Overview 'Digital' notes

OVERVIEW 'DIGITAL' NOTES
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ social activists via social media are weak - no discipline or sacrifice

social media is network, hierarchy is opposed networks

adaptability and resilience

Generative resources are easily available, without the permission of any FSE, for re-use, improvement, or transformation, whereas tethered resources are managed at the sole

discretion of the FSE require either legal or technical permission in order to be modified

participation is power but has limits

Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.

everyday usage and parlance arrests memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of superhuman digital programmability

because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge

cyberspace has implemented a real time that is eradicating local spaces and times.

Cyberspace real time threatens “a total loss of the bearings of the individual and “a loss of control over reason,” as the interval between image and subject disappears

the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the United States makes them ‘invisible’ almost overnight: they become an assumed part of the everyday existence, something which does not seem to require much reflection.

[ time of theory itself needs to change; Lovink’s “theory on the run” and Wark’s theory as “micro-event” take on the same temporality or speed as digital media, refusing to stand outside their mode of dissemination. - It is not only on the run because it engages the present but also because it “expresses itself in a range of ways, as code, interface design, social networks and hyperlinked aphorisms, hidden in mailinglist messages, weblogs and chatrooms and sent as SMS messages.” - the micro-event travels along the same media vectors as the mainstream event itself, displacing the event’s terms in its travels.it appears first on the net and then later in print. ]

having a short life spam

Digital media’s ontology is defined by memory, from content to purpose.

regenerative memory

organ rather than store

Vacuum tubes, unlike mechanical switches, can hold values precisely because their signals can degenerate—and thus regenerate. The internet’s content, memorable or not, is similarly based on memory. Many websites and dig- ital media projects focus on preservation.

By saving the past, it was supposed to make knowing the future easier.

Saving the past was to put into place the future simple through the threat of constant exposure

people increasingly record their own “transgressions”

digital media was supposed to—in its very functioning— encapsulate the enlightenment ideal: that better information leads to better knowledge, which in turn guarantees better decisions.

As a product of programming, it was to program the future

The memex is a desklike machine with two projectors that would enable its user to make permanent associative links between documents and to retrieve them at will.

Memex traces are not to fade

with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory”

The creative aspect of thought is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine

We are being buried in our own product

one is given the right to think X, one may think X, in which case the authority would be the machines themselves, our supposedly loyal servants.

may is an uncertain link to the future

there is no difference between access to and understanding the record, between what would be called, perhaps symptomatically, machine reading and human reading and comprehension, between informa- tion and argument.

The pleasure of forgetfulness is to some extent the pleasure of death and destruction.

supplementing of human memory has also been imagined as the death of the human species in so many fictions and films

de ́ja` vu as the mark of the artificial in The Matrix.

Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, eraseable.