grusin location location location
TRANSCRIPT
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Location, Location, Location
Desktop Real Estate and the Cultural Economyof the World Wide Web
Richard Grusin
Abstract: The concept of remediation can help explain the cultural
economy of the World Wide Web. As developed in a recentlypublished book (co-authored with Jay Bolter), remediation refers to the
wayin which new
digitalmedia refashion
priormedia forms.
Digitalmedia like computer graphics, virtual reality, and the web definethemselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and
refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film,photography, and painting, but also print. Furthermore, older media
can remediate newer ones within the same media economy.Remediation seems to be a fundamental characteristic not only for
contemporary media, but for all visual media at least since theRenaissance with its invention of linear-perspective painting. Each
medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning
other media,and
rivalryas
wellas
homageseems
alwaysto be at
work. In this paperI take up the cultural economy of the web in relationto three competing conceptual frameworks for making sense of new
digital media: cyberspace, ubiquitous computing, and mediated publicspace. In so doingI hope to move towards an analysis of the cultural
economy of the heterogenous networks within which digital media
circulate and areconsumed.
Remediating the On Friday, 5 November 1 q99, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued
desktop his findings of fact in the consolidated civil anti-trust actions initiated byboth the United States Justice Department and the State of New York
against Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation. As was widely reported,Judge Jackson’s findings supported almost point for point the anti-trust
case put forth by the Justice Department’s attorneys. Immediately uponrelease of these findings, speculation about the fate of Microsoft ran
rampant among media outlets, the general public, and the computerindustry generally. As interesting as Judge Jackson’s findings and this
ongoing speculation are (and as a longtime Mac user I find them
extremely interesting), the significance of the trial for observers of new
digital media is not to be found in the final outcome of what Microsoft’s
attorneys optimistically characterised as a
(baseball) game in its third ofnine innings. Rather, whatI find truly radical or fundamental about theMicrosoft case is a belief that is already shared not only by the Justice
Department, Judge Jackson and Microsoft, but by the popular media
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covering the case and the computer-using public generally: that the
computer desktop itself is prime real estate. By building its own web
browser, Internet Explorer, into its operating system, which is the
operating system loaded onto virtually every Intel-based PC, Microsoft is
accused of occupying valuable desktop real estate with its own
commercial developments, thereby preventing other browsermanufacturers (most notably Netscape) from competing with them forcustomers.
The Windows desktop is explicitly characterised as real estate onlytwice in Judge Jackson’s findings (once in a quote from Bill Gates, and
both in conjunction with Microsoft’s agreement with America On-Line to
use Internet Explorer rather than Netscape as the default web browser
forits
nearly10
million customers).Nonetheless
the assumption that theWindows desktop is, in Judge Jackson’s words, ’valuable real estate’,underlies the entire dispute about Mierosoft’s decision to bundle Internet
Explorer into its operating system. In this paperI take up some of thecultural implications of characterising the Windows desktop as realestate. To do so I will employ the concept of ’remediation’ to thinkabout the nature of a cultural economy in which a pixellated image on
a computer monitor can be considered real estate. In thinking aboutthe cultural economy of the World Wide Web,I will not directly be
addressing issues of market share or profitability. RatherI will be
lookingat
the wayin which
theweb and
othernew
digitalmedia
function as forms of cultural representation or mediation.
As Jay Bolter andI develop it, ’remediation’ refers to the way in whichmedia (particularly, but not exclusively new digital media) refashion
prior media forms.’ In response to the question of what is new about
digital media, we propose the answer that new media are new
precisely because of the ways in which they refashion older media.
Specfically, we examine the ways in which computer graphics, virtual
reality, and the web define themselves by borrowing from, paying
homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principallytelevision, film, photography, and painting, but also print. Computergames remediate film by styling themselves as ’interactive movies’.
Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting. Digitalphotography remediates the analogue photograph. The web absorbs
and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium,including television, film, radio, and print. Furthermore, older media
can remediate newer ones within the same media economy. Today,Hollywaod cinema is attempting to maintain its influential cultural status
by employing computer graphics in otherwise conventional linear films
and by beginning to develop entertainment for the web. Television ismaking such extensive use of new media that TV screens often lookmore like web pages than like video. Remediation seems to be a
persistent characteristic not only of contemporary media, but of all
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visual media at least since the Renaissance with its invention of linear-
perspective painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of
borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as
homage seems always to be at work.
Our project starts from the recognition that at the current historical
moment, digital media have developed two very distinct, apparentlycontradictory, styles or logics of mediation. In the first, which we call
’transparent immediacy’, the goal of digital media is to erase or
eliminate the signs of mediation - as epitomised most powerfully in
virtual reality and photorealistic computer graphics. In the second,which we call ’hypermediacy’, the goal of digital media is to multiplyand make visible the signs of mediation - as epitomised in the
windowed style of CD-ROMs, the PC’s desktop, or the web. Althoughthese two styles of mediation obey contradictory imperatives, they are
necessary halves of a double logic of remediation, in which our cultureseeks both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation, to
erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation.Our concept of remediation has three corollaries: that all mediation is
remediation; that mediation and reality are inseparable; and thatremediation is reform.
That
digitalmedia can reform and even save
societyis reminiscent of
the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much ofthe twentieth century. This is in some senses a peculiarly Americanpromise; American culture seems to believe in technology in a way that
European culture, for example, may not. Throughout the twentieth
century, or really since the French Revolution, salvation in Europe has
most often been defined in political terms - finding the appropriateradical left or radical right (or, in Tony Blair’s Britain, radical centre)political formula. Even more Marxist-influenced thinkers, who believe in
technological progress, subordinate that progress to political change.One such figure is Walter Benjamin, whose influential essay on ’TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ argues for the
political possibilities brought about by technologies of mechanical
reproduction.2I invoke Benjamin’s argument as a way to think about
the corollary 1990s argument for new digital media. In the current
cultural climate new media, not unlike film in the 1930s and 1940s, is
thought to have the potential to democratise the production of mediaand thus offer the promise of political action in the form of individuals
taking grass-roots control of media, or political groups formingalternative forums for political agency. In the most extreme version of
this argument we find someone like John Perry Barlow proclaimingcyberspace as a new political territory in which the laws of industrial
capitalism no longer apply, and exhorting the possibility of a new
political order lying on (or perhaps just beyond) our monitors.’ In this
- paperI will unfold the cultural economy of the web in relation to three
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new technological manifestations of digital media: cyberspace,ubiquitous computing, and mediated public space. in so doing t hopeto point the way towards an analysis of the cultural politics of the
heterogenous networks within which these new media circulate.
The virtual To begin to unpack further the cultural economy of the web, it is useful to
theology of think about art not only in relation to mechanical reproduction but in
cyberspace relation to the technologies of cyberspace more generally. It is also usefulto think about the mechanical reproduction not only of art but also of
nature, whose aura Benjamin defines ’as the unique phenomenon of a
distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer
afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or
a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura ofthose mountains, of that branch’.&dquo; When natural
objectsor
landscapesare removed from their context in historical tradition by the mechanical
reproduction of photography or film, Benjamin argues, they are broughtcloser to the contemporary masses. At the same time, like works of art
that have been mechanically reproduced, they lose their aura of
uniqueness, fulfilling what Benjamin characterises as ’the desire of
contemporary masses to bring things &dquo;closer&dquo; spatially and humanly,which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of
every reality by accepting its reproduction.5
A
similar movement from distance tonearness can
beseen
if we takea
cursory, and admittedly incomplete, look at the representation of nature in
the history of Western painting. In late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuryItalian religious paintings, for example, the natural landscape is almost
invariably represented as a subordinate, almost decorative, element in
relation to the paintings’ religious narratives. Landscapes are viewed onlythrough windows or doors, so that nature is also framed by contemporaryarchitecture; in fact the shapes of the windows or doors often parallel the
shape of the painting itself. Such paintings set their scenes in an interior
not because their subjects demanded it, but as a way of symbolising and
containing their theological message. But it is not only the depictedlandscape that is framed. Nature itself is framed or subordinated to the
religious allegory represented in the painting, more generally to the
theological meaning of the world. In these paintings what we regard as
the natural world was subordinated to the religious. In other words, the
largest possible context, the largest conceptual frame, so to speak, is
Christianity, the story of God’s intervention in human affairs set forth in theOld and New Testaments. Embedded in the Christian tradition, nature or
landscape possesses an aura and is kept at a distance.
The visual subordination of nature to Christianity began to give way as
early as the seventeenth century, in later Italian religious paintings and
especially in Dutch landscapes. Although in narrative terms Italian
_
~ religious paintings still conceptually subordinated nature to God,
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visually the religious subject is increasingly situated not inside a built
environment, but outside in a natural landscape. The ’art of describing’in Dutch landscapes, on the other hand, increasingly depicted nature
independentlyof any larger spiritual narrative.~ And ever since the
eighteenth century, when nature had begun to replace God and theChurch as the largest context for making sense of human actions and
purposes, the windows of the Italian Renaissance have not been neededas a frame.
On the computer screen, however, the windows have now returned:
everything in this world (and, as NASA’s 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission
demonstrated, beyond this world as well) is made visible to us throughwindows, which we can click on and enter in a more interactive way
than one could enter the windowed spaces of Italian paintings.Furthermore, for enthusiasts at least, cyberspace is bidding to replacenature as the largest interpretive context for understanding the human.
As Marcos Novak puts it: ’Cyberspace involves a reversal of thecurrent mode of interaction with computerized information. At presentsuch information is external to us. The idea of cyberspace subverts that
relation; we are now within information. In order to do so we ourselvesmust be reduced to bits, represented in the system, and in the processbecome information anew. 17 Just as, in early religious paintings, nature
was initially separate from us and then became the predominant context
for understanding our world and our actions, so ’the idea ofcyberspace’ is seen to transform information from something separateand contained within our computers to a space that we inhabit. The
current development of the visual and conceptual space of the computerscreen thus mirrors the development of the space of the canvas in the
history of Western painting. We are said to inhabit cyberspace as
previous generations inhabited nature, or even earlier generations livedin a theocentric (and indeed logocentric) world. For Novak, Michael
Benedikt, and others, the master narrative of our culture is no longer the
story of God’s relation to us or of our relation to nature, but of our
relation to information technologies: it is a virtual theology of
cyberspace.
When William Gibson invented the term ’cyberspace’ in his novel
Neuromancer, it was described as ’[a] consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation ...
a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every
computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of lightranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.
Like city lights receding ...‘.~ For Gibson, cyberspace consisted of thenetwork of all computer and information-processing systems on the earthor in orbit. When hackers ’jacked in’ using a headset, they could see
and feel their way through this electronic network. The passinginformation had colours and shapes, and the network itself defined a
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space through which they could move. Gibson’s definition of
cyberspace as a combination of networking and virtual reality, a spaceboth in a metaphorical and in a visual sense, has become paradigmaticfor others (such as Novak, Benedikt, and David Tomas) in their
observations about cyberspace. Tomas speaks of a ’a parallel world ofpotential workspaces’,9 Benedikt of a ’globally networked
...&dquo;virtual&dquo;
reality ... made up of data, of pure information.&dquo; For cyberspaceenthusiasts, there are two distinct worlds: ’the sensorial world of the
organically human’ and the digitised, pure, immaterial world of
cyberspace. Benedikt thinks of the relation between these two worlds
as an evolving process of dematerialisation: ’And cyberspace, wemight now see, is nothing more, or less, than the latest stage in theevolution of [Sir Karl Popper’s] World 3, with the ballast of materialitycast away - cast away again, and perhaps finally.’&dquo; While Benedikt
instantly qualifies this statement, insisting that cyberspace or virtualreality will never replace ’real reality’, he nonetheless conceives of these’realities’ as distinct, autonomous realms.12 Proponents of cyberspaceseem to be replaying the logic of transcendence at the heart of
Christianity, as when Benedikt, sounding very much like a revivalist
preacher reminding us not to ignore the care of our spirit while caughtup in the bodily snares of this world, implores us to take care of
cyberspace:
The
designof
cyberspaceis, after all, the
designof another life-
world, a parallel universe, offering the intoxicating prospect of
actually fulfilling - with a technology very nearly achieved - a
dream thousands of years old: the dream of transcending the
physical world, fully alive, at will, to dwell in some Beyond - to be
empowered or enlightened there, alone or with others, and to
return.’3
This dream of transcendence is so compelling that its advocates willsometimes ignore even the most obvious material limitations of
cyberspace. For example, Michael Heim suggests that ’the computernetwork appears as a godsend in providing forums for people to gatherin surprisingly personal proximity - especially considering today’slimited bandwidths - without the physical limitations of geography, time
zones, or conspicuous social status’. 14 Yet all of us know that preciselythe opposite is true. Geography, time zones, and social status are
indeed limitations, or rather the enabling characteristics, of computernetworks. Where we are located on earth (in what kind of urban or
rural setting, in an industrialised or developing country) will determine
how and whether we can connect to the internet at all. The
institutionalised system of time-keeping affects every phase of ’time-stamped’ internet communications. Finally, the conspicuous social status
of a post-industrial, computer-owning, global citizen is as much a partof the internet as are routers and protocols. Cyberspace exists in a
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tightly defined network of computers, economic status, and
considerations of time and space. It is only within this network that onecan enjoy what Heim describes as the erotic experience of cyberspace,or what Benedikt characterises as transcendence, both of which entailan apparent rejection of the material world and the human body thathas called forth serious criticism from feminist and cultural studiesscholars like Donna Haraway, Kate Hayles, and Sandy Stone.
Christine Wertheim has noted the same rhetoric of theologisation that I
have been discussing, remarking approvingly that cyberspace promisesto reintroduce the soul to Western civilisation in the form of a
cosmological dualism that has been missing since soon after the Middle
Ages. ’5 Wertheim suggests that where for Dante and his contemporaries
there were two worlds, with two distinct geographies - the profanephysical world and the sacred spiritual world - for the world of
rationalism, materialism, and science there has long since been onlyone. Beginning with the invention of linear perspective, Wertheim sees
the eradication of the spiritual world mapped out in Dante’s Inferno, thereduction of all space to a single continuous material space. Tracingcosmological theories from Galileo to Stephen Hawking, Wertheim
argues that for the first time in more than 500 years, cyberspace offersour culture the possibility of a space of the soul, a spiritual world not
reducible to material causes and explanations.
While Wertheim’s argument may appear to support mine, it reallymoves in the opposite direction. Wertheim subscribes to the theology of
Heim, Benedict, Tomas, and others - accepting the theological rhetoricof cyberspace as her own newly discovered faith. In matters pertainingto the theology of cyberspace, I on the other hand must declare myselfagnostic. My concern with cultural economy is not with space in an
ontological sense but with mediated space, the space of representation- what might be called screen space. Cyberspace is not, despite whatWertheim proclaims, an immaterial world. Very much a part of our
contemporary world, cyberspace is constituted through a series ofremediations. It is not, as its enthusiasts assert, a parallel universe. It is
not a place of escape from contemporary society, nor indeed from the
physical world. Cyberspace is a shopping mall in the ether. It fits
smoothly into our contemporary networks of transportation,communication, and economic exchange. As a digital network,cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past150 years, the telegraph and the telephone. As virtual reality, it
remediates the visual spaces of painting, film, and television. And as a
social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parksand such non-places as theme parks and shopping malls. Like othercontemporary mediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extendsearlier media, which are themselves embedded in and in turn embed
material and social environments.
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Ubiquitous Where cyberspace theologians imagine that new digital media can
computing and empower postmodern subjects by allowing them to transcend theinformation materiality not only of their own bodies but of the world itself,
appliancesadvocates of
ubiquitouscomputing argue that new digital
technologyempowers postmodern individuals in a consumerist sense preciselyinsofar as it makes its technology invisible to the user by embedding it
in what are often characterised as ’information appliances’. Asdescribed by Don Norman in The Invisible Computer, information
appliances are to the personal computer what electric appliances are to
the electric motor.16 Extrapolating from the fact that in the earlytwentieth-century home electric motors were marketed as all-purposeengines for a variety of domestic attachments (like sewing machines,fans, churns, mixers, beaters, vibrators, and grinders), Norman arguesthat the
personal computer,like the home electric motor, will soon
become invisible, to be embedded in information appliances like
calculators, cameras, medical sensors, and so forth. For Norman, the
personal computer is a technology in which mediation is not onlyalways evident, but often makes it difficult for users to accomplish thetasks they set out to perform. Information appliances, on the other
hand, by making their digital mediation invisible, provide an interfacethat is immediately evident to their users.
The information
appliancemodel of
ubiquitous computingreverses the
virtual theology of cyberspace in an important way. Where cyberspacetheologians would reform reality by giving us an alternative world and
insisting on that world as the locus of presence and meaning for us,
recent proposals for ’ubiquitous’ or ’distributed’ computing would do
just the opposite, but in the service of the same desire for reform.Instead of putting ourselves in the computer’s graphic world, the
strategy of ubiquitous computing is to scatter computers and
computational devices throughout our world: to ’augment reality’ with
digital artifacts and so create a ’distributed cyberspace’ in which
computers (concealedin information
appliances)bustle around -
opening files, opening windows, switching cameras and sound systemson and off - to suit our needs.&dquo; Enthusiasts for ubiquitous computingenvision environments in which our data files, applications, and
preferences follow us automatically from computer to computer as we
move around our workplace. Devices that are now ’dumb’, such as
windows, doors, and refrigerators, become ’smart’, communicate withus and with one another, and anticipate our needs. Ubiquitouscomputing attempts to reform reality by making technological objectsconform to human needs and wishes: windows that open at bedtime
because welike
to
sleepin
the fresh air; refrigerators that notifyus
when we are low on milk; computers that download program updatesbefore we ask for them, and so on. Some enthusiasts have begun to
develop a vast industry of wearable computers - watches, hats, belts,
eyeglasses, and shoes that entertain or inform us. Finally, there are the
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evangelists for ’nanomachines’ placed throughout the environment, even
inside our bodies for medical and other purposes. These reformers are
all remediators of reality, who want to turn our physical world into a
placewhere
everythingremediates
somethingelse.
Advocates of ubiquitous computing and information appliances insist
aggressively on the reality of media in our social and physical world.
They see such a strategy ’as a way to improve on the &dquo;flawed&dquo; designin ordinary reality’ .18 For Wendy Kellogg and others, the problem with
reality is that ’objects are largely &dquo;dead&dquo; to distinctions we care about.
Television sets and stereo systems are socially insensitive: they do not
turn themselves down when we talk on the phone’.’9 Of course, as the
proliferation of cell phones makes evident almost daily, the problem of
social insensitivityis not
limitedto
older technologies, butis at
leastequally true of eager adapters of new ones.
Like virtually all manifestations of new media, ubiquitous computingoperates according to the double logic of remediation. Information
appliances express the desire for immediacy, by concealing their
technological mediation behind a ’natural’, easy-to-use interface. At thesame time, the proliferation of such appliances, and the seamless
networking that is imagined to link them together, expresses thefascination with mediation at the heart of hypermediacy. Following the
logic of remediation as reform, ubiquitous computing insists thatnetworked information appliances will improve contemporary society byrefashioning the personal computer into new digital technologies that,for the first time in history, respond to the needs and desires of its users.
I would take issue with this idea - not becauseI believe that information
appliances will not be responsive in precisely this way (indeed many ofthem already are), but because for hundreds of years we have been
constructing our technologies precisely to take our cultural distinctions
seriously. Bruno Latour reminds us that in certain respects information
appliances would hardly be new, because technologies like seat belts,speed bumps, and hotel keys already act in such a way that they carryout our cultural preferences - by keeping us from going through thewindshield in a crash, by discouraging us from speeding throughresidential neighbourhoods and other pedestrian-dense areas, and byreminding us (at least in Europe) to leave our keys at the front desk
when we leave our hotel .20 Although Latour might agree with theenthusiasts for distributed computing that ’[t]he &dquo;distinctions&dquo; peoplecare about can be viewed as virtual worlds, or
...information webs’,
these enthusiasts miss the point when they want to make a categoricaldistinction between a distributed cyberspace and other current and pasttechnologies .2’ For Latour the idea of technologies that embody our
cultural values or distinctions has been a feature not only of modern but
of ’amodern’ or ’premodern’ societies as well.22 I, too, would argue
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that technologies have in this sense always been ’smart’. The
information appliances of ubiquitous computing may only be ’smarter’.
Location, location, Advocates of information
appliancesand
ubiquitouscomputing express
location : desktop grandiloquently the implied goal of all advocates and practitioners ofreal estate as digital media: to reimagine and therefore to reform the world as a
new public space mediated (and remediated) space. Like the desire to remediate society,the desire to remediate public space is not new. Nor will theinformation appliances of ubiquitous computing be the last expressionof remediation as reform - as we are reminded by the proliferation ofthe public and quasi-public mediated spaces (shopping malls, theme
parks, stadia, airports etc) that anthropologist Marc Aug6 has called
’non-places’.23
Aug6 characterises these non-places as ’spaces which are not
themselves anthropological places’. He argues that ’a dense network ofmeans of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing;where the habitu6 of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards
communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract,unmediated commerce.&dquo; Although non-places provide the immediacyof an unmediated commercial exchange, they also provide a standard
against which we can measure the heterogeneous network ofmediations that makes up supermodernity. As Aug6 writes:
[non-places] are the real measure of our time; one that could be
quantified - with the aid of a few conversions between area,
volume and distance - by totaling all the air, rail and motorwayroutes, the mobile cabins called ’means of transport’ (aircraft,trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel
chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complexskein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial
space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it
often puts the individual in contact only with another image ofhimself.zs
Not only can these non-places be measured and quantified, but they also
provide sites for experiencing the reality of mediation: ’Frequentation of
non-places today provides an experience - without real historical
precedent - of solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation
(all it takes is a notice or a screen) between the individual and the publicauthority.’26 What the individual experiences in these moments is the
hypermediacy of these non-places, which are defined not by theirassociations with local history or even with the ground on which they are
built, but primarily by the reality of the media they contain.
In conceptualising the non-places of supermodernity as being defined bythe ’non-human mediation’ of’a notice or a screen’, Auge points the way
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towards an understanding of the computer desktop itself as perhaps the
quintessential non-place of our time. Like Microsoft, AOL, the Justice
Department, and Judge Jackson, others too have recognised (and tried to
capitalise on)what real estate
agentscharacterise as the three most
important considerations in determining property value: location,location, location. Thus, in 1998 the Pixel Company began marketing a
piece of software called MySpace, which allows users to claim forthemselves the unused one-eighth to one-half inch of the monitor thatframes the desktop display. As described on the company’s web site,
’MySpace is a patent-pending graphical user interface that expands and
utilizes the unused border of the monitor below the MicrosoftWindows@ desktop. By increasing the number of pixels in the displayarea, MySpace creates entirely new digital real estate.’2’ For the Pixel
Company MySpace remediates the
desktopinterface as a television:
Made up of functional cartridges (think: television dials), the
MySpace control bar has limitless content possibilities. It can launch
any technology - it can manage applications; manage hardware;link to the Internet; control your CD, and more. Because it is outsideof the standard desktop area, MySpace is never covered byrunning applications, so it is always visible. Users can access
information and/or launch applications more directly by bypassingthe multiple layers of the desktop without interfering with desktop
applications.28
Where Pixel Company would exploit the notion of desktop real estate to
sell consumers its software, other companies have begun to give awaycomputers, often in exchange for a three-year commitment to a
particular Internet Service Provider. One of the first of these companieswas Free-PC, which initially offered 10,000 lucky ’beta testers’ free
personal computers and internet access, in exchange for their
agreement to accept an irremovable code that allows the company to
claim a frame on the monitor’s screen for
corporateand other
advertisements sold to the highest bidders. According to the Free-PC
website: ’That frame surrounds a screen area that is the same size as a
traditional high-resolution monitor (800 x 600 pixels for you techies!),which is available for Web browsing, e-mail, or any other MicrosoftWindows@ application.’29 Both of these companies (and there are
many more) are built upon the shared cultural assumption that underliesthe Microsoft case - and indeed Free-PC is built upon the Windows
operating system as well. The unspoken assumption, of course, is thatthe desktop interface, the medium, the digitalised display of pixels on
the monitor is potentially more valuable, and
arguablymore ’real’, than
the mechanism itself (the CPU, the hard-drive, the case, cables, fan,monitor, and so forth) - indeed so much more valuable that Free-PC is
willing to give away the computer itself in exchange for permanentspace on the desktop. And the reason for this is that the desktop, like
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59
any non-place, offers the immediacy of commercial exchange througherasing or concealing the network of heterogeneous mediation thatmakes this exchange possible.
To conceptualise the desktop as real estate, as mediated space, is to
move the question of cultural economy to a very local, indeed personal,level. To boot up your computer is thus always to engage in commerce,
to be already engaged with real estate and monopoly law, withnetworks of communication and transportation. Like mechanical
reproduction, remediation makes possible a reconfiguration of propertyrelations by bringing them, in the form of commercial exchange, closerto the user. Put more plainly, whenever you boot up your computer, youare engaging in a commercial transaction in a mediated public spacewhich is
being increasinglycontested
by Microsoft,the USA
Government, and inevitably other governments and corporations as
well. As the Microsoft anti-trust case makes clear, these propertyrelations are constitutive of our use of all digital media - whether we
are using our computers on-line or off. That is, as users of digitalmedia, we are engaged in commerce not just in purchasing our
computers or contracting with our Internet Service Providers or
engaging in e-commerce. Rather commercial exchange has now been
built into the very interface with the computer itself. Inasmuch as our
exchange with desktop real estate has become a necessary part of our
interaction with our
personalcomputers, we find ourselves in a situation
in which our exchange with the market is not (as it has developedhistorically) something that happens external to the home, but has now
become internal to, in some senses at the very heart of, domestic space. And if, as the German computer art collective Knowbotic Research
writes, ’the interface ... is the medium that brings forth the subject andshapes the world, 30 then our exchange with the market has now become
constitutive of personal space as well - evident in the mobile
technologies of lap-tops, palm-tops, PDAs, and cell-phones (which work
similarly to reconfigure the space of telephonic communication from
private to public space).
The cultural politics of the Microsoft case, then, run counter to the virtual
theology of cyberspace by insisting in multiple ways upon the very real
materiality of the digital interface. Similarly, the Microsoft case reverses
the argument behind Norman’s advocacy of ’information appliances’ -that the camera or the phone or the ’appliance’ is more ’real’, more
persistent, more visible, than the motor or the chip, which should be
invisible. In the case of the personal computer, it is the desktop display,the digital realm, that is seen to be real and visible, while the
technology itself,the
appliance,is rendered invisible as we focus on the
desktop and the information space to which this desktop gives us
access. Although the virtual theology of cyberspace would privilege the
dematerialisation and disembodiment of new digital media, and the
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advocates of ubiquitous computing would privilege the materiality ofinformation appliances, both sides would agree in maintaining a
categorical and practical distinction between the materiality of physical
objectsand space and the immateriality of digital information.
What the cultural economy underlying the notion of desktop realestate allows us to see, however, is that new media are engaged in
reconfiguring the distinction between materiality and immateriality,between reality and mediation. The cultural economy of new digitalmedia does not, as Baudrillard would have it, murder the real, butremediates it.31 In saying this I am not claiming that digital media are
doing anything radically or fundamentally new, but rather are onlyrefashioning a distinction with its own problematic genealogy in the
historyof western culture. In so
doing, theyare
engagedin a
projectwhich goes back, at the beginning of this century, to art forms likemodernist collage, but which has been at play in various forms of
representation and mediation since before the invention of linear
perspective. While totalising arguments are, and have always been,rhetorically and emotionally appealing, we need to resist the
temptation to indulge in them. Although it has become fashionable to
promote the web as having established a truly global economy, we
need to think carefully about what the category of the global reallymeans:
What is referred to as the global is, in most cases, based on a
technological infrastructure rather than on real-life experiences. Theelectronic networks form a communication superstructure that allows
for a fast and easy exchange of data over large distances. But the
way in which people use these networks is strongly determined bythe local contexts in which they live, so that, as a social and cultural
space, the electronic networks are not so much a global but a
translocal structure.32
Seen from the perspective of remediation, the cultural economy of theweb is neither revolutionary nor consumerist, neither monopolistic nor
utopian, but like cultural practices everywhere, only local, partial,tactical, and fragmentary. If one wishes to think otherwise, to
maintain, for example, either the fantasy of transcendence at the heartof the virtual theology of cyberspace, or the fantasy of immanence thatinforms the advocates of ubiquitous computing, then there are plenty of
purveyors of personal computers and information applicances who willbe eager to fulfill those fantasies for a very modest price.
Notes 1 This isa
revised version of my keynote address presented at the Creativity andConsumption conference, University of Luton, UK, 29-31 March 1999. It is
deeply indebted to my work with Jay Bolter, from which portions of this essay
are derived. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).
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2 In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah
Arendt, transloted by Harry Zohn (N.Y: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217-252.
3 John Perry Barlow, ’Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace’, at
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declarotion
(31 January 2000).4 Ibid, pp. 222-223.
5 Ibid.6 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).7 Marcos Novak, ’Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace,’ in Cyberspace: First Steps,
ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 225.
8 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1986), p. 52.
9 David Tomas, ’Old Rituals for New Space,’ in Benedikt, p. 35.
10 Michael Benedikt, in Benedikt, pp. 122-123.
11 Ibid, p. 4.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid, p. 131.
14 Michael Heim, ’The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,’ in Benedikt, p. 73.
15 Christine Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from
Dante to the Internet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).16 Don Norman, The Invisible Computer (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).17 Wendy A. Kellogg, John M. Carroll, and John T. Richards, ’Making Reality a
Cyberspace,’ in Benedikt, pp. 411-433.
18 Ibid, p. 418.
19 Ibid.
20 Bruno Latour, ’Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few
Mundane
Artifacts,’in
Shaping Technology/Building Society:Studies in
Sociotechnical Change, eds. W.E. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1992), pp. 225-258.
21 Kellogg, Carroll, and Richards, p. 418.
22 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993).23 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).24 Ibid, p. 77.
25 Ibid.26 Ibid, p. 117.
27 At
http://www.thepixelcompany.com/ (29March
1999).28 Although the Pixel Company has now renamed their software xSides™, the
assumptions underlying it, and much of the rhetoric promoting it, remains the
same.
29 At http://www.free-pc.com (29 March 1999).30 Knowbotic Research,’10_Dencies - Questioning Urbanity,’ in The Art of the
Accident, ed. Joke Brouwer et al (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers/V2_Organisatie,1998), p. 194.
31 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996).32 Knowbotic Research, p. 200.