Richard Foreman, of the Ontologico-Hysteric Theater talks about the quest to lose context. So much of the work currently going on in the Network has to do with identifying the context of some artifact of text, sound or image. We look to machines to identify the contexts floating around our speech. As an artist, Foreman is uninterested in echoing back the dominant story the culture wants to tell itself. He asks if there can be meaning outside of the well worn pathways of speech and cultural practice.
Alphabets are an arbitrary set of symbols that are meant to correspond to an arbitrary set of phonemes. We use this codec to encode experiences, and then translate and transmit them to others using the same codec. These experiences can be real or imaginary. The method of transfer requires a willing suspension of disbelief – the artifacts of the message have an arbitrary relationship to the experience. The message is not the experience– we use metaphors to do this work.
The term derives from GreekμεταφοÏ?ά (metaphora), or “transference”, from μεταφÎÏ?ω (metaphero) “to carry over, to transfer” and that from μετά (meta), “between” + φÎÏ?ω (phero), “to bear, to carry”.
Foreman’s theater relies on image, rhythm, tone and energy to transfer its messages. These are elements that have come the forefront in the post-literate communications surging through the Network. It’s like understanding the meaning of a rock and roll song without actually knowing the words.
Midway through a series of thoughts on gluttony, violence, numbness and the Network, I found myself leafing through Robert Pinsky’s verse translation of The Inferno of Dante:
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder
Off the true path…
The train of thought started with the asymmetric publish-subscribe social network model popularized by Twitter. In a symmetric model, there must be assent by both parties for a connection to be forged. In an asymmetric model, a person may follow an unbounded number of other people. Like a kid in a candy store, we greedily subscribe to this one and that. Oh, and the one over there looks very interesting. Our virtual stomachs and appetites have an unlimited capacity.
As we sit back to digest the stream of messages, we find ourselves looking into the business end of a firehose. Each person we subscribe to may produce a manageable flow, but if we aggregate all these messages and make them march single file through a small opening the velocity becomes violent. The senses are pummeled with a raging torrent of voices from all quarters of the globe.
The response to a violent overstimulation of the senses is numbness and withdrawal. It started out so innocently, a few friends gather round a bar and swapped one liners. Every joke was heard, and each built on and referred to the previous one. Now the messages move by so quickly we can barely grasp the words they contain. We grow numb, distant, we hold the stream at arms length, our emotions disengage.
What does the defender against this battering look like? Is he the one who decries this new-fangled firehose of messages? Dismisses it as unneeded, as superfluous? The one who lovingly points to the old ways and speaks eloquently of their sufficiency?
Or perhaps it is the one who points the way, showing us evidence of a path that seems to lead over the horizon. Telling of us of a wondrous time and place where the new technology is perfectly integrated—all friction resolved. The one who expectantly points to what is absent and asks us for our present for the sake of the future.
If media is an extension of our central nervous systems; if these subscriptions are extensions of our eyes and ears, our sense of touch— then each of these sensors serve to collect impressions, translate them into words, images and sounds and relay them back to us.
But when we first come upon them we don’t recognize them as parts of ourselves. Perhaps we see them as just another commodity in the corporate marketplace of entertainments—an amusement to occupy our time. Sense organs detached, packaged, and sold back to us on a subscription model.
At this present moment, we walk like a drunkard, numb to the world around us, filled to the gills with firewater and lurching to and fro. We promise we’ll only dip in from time to time. But we find ourselves, eyes glazed, mouth open, staring at the flow racing through the glowing rectangle. Unable to comprehend, unable to pull ourselves away. Comfortably numb.
What would it look like if we used those subscriptions as purposeful extensions of our senses? Our senses serve us as we navigate and discover the spaces of the Network. We share, create and connect. We might extend our senses through subscriptions to those with whom we share an affinity. The shape and value of the social graph would be measured not by its sheer size, but rather by its sensitivity to our circle of concerns. Is there a road we can travel to reconnect to our own sensibilities?
…This hollow where we stand. There is below
As far from Beelzebub as one can be
Within his tomb, a place one cannot know
By sight, but by the sound a little runnel
Makes as it wends the hollow rock its flow
Has worn, descending through its winding channel:
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;
And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
We seemed to first learn about this framework for understanding media when talking about the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960. It was said that Nixon won the debate on the radio, and that Kennedy won on television. Television, it was said, was a “cool medium,” while radio was a “hot medium.” Nixon was called ‘too hot’ for the cool medium of television. The words “hot” and “cool” were, and are, overdetermined. It’s very difficult to keep them focused to look through the lens that McLuhan provided.
Because television was (is) so new and we were struggling to comprehend its impacts on society, the idea of a cool medium stuck to television. However, all media have temperature characteristics, and as we look at text, hypertext, document-based web pages, and the real time web of FriendFeed, FaceBook, Microsoft Mesh and Google Wave — we might keep a thermometer handy. In order to better understand what McLuhan was getting at, let’s look at some fragments from his book, published in 1964, Understanding Media:
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well-filled with data.
The telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in or completed by the listener.
On the other hand, hot media, are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.
The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.
If we journey into the thermoclines and fronts of the current media environment, the places where hot and cool touch, we’ll find a turbulent search for identity.
Newspapers have employed the medium of typography, ink and paper to translate and relay stories back to the culture. The hot textual medium of the newspaper is dumbfounded by the cool medium of hypertext on the Web. The typical complaints are trotted out, this cool new medium doesn’t have the high definition professionalism/specialization of the incumbent hot medium. Attempts are made to colonize it by heating it up and filtering out the high-definition bits. But the reverse is happening, the cool medium is engulfing the hot medium.
Public relations has traditionally been a hot medium deploying high definition communications to influence the direction of public opinion. As social networks have emerged as the most visible sites for the citation of public opinion, the corporate communications industry has been serving up recipes for the best method of heating up ‘communities.’ We might ask, once a community has been fully cooked, will it have any flavor left?
The economics of high and low definition media are very different. When the anchors on CNN read tweets on air for an hour, their advertisers are being cheated. They’re paying for high-definition hot media, and they’re getting a relayed and filtered low-definition signal instead.
The blending of Hot and Cool media is a new media type. The result shouldn’t be luke warm– the hot needs to stay hot; and the cool must stay cool. As McLuhan reminds us, the content of the new media is the old media. Our fingers are twitching nervously over the remote control as we endlessly change the channel searching for the new container…
An opera house holds around 4 or 5 thousand people. When the performance is ready to begin there are a number cues to the audience. The lighting changes, the conductor enters, the ushers take their places, the crowd organizes itself, shows appreciation to the performers through applause– there’s a shout of ‘bravo!’ and then it focuses its attention. You’ll hear a shush here and there to establish order, and the performance begins.
At the live simulcast of Tosca at the ballpark there were around 27,000 people from all walks of life in attendance. The cues to settle and get ready for the performance are much more subtle than in the opera house. Ballparks can accommodate highly focused attention, say the ninth ining of a no-hitter. But these venues also work well with multiple threads of activity none of which are focused on the game. As the third act begins, there are some notices in text on the high-definition Jumbotron screen and a small change in lighting.
Watch the video above and take note of how a crowd of 27,000 people can take a cue, settle down and focus their attention on the musical melodrama unfolding before them. This moment is the beginning of the third act. Scarpia is dead and Tosca has gone to save Mario from the firing squad.
As we think about the civility of the real-time social web; about how crowds self-organize for this task or that one. We can look at how civility and cooperation is established in other venues. A crowd of anonymous people understand their role and take their part in the drama. Tosca stabs the evil Scarpia, shouting “this is Tosca’s kiss!” The crowd cheers wildly as justice is portrayed. The emotions of the crowd ride the roller coaster of the bigger-than-life melodrama. No one takes Scarpia’s evil behavior as an excuse misbehave. They understand the roles of the players and the shape of the drama.
We can plainly see that a crowd can organize and police itself in real time as it takes part in the ceremony of live performance. Is it the physicality of the audience that makes the difference? Could it be possible to transfer that social contract to the live web? Or do we believe so little in the substance of our digital bodies that we think of ourselves as ghosts– neither living nor dead, immune to the judgement of our tribe.
