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Introduction
- University of Minnesota Press
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ix INTRODUCTION Noise is the ultimate limiter of communication. —Colin Cherry, On Human Communication We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely. —Michel Serres, The Parasite analyzing computer-mediated communicationinaseriesofnoisychannels , this study of cultural forms developing around the human–computer interface looks at digital culture through the lens of inefficiencies. Rather than focus on how one might design the most ergonomic interface or engineer trustworthy reciprocity of encoding and decoding under conditions of lossy transmission, this book profiles a digital culture that goes against the grain of efficiency and ergonomics and embraces the reserves that reside in noise, error, and glitch. Digital culture taps reservoirs of creative expression under the conditions of networked computing, despite an apparent trend toward clean interfaces and tightly controlled interactions. The motivation for this book is not to restate Murphy’s law—anyone using computers knows they will inevitably fail—but to engage with some core assumptions about “new media” and the hype surrounding each new technology in its early stages. From the anachronisms of hypertext theory to the mythologies of cyberterrorism, and from the glitchy sounds that computers unleash to the compelling scenarios of erring and exploring in gaming, this book engages with the dynamics of innovation and teleology in media history, discussing text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in channels of computer-mediated communication that embrace the limitations and closures of computing x INTRODUCTION culture around the turn of the twenty-first century rather than trying to overcome them. This book therefore profiles the productivity of noise in computer culture, tracing it in a series of examples: from writing under the conditions of the database, to questions of secrecy and visibility in a world of networked screens, to laptop music distributed by net labels, to playing with games as models of contingency, and finally to the question of archival access and cultural memory of the experience of play and performance in computer culture. Tracing in new media cultures a resistance against the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, I borrow some terminology from information theory, which influenced the work of some of the foremost media theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, ranging from Marshall McLuhan, Michel Serres, and Max Bense to Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and Katherine Hayles, to name but a few. As humanities scholars grounded in historical and conceptual inquiry, they integrate insights from the history of technology and the philosophy of science. For instance, Hayles writes with reference to Claude Shannon and Serres of “formal results within information theory that demonstrated noise in a communication channel need not always destructively interfere with the message, but rather could itself become part of the message.”1 Following in their conceptual footsteps, this book not only treats of signals, gestures, and sounds in emerging forms of creative expression—ranging from writing and music to film and games—but also aims to contribute theoretically to current debates in the field of critical new media studies. Arguably this burgeoning field has never been more in need of historical grounding, because the role of critical analysis and conceptual interpretation is too often swept aside by an emphasis on current social and political factors in the industry.2 By the same token, as Alan Liu emphasizes, “when new media is understood to be fully embedded in history rather than (as when it is facilely said that the internet makes books obsolete) post-historical, then it appears to be trickily both before and after its time.”3 Media technologies that afford time axis manipulation complicate discourse analysis; although the following chapters roughly follow a historical sequence, the story of our “information society” does not simply provide a linear index of progress. The term information has a varied career, from its etymological con- [44.206.248.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:55 GMT) INTRODUCTION xi notations of the formative (including education) to denoting something communicable across time and space (and its value may depend on a particular time and space), and thence on to Shannon’s quantitative definition.4 These aspects are retained (to different degrees) in the current use of the word in media studies; Mark Poster contrasts Marx’s mode of production to a more contemporary mode of information, and Bense juxtaposes a classical, Archimedean world, understood in terms of expenditures of energy and labor, with a nonclassical, Pascalian world of communication and information.5 In the historical context of a confluence of radar...