The Robot Historian and the Internet 1. Manuel Castells's Internet Galaxy
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Notes Introduction: The Robot Historian and the Internet 1. Manuel Castells’s Internet Galaxy and Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media both provide very useful historical outlines of the Internet up to the point of their publications. Castells relies on Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 2000) and John Naughton’s A Brief History of the Future (Overlook, 2001). I also use Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (New York: ReaktionBook, 2010) as well as J. P. Moschovitis et al.’s History of the Internet: Chronology, 1843 to the Present (Denver: ABC-CLIO, 1999). 2. A robot historian in 2050 might look back at 2014 as the end of Web 2.0 and the beginning of a Wearable Computing and Internet of Everything Era brought on by technologies such as Google Glass, the Pebble Watch, the Oculus Rift (not to mention the specter of a possible future quantum computer). 3. While I use the key McLuhan texts, The Medium Is the Massage (Random House, 1967) and Understanding Media (Sphere Books, 1967), my clearest comprehension of the concepts comes from an interview he did with Playboy in 1969, found in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003). 4. The “Y2K bug” lying in wait was the domino effect of older com- puter systems being date programmed with only two digits, instead of four (the “19” prefix implied) to indicate the year; therefore, a com- puter with this bug would go from “99” back down to “00” and the computer would think it was January 1, 1900. This “crisis” passed, though only after a time-exhaustive “checking and rewriting of mil- lions of lines of computer code and the scrapping and replacement of equipment worth billions of dollars” (John Quiggin, “The Y2K scare: Causes, Costs and Cures,” accessed July 18, 2013, http://www .uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/JournalArticles05/Quiggin AJPA05Y2K.pdf, 47). 5. For further explanations of the technical aspects of Web 2.0, see Felicia Wu Song’s “Theorizing Web 2.0,” Information, Communication & 224 NOTES Society 13.2 (2010), specifically pages 260–263, as well as Sam Murugesan’s “Understanding Web 2.0,” IT Pro (July/August 2007). 6. “The Internet of Everything” (or “The Internet of Things”) is a relatively new concept, brought about by increasingly smaller/more powerful microchips and the proliferation of smartphones, pointing to the idea that nonnetworked objects (lamps, coffeemakers, etc.) can be “made” digital and plugged into the Internet. “Welcome to the Programmable World” by Bill Wasik (Wired, April 2013) imagines “smart homes,” but also concerts in which a user’s phone automati- cally pairs him/her with like-minded dates or allows a server to find him/her on a crowded dance floor with drinks via GPS. 7. De Landa rightly notes that Deleuze uses “assemblage” in a num- ber of different ways depending on whether he is writing by himself or with Guattari. Like De Landa, I use the Deleuze’s more “open” definition “while trying to capture the content of the second one through the distinction between the material and expressive compo- nents of an assemblage. Different assemblages have ‘control knobs’ of more or less homogeneity/heterogeneity: quantifying the degree of homo or hetero of the components, or the degree to which the assemblage’s identity is rigid or flexibly determined” in Manuel De Landa, Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 72–73. This allows an assemblage to be more “full” (or “cancerous” or “empty”) than others, therefore expressing more or less unified or intense organism(s)-BwOs relationships. 1 The Cables under, in, and around Our Homes: “The Net” as Viral Suburban Intruder 1. Taken from Richard E. Drake’s literature review in “Potential Health Hazards of Pornography Consumption as Viewed by Psychiatric Nurses.” Original articles are: D. Zillman, “Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography,” in Pornography: Research Advances and Policy Considerations, ed. D. Zillman and J. Bryant (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), 127–157; D. Zillman and J. Bryant, “Effects of Massive Exposure to Pornography,” in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, ed. N. M. Malamuth and E. Donnerstein (Orlando, FL: Academic, 1984), 115–138; E. Donnerstein, “Pornography: Its Effect on Violence against Women,” in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, ed. N. M. Malamuth and E. Donnerstein (New York: Academic Press, 1984), 53–81; N. M. Malamuth, “Debriefing Effectiveness Following Exposure to Pornographic Rape Depictions,” Journal of Sex Research 20 (1984): l–13. 2. The General Society Survey didn’t start publishing information on its respondents’ Internet usage until 2000. In 2000, 87 percent of respondents claimed to have not visited a pornography site in the previous 30 days; by 2004, that number was up to 91.5 percent. NOTES 225 3. Neil Munroe’s article “The Web’s Pornicopia” is a strong history of the Child Online Protection Act and does very well to track shifting reactions from both government officials and users of the Internet. It is a fascinating explanation of how the government was trying to cre- ate a walled-off version of the Internet to save children from “obscen- ity” while still attempting to maintain a digital arena of free speech. 4. Rimm’s work was later disproved by a number of sources but not before Time’s Elmer-DeWitt only worsened the initial panic of Rimm’s report by conflating a number of his statistics to get to the “83.5%” of the Internet that the Times article reported as pornogra- phy. Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak were the most vocal opponents. Jim Thomas’s “When Cyberresearch Goes Awry: The Ethics of the Rimm ‘Cyberporn’ Study,” Information Society 12 (2) (April 1996): 189–198, is an excellent summary of the details. 5. As mentioned in the Introduction, Turkle’s The Second Self and Life on the Screen are both excellent texts in describing how users of that time interacted with their computers and how their identities were shaped by them. 6. While Hackers did not make nearly as much box office money ($7.5 million) as The Net in its original release, its best-selling sound- track and cult status nearly 20 years later speaks to its influence and my included discussion of the film. All box office statistics were gath- ered from the individual films’ boxofficemojo.com webpages. 2 The Evolution of the Web Browser: The Global Village Outgrown 1. The ability for multiple users to inhabit the digital space at once as separate agents moves the Tron software toward an initial (somewhat primitive) understanding of the Internet. If the Internet is a network of networked devices and users, then the original TRON can be seen as a very simple, early form of the Internet (a LAN party perhaps). Similarly, The Thirteenth Floor appears to be a piece of nonnet- worked software wherein one user at a time uses the world and the other entities are nonplayable characters (NPCs). However, the rev- elation that the initial world of the film is in fact a simulation that multiple users are interacting within at once points us toward it as a reflection of the Internet. 2. The remnants of this can be seen with Apple’s iPhone touch-based interface (first released in 2007) in which “swiping” or “pinching” have essentially similar effects, regardless of the application. 3. This discussion of evolution and “legacy” is carried further with an in- depth discussion of Avatar and the machinic audience in chapter 3. 4. Jeff Flynn has actually undergone what Moravec predicts/advocates when outlining the postbiological, yet feels it necessary to sacrifice himself at the end. Alternatively, Quorra is a creature who opts to live 226 NOTES in the “real” rather than the digital ephemera, and, as such, would perhaps speak to a machine’s/avatar’s need/compulsion to “become” human. 5. I owe a deep debt to Candra Gill and her presentation “Tony Stark Doesn’t Use Keyboards: Interaction Design in Blockbuster Movies” at the 2013 PCA/ACA conference in Washington, DC. Her excellent discussion of interfaces in contemporary films (in particular Minority Report and Iron Man) were very exciting and informative, and did much to add to my thinking here. Further, she was extremely gener- ous in sending me a list of books to consider, many of which show up in this chapter. To build on the comment about films effecting user/technology interface, Christina Brown’s piece “How ‘Minority Report’ Trapped Us In a World of Bad Interfaces” (http://www.theawl.com/2013/02 /how-minority-report-trapped-us-in-a-world-of-bad-interfaces) details the reciprocal (and frustrating) attempts to have “real” interfaces mirror those imagined cinematic diegetic prototypes and how Minority Report in particular has influenced the interfaces of users ten years later. 3 Avatar in the Uncanny Valley: The Na’vi and Us, the Machinic Audience 1. Sadly, years later, Chamberlain admitted to “editing” the work of Racter, though claiming to not add any material but rather shape the poems. Further discussion of Racter by its author can be found at http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/write_about_itself.php. 2. It should be noted that Cameron’s auteur status and previous track record with exceptionally successful films such as Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), and Titanic (1997) must be factored into considering the film’s success. While this is undeniably true, the twelve year gap between Titanic and Avatar suggests that it is the film’s technologi- cal breakthroughs that drew a younger, contemporary audience that might not be familiar with his previous films.All box office figures come from the films’ boxofficemojo.com pages 3.