Digital Media: Utopia or Dystopia?

In Mark Hansen’s “Media Theory,” he celebrates the potential unlocked by digital media technology, contrasting the “one-to-many” relationship of mass media with the “many-to-many”dialogue unlocked by  more interactive digital technology. These technics, Hansen argues, occupy a unique middle-ground between the animate and inanimate, which he calls (borrowing from the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon) “ontic;”

“…rather than operating through casual interference, technics impacts the human being and the human impacts the technical as respective perturbations to the organization-maintaining (and hence system preserving) operation of the other. Technics and the living impact one another by triggering crises in the organizational closure of the other, such that each must change, and change not through submission to external forces, but through self-(re-)structuring that follows operational rules and preserves constitutive organizational principles.” (Hansen, 302)

While the reciprocal relationships that Hansen depict bear a closer look, I am more interest in how these ontic relationships are contextualized within contemporary dialogues about the culture industry. Hansen, on the surface, depicts newer technology as a welcome escape from the traditional mass media; he remarks that while “the culture industry strive to exercise and maintain a stranglehold on cultural memory…by offering pre-programmed, media artifactual memory objects…,” digital technology instead helps “personal consciousness intervene creatively and substantively in the production of presencing that constitutes…lived reality itself, including the lived reality of (constituting) consciousness.” (Hansen, 304) While, as we noted during class, this all-or-nothing evaluation risks polarizing both mass and digital eras into reductive caricatures (Adornian dystopia versus open-source utopia respectively), I think that Hansen wisely draws our attention to the radical transformation that occurs with newer digital technology. As Hansen (and many other scholars) have written, the interactivity brought by digital media have transformed the traditional political, aesthetic, and ideological aspects that underlay the culture industry.

Some, like Hansen, view these new relationships with optimism, allowing would-be users an escape from the overwhelming cacophony of mass media. For instance, the media theorist Peter Lunenfeld argues that digital media creates a culture of “unfinish,” whereby all works become open to revision, remix, appropriation, or other creative reuse. In stark contrast to the fixity of traditional media (think television programs, advertisements, music, films…) which was ready-made for consumption (what Lunenfeld calls “downloading), digital technology instead allows users to become part of a “participatory culture” that undermines that fixity (“uploading”). As Lunenfeld triumphantly declares, “The idea that everything is essentially an iteration can be terrifying because it encourages endless tweaking, rather than a commitment to the discrete project with a beginning and an ending…the new era of unfinish can be used to acknowledge that every cultural product eventually relates to and is transformed by its contact with users and other products.” In this culture, users not only “download” traditional media, but they creatively engage, destroy, and reuse that media in ways that empower the individual agency; in a sense, one-to-many is constantly remade into one-to-one. See for instance;

Nevertheless at the same time, many commentators have suggested that digital media technology does not so much “escape” the malevolent tendrils of the culture industry, but rather it subsumes it’s ideologies deeper within proprietary software–imprinted within algorithms, databanks and interfaces, and giving the user the “illusion” of freedom. Media theorist and musicologist Martin Scherzinger, building on Adorno’s critique, argues that it continues to be an issue of “standardization.” While traditional mass media “standardized” its audiences superficially (in which all music/art/television/films are essentially the same), digital standardization manifests within the blackbox protocols of software design itself. Although we are given the illusion of individuality (in which the ontic relationship appears to be tailor-made for the user user), the software is actually modeling a specific kind of user interaction. Scherzinger argues that we need to engage deeper within these systems, a pursuit that he calls “software physiognomics”–a meta-analysis of the digital infra-structures.

While Lunenfeld and Scherzinger occupy the twin poles of digital media criticism, Hansen’s paper ends on a more dialectical note. In the final paragraph, he draws a parallel between Berhard Stiegler’s early work on digital media and Walter Benjamin’s own appreciation for mass culture. Arguably, although Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction” is not explicitly discussed by Hansen, its ideas are sprinkled throughout Hansen’s theories. Art in the age of mass media, argues Benjamin, must come to terms with its technologically reproducible nature; whether as film, photography, or musical recording, mechanical reproduction technology transformed the audience’s (viewer/listener) relationship with the wider world. These themes assert themselves more forcibly in the digital age that Hansen outlines; in this interactive era, media becomes much more amorphous, relying on software to transform reproduction into simulacra. One can sense this kinship in Hansen’s final lines; “The very hope for a viable future, the hope of  keeping open the future, requires a struggle with today’s culture industries and with the media and artifacts that they produce, and this struggle is a struggle for control over the source that is living singularity, which is to say, the source of the very transductive dialectic–between the living and the technics–that constitute the being of the human.”

Thus, while it is easy to reduce the digital age that Hansen depicts to simple binarisms (technology AS good/empowering/powerful, technology AS bad/controlling/Orwellian), the truth is that it is immeasurably complex, easily thwarting any simple definition. Instead, as Hansen professes, our goal as media theorists must be to forge productive dialogues about the messy ontic relationships between users, computers, and their wider world.

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Sources

Mark B. N. Hansen, “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (May 1, 2006): 297–306.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 3rd. ed., n.d.

Peter Lunenfeld, The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

Martin Scherzinger, “Software Physiognomics” (Lecture, Varis Lecture Hll, Tufts University, October 18, 2013).