Other sections of the thesis

Other students have also put their theses on the web. Among them are:

Truth and Politics - Mass Media in Independent Ukraine 1991 - 2001

Private TV in Palestine

Technology often develops before its producers, or even its purchasers, understand how it will be used, and further developed, by the societies and times in which it is situated. Its habitus develop over time. When an engineer proposed that Intel produce a personal computer, he was stumped by the question "what were people going to do with these personal computers?" His answer was to store cooking recipes (Johnson; 1997, 148). Living in an early, partially, wired world we are perhaps little better situated. Still, having considered the nature and reach of texts in the wired world, and the characteristics of the embodied agents that will commission them, we can begin to imagine the resulting interactions and constructions -- the new habitus that will develop.

(a) The Embodied Agent Self

Bolter and Grusin (1999, 232) suggest two models of the self are possible in the wired world. They are virtual reality enthusiasts, and such one model as that of "a point of view immersed in an apparently seamless visual environment". I reject the possibility of widespread "virtual reality" and would suggest that point of view has been available ever since the oral narrative was invented. I do, however, support their second model of what they call "the hypermedia self ? a network of affiliations which are constantly shifting". Its logic is that of "being interrelated or connected". The result will be, as Bolter and Grusin (1999; 251) suggest: "The key is to experience the world as others do, not to retire from the distractions of the world to discover oneself as a thinking agent.... It does not learn by scientific study in a subject-object relationship, but by "immersion" which produces empathy and identification." This is the connected embodied agent, embedded in a wide variety of cultural environments, and thinking and learning in a manner somewhat different to that of today - developing new habitus probably more networked, less "individualised", in thought and relations, than today's.

Landow (1997, 221) suggests that in a wired world "exploratory" or "linear" learning my dominate, with "implicit" learning dominant, so that study involves not a direct drive towards a topic, but a meander around it that provides a far more contextual, networked understanding. Such a change is likely to cause hysteria in many traditional education circles. They might be referred to the historicised nature of learning and thinking. These too have habitus that vary in time, place, society and body. As Paul Saenger pointed out in "fourteenth-century universities, private silent reading [was] forbidden" for fear that students would, if left to themselves, misconstrue the meanings of texts (Quoted in 1997, 268). From a different perspective Braunstein (1999) makes a similar proposal, that lateral thinking will replace, or at least supplant, the "vertical" thinking that has dominated in the West in recent centuries. He argues that this is essential to manage the wealth of knowledge generated in even our partially wired world (see page 55).

(b) Navigating the Wired World

The term commissioning, I have suggested, explains the relationship between individuals and texts, but what about the relationships between an individual and those she meets in the wired world, or with the communities in which she participates? The streets of the great cities of the industrial revolution Johnson (1997, 62) says, had "an improvised, organic quality", with streets developing according to their users' needs and desires "created by the countless daily acts of individuals following their routines". It seems likely that the wired world will develop in similar ways, with communities and individuals evolves habitus that meet their needs. One technique, developed for those industrial cities, which offers a model of how that might be explored is that of the derive. It arose from the Situational International movement and involved transient passages through "varied ambiences" with "playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects" (Knabb; 1981, 50). It is, its proponents are at pains to point out, not a stroll, but a purposeful, if carefully little-directed, exploration. One of its discoveries was that there are effective distances between points in the city that have nothing to do with the ground distance, (Knabb; 1981, 53) a pre-imagination of the nature of the wired world. The derive bears some resemblances to the claim of McLuhan (1984, xxii) that in a world of electronic media citizens would be replaced by "nomads".

Jones (1997) suggests that the hugely popular game/hypertext Myst established, within the closed, limited world of a single CD-Rom, something very like a derive. He says: "Like stumbling into someone else's dreamscape or stepping into a quiet surrealist painting . . . this game encourages the suspension of disbelief in one's freedom to navigate. The paths fork and you must choose, but there is no default motion sweeping you along: you stand still until you click. No one dies in this game ? the user tends to relax into the rhythm of aimless wandering, a fl⮥ur without the crowd, strolling, alert and yet dreaming." (1997, paragraph 12)

As the theory of the derive anticipates, and as habitus implies, knowledge of the artificially (inaccurately) imagined "rules" of the wired world can be a positive disadvantage. As Ronnett said: "It took scientists a decade to see what was obvious to every kid the first time he touched a video game - the power of interactive computer graphics." (Quoted in Rheingold; 1991, 24) And there were, of course, those PCs to store recipes. The sense of the game is held often best by fiction writers, who can "play" with the setting in a way that goes against academic cultures and understandings. Among those who have most effectively explored the wired world are a group collectively labelled "cyberpunk", including Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner and Greg Bear (Featherstone and Burrows; 1995, 7).

(c) The Economic Wired World

The term commissioner, from its Renaissance antecedents, makes certain suggestions about the relationship between an embodied agent and the texts that she commissions. This might seem to be at odds with the fact that "information is not a materially conserved quality" (Hayles; 1999a, 78). The key question, she says, is access, not ownership. This is true, certainly, of the lexias of the wired world, but what will be individual, in some sense "owned" by its commissioner, is the pathways navigated through it. Assuming that in the future commissioners will be able to store and transfer their recorded navigations, then they will "own" them.

What that "ownership" means will depend on other social and political relations. Imagining such paths in the current environment, then most individuals would be "alienated", in the Marxist sense of the term, from many of their paths, because they would be constructed in "work" time and would therefore be the property of their employer. It would seem that the natural inclination, the tendency, promoted by the technology of the wired world, is for these paths to be personally owned, for they will be personal objects - many of the links being "jumps" following personal logic and intuition that will be meaningful only to an individual agent who has a particular knowledge set and understandings.

What then of the "authors" of lexias? I discussed in chapter 4 how while individual commissioners will produce texts, lexias will still have authors as writers. What will be lacking is ownership (copyright) as we now see it. No one will have full control of any particular text, or the ability to say "Leave my text alone!"(Landow; 1999, 156). In this area, it would be tending into futurology to make any predictions about the economy of the wired world because of the many potential directions and forces.

(d) Insufficient data: (Not)understanding the Wired World

Above, I have been able to imagine some aspects of the wired world. Many areas, however, are difficult or impossible to imagine due to a lack of critical research into the cultural forms of the technology. One obstacle lies in the fact that, as Latour (1996, viii) puts it "people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians and technocrats". He argues that machines are cultural objects worthy of study, and has made such a study, of an automated train system, "Aramis". At work here is another result of the traditional Cartesian division of material/ideal. Since the ideal is privileged, studying the "material" is poorly regarded.

Latour's Aramis study indicates another obstacle to studying the wired world, in its rare deviance from traditional models. His study takes a narrative form traditionally associated with fiction, and blends fiction and non-fiction into what the author describes as "scientifiction": "a young engineer is describing his research project and his sociotechnological initiation. His professor offers a running commentary. The (invisible) author adds verbatim accounts of real-life interviews along with genuine documents, gathered in a field study carried out from December 1987 to January 1989. Mysterious voices also chime in and out, drawing from time to time on the privileges of prosopopoeia, allowing Aramis to speak". (1996, x) Yet the reality of academe, and of the corporate-funded study, mean such creativity and exploration are available to few. The traditional, linear narrative is still the only recognised form, alternatives might be acceptable for artists, but not those seeking to climb the academic greasy pole.

Even areas which it might be productively examined by traditional methods are curiously empty. Much ink has been spent on the issues of children in a wired world, yet little has been seriously academic and almost all is dragged down by an essentialist approach that mimics the broader utopia/dystopia frameworks. Thus "electronic media are seen to have a unique power to exploit children's vulnerability, to destroy their innocence and to undermine their creativity" or "children are seen to possess a powerful form of 'media literacy', a spontaneous natural wisdom that informs their dealings with the media and which is somehow denied to adults". (Buckingham; 1998, 557)

I find it difficult to imagine the development of the embodied agents in a wired world from early childhood, because although the exposure of children to wired technology, albeit in basic form, has been occurring for decades, there has been very little research into its impacts. Tantalising hints are provided by one valuable piece of work which seriously explores (albeit in a small and limited form) the issues which cry out to be addressed is that of Sherry Turkle. She begins from the theories of Jean Piaget, who "showed us the degree to which it is the business of childhood to take the objects in the world and use how they 'work' to construct theories - of space, time, number, causality, life, and mind" (Turkle; 1998, 317). Using this approach Turkle has observed and interviewed "hundreds" of children interacting with "computational objects", including computer programs and robots. She found that when children encountered still quite simple computer games that "spoke, strategized and 'won'", the children asked questions about whether these machines had a psychology, did the machines know what they were doing? (Turkle; 1998, 318) The children Turkle studied invested the machines with a kind of consciousness, and thought that they were in some sense "alive". Piaget, by contrasted, in the pre-wired age, found that children associated life with "moving of one's own accord", which later came to be refined to focus of the "life motions" of breathing and metabolism. (Turkle; 1998, 319) She argues that games and "toy" robots are "significant actors for provoking a new discourse about aliveness" (320).