Ontic Communities

Ontic Communities: Speculative Fiction, Ontology, and the Digital Design Community A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Drexel University by James W. Malazita in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2014 ii © Copyright 2014 James W. Malazita. All Rights Reserved. iii Table of Contents Introduction:........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Communities of Practice, Who and What:...................................................... 45 Chapter 2: Ontology and Epistemology:........................................................................... 93 Chapter 3: Speculative Reality:....................................................................................... 144 Conclusion:....................................................................................................................... 190 Works Cited:.....................................................................................................................192 iv List of Tables 1. Analysis of Speakers and Article Content of Wired .............................................................8 2. Analysis of Ontic Talk in Wired...................................................................................... ..109 v List of Figures 1. The Subject-Object Split in Social Scientific Thinking...............................................................27 2. A Screen Shot of Cipher Prime's Auditorium ............................................................................52 3. Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite ...............................................................................................96 4. Drake's Wireframe Mesh from Uncharted 4 ..........................................................................123 5. A Scene from Quickman's Level in Megaman 2.....................................................................139 6. A Character coloring guide from DOTA 2 ...............................................................................140 7. The Crew of the ISS in Star Trek Uniforms.............................................................................144 8. The NES Controller.................................................................................................................157 9. The "Angelator" from Bones ...................................................................................................163 10. The PADD vs. the iPad..........................................................................................................173 11. A Holographic Conversation between Darth Sidious and Commander Cody......................180 12. Two Holographic Representations of Social Hierarchy in Star Wars ...................................181 13. Superman Supports the VFXSI.............................................................................................187 14. William Wallace Tries to Rally the VFXSI.............................................................................188 vi Abstract Ontic Communities: Speculative Fiction, Ontology, and the Digital Design Community James W. Malazita Advisor: Douglas Porpora, Ph.D. This dissertation is about the digital design community, those who build cultural and artistic works primarily using digital media. This dissertation, however, is also centered around a larger argument, of which the digital arts and design community serves as a case study. In short, the larger argument is a call to examine more closely the social relationships of material objects (including, but not limited to, humans and things) and idea objects (including, but not limited to, broad cultural and social forces) that constitute the world. This dissertation forwards three major arguments: 1.) That it is often the case, particularly in the social sciences, that scholars look not at non- human objects, but instead at the ways those objects are perceived and labeled by humans/society. Scholars of materiality, then, often miss the mark, and study the conceptualizations of objects at the expense of the objects in of themselves . 2.) That it is theoretically and empirically possible to examine objects in of themselves, and that it is important to do so, as both material and non-material objects contain causal powers that impact history and society independent of the human recognition or conceptualization of these powers. 3.) That objects are also subjects, and engage in intersubjective meaning-making both with humans and other objects. Objects, then, should not be theorized as having various mechanical impacts upon human communities that they interact with, but should instead be theorized as members of the community in of themselves. Non-human entities, in other words, are themselves social beings. 1 Introduction In the winter of 1995, science fiction literary agent and author John Brockman sat down to lunch with a division head of a new publishing company, a company that, like so many others, was attempting to ride the economic wave of "multimedia convergence" ushered in by the growing ubiquity of the World Wide Web. As the division head ran through a conversation concerning the massive efforts companies were making to "digitize assets," outsource "keystroke" workers, and find "content providers," Brockman came to a realization: Something big was happening. 1 Brockman, who's publishing company had a long run of success in the 1980s by being one of the first to market itself to software developers during the initial personal computer boom, played the businessman. The new terms and ideas in this conversation convinced him that some sort of technological and economic change was on the horizon, and he wanted to position Brockman, Inc. to be on the forefront of the potential monetary windfall. To that end, Brockman set up a series of lunches and interviews with some of cyberculture's elite, whom he dubbed the "digerati," in order to help him paint a picture of what the present and future of a world inundated with digital technologies may be. He would later publish excerpts of 33 of these interviews in his book Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite . One of the digerati interviewed by Brockman was Jane Metcalfe, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounder of Wired Ventures, the publishing company of the then-wildly popular and sometimes controversial Wired magazine. When asked about the new digital world and Wired's place in it, Metcalfe responded: It's trite to say that Wired is talking about the convergence of media, computers, and communications. What we are really talking about is a fundamental shift in 1 Brockman, J. 1996. Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite . Hardwired Books, San Francisco, CA 2 society that is being led by technology but is infiltrating every aspect of society. Technology, invented in labs, gets absorbed by business, and as business takes it on, it starts to spread throughout society. Often, at that point, artists are attracted to it and pioneer it, champion it, stretch it, push the boundaries of it, and use it to bring a different message to the public. It's a three-pronged approach that has a multilayered response from the society it's impacting. Wired is really about this change. It's led by technology, absorbed by business, and spread by artists. But it's not about technology. 2 At first glance it would be easy to dismiss this quote as a bit of marketing. Wired has, throughout its history, aggressively tried to position itself as a magazine focused on design, culture, and society, and not a technology or product review journal. While there may be some validity to this, this quote also begins to unearth valuable areas of exploration for examining the process of creation and actualization of digital technology. What is embedded in Metcalfe's "three-pronged approach?" There are several places where Metcalfe is unclear. The first thing Metcalfe identifies as a driving factor in the digital age is the technology itself. Is she a technological determinist? The technology starts the revolution, gets absorbed by businesses and artists, and seems to direct the evolution of culture. At the very least, Metcalfe appears to be discussing attributes or applying causality or agency to technology itself. Has Metcalfe just been swept up in what Brian Cantwell Smith 3 and David Hakken 4 bemoan as the unfortunate and problematic ontological speak which ensnares the disciplines of computer science and engineering? Of course, Metcalfe acknowledges that this technology did not come from alien or natural forces. It was created, presumably by humans, in a laboratory. This human-constructed technology then becomes adapted and its uses reconfigured by businesses and the arts. Metcalfe could be describing the creation process of the Internet--a military-funded research 2 Brockman, J. 1996. Cyberculture: Conversations with the Digital Elite . Hardwired Books, San Francisco, CA. pp. 221 3 Cantwell Smith, B. 1996. On the Origin of Objects 4 Hakken, D. 2003. The Knowledge Landscapes of Science. Routledge, New York, NY 3 project advanced by DARPA in the late 1960s, which would become popularized via universities and commercial companies in the late 1980s, and adopted and adapted by artists and users beginning in the 1990s, notably by Usenet groups in Metcalfe's time. Or she could be referring to the influence of the Xerox PARC laboratories for ubiquitous computing, as chronicled by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell. 5 What

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