[Previous entry: "celebrity"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Changing Bios"]

12/17/2005 Archived Entry: "Links/Maps"

Links/Maps
To build off Derek, the map serves as a type of post-literate practice for understanding identity formation. The literate model of mapping might be the autobiography, the identity card, or in the Web's early stages, the homepage. Jameson's cognitive map - though too dependent on allegory - is an effort to understand the kinds of linkages generated through the rise of new media (whether or not Jameson phrases the work as such). The return of the map to a dominant position in rhetoric and related studies is interesting, particularly for how the map is not a new form of technology and for how it is being juxtaposed with non-referential systems like the imagination (see Harmon's You Are Here). The point is not: how do I get from place X to place Z, but instead, how is my world view created (mapped) among the various areas of experience I link together in intentional and non-intentional ways. Blogs are but one way to explore that process - tags, images, hyperlinks are others - but not in the way blogs tend to be represented as merely the posting of diary or daily experience (though such postings constitute part of the overall process of world view). Passing the mic - the metaphoric update of cognitive mapping - is the exchange of words, ideas, concepts, images, moments, experiences in the quest for new media celebrity; i.e., new media identity.

Rel. to DIY Cartography and passing the mic(rofame), Miller: "To name, to call, to upload, to download...So I'm sitting here and writing--creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions--reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapidly moving into what I like to call prosthetic realism.  Sight and sound, sign and signification: The travel at this point becomes mental, and as with [D.W.] Griffith's hyper-dense technically prescient intercuts, it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece.  If you play, you get something out of the experience.  If you don't, like Griffith, the medium becomes a reinforcement of what's already there, or as one critic, Iris Barry, said a long time ago of Griffith's Intolerance: 'History itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen'" (Rhythm Science 84).
I should probably acknowledge that Miller's talking film/realism here, but it can go to broader screen/identification, choice/play and the problem of reinforcing what's already (taken to be) there, esp. when "what's already" is perpetuated via lore or (far worse), absent from the map altogether.

Posted by Derek @ 12/20/2005 09:38 PM EST

frank,

i read it fine. i just don't buy the metaphor. "passing the mic" just so that everyone can "participate" on the new celebrity grid aka the web doesn't even cut it on the Warhol level. perhaps it's because i'm an egomaniac and need something other than the smaller-than-life rhizome of the web.

Posted by idle american idol @ 12/20/2005 06:23 PM EST

Dear American idol made me idle:
Did you read what Jeff wrote?

It doesn't sound like it. Some of the things I'm reading here resonate with a course I taught last year called New Media Terminology. Not everything, but some. You should look at my syllabus. I think you would get a better understanding of what is being said here - I take these ideas a bit further.

Frank

Posted by Frank @ 12/20/2005 01:50 PM EST

passing the mic for the sake of passing the mic doesn't cut it - you have to have something coherent to say. there's literally millions of would be rappers out there passing the mic or waiting to be passed the mic but when the moment comes, they can't deliver the goods. in art, there is no democracy; work is always adjudicated, always critiqued, always rewarded or ignored. celebrity in which everyone has celebrity is not fame.

Posted by american idol made me idle @ 12/19/2005 04:17 PM EST

Interesting related article, entitled "Do-It-Yourself Cartography," from the NYTimes Magazine a week or two ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-13.html

Posted by c-m @ 12/19/2005 02:17 PM EST

Sorry, Robert. Sounded harsh and didn't meant to at all.
I was just trying to say that while I don't disagree with examples like "but the Talmud is hypertextual" it's not really something I'm focusing or thinking about because....well, I'm not really sure why. As you note about the Talmud with its overlapping and extended commentaries or as John W. might state regarding medieval manuscripts, there is all this precedent to whatever we are experiencing. Absolutely. But institutional shifts based on such precedents don't seem to be there...instead of the open texts of the manuscript (user added) or the commentary upon commentary of the Talmudic text, we got a different kind of logic instutitionalized in, among other places, schooling. We also get a different kind of identity than what such pre-hypertexts might have generated if institutionalized.

That is obviously a quick summary.

The argument I find more attractive is the Ulmer one that the Web is itself an institutional shift in thinking for the kind of discourse and mapping generated (the mapping is identity and textual; perception - a complex McLuhan point - and rhetorical). What are the implications of this shift (which of course draws upon past practices, as McLuhan would say)...that remains for us to invent; i.e. for us to invent the practices. So I try to do just that. Am I successful? Ah. Too early to tell. Maybe not.

Posted by jeff @ 12/18/2005 01:48 PM EST

Ouch! Well--
I sympathize with your impatience with arguments that question the value of something because it is not, in fact, novel. Not the argument I intended to make--
Mine is a nonspecialist's interest, so I'm bound to make a nonspecialists mistakes.
In any case, what intrigues me is not the novelty of the web's power or potential, or the power and potential of hypertextuality,
but that it's power and potential
are built on structures that are
fairly continuous in human thinking and experience-- a reason why the virtual and the real work together so seamlessly.
Naive to observe surely, and not intended to diminish what is novel about the web and hpertextuality.
And just a parochial note, though Talmud wasn't my central point.
My claim is not that Talmudic writing is hypertextual; though that is as interesting to consider
as it was to observe the likeness between Talmudic exegesis and deconstruction. Again, it's a question of likeness, not novely, or even comparison's of sophistication. Though it does strike me still that that
the sophisticated interpretive apparatus for coping with links, simultaneity in the occupation of multiple imaginaty
space/time frames, and extension across physical space and time
that is of a piece with Talmudic representation and interpreation is something that scholars interest in the web and hypertextuality aspire to create.
And though I'm not sure what a "hypertextual Judaism" would look like, it strikes me also that this is about as "necessary" to Judaism as the creation of a "Talmudic Hypertextuality" is to theorists of mapping.

Posted by robert @ 12/18/2005 01:38 PM EST

Well..the arguments are not to emphasize whether something is novel but rather how practices are foregrounded within certain technological shifts. It was too easy to dismiss hypertext in the '80s by pointing out "pre" hypertext work (Choose Your Own Adventures, Hopscotch, Talmudic thinking, etc), but that nod towards something pre did little to think through the ways technological shifts affect logic and institutional shifts (let's face it, however "hypertextual" we want to claim Talmudic writing is, it didn't lead to hypertextual Judaism). George Landow has tried a bit to think in that direction...but few still do. So the pre argument (like the access one) means little to me.

The question of the map is not a literal one ("but maps already exist!"). It is a conceptual one - the ways we position ourselves in a worldview, the ways we forge links to generate that worldview. How is the Web (often named a metaphoric map) contribute to this process or even institutionalize it?

Posted by jeff @ 12/18/2005 11:19 AM EST

Of course, I'm probably out of my depth here-- I offer this humbly (mumbly) but I don't know if I'd treat mapped and created as synonomous. The fact that new technology allows us to represent more extensively, or to treat ourselves as more extensive, doesn't strike me as the same as creating it, since the kind of links you describe or pre-literate-- clan memberships, long spoken poems and ballads-- as well as complexly literate as derived from oral sources-- the Talmud for instance, various angelologies, sutras-- and symbolic-- mandalas and sand paintings (not merely mnemonic devices, but links). I allow the fact that geography and mapping seems to have asserted itself because of its usefulness in understanding far flung links across space and time. Theorists of the web-- maybe the web itself-- seeks its own Talmud style representation and related hermeneutics.

Posted by robert @ 12/17/2005 08:00 PM EST