Month: July 2010

Die Zeit: “Do you concern yourself with new media and technology?”
Jean-Luc Godard: “I try to keep up. But people make films on the Internet to show that they exist, not in order to see something”.
– Die Zeit, 16.12.2008

There is a great sadness in this world. A sadness that is spreading through our networks, invading our bodies, infecting our souls. It’s not like it’s taking us by surprise. Perhaps it has been there all along, as long as we care to remember. At least since the ghosts of progress made their appearance, and we suddenly found ourselves moving through a world cluttered with things. Cinema saw it coming all along. It was Charlie Chaplin who told us the story of the dehumanization of 20th century industrialism, when our bodies were taken away from us for the sake of speed and efficiency. But at least then, it seemed, we were still capable of being human. It was Michelangelo Antonioni who captured the growing sense of alienation in modern society, in his haunting images of estranged, fractured figures wandering through industrial landscapes, unfit to relate, unable to communicate. Slow burning emptiness became perfect loneliness. But then a strong, warm wind made its way and overthrew this emotional landscape. It was Chris Marker, amongst others, who documented this collective outcry for freedom and imagination; its powerful rise, and its tragic decline; from revolutionary action to cynical spectacle. It was also Marker who, during one of his many travels, witnessed the becoming of another, even more invasive, form of alienation. What he saw was a city that looked like “Planet Manga”, occupied with “pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs”; a giant hologram where life itself had become nothing but a simulation effect. As of then we knew our old world had started to disappear, right in front of our very eyes.

The void reigns, they say. Ever since the last decades of our previous century, when the deep effects of the neo-liberal turn were becoming evident and the promise of an all-connected world started to (im)materialize, the alienation of our times has taken a heavy stranglehold on our daily lives. As if what we experience is no longer the pulse of life, but only the cardiogram. In this post-industrial landscape, we are being overloaded with signs, unleashing endless chains of consumption, decoding, interpretation and response. With our attention constantly under siege, breathing has become difficult. We’re increasingly living in “real-time” mode, without the shadow of a past, or the light of a dream. No more maps we can trust, no more destinations to reach. The only way left to navigate this schizophrenic universe is to keep on surfing the incoming semiotic waves, wading through the chatter and fluff circulating in the infosphere. As we’re going through the motions, we’re constantly pressed to (re)act. Because the dominant pathology of our times is no longer produced by repression or suppression, but precisely by the injunction to express and confess. Saying out loud what we feel, think and see is no longer a choice, but an obligation. “Just do it”, claims Franco “Bifo” Berardi, has become the thumping mantra of the first networked generations who, deprived of any energy coming from desire or (com)passion, can do nothing but adhere to the violent logic of belonging.

“I feel like it’s an opening in an otherwise very lonely world, full of misunderstandings and regrets. So thank you to everyone for making this a community I want to be part of.” Somewhere in the deep shadows of YouTube.world a silent whisper resounds, without resolution or conclusion. In this cruel theatre of teenage blues and growing pains, broken hearts and contrite spirits, the dark side of our souls is laid bare for all to see. What we are confronted with is a cosmos of fear, anxiety, insecurity and disillusionment, expressed by bodies and voices reaching out to be understood and loved, without any hope of succeeding. Bloggers and vloggers, writes Geert Lovink, are “trapped by their own inner contradictions in the Land of No Choice”. Like the characters in Michel Houellebecq’s novels, we cope with our coded lives and branded souls by projecting our own loneliness and indifference on to the world. In this time of radical uncertainty, it turns out the Web not only functions as a mirror, but also as a projection field. And so we find ourselves in this estranged twilight zone between the public and the private, amidst a never-ending stream of micro-confessions and intimate exposures. As if we could still believe the truth would set us free. We want to believe so badly, that we fail to see that what the contemporary info-cracy facilitates is not Truth, but Nothingness.

Alone together, at last. We know we are being watched, but we don’t mind. If this is what it takes to prove we exist, to feel we belong, bring it on. We’re scared and confused, but that’s ok, because we know you are too: after all, you’re not that different anyway. Our cams are always there, almost always on. We can feel the eagerness of your gaze, but still we remain the same – “for real” – locked in our bittersweet solitude, with our bodies sealed in signs. Rather than continue to be victims of the image, we decide to become image. Because we want to be seen. Because we are visual. As if we are two-dimensional, only skin-deep. No more depth, only transparency. No matter if there’s nothing to show, nothing to say. No matter if there’s ultimately nothing left to see. We take comfort in this Nothingness. Disappearing behind our images is our way to protect ourselves from Being. No worries anymore that our images could be stolen from us, or that we should give up our precious secrets, because we no longer have any. There are no illusions or scruples left: all will be revealed for the sake of appearances; all except, perhaps, for the Truth. Take a close look. Here we are now, desperate bodies without desire, crude visuals without necessity or consequence. Here we are. Welcome to the spectacle of banality.

A reflection on ‘Because We Are Visual’, a wonderful video-essay by Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes (2010, 47’, produced by KASKfilms). All stills taken from the video. Inspiration: Lovink, Bifo and Baudrillard, of course.

“Un cinéphile est quelqu’un qui attend trop de choses du cinéma. Qui attend que le cinéma soit le terrain sur lequel va se jouer son propre rapport à son image. Des cinéphiles, il y en a toujours eu et il y en aura encore longtemps, des gens qui demandent à l’image un peu plus que ce qu’elle peut ‘donner'”.
– Serge Daney

Gonzo Circus magazine has just published the first part of an article I recently wrote (in Dutch, available here) about film criticism and cinephilia. The article (perhaps more of a loose compendium of thoughts and musings) was written quite impulsively, partly in reaction to the débacle around the Cannes palmares (particularly Apichatpong Weerasethakul winning the Palme d’Or with Loong Boonmee raleuk chat), which showed just how fragmented contemporary film criticism really is. While magazines such as Cinemascope and Cahiers du Cinema wrote ecstatic reports about the triumph of their “golden boy” (the cover of the recent Cahiers read “Apichatpong, une palme de rêve”, Cinemascope raved about the “Apichatpalme” as the ultimate symbol of “the year we made contact”), mainstream journalists were generally unhappy and disturbed. How to communicate to their “audience” that a relatively “unknown” cineaste with a background in architecture and visual arts, and a name hardly anyone cares to pronounce (Wee-ra-se-tha-kul – but you can also just call him “Joe”) won one of the most prestigious awards in world cinema? How to explain his work, that draws as much from classical cinema (Jacques Tourneur) and avant-garde film (Bruce Baillie) as it does from Thai soap-opera’s and Boedhistic fables, resulting in a singular cinematographic world where the everyday and the mythological, reality and fantasy fuse in a complex meditation on memory, reincarnation and obsession? Most journalists didn’t even bother. In Flanders/Belgium, at least two newspapers headlined “boring Thai film wins Golden Palm”, while the self-proclaimed “quality” newspapers basically wrote the same thing, using a slightly more expansive language (hilarious quote from de Morgen’s Jan Temmerman : “…one’s dream is another man’s nightmare”).

Of course, this paradigm – delivering infotainment rather than sceptical analysis – is a problem integral to the whole print media business, as documented in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News. As it happens, the other day the University of Leuven published the results of a research, which state that 75% of all the articles in Flemish “quality “ newspapers partly or completely consist of pre-fabricated and/or PR-related material. “The mass-production of ignorance” that Davies finds so repulsive resonates with the proliferation of “storytelling management”, a concept that stems from the marketing industry (see Naomi Klein’s No Logo) but has over the past decennia infiltrated in diverse levels of society, in the form of branding, propaganda and post-political campaigns. These mechanisms of communication and control – cynical lowpoints are the mechanisations around the two Gulf wars – are meticulously analysed in the book Storytelling: La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits (2008) by Christian Salmon, who talks about the rise of a new “narrative order”. The stories we’re being told, he writes, format the imagination, instrumentalise emotions, model opinions. No doubt the dominant media play an important role in this evolution. The hollowing out of journalistic norms and values is also visible in film journalism, which is based more and more on human-interest stories and scoops. That’s why Tom Cruise’s coming-out as a Scientology fanatic in 2005 got more coverage than Spielberg’s War of the Worlds – and way more than the eruptions of violence in Darfur, that cost the life of more than 400.0000 people.

And then there’s that other aspect of the widely discussed “crisis” of journalism: the disintegration of the “professional” status and the lay-off of thousands of journalists worldwide. Sure enough, the unstable economical status and fundamental identity crisis (the Internet, dear…) of the traditional mass media are easily to blame here, although it’s also safe to say that the (film=media) industry doesn’t mind the “middle-man” being deleted from the communication process. Isn’t it easier and safer to just print an ad instead of a “critical” piece on a movie? Why bother at all? What remains are nothing more than cheap tastemakers, implicitly or explicitly sponsored by an industry which shows nothing but contempt for the cinema lover. So then, I ask, where is the beating heart of cinephilia today? What is left of the cinephile moral, the mission to counter the anesthetic effect of the cinematographic experience and the passivity of the identification process (with the characters or the cineaste) with the activity of critical thought? The ethics of the cinephile, wrote Serge Daney – “ciné-fils” par excellence – is an “impossible flirt”, informed by a firm belief in the power of cinema to show and establish a relation with the world, but at the same time by a resistance against this unique art form, which has risen out as an industry of spectacle amidst a global marketplace of interchangeable images. This evolution is what Susan Sontag had in mind when she announced the demise of cinephilia. Once, she wrote on the occasion of cinema’s 100th official birthday (but actually the birthday of the first commercial projection), cinema had its true apostles, but do they still have a place in a entertainment cloud filled with decadent en hyperindustrial movies? If cinema could arise from its ashes, it would be through the establishment of a new sort of “cine-love”. And now, 15 years after Sontag wrote her last article, about the Abu Ghraib affair – in which she pleaded for a (re)consideration of the relation between image and reality – there seems to be a new kind of burning love.

Perhaps it’s time for “Cinephilia Take Two”, thus wrote Thomas Elsaesser in his essay ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’. He was not the first to make note of the possibility of new ideas and forms of cinephilia. It was notably Jonathan Rosenbaum who saw, in the 1990’s, a new transcultural generation of film lovers and critics blossoming, feeding on the proliferation of new distribution channels, media and festivals, far beyond academic and institutional walls. He recognized in programmers, critics and teachers such as Nicole Brenez, Alexander Horwath, Adrian Martin and Kent Jones a collective sensibility, free from cultural pessimism, market thinking and postmodern irony. Here was what seemed like the beginning of a movement that not only wanted to upgrade and reevaluate existing paradigms and theories, but also felt the need to develop and explore new tools and concepts, without concern for political correctness or neo-puritanism, with a sense of wonder and curiosity that extended well beyond the borders of alternative knowledge domains. Now, 13 years after Rosenbaum published the first letter of what became a whole series (published in Trafic, later compiled in the book Movie Mutations), now that the walls around the old cinema regime have crumbled down beyond recovery, this need for fresh perspectives and dynamic energy forces feels more urgent than ever.

“Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephelia” is the title of the new book Rosenbaum is working on. He’s right of course: cinema is no longer what it used to be. But the flirtations with the “end of cinema”, in the work of many critics and filmmakers since the 1990’s, have never implied its disappearance, rather the loss of its symbolic force. Cinema as a collective passion and memory, at the same time popular art and intellectual pleasure: that idea seems to have faded. Besides, as Chris Marker once said, quoting Godard, “cinema is that which is bigger than us – you have to lift your eyes up to it”. Now that we’re no longer watching films, but rather “databases” (dixit Geert Lovink), cinema has lost part of its essence. The digitisation and endless reproduction and distribution of the moving image means that film history is available to everyone with an internet connection and/or media player, but it also implies the loss of the classic cinema culture. At the same time, we’re all eagerly looking towards the Internet as the key to the necessary renewal of cinephilia. Looking for Robert Bresson’s obscure slapstick comedy or that infamous 12-hour long masterstroke by Jacques Rivette? What about the wonderful, insightful letters Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton sent to each other? Or English translations of Daney’s articles? If you dig deep enough, you’ll find it on the Web. But that’s not enough, is it? How do we go beyond mere compulsive consumption and accumulation? How can we make the paradigms of network culture – including “searchability” and “instant replay” – our own and use them to develop new forms of thinking and talking about cinema, as an antipode for the mores of the contemporary media-user, who seems to be stuck in a continuous preview-mode?

Make no mistake: there is (after)life on the Web. It does not only open (legal or illegal) pathways to an ever expanding archive of (digital copies of) cinematic works, it also functions as a safe haven for reflection and criticism. While traditional filmmagazines such as Andere Sinema (in Belgium) and Balthazar (in France) were abandoned a few years ago, and old values such as Cahiers du Cinéma or Sight & Sound have lost a major part of their relevancy and energy, on the Internet a wealth of film critical resources has appeared. There are excellent netzines like Senses of Cinema and Rouge, but perhaps even more important is the blogosphere, where you can find oldtimers like David Bordwell as well as “amateurs” like Girish Shambu (who’s actually a professional chemical engineer). The multimedia platform Mubi (formerly the Auteurs) is also an interesting case of “cinephilia 2.0”, as it profiles itself as an “online cinematheque”, with an excellent selection of films (often available before the DVD release) on offer, that tries to integrate an interactive and participatory dynamic with the help of all sorts of social networking tools. And so the Web develops itself as a space where various “gaps” can be bridged: between image and word (see Raymond Bellour’s wonderful analysis of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara – which I saw just recently at FID Marseille), between different cultures (take, for example, Criticine, based in the Fillipines, which maps cinema culture in South East Asia), but also between film lovers of all generations and backgrounds (read the comments on Dave Kehr’s blog). But again, is it enough? Let us remember that cinephilia consists of an ensemble of social practices. Daney put cinephilia in the tradition of griots: “If no-one speaks anymore, no-one will see, because we can’t see things very well unless we can say them…”. Cinephilia is about speaking and reaching out, about constructing a message, putting it in a bottle and throwing it into the open sea, in the hope someone will read, prolong and maybe return it. But it’s also about sharing (a sense, a view, a rhythm), friendship, love, and – let’s not forget – resistance: perhaps the only ways to bridge the chaos of the current infosphere.

The cinephile? “He who in vain keeps his eyes wide open but will tell no one that he couldn’t see a thing; he who prepares himself for a life as a professional ‘watcher,’ as a way to make up for his tardiness, as slowly as possible.” Daney again – always him – referring to the images each of us live with, the images each of us has learnt to live with, which we have once watched and are now watching us. These are the moments that constitute the primitive scène of every cinephile: the scène “in which he wasn’t present and yet it was entirely about him”. In one of his last and most touching pieces, Le Travelling de Kapo (1992), Daney wrote about his faithful compagnons-de-route: films like Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard or Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, who supplied the images that have haunted him his whole life. In the same piece he also traced the birth of his cinephilia to an article by one of his mentors, Jacques Rivette: a review of Gilles Pontecorvo’s Holocaust-drama Kapo. In it, Rivette described only one scène: “Search for the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.” This text was Daney’s zero point, the axiom that informed his thinking and writing about cinema. In this article – about a film he has never seen – Daney found everything that would continuously feed this cinephilia: the political discourse of the Cahiers family (which would also become his), a focus on ethical and moral “justesse”, and above all a consciousness of the intimate relation between cinema and history. For him and many of his generation, the horror of WW II marked the point of no return. It was cinema that made him aware of how much this history was also his. It was also cinema that turned its back on history. The moment Daney realized his axiom had to be reevaluated was when he saw the American TV series Holocaust. The old aesthetical enemy was back, with a vengeance, in the form of sociological correct entertainment. And then, in the course of 1985, he saw an upgraded, “improved” version of his “tracking shot in Kapo”: the TV-show of USA for Africa (“we are the world, we are the children”). “These are the images”, he wrote, “I would like at least one teenager to be disgusted by and ashamed of. Not merely ashamed to be fed and affluent, but ashamed to be seen as someone who has to be aesthetically seduced where it is only a matter of conscience – good or bad – of being a human and nothing more.”

Where does our history start? Yours and mine. Which are the images that haunt and watch us? The words that teach us how to see? The gestures we despise with all our hearts? “What is Being Fought for by Today’s Cinephilia(S)?”, asked a recent edition of Framework magazine. What do we fight for – children of the blockbuster era, brought up with television, grown up on the Internet – in a world with ubiquitous images that seem to be directed to no-one. Where do we fight for, now that the memory of Nazism is fading (see Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds or Scorsese’s Shutter Island) and the one image that haunts the collective memory – the hijacked plane that hits the second tower of the Twin Towers – has become a spectacular icon (a perfect fit for our attention culture: intense, compact and explosive). Which cinephilia do we need today? Cinephilia, writes Adrian Martin, is nothing less than a cultural war machine, more than ever embroiled in a never ending battle: the battle for cinema. The last words are for Daney, he who taught us that we have to stay true to the idea of one unique world of images, he who keeps reminding us to never give up hope. “And then I see clearly why I have adopted cinema: so it could adopt me in return. So it could teach me to tirelessly touch with my gaze the distance from me at which the other begins.”

(In December this year, Dutch translations of a selection of Daney’s texts will be (finally) published. Related to this, we’re working on a few projects that take a few issues and questions posed in this post as a starting point. More info later!)

— The title of this post (and the article) is taken from a collection of film reviews by Roger Tailleur —

In his essay ‘MyBrain.net’, Geert Lovink pointed out a “neurological turn” in recent Net criticism, referring to a slew of authors who “cleverly exploit the Anglo-American obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness”. One of the most celebrated and respected of these authors is Nicholas Carr, whose books Does IT Matter (2004) and The Big Switch (2008) have proven him to be a particularly well-informed and lucid analyst of contemporary tendencies in information technology, economy and ecology. His new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains grew out of his widely discussed essay ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid’ (2008) (see earlier post) and is basically an account of his research into the impact of new technologies on human cognition. Drawing on the work of Marshall Mcluhan and Joseph Weizenbaum, amongst others, Carr starts out from the idea that an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity not only to what’s gained, but also to what’s lost. “We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self”. This skeptical premiss leads to an equally wide-ranging and well-written account of the interplay between technology and the mind, in which Carr freewheels between the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alan Turing and Michael Merzenich, between findings in computer engineering, clinical psychology and neuroplasticity. Carr argues that the tools we use to extend or support our mental capabilities – to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory – have a huge influence on our mental habits. Insofar that recent discoveries in neuroplasticity indicate that these tools actually give shape to the physical structure and workings of the human mind. We become, neurologically, what we think (which brings into harmony two philosophies of the mind that have for centuries stood in conflict: empiricism and rationalism). These discoveries are all the more important now that we seem to have arrived at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking: from a linear thought process to an intellectual ethic of browsing and skimming, from the world of the page to the world of the screen. “By reducing the cost of creating, storing, and sharing information, computer networks have placed far more information within our reach than we ever had access to before. And the tools for discovering, filtering, and distributing information developed by companies like Google ensure that we are forever inundated by information of immediate interest to us, and in quantities well beyond what our brains can handle. As the technologies for data processing improve, the flood of relevant information only intensifies. More of what is of interest to us becomes visible to us; Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse”. The more we use the Web, the more we train our brains to be distracted – to process information very quickly and efficiently but without sustained attention. Every time we’re surfing the waves of the WWW, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” (Cory Doctorow). Certainly, some cognitive skills are strengthened – mostly related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data (see for example the much cited study of video-gaming in ‘Nature’ magazine) – but these new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for concentration and contemplation. As we, ever restless informavores craving for our Net fix, are skimming the Web, as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move (apparently our eyes skip down pages in a pattern that resembles roughly the letter F – “F”, wrote Jakob Nielsen, for “Fast”), we revert to being mere decoders of information. As we are juggling with several mental tasks at the same time, we become “mindless consumers of data”. Loud statements indeed, but Carr is well-aware of their sour resonances: he is cautious to avoid taking the neoconservatist roads the likes of Andrew Keen are exploiting, frames the current paradigm shift in a broad historical account of intellectual ethics, and draws upon a wealth of scientific studies, indicating how scholars of the mind believe, or at least worry, that our use of digital hypermedia is having a deep influence on our ways of thinking. Carr fully acknowledges that it’s neither possible nor preferable to “rewind” or “unplug”, but aims to build up an understanding, or at last a consciousness, of the changes in our patterns of attention, cognition and memory as we’re adapting to a new information environment, and what these changes might imply on a long term, in our culture and society. We cannot deny that a new intellectual ethic is taking hold – an ethic its inventors couldn’t have foreseen – but while we are swiftly and eagerly adapting to the circumstances, we should also be aware of the price we pay to assume technology’s power. Carr quotes movie critic David Thomas, who once observed that “doubts can be rendered feeble in the face of the certainty of the medium”. Thomas was writing about cinema, but is also applies, perhaps with even greater force, to the Net.

Arguably the most satisfying pieces in The Shallows are the ones in which Carr engages with information politics and control, notably ‘the church of Google’ chapter, in which he (drawing on material that earlier appeared in the article ‘The Google Enigma‘) reveals Google’s strategy as an extension of Taylorism. “What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind”. Isn’t it remarkable, Carr asks, how the intellectual ethic of Google is mirrored in Taylor’s basic concepts of scientific management, as written down by Neil Postman in his book Technopoly.

“These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; than in fact human judgement cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts”

Carr describes how Google relies heavily on cognitive psychology research to further its goal of making people use their computer technologies more “efficiently”. He quotes Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, saying that “on the Web, design has become much more of a science than an art. Because you can iterate so quickly, because you can measure so precisely, you can actually find small differences and mathematically learn which one is right (…) You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine”. For Google, information is above all a commodity: anything that stands in the way of its collection, dissection, and transmission is a threat not only to its business but to the new utopia of cognitive efficiency it aims to construct on the Internet. But Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes the relationship with the content it serves. “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction (…) Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration – and it’s Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible.” And as fast as possible: after all, “the colonization of real-time”, as Lovink puts it, has now also become one of its main concerns. Citing Twitter’s achievements in speeding the flow of data, Larry Page (co-founder of Google) said that his company wouldn’t be satisfied until it is able “to index the Web every second to allow real-time search.” This quest is not only the driving force behind the Google Wave service (which, as one commentator has stated, “turns conversations into fast-moving streams-of-consciousness”) but also the prime reason why Google has recently revamped its search engine. The quality of a page – as determined by the links coming in – is no longer the chief criterion in ranking search results – as it turns out, it’s now only one of the 200 different “signals” that the company monitors and measures. No, the priority lays now on what it calls the “freshness” of the pages it recommends. “Google not only identifies new or revised Web pages much more quickly than it used to but for many searches it skews its results to favor newer pages over older ones. In May 2009, the company introduced a new twist to its search service, allowing users to bypass considerations of quality entirely and have results ranked according to how recently the information was posted to the Web. A few months later, it announced a “next-generation architecture” for its search engine that bore the telling code name Caffeine”. In June this year a post on the Google Blog mentioned that the system was completed. Significantly, it provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” And so Google continues to expand its hold on Web users and their data, by diversifying its services and further colonizing all types of content. “For Google, everything that happens on the Net is a complement to its main business: selling and distributing online ads.” Most of its services (like YouTube) are actually not profitable in themselves, but they enable them to collect more information, to funnel more users towards its search engine, and to prevent would-be competitors from gaining footholds in its markets. Nearly everything the company does is aimed at reducing the costs and expanding the scope of Internet Use (that’s why they want information to be free). “Its ideals and its business interest converge in one overarching goal: to digitize ever more types of information, move the information onto the Web, feed it into its database, run it through its classification and ranking algorithms, and dispense what it calls ‘snippets’ to Web surfers, preferably with ads in tow. With each expansion of Google’s ambit, its Taylorist ethic gains a tighter hold on our intellectual lives.”

No matter if or how long Google is able to maintain its dominance over the flow of digital information, its intellectual ethic will remain the general ethic of the Internet as a medium. It’s an ethic of informality and immediacy, which might lead to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence (“writing will become a means for recording chatter”). It’s also an ethic, as the Google Books project (what Mayer calls its “moon shot”) makes clear, that involves fragmentation and decontextualisation. The books Google is digitizing are not being considered as self-contained literary works but as piles of data to be mined. “It’s not a library of books. It’s a library of snippets.” A result of this “slice and dice” strategy or what economists call the “unbundling” of content is, according to Carr, that “we don’t see the forest when we search the web. we don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” “What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.” The Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. As attention (“a ghost inside the head” says developmental psychologist Bruce McCandliss) is really the key for memory consolidation (and long-term memory can be considered the seat of understanding) the impact is considerable. Memory now functions as an index, pointing us to places on the Web where we can locate the information we need at the moment we need it. Socrates might have actually been right all along when we warned for technologies that would “implant forgetfulness” in the mind, providing “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder”. Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the web or the notion of “perfect remembering” (see also previous post) have been misled by the ubiquitous metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer (typically the post-internet conception of memory, in which artificial and biological memory come together). Carr explains how the old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are really remarkably apt: biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal, and furthermore, the brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory. But when we’re facing many information faucets at the same time – like when we’re power-browsing – it becomes harder to retain information or transfer it to our biological memory. “Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering”, what might lead to a “self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop”: the more difficult it gets to “process” information and weave it into conceptual schemas, the more we’re dependent on the Web’s information stores. Conclusion: more information can mean less knowledge. The tendency to automate cognitive processes and create evermore user-friendly interfaces, embedded in most contemporary software tools, reinforces this cul-de-sac. Whenever we’re externalizing problem solving and other cognitive chores, we reduce our brain’s ability “to build stable knowledge structures”. Whenever we use tools to sift information, we frame our thinking (sociologist Robert Evans has noted that the automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t). Whenever we go online we are following scripts written by others, and we’re routinely and passively going through the motions. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts”, McLuhan wrote. Rather, they alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” But perhaps there are ways of resisting, without resorting to nihilist strategies of “escaping” or “taming” the Net. Perhaps there are ways of countering the “terrors” of immediacy and informality, by designing alternative ecologies, “technologies of debate” (Bernard Stiegler), or a “contre-arsenal” (Paul Virilio). What we might need, to follow Stiegler’s reasoning, is new techniques of perception. Which reminds me of a chat I recently had with a political analyst working for a government agency, who was talking about the “thinking” software that has been installed to analyze the wealth of incoming data. “The results are basically correct, there is not one I could find that is incorrect”, he said, “but then again, they are all missing the point.”