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FIGURES OF UBICOMP: CONCEPTUALIZING AND COMPOSING ACTIONABLE MEDIA By JOHN TINNELL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 John Tinnell 2 To Hutton 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like thank all of the amazing people in the English Department at the University of Florida, especially Greg Ulmer and Sid Dobrin. Greg’s work models everything I hope to achieve in my own. While I try to not follow his footsteps too obviously, I will always be seeking to further the insights and projects that his books so originally present. For me, Greg is among the masters that his motto gestures toward. Sid, perhaps more than anyone else, helped me come of age as a professional. Because of his constant encouragement and pinpoint advice, I felt as though I had made the transition from graduate student to Assistant Professor before I even started my dissertation. It would have been inconceivable for me to complete this project in under a year without that level of confidence and support. The other two members of my committee, Laurie Gries and Jack Stenner, provided me with vital feedback. Laurie’s capacity to respond to her students’ writing is unparalleled; she saw incongruencies in my writing to which I would otherwise still be blind. Jack voiced criticisms that I did not want to hear, which are the most important to hear. I thank my parents, emphatically, for their support and for doing what they are passionate about and always encouraging me to do the same. My mom has a very unique combination of unwavering determination and limitless generosity; I have relied on her lessons more than ever during the past year. My dad has always been brimming with ideas of all sorts, and many of my best ideas stem from conversations with him. Last but most of all, I thank Kim, for her resilience, as a sounding board and a proofreader; her patience, when I am in the zone; and her readiness to believe in me. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 9 2 THE SPECTER OF TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM ....................................... 19 The Humanistic Study of Media .............................................................................. 23 Technogenesis: The Humanities’ New Enthymeme ............................................... 29 Orality Literacy Electracy ........................................................................................ 44 Toward a Grammatology of Ubicomp ..................................................................... 52 3 GRAMMATIZATION: BERNARD STIEGLER’S THEORY OF TECHNICS AND WRITING ................................................................................................................ 58 The Technics of Writing .......................................................................................... 61 Stiegler and Derrida ................................................................................................ 63 Originary Technicity ................................................................................................ 65 Arche-Writing .......................................................................................................... 71 From the Logic of the Supplementarity to the History of the Supplement ............... 76 Grammatization and Grammatology ....................................................................... 86 Grammatization and Industrial Technics ................................................................. 90 The Grammatization of Real-Time .......................................................................... 93 Grammatization as Method ..................................................................................... 98 Grammatization and Digital Rhetoric .................................................................... 102 4 UBICOMP: WRITING SPACES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY .............. 109 The Invention of Ubicomp ..................................................................................... 112 Beyond Mobility and Location ............................................................................... 131 The Space of Ubicomp ......................................................................................... 143 Beyond Digital-Physical Convergence .................................................................. 158 5 ACTIONABLE MEDIA: FROM WIMP TO ATLAS ................................................. 169 Introducing Actionable Media ................................................................................ 172 Techno-Geographic Actant-Networks ................................................................... 180 Figures .................................................................................................................. 191 Layers: As Technocultural Category ..................................................................... 195 Layers: As Actionable Media Practice; or, Computing and Writing En Plein Air ... 208 5 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 237 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 245 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy FIGURES OF UBICOMP: CONCEPTUALIZING AND COMPOSING ACTIONABLE MEDIA By John Tinnell May 2013 Chair: Gregory L. Ulmer Major: English Since the rise of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), a growing contingency of scholars from various fields have all attested to the need for new critical categories to help us understand the ways in which digital data now interlocks with physical space. Responding to this need, I propose five rhetorical figures specific to ubicomp interfaces, and, on the basis of these figures, attempt to outline a whole new class of media emerging at the margins of social, mobile, and locative media. For instance, GPS navigation devices are mobile and locative, but these qualities do not begin to account for the technology’s most radical affordance: the capacity to sync with (i.e., generate multimedia in response to) the actions of human and environmental actants in real-time. My term for this emerging set of technologies and techniques is actionable media. Drawing on the military phrase “actionable intelligence,” actionable media describes the compelling ways media can be designed to hinge upon what we are doing while we are doing it. In more theoretical terms, drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s notion of grammatization, actionable media concerns the modalities by which the flux of the Web gets broken down into gramme for acting upon in real-time, as well as the processes by which media break down the continuous movements of actant-networks into networked 7 gramme. Taking GPS navigation, RFID tags, and AR browsers as paradigmatic examples of actionable media, I ask how we might extrapolate from these commonplace scenarios to imagine further possibilities for digital writing and audiovisual media that fully exploit the features of ubicomp platforms. Throughout the work, I comment specifically on actionable media practices implicit in innovative projects done by digital artists, writers, and cultural institutions around the world. Ultimately, I argue that the value of ubicomp projects coincides with their potential to perform in the capacity of actionable media. That is, while the technical phenomena associated with mobile devices, geoinformation, and digital-physical convergence are often astonishing at first glance; the historical worth of these basic mechanics will have been measured by the advent of compelling cultural practices that we are just beginning to glimpse. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION For media theorists and technologists, “ubiquitous computing” marks the paradigmatic horizon of current innovations in mobile media, locative networks, wearable devices, augmented reality, and smart objects. As an umbrella term, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) typically signifies the onset a third wave in the history of the modern computer. Ubiquitous systems promise to break from the PC era and the models of computing that defined it, creating as many new possibilities and new problems as the shift from mainframe computers to PCs initiated during the 1980s. By virtue of this pending transition, the Internet is also said to be entering a third stage often referred to as Web 3.0. Commentators who forecast this scenario—which many people are already starting to experience—claim that the Web will be all around us, always on and accessible via smartphones, tablets, televisions, cars, and many other everyday items. No humanities scholar can deny the profound changes undergone in the study of writing, rhetoric, and media in the wake of personal computing and Web 2.0. In the midst of societies characterized by permanent technological innovation, many leading scholars are variously engaged in building theories of the present. They share an aim to understand current digital developments in reference to existing
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