This intrigued me as further evidence of Edwards’ ‘gathering” and the non-separation of matter and meaning.  The documents themselves are entangled with the human world they enact with. (Clumsy sentence!)  Perhaps Latour’s “quasi objects”.

Barad as quoted in Edwards:

“Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds or making specific worldly configurations”  and goes on ” not making ex nihilo or out of language, belief or ideas but materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form.”

 

When I first moved to the Arabian Gulf, I was astounded at how such large cities could exist in what appeared to be a hostile environment of heat, dust, salt and scouring winds.  Many others have commented on the sci-fi film appearance of Gulf cities and the sight of Riyadh rising out of its desert plateau never failed to make me catch my breath; how did it survive there?

One minute it's desert, then suddenly it becomes a city

Water is pumped across the desert, for about 450 kms, from the desalination plants on the Gulf coast.  The air is chilled and it is possible to live life without ever leaving a thermostatically controlled environment for more than a few minutes; just long enough to move from your car to the lift or from the supermarket to your car.  Cars rule.  Air conditioning rules.  Water wealth, as commented on by Jonathan Raban in “Arabia Through the Looking Glass”, rules. 

During the 2nd Gulf War, we were warned to store water as one hit to The Pipe (you never needed to ask which pipe was being spoken about), and the city would dry up and out and away.  Embassies filled their pools with fresh water, I filled my cupboards with drums of the stuff.  It brought home the nature of life in these environments and how far we, as humans, have moved into the apparently hostile and made it our home.  The older generations would talk nostalgically of life Before Air Conditioning yet few wanted to return to wind towers and mud walls. 

Living in a desert city is an ontological experience.  So many aspects of life are conceptual e.g. chilled air, potable sea water but the meaning is difficult to siphon off from the matter.  To understand the importance of air conditioning, it cannot be simply represented as chilled air.  Air conditioning makes life possible.  Similarly with desalinated water; you cannot simply say it is water with the salt removed.  Am I making sense?

(I can’t find any images to represent what air conditioning and ample water supply mean.)

Here in the UAE, there is an abandoned village called Al Jazeerah Al Hamra.   To walk around the village is to sense something of Edwards’ take on “gathering things together and experimenting.”  To see an abandoned village, with shutters at the windows and paint on cracking mud walls, is to invite all manner of explanation.  I suppose in a representational way, explanations would be sought as to the origin of the story.  But “origins are myths” and, as Edwards makes clear, “place contraints on experimentation’. (Ewards, 2010, p8.) 

My photos from the village uploaded to flickr (beware: I’m not a photographer!)

The village is a popular subject for newspaper stories and everyone they interview who used to live there gives a slightly different version of the reason why they left.  “I claim little original or seek the origins to that which I write.  I gather words.”  To that I’d add images.  For images evoke words plus emotions and I suspect that an approach to learning that involves so much entanglement cannot escape the powerful impetus of emotion.  To learn why the people of Al Jazeerah Al Hamra left would require a co-existence of matter and meaning; air-conditioning, water supply and strong walls not represented by chilled air, pipes and concrete.  “The knowing human subject is decentred by a concern for ways of enacting within the material world.”  (Ewards, 2010, p9).  The Gulf villages and cities decentre the human subject.  The buildings, their functions, their facilities interact or fail to interact with their environment in ways which the human subject still does not fully comprehend.  The builders of Burj Khalifa in Dubai fully admitted the risks they were taking and how their creation required the development of new technology as the building took shape and grew.  But remove the non-human and what would still function in a landscape where a sandstorm can strip a car of paint down to the bare metal in a matter of hours?

Sand storm moving in from the desert and moving through Riyadh

My initial issue is that I need to understand what is meant by “human” before I can really accommodate the notion of “posthuman”. The aspect I’ve struggled with most is the idea that posthuman means the use of tools. I am of the firm belief that the use of tools is an integral part of being human.

The situation seemed to clarify itself for me with an incident that happened over the weekend. A friend recently moved home to a more remote part of the Emirates and I helped him shift. We discovered that not only 3G but also basic phone connection was sporadic and weak. He is not much into cooking and wanted to keep his life simple so he bought a single hot plate. His purchasing decision was based on how it looked: sleek, black, glass, minimal touch functions. When trying to make coffee in his espresso pot, the hot plate refused to work. However, earlier, he’d been able to heat up some food in a pot. When I arrived, we decided that we could work this out. This is, I believe, a basic human characteristic.

First assumption was that the hot plate was broken. But it worked when the curry pot was put back on. Therefore, it was clearly operational.

Second assumption was that it had something to do with the bottom of the pot as the curry pot was smooth and the espresso pot was ridged.

After a lot of time we’d narrowed it down to either material (all the stainless steel pots worked) or design (all the ridged bottoms did not work).

Finally, the next day, when in an internet accessible zone of the desert, we were able, in 3 minutes, to find out what was really going on. The smooth smart black hot plate was based on induction cooking and would work with ferromagnetic cookware only.

What did this tell me?

First of all that human curiosity and use of tools is inherent and it is a basic human need to solve problems. That almost always involves some kind of tool, even if I haven’t made the tool myself. For example, my friend’s daughter was able to open my iPhone in India with a darning needle as I’d forgotten the little tool that opens the SIM drawer. So, in the hot plate situation, we used all sorts of tools to test the cooking ability of the hot plate. Actually heating food to eat was forgotten in the process.

The solution came when we were able to access the internet (good old Wikipedia) using another tool, the iPhone. I think, for me, that is the moment we became posthuman. Through the use of a tool, a sophisticated one admittedly, we were able to access an unseen yet highly potent body of knowledge that was far greater than our combined knowledge to date. In addition, it was solved in less than 3 minutes.

This set me wondering. Look at the Mayan people. They had a highly sophisticated civilisation. Conventional history makes much of the fact that their weapons were no match for the Spanish. Yet, in the preSpanish context, their weapons were superior and highly successful. Gunpowder, cavalry and steel trounced stone and wood. So, many historians have called the Spanish “more advanced”. And yet Mayan science, knowledge and technology is arguably closer to posthuman than Spanish when we consider the Mayan calendar and their advanced astrological observations. The Spanish came from the context of the Inquisition which had actively sought to destroy science. Posthuman, therefore, cannot be seen as a linear development, which is how I think it’s coming across in the readings and some discussions. The Mayans created an immense body of advanced knowledge that was accessed by successive generations through their writing and architecture. For me, posthuman is when we use a tool eg a system of writing or an iPhone, to access an advanced, accumulative body of knowledge that then assists us in solving a current issue. Is this making sense?

As some of the more recent Tweets have suggested, I think that posthuman is something that we can tap into and have been able to tap into throughout history without ever achieving a full-time, full scale posthuman state. If you could pluck a clerk from an 18th century counting house, you could train him to use our technology (and perhaps avert a monumental financial crisis to boot). There is not, I believe, anything inherently different in our brains at this point in history which makes us posthuman. It is our use of what we have created (or had created for us) that makes our applications of knowledge and our paths to those applications posthuman. It is a part-time state.

I suspect that there’s is some very human hubris involved, too, in this reaching out for an advanced state of evolution. However, a quick look around the globe and we can see that though the technology has changed, the basic motivators of conquest, oppression and parochial xenophobia have not.

Which made me think about membership and belonging and how to carry out this latest assignment.  I don’t for one minute believe that Mandy is even real or that the people running the cruises are so heart-set on my joining them but, just for a split second, there was a flash of belonging.  I love the sea and I love being on the sea.  The message was chatty, friendly and almost human. 

Cunard's Queen Victoria arrives in Cochin, India.

There is a basic human desire to belong to groups.  However, as the readings highlight, the criticism from social constructivists of the holistic approach focuses on the constructed knowledge and personal history of the ethnographer.  In my time in the Arabian Gulf, I have noticed that many people arrive here with preset notions and, of course, find plenty of evidence to support their own preconceptions.  Germaine Greer toured Dubai on an open-top bus during a stopover and found plenty to criticise from her elitist viewpoint (the tour buses cost a fortune).  You don’t need to read the article subsequently published in The Guardian to know what she found; the heading is enough ”From its Artificial Islands to its Boring New Skyscraper, Dubai’s Architecture is Beyond Crass”

Taking comfort in the familiar in order to view the new

Admittedly, Greer does not claim to be an ethnographer yet her status as an academic, intellectual and cultural commentator might lead one to believe she would make an attempt at objectivity.  However, as Hine points out, there is a high level of subjectivity in ethnography.  “How can anyone document a reality external to self?  No-one is asocial and free from particular practices of knowing.”  As mentioned later in his text, there is the “distant ethnographer”, sitting on the verandah (or the top deck of an imported British tour bus) observing the natives as they go about their tasks.  Visitors to Dubai do the same thing and can be heard interpreting what they see within their own contexts.  It’s what we do when we encounter something new.  Our ‘a priori’

Would everyone recognise this as breakfast?

hypotheses, latent or blatant, quickly come to the forefront as we observe the groups before us; not being part of them, we perhaps feel a certain right to assess and pass judgement.  We also relate things back to what we believe to be the standard re Carol’s posting on Foucault: “The fundamental codes of a culture–those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices–establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home”

In our Twitter feeds we’ve mentioned the role of arrival and Hine speaks about how this can anchor the ethnographer in the “culture” being visited.  My own personal experience of Gulf airports has always enhanced my attitude towards being here.  Compare Dubai with Heathrow and I know where I’d rather land.  And yet nowhere makes me happier than India; those airports are suffused with the tantalising smell of being there.  I feel the same about my online experience.  FB seems like a penance but it’s necessary to go there, from time to time, to keep in touch with people I like who would otherwise drift away.  There are sites I visit for work where I’m a signed up member and they fulfill a variety of needs, though I notice I usually switch off all chat entities as I want to go there, do what I need to do and then leave!  But my “happy places” online remind me of visiting my “happy places” in real life.  I sign in and relax as I chat with people, or root around looking for things or just listen to music or watch moving pictures. 

Not all means of arrival are the same.

That’s me as a member; my 3 categories of arrival are Heathrow, Dubai and Kozhikode: misery, efficiency, happiness.

As an ethnographer how to I slough off my attitudes?  Are all airports the same?  I know that they are not.  Are all online groups the same?   What I find most interesting at this stage of the process is the idea of not inhabiting space but following connections.  Initially I found Twitter twoublesome as the posts contain so many URLs.  The compulsion to follow every one was resulting in endless tangential journeys.  But with time and practice, it has become less of an ordeal and is a lot more enjoyable.  With the online group I have chosen to look at, I find that the same thing is happening.  Most of the posts contain links to other things outside the group.  Although you have to click a button to join the group, the membership process is not vetted and is instantaneous.  But it’s still a group and you still need to click that button, so it suggests a certain “walled garden” approach.  But the links paint a different picture of a porous organisation; less walled garden and more meadow where you may have to cross a stream to get there but it’s more of a burn than a brook.  So, there seems less need to arrive and a greater need to join the flow.

“Being there trumps all” and yet what does being there mean?  Despite my most fervent wishes, my tired old body still feels the physical reality of sitting on a chair at a desk or, if I’m lucky, lying on my bed.  My mind may wander around the virtual world but physical reality is also going to have an impact.  My “arrival” is coloured in a way that physical arrival is not.  Physical arrival is total submersion.  Everything from negotiating Customs to working out how to get from the airport to the next place you want to be requires the focus of all your senses and physical presence.  Online this is not the case; I can be aware of other events outside the realm of the online group and I can follow them; one eye on the news as I read the day’s postings or the secure knowledge that my dinner is sorted out instead of scouring the horizon for sustenance.  Sights, smells, sensations – all play a big part in arrival.  Can I, as amateur ethnographer, hope to experience the emotions, tensions, sounds and smells?  I can look, read, image and imagine but is that as deep an experience?  Referring back to the uncanny, I suspect that it can.  I remember once having a conversation with a friend broken into by, for want of a better word, a hacker.  The hacker was abusive in a silly way but even after I’d logged out, I felt the impact of having been harassed.  In a way, that gives me hope that my ethnography report is not going to be the dry stick it feels at pressent.

Zombie craze continues to infect popular culture

posted on the BBC site today.  And a curious story from earlier this summer

Zombie attack: Leicester city council overrun by ‘undead’

Back in the 1980s, there was a cabaret act called “The Joan Collins Fan Club”.  We weren’t digital then but key elements of that act illustrate the power of the uncanny.  This was long before Julian Clary was famous, so the act played in small clubs and was intimate and scary at the same time.  Clary would walk amongst the audience, selecting his “victims” for the evening.  A key part of his act was to take someone’s handbag or wallet and then go through it, item by item, dissecting their personality with acerbic wit.  This was buzzing around in my mind as I read about the power of the uncanny to defamiliarise conventional teaching practices.  Just as Bayne writes about the liminal area between what is perceived to be “normal” and that which is “troublesome” or “strange”, so the cabaret picked apart the artefacts that an “unstrange” member of the audience carried with them and could thus be assumed to be both personal and also having some value to that person.  As the dissection went on, those of us in the audience laughing at the jokes and banter were also left feeling distinctly uneasy; what would be made of some of the things I had in my pockets?  What would they say about me?  When laid out bare on the stage (or screen) what do our artefacts say in a voice that is not necessarily under our control?

“our actual and immediate activity on the network is less important than the presence of our representation, our ‘ghost’”

The unease/ amusement was accentuated when Fanny the Wonder Dog would do her impressions of famous people of the time.  It was ridiculous and yet, somehow, it worked: a dog in a wig was recognised as a member of the Royal Family.  For some of the audience, this display of “troublesome knowledge” induced anxiety leading to desires to disengage.  For most, however, it held a fascination and demonstrated the fluidity of our ability to process images and “ontological disturbance” in ways which created new meanings that had a shared provenance and resonance but also a particularly personal edge.

At the moment, I perceive the LifeStream to be a type of “pocket emptying”; what is to be made of what I carry around virtually?  As Bayne points out, there is a blurring of boundaries that leads to a redefining of identity.  As I have commented elsewhere, on the continuum of Absent to Present and back again, how is that reflected in my presence online?  While I may be tied up in meetings or lying on the sofa telling myself to do some work, that is not the presence that is represented online by my ‘ghost’.  That ghost may not register at all or may be seen as less ghostlike than I think.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

Robert Burns here evokes the uncanny in that a louse wandering around a woman’s hair has taken on the presence of a phantomenological encounter.  A louse amidst the finery is mischievous and the author is near malicious in his analysis of what it represents.  We experience a new relationship with reality as we contemplate the appeal to a higher power; this is the power of the uncanny, providing us with the ability to see ourselves in new existences and from alternate existences.  (This is also why I think the word “strangeness” is just not strong enough.  Uncanny layers the experience with a myriad nuances that tap into, like hypertext, a wealth of other understandings.)

Which brings me to Zombies (this is a posting of tangents…)  A few decades back, Zombies were gross representations of the “living dead”; slow-moving, incapable of thought, driven purely by some supernatural instinct.  Now, that has changed.  In the recent TV series, “The Walking Dead“, Zombies have acquired human abilities; they have the sense of smell and taste, can use basic tools and have a primitive ability to hunt in packs.  And they’re not called Zombies anymore.  They are now known as “Walkers”, which sounds cosily human to me in a country where “mall walking” is a legitimate form of exercise.

This made me wonder if the on-going popularity of magic (Harry Potter et al) and the supernatural (all things Vampire, Undead and Super-Powered) is in some way a reflection of our attempts to reason out the impact of the virtual world on and in our lives.  It is no longer the case that the uncanny inhabit the dark nights and dark alleys of our imagination.  We have become uncanny in our flow through the digiverse but how to we process that?  I’ve probably gone too far off track in my thinking but I can’t help feeling that our attempts to humanise the unnatural are a reflection of our need to humanise the virtual.  We recognise the uncanny but do not seem able to embrace it in its entirety.  Therefore, we need to give it some of our attributes.

There seem to be far fewer “sleek shiny avatars” these days and far earthier, more nature-based representations.  We may give ourselves wings, horns or halos but it seems we need to deal with the uncanny by keeping a link to realworld human representation.  I don’t have one but I’ve been in cars where the car talks to you.  You can choose the voice you want it to have.  In my apartment building, the lift talks to me.  Admittedly, “her” repertoire is limited to telling me if I’m going up and down and which floor we’re stopping at but I find I do think of the lift as “her”.  (Other people hear her, too, so it’s alright.)

Courtesy of Mohammed Al Marzouqi as found on Facebook. He is a digital artist and can be contacted at Momorzq@gmail.com

In his article, “Unspoken Truths“, Christopher Hitchens writes about language and the power of the voice and how he has reacted to its weakening as a result of his cancer:

“Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.”

David Mitchell, author of “Cloud Atlas” spoke in a Guardian Podcast about the writer’s voice and how each writer needs to find it for themselves before they can produce a text.  As he says at the beginning of the podcast, it’s dangerous to think too much about who is reading your words as you can overanalyse and hency stultify the message.  He goes on to say that it’s not worth working out if you’re writing for “high brow” or “low brow”; there’s “just brow”.

I think that this is what Kress was getting at in his chapter.  He was pounced on for his comments on words as “mere signifiers” to be filled with meaning: “relatively empty signifiers”.  And yet, is he so far from the truth?  As a language teacher, I know that we often define words by saying what they are not.  For example, if I’m talking about drinking vessels, and I want to convey the meaning of “mug”, it would be very long-winded of me to try and describe a mug in isolation; it could potentially lead to confusion with other things that we drink from.  So, it seems easier to start with, “It’s not a cup.”  Move on to “It’s not a glass.”  Once that’s established, we can go on to clarify what features distinguish it from both cups and glasses, thereby pouring significance into the word.

There is also the role of nuance and with it the power of the idiolect; what do we bring to the meaning of words and how to we relate to them on a personal level?  For example, a typical British person is likely to have a fairly positive reaction to the word “dog” when discussing pets.  A Gulf Arab is not necessarily going to have the same reaction.  Although the word “dog” is clearly understood by both parties in terms of zoological terms, the significance of what that word signifies can be radically different.  The same is true of body language, visuals and a wealth of other communication devices.  I recall a new teacher to Saudi Arabia going into a children’s class and showing scenes from the movie “Babe: Pig in the City”.  Many of the boys didn’t even recognise Babe as a pig as they had never seen one before (they are banned in that country and their image is forbidden).  But as young religious scholars, they shared the horror of speaking animals.  What was a cute story of animal friendship in one context became a horror story in another.

Bearing all of this in mind, Kress makes the valuable point that the affordances of virtual semiotics allow us to compose, create and convey meaning in new ways that are perhaps not fully grasped until actually undertaken.  My visual artefact exercise gave me a whole new respect for Kress and helped me to grasp what he was saying.  If I was a non-English speaker and was to look up “uncanny” in either Cambridge or Oxford Online (two of the most used resources for English learners), I’d be left with a rather dry and perhaps confusing concept: strange, mysterious, unsettling.  Into these bare shells I need to pour my own representations of what that term means to me as I explore it in various contexts.  The Scots Dictionary will help to fill out the construction but no matter what a dictionary says, we do not know a word until it speaks to us in a voice we understand; a voice we have given it.

DSL - DOST (Uncanny,) Uncannie, adj. Also: uncany, -kannie.
[Canny adj.] a. Malicious, mischievous. b. ? Aggressive, threatening. c. Unreliable, untrustworthy; incautious. — a.
Sum now, vncannie sawers, sew sum causes of contentioun betuene the Chanceller and the Gouernour; Dalr. II 58/24. — b.
Order to be taken for restraining uncany begers; 1631 Kirkcaldy Presb. 33. — c.
I [was] … made hopefull he would not suffer it be spoiled by the imprudencie of mony uncannie hands which are about it; 1638 Baillie I 100.
To make all, without dinn, march forward, leist his unkannie trewes-men should light on to call them up in their rear; 1639 Baillie I 211.

Cambridge Online goes for:

Up until now, I’ve treated the films we’ve been watching as academic exercises. What are they trying to tell us? In “Word Builder”, why does the husband/designer create a yellow flower? Will the villagers in “Bendito” move on to a 4G deity now that they Deus Dial Up Modem proved a bust? In all of this, I have found emotion to be lacking. And I think that is dangerous when we consider culture in any form. Culture both provokes and sustains emotion. Deep, rock-rooted and intensely personal emotion. Just as I found myself muttering in Scots when the LifeStream was defying me, I believe that most people have a personal relationship with their culture, the depth of which may surprise them when it is revealed in moments of stress or liquefaction!

What's my default?

I left Scotland nearly 20 years ago with no plan in my head other than to see other cultures, learn new things and eat different food. As time has gone on, my overt cultural links to my place of birth have in some instances ossified: prices in Edinburgh shock me as my mind still expects to pay for things circa 1991; I expect the villages of my youth not to have turned into suburbs and I still think of the Grassmarket as exciting but scary. Other things have kept up with the times; banks! As an expatriate worker who has already had to leave one country rather sharpish on account of local instability, I know it is sensible to keep a bank account alive and kicking back in the Home Place. While relatives and friends are happy to take you in for “a wee while”, nobody wants to keep you indefinitely. So, I have an Emergency Bank Account. I have trained myself not to think of it as money for spending and, being an internet account, that’s been easy. Maybe it has something to do with the colour of the screen when I access the account, but I imagine it as a small room buried under a hill (a faulty holodeck, perhaps?) Of course, access to this buried treasure does not involve spades, shovels and troll-blinding spells but the process of entering User ID, Password, and selected items from my Memorable Information.

It's all mine. Mine!

I don’t check this account often but pop in every few months to see if the pirates have been. Forever exhorted not to write security details down, I haven’t. So, I was relying on memory and a cryptic note I’d written to myself about 2 years ago which now made no sense post summer holidays and the start of the LifeStream. Naturally, it all went wrong but my screen, determined to be helpful, started suggesting how I could rectify the situation. I was guided to a new page, entered the few details I could remember and was given a reference number and phone number to call in the UK. I called and was guided by an automated message. Then the message told me it was having difficulty recognising some of my details and was transferring me. Bips and beeps and staccato tones followed. Eventually a human came on the line. We worked through the process of identifying myself. Up till now I had been fully focussed on gaining access to my account. This was the moment when Digital Culture became evident.

How do you prove you are really you? Are the questions chosen by the system and merely relayed by the humans the right ones? 20 or so years on, does anyone really remember the month and year when they opened the account? I can remember the snooty clerk who dealt with my application. Isn’t that just as valid?

On the one hand, the call centre staff were Scottish and the cadences of their accents calmed me into thinking this would be a straightforward, matter-of-fact transaction. Starved of visual or physical cues, I was relying solely on the transmission and receipt of oral/aural code to make this work. But the system does not recognise a shared culture. The system needs to be fed exact facts. On demand and as required. I got one of my security questions mixed up. I realised this when I was on to my 3rd question and I corrected the previous mistake but it was too late. The system had already received my incorrect submission. My culture-sharer on the other end of the line sympathised profusely and perhaps we even bonded. But the system is implacable. No surprise I started channeling Hal at this point. Sympathy but no wavering in stance.

I was now beyond the help of my first human and was redirected to a second. He also sympathised but reiterated that the system had now moved on and had already started the process of locking my account until an entirely new protocol had been initiated and satisfied. I saw the machines from “Bendito”. Obey or be destroyed. It may sound funny but it wasn’t. I stood at my bedroom window, phone pressed to my ear, gazing out at the washing flapping in the still-too-hot air and felt fear. The money in that account is supposed to pay for this course. The money in that account is now locked behind a door I can’t open. The humans can’t help me open that door. The system has locked the door. I heard the Voice of Colossus.

The process has been initiated

In its wisdom, the system (I have deliberately not used a capital S for fear of scaring myself further) has sent out an automated letter to my Scottish address even though it normally sends things to me here. Why? This is a security matter. The system defaults to…. something I didn’t understand. Once the letter is received, in reassuring paper and ink, the information in the letter must be inputted back into the system. Then, and only then, will the system open the door. Couldn’t the system send a letter to me here? No. Couldn’t the system send some sort of encrypted electronic message? No. The system has decided and will do nothing more till it is fed whatever it wants to be fed.

I may sound glib in this posting. But this incident highlighted for me the emotive side of dealing with machines and internet based systems. As we’re looking at the human element, I thought this was surprisingly apt. Throughout the events described above, the humans were kind, helpful, understanding but ultimately unable to do anything. It was clear, at times, that though they follow certain protocols, they were not sure exactly why and relied on referring back to the system as a default position.

It is also clear that fear is present. From the fear of identity theft, to theft of possessions, to getting things wrong, to doing something that the system doesn’t like and instigates punishment.

I entrusted material possessions in the form of money to a virtual location. That money took on a virtual presence but has a physical significance: it’s my survival money. So, that means for me that this money is imbued with all manner of emotions as I already know what it feels like to leave a country with no more than 2 bags and a suntan. As a result of bungling the unlocking of the padlocks, that money was being withheld from me. The second human told me how much virtual cash I still had (phew, no pirates!) which almost made it worse in as much as I caught a glimpse of my security blanket through the bars but could go no further.

A range of emotions ensued; frustration with both myself for forgetting so many bits of information and at the system for not knowing I was who I said I was; disappointment at not getting things sorted; anxiety because the phone calls took almost an hour and I was paying peak international rates; fear because I thought I might “lose” my money; annoyance that I could only stare at the screen and not be able to interact with it (look, I might say, here’s my passport and here’s my driving licence and here’s my birth certificate, now let me in); embarrassment that I was in this situation (those humans must be thinking what a fool, he’s lost all that important information and now he wonders why he can’t get in) but, overall, helplessness as there was absolutely nothing I could do, no-one to whom I could appeal, no quick fix.

This experience has prompted me to go back and view again the films in the festival but this time with the intention of seeing the emotion in them. I have always had an emotional reaction to Hal but I’d viewed some of the other clips as something abstract and disconnected. In fact, “Word Builder” initially made me think of clever advertising but no more than that as I found the denouement both contrived and mawkish. Re “Poetic Holodeck”, I’ve spent the last decade or more living next to deserts so I find the whole idea of snow-capped mountains representing nature to be no more than an echo of 18th century Europe’s obsession with the sublime. The only films that had emotionally touched me were the scenes from “2001″, “The Matrix” and “Massive Attack”, the latter because of the voice more than the visuals. But I hadn’t bothered to really work out why.

In conclusion, it is still not easy to say why. “eXistenZ” may disgust us and “Colossus” may frighten us but I realised today that this course is about reaching in deep and applying what I’m studying to what I’m experiencing. I guess that is what the LifeStream is all about. I can’t simply read some articles, watch some clips and play around on YouTube. The fact is that our emotional reaction to what we experience, what we live through online is as vivid, pertinent and consciousness-forming as anything we experience in real life. Maybe it’s because emotions are ephemeral but also transferable that this happens. I can sit at my screen for 12 hours but I will never really feel I’m inside the machine in front of me. But my emotional involvement with the “Neil” that exists in the virtual world is real and significant. Part of me, as I discovered today, the part of me that means something to who I am, exists inside (I still see that world as inside something else). The physical me has to know how to trigger the right responses and reactions to responses to access that part of me. I can’t reboot and start again as I will risk losing the Neil that has already been created and already means something. Today taught me that my virtual self is real and plays or abides by rules, laws, systems that are not open to typical human reactions. If my e-pass doesn’t work on the bus, the chances are that the bus driver will let me stay on. He and I both know that the system sometimes hiccups and we can be human together, shrug and let it go. But when human and machine interact, we still don’t know each other well enough to get inside each others’ thought processes to make it happen.

Today the machines won. It’s difficult not to see it as a contest. If I ever want to see my money again, I need to do what the system wants. Maybe that’s why the films show fear of the machines; their lack of compromise and of the irrational yet entirely understandable human ability to just let things go. We rely on mutually sustainable compassion much more than we think.

Were they checking their social media?

Though Hand’s chapter is more descriptive than prescriptive, it is hard to say where such events fall in his analysis of positions. He was writing after 9/11, at a time when many people felt the need to go online to talk about what they had experienced and how they felt. Perhaps this was more of a reflective reaction. People need to talk about harrowing and disturbing events. The internet with its vast range of chat rooms, boards and discussion fora provides such an opportunity. In this case, all anyone needed was the internet access and basic internet skills. Perhaps, at such a time of distress, the potential of the internet seemed to be one of healing and recovery. Indeed, as Hand discusses, digital technology presents us with both promise and threat with the former promising a massive extensive of the flow of information whilst the latter brings disorganisation and an element of reflexivity.

If we don't learn to adapt to the changes around us, will we fall off?

Hand’s 3 Key Motifs are Access, Interactivity and Authenticity. He links these to the economic, technical, political and social spheres of our lives. And therein lies the rub. If all we need the internet for is to express ourselves then we have achieved that goal. There are endless opportunities to do so from commenting on newspaper articles to chat rooms to social media. Hand talks at length about the flow of information and how the “promise side” sees this as inclusive citizenship, affording democratic empowerment and choice. But little is really said about the nature of this information and its application. For someone of my generation, one of the most powerful images is that of Colin Powell sitting at the UN with his proof of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. This was presented as information and yet the “neterati” are still commenting on its lack of veracity. It strikes me, in 2011, that we are still far from having truly ubiquitous convergence, truly ubiquitous access. So, for me, the issues Hand raises are only partially dealt with in his chapter.

In the chapter, Hand refers to the liquefaction of territorially located culture. In the cases mentioned above, that liquefaction took on a physical element, too. If the promise of the internet is interactive culture, when does the interaction begin? Which language will it use? While we ponder the role of machines in our lives and the investment of our time and consciousness in the virtual world, how accessible is any of it outside the networks which created it? If hierarchical knowledge is to give way to horizontal information, surely that information must in turn be recreated as knowledge. But in what context? In the last month, the first web addresses using Arabic letters have been launched. Soon, with the rise of Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi and other languages which use scripts quite different to the languages of European origin, the net will take on a different aspect. Will the empowered citizens of Western democracies take the time to learn Urdu and Pashto so that they can fully acquaint themselves with the information present on websites presented in these languages before undertaking actions which will directly and irreparably affect the spatial, temporal and local realities of those territories?

Hand is perhaps too glib in his notion of permeable national borders and his references to democracy, a notion he never defines. His notions of history are also called into question: “contemporary culture has been technologised on a scale and with a speed that is wholly unprecedented.” Has it? Think about the effect of the railroads in the American West in the 19th century. A different sort of technology but not without consideration. There seem to be elements of nostalgia in the discussions of online citizens debating crucial issues; the early town halls of New England come to life in virtuality. But, without being glib myself, most comments online seem to have more to do with celebrity weddings and divorces than policy. Perhaps this is an element of “the commodifying tendencies of late capitalism”. Though, it should be noted that “early” capitalism was also rather interested in commodification. Read any book on the Roman Empire and you will quickly note that it was all about the commodities. If Kim Kardashian’s wedding was put up against Obama’s reform of the American health system, which would create more internet buzz?

Going back to my earlier “planetary events”, I wanted to apply the different theories to these particular situations. First of all, the economic crisis arguably confuses most people who try to understand it. I do not see where online communities of concerned cybercitizens have had any impact at all on the decisions that have been made. The “privatised society of atomized consumers” may bay at the moon as they watch their portfolios shrink and their investments shrink but do their online howls of protest and demands for action have any effect. Rather like protestors in the real streets of Athens, they may cause a ripple, but at the end of the day the decisions that matter are taken regardless of their pain and outrage.

The riots in the UK during the summer were simply images on a screen as I lay in bed in Bangalore. The commentators assured me that Twitter and Facebook were somehow making the confrontations easier. Then others would say that the police were monitoring these tools and arresting people before they had even left home “the penetrative embedding of technocratic control and surveillance within previously ‘public spheres’”. Where the cyber element of the economic crisis seems to suggest the powerlessness of the atomized individual, the UK riots imply at least some role for “Cyberia”. As with any sword, it has two edges and can cut both ways.

If any “empowerment” is to be seen, I believe it lies in events generally grouped together and rather inaptly named “The Arab Spring”. (Living in the Middle East, I have been asked where this name comes from. It is a Western cultural construct which neither elucidates nor illustrates but rather mashes up the reality of both Prague and Cairo.) As this blog is public, I am constrained by my territorial realities in what I can say. In fact, my employers have warned us about the dangers of public posts. What is clear about the recent changes of government in North Africa is that the internet or the cyber world or whatever name we wish to use played a significant role in that very flow of information described by Hand. I think what is truly significant here is best expressed by Saskia Sassen in Hand’s chapter:

“much of what happens in electronic space is deeply inflected by the cultures, the material practices, and the imaginaries that take place outside electronic space.” p28

In other words, just as certain Western journalists in Cairo and elsewhere wanted to portray the events they were witnessing in the terms of the American Revolution, a closer look at the blogs coming out of those cities and countries would show that there was a far deeper Islamic consciousness at work. We see what we want to see. Western reporting often missed the point because it failed to grasp the culture; the deep, rich and ancient culture, that informed the blogs and the postings and the online reporting. Twitter, Facebook et al did not cause the changes of government; brave people did. But the tools of the internet allowed them to communicate, to be reflexive in a way that had not happened in their generation and to discuss ways of challenging the political hegemony as well as the ideological domination of certain parties or personalities.

Do all revolutions look the same?

To sum up, I would like to look at a very personal example which, for me, encapsulates both the utopian and dystopian worlds discussed by Hand. A few days ago I downloaded the new University of Edinburgh app to my iPhone. I gazed at it in wonder. Nearly 30 years ago, I first walked into the library in George Square and wondered how I could ever find anything in that vast place. Now, in my hand, I had access to that building’s stored treasures and more. I had access. I could interact with skilled technicians to find things I needed without ever leaving my sofa on a distant continent. But it costs me. As I am regarded as an overseas student, I pay 100 pounds a week for that access through my course enrolment. On top of that it costs me 40 pounds a month for internet access at home. Then there is the running cost of the hardware that interfaces with that information and makes it available to me. The magic is there, of that there is no doubt. But just as history is written by the victors, the magic is shaped by factors by the realities of human existence. Machines may frighten us because they threaten our sense of power (“The computer says ‘No!’”) But it is still the human element that pushes the button, designs the interface, pulls the plug.