes. Each blink a shutter closing and giving us “blackness,” similar to a film projection gives us blackness (or rather did) — so here lies another instance of the question I posed, what does it mean to see and experience seeing?

Week 9

1: Maybe this is a simplification, but in Stone’s article there is one sentence which states “as I watch them, or rather their bodies (since their selves are off in the net)…”. It somewhat sums up some of my critiques of the theory put forth to ask why the projected self is no longer a part of the body? When someone is projecting themselves into digital space, do their selves suddenly become detached from their physical bodies? Even as I write this for the internet, I am noting that I’m hungry and will have to get food, but I don’t consider it to somehow sever my extension into the digital network I’m in.

2: Drawing from the above and the Sobchack reading, is it possible that the prothetic is an apt metaphor for the use of technology as a sense, to a degree, but that it’s being utilized wrong? By my reading, the manner that Sobcheck descibes his own prosthetic is similar to how I would describe engagement through digital “prosthetics”, but that broader academia has been utilizing it incorrectly for the same purpose. Maybe this goes into my belief that we do not disengage our bodies when we engage a digital network, but it seems like it is not the term that is wrong, but the way in which it is used.

3: In the Dixon article, why start the discussion of “liveness” with photography? I simply don’t see why photography is principally any different than a realistic portrait or a statue of someone created before the rise of modern technology. These embodiments of a person and all of the associated baggage with that person have been studied in various ways, so I wonder if we couldn’t glean more value about this concept of “liveness” by going further back.

Cartesian: Stone’s article in particular seems to draw on a separation of the senses from the body, and I suppose I would find myself siding with the first author in emphatically disagreeing with the notion.

Virtual/Actual

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodiment, by virtue of our relationships with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that come into being through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination of self in relation to virtual and actual communities.

Questions:

To help organize our discussion today, I thought I would compile the questions from the blog posts as I’m noticing some common threads.

1. Here’s a question of mine from last week, since I accidentally read de Souza e Silva and Sutko:

I find the frameworks that de Souza e Silva and Sutko lay out for thinking the virtual and the real to be immensely useful, especially when it comes to potential. I am also preoccupied with the language of “possible and incompossible worlds” (32), which I think has implications for community organizing of various kinds. They write, “For Borges, as for Deleuze, there is no longer a person who chooses among several worlds, as in Leibniz, but a person who is pressured by several selves, which are not masks or appearances (like in Plato), but indeed constitute the same person. This perspective frames the virtual into something that is ready to emerge, to be created, or to transform” (32-33). This is particularly useful for conceptualizing identity and intersectionality; it gives us a way to think about identification as a process, with multiple forms or modes of consciousness operating or salient at different times, a la Chela Sandoval. My question therefore is about the difficulty of writing about this process in an analysis, as language seems inadequate to the task of apprehending being/becoming. In our own research, how do we each deal differently with representing the slipperiness of identity as process?

2. Felix and Justin have asked about the role of the psychological, cognitive, imaginative, and I would add, affective in spatial practices, all of which have implications not only for theorizing the virtual through locative technologies but also for the “generative process” of design (Tierney). Similarly, Jessica V. has asked about memory and perception, and many of us seem preoccupied with developing a language for embodied experiences in virtual/actual worlds as well as in spacetime. Does the metaphor of the “virtual house” work for us? It might be productive to revisit our discussions of the cognitive/precognitive, as well as Butler’s arguments on the racial production of the visible. We could also clarify our terms: virtual, actual, real, material, physical, potential vs. possible.

3. Tatiana brought up the in-betweenness of transnational subjects and spaces, as well as the need to think space and place relationally. I agree with her that relationships are key here. How do we conceptualize being/becoming in-between, whether it’s in between past and future or in-between places and spaces? Many of us have also mentioned actualization; if the virtual is the background for our reality and new realities as Tierney claims, then how do we reconceptualize cause and effect and therefore individual and collective agency?

Virtual Insanity

If the self that uses locative technologies can indeed be an assemblages of many “selves” then do these selves influence how virtuality is actualized by the viewer? I really appreciate the idea that interactions with virtuality are not transportation into a mirrored, shadowed, or less substantive realm but indeed constitute a process of becoming where the physical environment becomes informed by virtual interactions. Sociality then comes to bear on this exchange so I’m wondering if the negotiation of selves that we find in interactions without locative technologies are also important to social interactions with locative technologies. I’ am especially thinking about strategic essentializing or code switching through social interaction—choosing which self is expressed to which viewer or participant. How is the viewer of your use of locative technology figured into this processes of becoming?

To whom is the virtual a problem or “something we must always experiment and work with in order to see it (Rajchman, 116).  Is there a limit on ones ability to see the potential of different possible worlds based on their location within a social hierarchy?

House is used to point the construction of certain “arrangements that determine our nature (Rajchman, 118).” The construction of the virtual house would seem to allow for the most complex number of arrangements within it. But does the virtual house need technology? I’m confused as to how other metaphors of home, that don’t necessarily rely on a house (as a normative thing that is constructed, has a plan, and is laid out in a certain way to contain) wouldn’t fit into this virtual house.

Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place. Space is a right.

Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely. Facilitated by place marking objects like maps.

Identity:  How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.

Virtual? What is it :/?

Space and Place: Thinking about the virtual and actual this week made me think about relationships. I have been spending a lot of time defining these terms separately. I am now trying to think through them as relational.  Space exists before there is a place. I thought about space as freedom this week, but we can only understand this freedom once we make it a place. Space is freedom because it exists but it has meaning because of the story it is filled with. Wit this story space becomes place. Overall, I want to work out the relationship between space and place.

1. I think we spend a lot of time concentrating on the dialectic. The virtual and the actual tend to be viewed as separate. What about the in-between space? Instead of an either or model can we have an “and”? This may be what the Rajchman reading is raising about possibility, but I am unsure.

2. Thinking about this in-between space made me think about the De Souza e Silva article where she discusses the virtual as an extension us. But she describes this understanding as heavily contested. Is it contested because we do not have a way of talking about an in-between space? For instance, what does it mean for a transnational subject to be in Barbados but talking to someone via skype in the New York? I would argue that they are having a dual experience. What would this experience mean for belonging if they were one U.S. residents? Although the person on the other side of the computer is a representation of the real they are still experiencing it through their interaction with that space.

3. My last question is simple, what are the embodied experiences with in the virtual? I am just trying to move the virtual from the abstract. I struggled with understanding the theorizing of the virtual. Does it only exist theoretical?

the virtual and the actual

1) Rajchman discusses the metaphor of the virtual landscape as a house (architecture, construction, etc.), noting, “the virtual house becomes here the house of this less grounded condition of image and body, as though it were the house for an unreal, disembodied mind linked to all other in a virtual realm” (118). I wonder, since the ‘house’ is being reimagined and appropriated to explain the virtual, if the virtual house can then be used to explain community arrangements in the physical world? Reading this made me think of ‘Houses’ from Ball culture (e.g. Paris is Burning). I keep churning these ideas of de-centered specificity, virtual house, and increased possibility as being really useful vehicles to apply to concepts in areas like identity, area, or mixed-race studies.

2) With de Souza e Silva and Sutko in mind (specifically page 34), I wonder where the psychological interacts with the physical and virtual. Specifically thinking about location based technologies like Whrrl or foursquare, when I log on I can edit my location and provide details or see my friends details. Their interaction with the virtual then has the possibility to steer my interaction with the physical. My friend saying I got this great croissant at so-and-so deli may influence my choice to go there, when I may have never entered this deli without them. They mention this with potential, but I’m interested in the implications of making choice (or they might use actualization) tangible/mappable like they are with physical and virtual.

3) While reading Tierney’s discussion of temporarily starting on page 138, I am brought back to a question that was lingering from last week, which was about the ways in which we can imagine physical topography maps on top of digital topographies. added to this, I’m interested to explore how time in both physical and digital interact and what that would look like mapped out.

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Space: Something able to be occupied; is layered based on context, and the same space can be occupied in multiple ways

The Virtual

1) In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects in the study of space is how different social practices affect (and are affected) within the interaction of space. One of question that comes to my mind is, in the context of location-based technologies, how does spatial experience change in the process of “actualizing information as space and space as information”? (de Souza & Sutko, 2011, p. 37). For example, the authors explain that LBSs, such as WikiMe, influence how a user thinks about space and how users experience location augmented by LBSs. Therefore, we would be facing the idea that social practices such as tourism and entertainment suffer a modification because of the interference of location-based technologies. In other words, could we think that nowadays the ideas we have in relation to the physical world (represented in cities, monuments, museums, etc.) would be conditioned by the interaction between the virtual and the physical? Would the “market” of entertainment and tourism should change the way they offer places to visit?

2) Just a thought…. Imagination! Perhaps, that is one of the core components of the virtual. I cannot stop thinking about imagination while reading Rajchman’s reflection on the virtual house. Deleuze (as explained by de Souza & Sutko) considers that “the real encompasses both our actual world and the potential to produce new realities” (p. 33). If we use the metaphor of the body (and the brain) to explain the way technological devices work, then the mind and imagination becomes the counterpart of the virtual. Rajchman states that the virtual “thinks in terms of arrangements of body and soul, irreducible to any such symbolic order, any such law of possibilities” (p. 120) and for that reason we could consider the virtual can only be compared to processes of the mind that have certain potential to be part of the real. Therefore, the virtual might not have limits, but it is interesting to consider that the devices that allow the virtual to become actual might impose some boundaries.

3) Tierney explains that “a more accurate description of the virtual, then, is as the nexus of an entire set of cognitive, social, and material activities” (p. 137). I think that this is does not only point out at the notion of the virtual but also at the notion of culture and social experience. Therefore, does culture enter into the field of the virtual? Could we say that culture helps to determine the way in which the virtual emerges or the virtual shapes and modifies culture?

Definition:

The virtual space: it is the field where multiplicities of possible worlds can be actualized simultaneously.

Virtual as Actual and Vice Versa.

Arguably, the virtual world is no longer simulacra – an escape from reality. It can at times represent a hyperreal situation in which the virtual becomes similar to that of Las Vegas. In regards to the creation of digital/virtual graffiti there is an app that allows you to share your graffiti with members of the community. You can tag any place with whatever image you so desire. Along these lines I would have enjoyed a more intense or in-depth discussion about dynamic locative maps and how they work in connection to reality and potential changes to maps. I think this is an important step in understanding interactivity with digital spaces as well as interactivity with the physical spaces surrounding us. I am also a little hung up on this idea of the virtual and the actual via Aristotle. I don’t know how convinced I am of this considering Deleuze’s argument that the virtual is actually real and is a state of potential.

I like the idea that is brought up in “The Virtual House” (originating from Deleuze) that the virtual essentially “makes visible something intolerable for which there existed no present manner of thinking” – in relation to “time images” of postwar films (117); this idea that something is virtual because it allows for a better understanding or new way of thinking is something that I’d like to play with or push further.  Also the idea of a virtual house, one that does everything for the inhabitants of such a place reminds me of a film called ‘Smart House’ where the house turns against those inhabiting it. Essentially treating those who own the house like intruders. Who is to say that continuing on with virtual lifestyles is going to make a positive impact?

Virtuality does not exist tangibly and is immaterial and yet is considered real and having affect. Virtuality and space are similar in this aspect – both not being tangible but having an affect on those who occupy (given that the virtual is constantly being occupied because it is not limited to the digital). My question here is as follows: Is Tierney saying that the virtual also exists on multiple planes or through different zones of occupation/spaces/objects?

Definitions:

Space – (cont’d) Sharing similar qualities with the virtual; intangible and immaterial yet having an affect on the material/tangible.

Let’s Talk Virtual.

1. I’m still working/thinking through the concepts and ideas I posed in my digital space presentation and upon rereading de Souza e Silva and Sutko, I’m now considering how the body can be understood as an interface. As the authors explain in their discussion of Deleuze and the virtual as potentiality, “[t]he choice of interface itself actualizes certain potentialities and leaves others virtual” (33). If we think of the body as an interface (this reminds me of an earlier discussion about experience mediated through embodiment), does that also mean we necessarily leave other potentialities virtual? So, to draw from my own work, if the goal of weight loss relies on the body as a interface (the object through which information on diet, exercise, motivation, etc. can be read, what potentialities get left unfulfilled?
2. I’m grateful for the impetus to read Rajchman a second time, especially his discussion of possibility and specificity. While the virtual house’s possibility does not preclude specificity or vice versa, I wonder if that is also true of the body. He explains that “[i]ncreased possibility comes at the price of reducing specificity,” which, if I apply this concept to the bodies of fat women, seems to make sense (119). That is, the possibilities read into the fat body presuppose the fat body as malleable and without specificity (an amorphous blob, if you will. Please don’t. Ever.) but as it approaches its potential, its possibilities decrease to the point that it becomes an example of a very specific type of body, a “normal” body, a “thin” body.
3. Backing away from my project for a moment, I’d like to think about de Souza e Silva and Sutko’s discussion of WikiMe and “distance as the logic for organizing entries” (28). The authors argue that this means that “[p]hysical space, represented by distance, becomes the primary interface for that information. Can we consider space outside of distance? For example, the primacy of distance shifts when we consider the facts of physical barriers (walls, one-way streets, wheelchair inaccessible pathways) between two things that supposedly are closest to one another. What happens when the logic of “from Point A to Point B” does not work?

Definitions:

Body: The interface through which we interact with the world

Weekly Post – Week 8

1: Rajchman talks about the concept of the “virtual home” and the difference between the virtual and the actual. While he stresses that they are not dichotomous, exclusive terms, he doesn’t touch on the notion of the virtual dictating the actual. There is a new practice in architectural and historical communities to create computerized, virtual tours of landmarks and historic sites that no longer exist. In these cases, could it be argued that what we believe as being the “actual” site becomes influenced directly by the “virtual” decisions made by the digital architects?

2: On the reverse side of question 1, Rachjman discusses the “house with the most possibilities” on page 119 (PDF page 5), and states that contrary to the idea of the house being empty, it allows for the greatest number of singular points. When he discusses the virtual house in this manner, I think of MySpace, Facebook, and virtually every website promoting its ability for customization and control. Thus, is the appeal of the “virtual” home – be it a “smart” house or a website one considers a home of sorts – the idea of having control over one’s own space? Is that perhaps the driving force behind human fascination with the concept of the virtual?

3: Maybe this comes from my general understanding of the internet and how I’ve come to conceptualize it, but why is there so much time and effort dedicated to trying to define the “virtual” and particularly against the “actual”. Everything described as “virtual” is as important a part of our lives as physical objects and phenomena, so is this distinction relevant or even useful, particularly in an integrated world like our own?

Definition:

Virtual: Rajchman defines the virtual as the mobilization of possibilities and potential into an organized, if not determined, plan.

Cartesian: Cartesian logic, which I have followed through the course, has a primary role in this chapter as it relates to the separation between the physical and the mental, which in this case I believe to be the “actual” and the “virtual”.

Virtual and Imagined Communities

The anecdote in the Sangupta article about the call center agent calling the man in California really brought home the idea of how identities can be manipulated, especially with the aid of technology. But, at the end of the phone call, it appears the call center employee maintains her original identity and circumstances. Can this type of identity shifting through technology that spans boundaries and obfuscates identities actually have a lasting affect on racial, class, geographic, or other categories?

In the article about social networking sites and “white flight,” I thought boyd provided a really interesting analysis, but that the comparison with the geographical move to the suburbs was limited because of the economic implications. Unlike purchasing a home and being able to commute to work via car (often necessities in the suburbs), switching from MySpace to Facebook does not require any economic capital. So, what are the forces at work that differ in the digital realm from geographic flight?

Anderson’s concept of simultaneity has always seemed to me like an interesting starting point for looking at national identity in the digital age, because our ability to see or hear about what others are doing and provide feedback gets more and more advanced every day. How does the ability to not only read the news in the paper but to hear about events immediately and respond to them change the way our national community is “imagined?”

Guided Discussion Handout – Justin and Avery

Handout PDF

Here is a handout for our discussion today 🙂

Can Andersons formulation of nationalism without nation be instructive to Sengupta’s rupture of identity? Im really interested in what the phenomenon exist (I think Sengupta thinks things exist) that can create conversations between and across people who question the fixity of their identities? Can it only happen through production and networked materialities? And what happens to the “emotional legitimacy “ of identity?

Anderson argues that “ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth-language (14).”Does Sengupta suggests that the current truth language is the logics of domination expressed through capitalism?  Does domination become the paradigm through which everyone can interpret their lives? Does that make you sad? Makes me a little sad.

Time becomes what makes nation different from racism in Anderson’s formulation. While nationalism is invested in “historical destinies” racism doesn’t care about time—it is timeless and outside of history. Do racism and nationalism become complicit in Senguptas text where racialized identities are the representation of nation and therefore interested in very specific historical destinies?

Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place. Space is a right.

Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely. Facilitated by place marking objects like maps.

Identity:  How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.