We are now only seeing the beginning of fake news and the potential dangers of faked audio and video.
There was a time, not long ago, when news used to be mostly textual, and I think that whenever my father read the newspaper over morning coffee, he wouldn’t think for one second that what he was reading could be all made up - fake news. Roughly 500 years ago, when Columbus made his epic journeys to what he believed to be the far side of India, photo- or videocameras were not at hand, so Columbus, in order to prove that he had discovered new lands, had to bring back several items from the newly found continent, items that had never been seen before by the people in old Europe. In the world before Columbus, there was no technology that would allow the capturing of images from the discovered continent; no airplane or satellite could take the bird's eye view to chart the new territory. Columbus would eventually return with unknown plants such as potatoes or tobacco, he would bring back exotic animals or samples of the indigenous population of the new continent. After a while, it must have become clear that the new world had indeed many new things to offer. Had Columbus decided to bring just a drawing or a painting of the new continent, or had he just brought a written document - I think it is fair to assume that nobody back home would have believed him. Why? Because paintings and prose is something that we generate in our mind and elaborate with our hands. The relation of this elaboration with reality is never of the same kind as a physical proof, or better, many of those items. For the majority of people on the old continent at the time, it was impossible to travel to the unknown territories in Africa and America; therefore they had to be content with botanical and zoological gardens, where plants and animals from overseas could be exposed to a wider audience that could not take the rigors of such journeys, out of fear, lack of money or other impediments. So, the public exhibits of exotic material in zoos and botanical gardens were the discovery channels of ancient times. In some cases, it was also necessary to artificially reproduce the climatic conditions in the overseas colonies; that was achieved with greenhouses, made out of glass or in aquariums and these new ways of displaying exotic content were the early forerunners of today's screen devices. My father would look at his morning newspaper in exactly the same way people would look at the exotic content in the zoo. From a safe, convenient place, over coffee, he could look at terrible, dangerous animals, deserts and mountain ranges, violent wars and uproar. Somebody witnesses something for him, so he could look at it with the eyes of this „mediator“. He was living in a pre-digital age, where analogue technology was all that was available. So whenever he saw a photograph or a TV Newscast, he was rightly convinced that these images had some resemblance with reality, they had captured, documented reality, and this analogue representation of some form of reality could also be expressed in writing. Then there was fiction. But even fiction was based on the same premise. The images captured some kind of real events - in this case, staged events - that really happened in front of a camera lens. The digital age has changed these premises profoundly. Why? Because the images we see now are no longer representations of reality, like an analogue photograph was. Digital images are being generated by computers, they are encoded data, they cannot exist without code and a computer. That means, they are not, by default, showing us some captured slice of reality. They are showing us a „generated“ image, not a „captured“ image. The fake news era we are now entering has this distinction at its core. When we go back to the analogy of the exotic plant or animal that we would look at from behind a glass screen, then digitally altered video and audio would be comparable to some sort of scientific glove boxes, where you could handle „hazardous“ material from a safe distance. You would be able to alter (to „doctor“) whatever reality it is that is inside the box. And that could even further erode and undermine public trust in journalism and harm democracies with the intent of deceiving an audience - until the point where the distinction fake/real will become obsolete as well.
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This quote by Buckminster Fuller, arguably a Cybernetic, can be seen as the scientific principle par excellence, perhaps only matched by the Einstein quote: God doesn’t play dice. These two quotes taken together is all we need to embark on a career as a scientist. The premise is that there is one reality, and we just have to find the right model to explain it, and then act accordingly. So far so good, but if God (Einstein meant „nature“, but that is irrelevant here) does not play dice, there are certainly people who do play dice, including gambling and deceiving and cheating, right ? We have to understand that these people operate with different premises since they don’t feel any obligation to respect the set of scientific ethics. The only way to understand them (and perhaps find efficient counter-strategies to keep them in check) is to apply Game theory. In a game, there is no such thing as a „truth“, that can be discovered, or a better „model“, that makes the old one obsolete. No, in a game there only winners and losers. If you hear politicians or business people talk, you will see that they often use these terms, whereas in the scientific community, you rarely hear these words. In real life, we often see constellations, where „gamers“, such as politicians and businesspeople, will use and abuse scientists. Business and political leaders will use scientific inventions and findings for their next victory. If science can be held against their convictions, they will dismiss the scientific findings as „biased“. No matter if you are an American president or a football coach in the English premier league, you can choose to simply destroy any effort of your adversary to come up with a new, better model - one that would make your own model obsolete. You can even behave in a way that provokes everybody around you to try to „fight existing reality“, aka you. - That will guarantee you that your adversaries will spend all their energies on the wrong focus - namely, fighting existing reality, instead of building a new model - to change something. Oh, wait a minute, I am drifting into uncharted territory. Yes, the subject of my blog is the Digital Habitat, so be assured that „All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Connectivity refers to the structure and strength with which resources, species or actors disperse, migrate or interact across patches, habitats or social domains in a social-ecological system. This principle applies to life-sciences but even more so to the digital habitat.
Usually, clusters form around common purposes, you have the science community, and within this community there are different fields of research, institutes, groups that are more determined by demographics, etc. How well different circles are linked together determines how easy it is for an organism (let's say, an individual scientist) to move from one circle or patch to another. In every system, connectivity refers to the nature and strength of the interactions between the various components. From a social network perspective, people are individual actors within a system embedded in a web of connections. Connectivity can positively influence the resilience of an organism or a circle within the system but it can also accelerate the spreading of a disturbance or a disease, in the same way a wildfire spreads if there are no strategic corridors that keep the fires small and controllable. (Think cyberbullying or fake emergencies) In our physical habitat, we usually focus on the quality of our connectivity to get somewhere, and we connect „forward“ quite instinctively, which means, we are active in catching the next train or to drink a glass of water when we are thirsty, etc, which means, we make ourselves center in a web that we construct on the go . When we look at digital networks like a navigator (there once was a web-browser of that name, the most compelling one to this date, and considered one of the best technological products of all times) in the 15th century looks at the ocean, exploring currents, winds and anticipating the rockier shores, then it becomes clear that the ocean is the sailors’ „network“, he is connected to that network just as we all are connected to our habitat, and that network supports him and „collaborates“ with him to carry him to his destination. The "Digital Habitat" is a relatively new universe where many of us spend a huge amount of time - (well, a part of us does that, the part that is "transcendental", our bodies are largely barred from entering that habitat)
When I was in my teens and twenties, that was not yet possible - for better or worse. Lots of questions arise with this new habitat. As a father of two, I feel a certain unease when I see the lives of my beloved ones being "absorbed" by smartphones and rendered unresponsive to "real life". Perhaps we need to clarify what "real life" actually means. What follows is a lengthy quote by Norbert Wiener on that matter. (Excerpt from “The Human use of Human beings, N. Wiener, 1950) " Here I want to interject the semantic point that such words as life, purpose, and soul are grossly inadequate to precise scientific thinking. These terms have gained their significance through our recognition of the unity of a certain group of phenomena, and do not in fact furnish us with any adequate basis to characterize this unity. Whenever we find a new phenomenon which partakes to some degree of the nature of those which we have already termed "living phenomena," but does not conform to all the associated aspects which define the term "life," we are faced with the problem whether to enlarge the word "life" so as to include them, or to define it in a more restrictive way so as to exclude them. We have encountered this problem in the past in considering viruses, which show some of the tendencies of life-to persist, to multiply, and to organize, but do not express these tendencies in a fully-developed form. Now that certain analogies of behavior are being observed between the machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic and we are at liberty to answer it one way or the other as best suits our convenience. As Humpty Dumpty says about some of his more remarkable words, "I pay them extra, and make them do what I want." If we wish to use the word "life" to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy, we are at liberty to do so. However, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena which have only the shadiest resemblance to life as we ordinarily know it. It is in my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as "life," "soul," "vitalism," and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase. When I compare the living organism with such a machine, I do not for a moment mean that the specific physical, chemical, and spiritual processes of life as we ordinarily know it are the same as those of life-imitating machines. I mean simply that they both can exemplify locally anti-entropic processes, which perhaps may also be exemplified in many other ways which we should naturally term neither biological nor mechanical. " Speed and the Digital Habitat.
The Digital Habitat alters what we call “Space-Time” profoundly, and few people have a foggy idea of what that actually means. A good start would be to read some of the works by Paul Virilio. Virilio is a philosopher who has dedicated his life to the task of finding out what speed does to us - as humans, individually and collectively. Speed is a relative phenomenon, it’s not actually a phenomenon but it describes the relation between phenomena. Speed is a ratio of space and time, usually we think about a certain distance, say 1 km, and the time we need to cover that distance, and that ratio is what we call speed. As human beings, our core reference is what our body can do, so we look at the average time we need to cover a 1 km distance - when we would walk it or run it or take the bike or the car or the train or the airplane, etc. All of these speeds relate to a physical distance. The digital habitat has no physical dimension, it operates on an assumption of synchronized immediacy. Think a white sheet of paper and two dots on it. In the physical realm, finding the shortest distance between the two dots would mean to draw a straight line that connects the two dots. But whenever we do something in the digital habitat, we are confronted with what Virilio called a “lost dimension”. And this lost dimension is our good ol´ Space-Time and the notion of speed that is related to it. The substitute for this lost dimension in the digital habitat is the so-called “cyberspace”. The cyberspace is made of communication and control. It is an extended present, an instant that -paradoxically- lasts forever. Forever like in “eternity”. The shortest distance of the two dots on that sheet of paper would then be attained if we simply fold the paper so the two dots would "touch", and the distance between them would be reduced to Zero. For lack of other words we tend to call the digital experience “fast”, or “accelerated”, but that's not where it's at, because, remember, space-time is reduced to Zero. Paul Virilio came up with a better term, he labeled it “polar inertia”. That is the speed at which the earth rotates at the North- or Southpole. It's Zero km/h. It amounts to something like sitting in a car with the engine screaming because of your heavy foot on the accelerator, but you're in idle mode, standing still. That is speed in the Digital Habitat. And that kind of speed is very alien to the human experience. One of the most exciting features of the Digital Habitat is that it inches up the human capacity of doing things at a distance, remotely, and by that, we are creating the infamous “global village”, but, frankly, I do not like the term coined by Marshall McLuhan quite as much as I like the term “telepolis”. Telepolis is much better suited to describe the phenomenon, since it contains the prefix “tele”, that means in ancient Greek têle, “at a distance, far off, far away, far from” and “polis”, a body of citizens, a self-governed, autonomous and independent city-state. The telepolis is the virtual city where we all live and where we stroll down the avenues and back alleys when we are on-line. Actually, we do a lot of stuff there already. We talk, meet, shop, play, watch movies and go to see shows and artworks. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there is a lot of stuff that we do in real life, that is actually virtual. No wonder that on-line gaming is so popular, because game-play is, by default, the virtual activity par excellence, inasmuch as it is - disembodied - simulation. In a way, we can say that those blue, red and green pawn figurines on our board games are, in fact, the first avatars. If you have ever seen a 6-year-old losing in ludo king, or a day trader losing big at the stock exchange, it becomes clear that the real-life impact of a virtual activity can be very strong. Woody Allen said: “I hate reality but it's still the best place to get a good steak.” I’m not sure if that is an accurate description of the “place”, since “to get” a steak is not the same as “to eat” it. Honestly, it’s probably easier to get a steak in the telepolis than in reality, since most of us would rather prefer to buy it than to hunt or to breed cattle and slice up an animal - in order to get to the steak. Yes, I know, before the internet, we went to the local delicatessen or to the restaurant and paid our steak in cash. Most of us still do that in exactly the same fashion, today. But increasingly, everything that is not strictly an activity that involves your own body, like eating, can be done in the telepolis. You are hungry, you go on-line, order a steak, pay with paypal and wait for the delivery. All you have to do then is wolf it down. In the telepolis, your avatar is doing all these things at your command. Gobbling up your steak is the one and only thing you don’t want to outsource to him. That means, eating your steak is your "telos", your goal, aim and purpose. To be able to do things at a distance has always been a huge advantage. The "telum", Latin for "lance, spear" must have been an enormous advancement in terms of weaponry. Well, if you were able to use it properly: Coordination of sight, hand and arm movement and kinetic energy, combined with a great ability of measuring distances, all of this was crucial to hit the mark, while you could stay at a relatively safe distance from your adversary. There was a catch, of course. If you missed your target, your enemy could pick up the spear and use it against you. Today, in the digital habitat, this can happen all the same. Miss the mark and people will throw it back at you. Your avatar, aka your digital "telum" can be active 24/7 while you are sleeping, eating, having extended bathroom sessions, etc. Ideally, as long as you are in the telepolis, this activity goes seamless without any interference of the Real, but in the end - for better or worse - with very real consequences, depending on your "telos". Let’s assume, the Digital Habitat is one Galaxy. The physical habitat is another Galaxy. Now, all we know is, there are interfaces and „touchpoints“ between these Galaxies, there are blurred lines, right? In the very analogue film, "Illibatezza – Chastity”, by Rossellini, there is a guy (Joe) who tries to come into physical contact with the interface of the medium, raising new questions about the touchable screens and tactile experiences. In a different yet similar fashion, the segment "Illibatezza – Chastity” and the Cronenberg movie „Videodrome“ analyze the foundation of cinematic spectatorship. In both works, the focus shifts from eye to body, retina to skin, perception to sensation, vision to participation, and transcendence to embodiment. In "Illibatezza – Chastity”, a film projection engages us with an interfaciality that is hardly limited to the common notion of self-reflexivity. This time cinema does not address the subject’s passive eye, but incites him to become an active body, complicating subjectivity, the embodied agency of „entering“ an imaginary space, just like in a VR scenario. This classical account, a modernist version of Plato’s Cave allegory, however, presumes the spectator’s hyper-perceptive state, which is usually combined with an immobilized physical state. But what if the spectator stands up from his couch and tries to touch the projection? Paradoxical enough, this extreme approach to the screen puts in motion the Imaginary as the unconscious adhesion to the projection, reviving the paralyzed materiality of the body and the physical interface. However, this move from watching to touch cannot accomplish a real touch of the projected body because even a regained corporeality only contacts the apparatus, just like in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. This act would be tantamount to trying to make physical love to a ghost. Max in Videodrome and Joe in "Illibatezza – Chastity” experience the apparatus in flesh and blood: a tactile disclosure of the material structure of our projections - the transcendental subject has usually no ideological permission to do just that. Joe’s assimilation to the image becomes dissimilation when acting out turns into action just as the audience’s crying in sad movies reawakens their being physically situated in a theater. Through his bodily contact with the bodiless image, Joe must learn that the projection is now literally producing a blind spot through his body. Joe has to learn that his own projection is the guarantee that the projected object will be forever out of reach. The Digital Habitat stretches the concept of „projection“ a bit further. In video Games and in VR scenarios, we are taking our bodies with us. Our movements are projected onto a virtual body. Curiously enough, this does not „move“ us emotionally. Why? Because it does not tell us what to feel. As movie spectators, we can feel something, we can be „moved“ in a very pleasant way, precisely because we leave our body behind, we do not assume that we are bodies. As soon as we notice our own body, the necessary illusion is „broken“. That means, the Digital Habitat, such as VR, will have much more impact on „real, physical“ life than we may think. Imagine something of the kind that Franz Kafka describes in his „Penal Colony“: an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin before letting him die. Stafford Beer famously said: "If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control." V. I. Lenin supposedly said that „Trust is good but control is even better“. Today, the digital environment is all about control. One of the first discoveries of Cybernetics was, that the feature of Communication and Control can be found - and applied - in humans (or better, in all animals) and in machines alike. Today, no single feature exemplifies that better than the blue "Double-Tick-read receipt" that can be found in the messenger app „Whatsapp“. It is the kind of feedback mechanism that all the early Cybernetics were eager to promote. It tells the sender that the receiver has definitely gotten the message and from now on, he or she cannot convincingly claim that they „didn’t get anything“, be it an invoice or an invitation to a party that they would rather prefer not to attend. As soon as the two check symbols turn blue, there are no more excuses. (Click here to learn how to turn that off) Every day we are sliding ever further down that slope into a totally digitized habitat, and it begins to dawn on people that there is something profoundly inhumane to that 24/7 on-line life. It all started out with so much fun, and everything could be done with so much efficiency, it was mind-blowing. But now we are starting to see the other side of that progress, and it feels like a straight jacket, some invisible force urges us to always upgrade, pay the next fee, fill in the missing box, respond to the last survey, and every day that passes, it feels more and more claustrophobic. When you can control people, perhaps there is no need to trust them anymore. And moreover, when you command a machine to do something, you should expect to get a control message, if your command has been carried out. I think, precisely here should we see the difference. The machine sends us two blue ticks, yes, but what does that tell us about the human being and the message? Has he really read it? Or was it somebody else? And if he did read it, did he understand it? Technically speaking, someone who cannot read or write, could have just double-clicked on that Whatsapp-notification you just sent. Don’t be tricked into believing that you are effectively communicating with a specific human being on the receiving end. That could be the case, yes, but there are many other options as well. Perhaps trust is still something that should be considered a viable asset. To paraphrase Lenin, we could say today that control is good in machines, but trust is even better when dealing with human beings. A photographer wins ownership rights (copyright or IPR) over an image by producing a picture, in which he documents a certain place at a specific moment in time. Here it is interesting to distinguish the motif of place, or landscape, from a portrait, because, in the case of an image, the copyright claims for the portrait are not necessarily always on the side of the photographer, while, in the case of a landscape, the legal rights of the photographer are hardly questioned. The photographer affirms his perspective and his interpretation of an environment and creates an image of reality in the very moment, in which he has given this reality its visual shape (border, frame, angle, etc.). The act of taking a picture does, henceforth, to a place in the semiosphere what enclosure does to a territory in the real world. It is only a short step from the creation of a map to its instrumentalization, because each map is, at the same time, a manifestation and a prerogative. A current example for the instrumentalization of maps (and images) would be Google, the company that offers a free digital topographic maps service called Google Maps, in which the feature street view is integrated, a continuous photographic representation of all of a city's roads destined for car traffic. This has to be seen as a new type of enclosure - this time around, enclosure does not happen in the natural, biological habitat, but in the semiosphere. And this form of enclosure operates in all major cities of the world, no matter the country. In every Nation state, streets and squares or plazas are often a predominantly public realm, a territory not privately owned. Now, a vehicle of the private company Google drives around to photograph all the city's streets, and, as a side effect, it photographs all the buildings, regardless if they are publicly or privately owned, and all the people, who happen to be on the street at the time. All these elements alike become part of Google's street view. (If you own a building or something depicted on street view, you can order Google to blur it, but I am currently not aware of any nation state or city that has objected to Google's endeavor) The goal of Google is to "organize the world's information", but what they are doing is actually more than mere organization, it is mediatization, and thus a new form of enclosure - enclosure which nowadays takes place in the semiosphere. Google uses the photos in its own value chain, the images are the property of the company, Google takes care to protect these photos in economic terms, so there can be no doubt in relation to property rights. Google applies its own watermark. The photos are a source of income for the company as a digitized form of information. This leads to the question whether mediatization must be seen as an instrument to claim not only economic but also political power. Ever had the somewhat counter-intuitive sensation of relief, when suddenly the paywall of a website popped up and asked you gently to subscribe or go to premium to continue reading / watching / gaming? Relief, because you finally, at this point, have a reason to stop reading and to close your notebook, perhaps taking a deep breath afterwards ... It’s not the first time I hear people sigh with relief that they are not allowed to read further and further, dabbling away another precious day of their life (dabbling: taking a slight and not very serious interest in a subject or try a particular activity for a short period). The digital environment is not easy to navigate when you are lacking the discipline to ATTENUATE. To survive as an organism in any habitat, we need the ability to attenuate the incoming information. If we cannot do that effectively, we run around dazed and confused, we will have no idea what is important, what is relevant, what is dangerous, what is useful, etc. Everything is must have, must do. The digital habitat encourages us to constantly shift our attention to something else, something new, something more or less interesting. Relentlessly. Sounds familiar? Marketing people know this very well, they will provide ever more clickbait, ever more „to be continued“, ever more „click here for further information“, ever more „people who liked this article also liked …“, etc. Beware, our lives as human beings are limited, that’s why they are precious. People die, but on facebook, they are still around, right? In the digital world, it’s always „Game over - Start again!“ So, do yourself a favour after reading this: there are no links here, no further reading - close your laptop, close your eyes, give yourself a break! |
AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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