A Little Less Anecdotal, A Little More Quote Mines
Or Using Other People’s Words to Attempt Some Conclusions
Christian Sandvig quotes J. C. R. Licklider as writing “The Web’s original blueprint included the feature that any Web user could edit any Web page, which now seems quite impractical.” [It’s in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures and I read the Kindle edition. The University of Illinois Press published it in 2015.] He goes on to mention how that impracticability became a problem once servers began needing to allow access to large numbers of users. However, it occurs to me that many, if not most, of us tend still to think of the connections we make to “individuals” across the internet as direct one-to-one connections, overlooking the performativity inherent in all mediated communication. Hassan wrote a bit about Judith Butler’s concepts of precarity and performativity and how sexuality is performed. While I fully agree, I can’t help but also apply the same principle to other modes of being — race, class, community, culture, and even personality are performed. (This was one of the ideas I was struggling with back in this post.) In relation to my ideas of communicating through the internet and games, then, we are only communicating through mediation with performances, not actual people.
It’s the failures to reconcile this idea that leads to instances like the whole Mr. Bungles affair. Essentially, a group of people didn’t see the characters being played out on this MUD as indexing reality to the same extent as others. It was real, or at least a certain version of reality to much of the group, but not to another.
And I think this is where the problem comes in with my original assertion, that mediation affects our ability to consider other people as real. In my admittedly anecdotal experience as outlined in previous post here, it was less that I was unable to recognize other player avatars as indexing real people, and more that this recognition changed the way I felt about them. However, in these cases, I was explicitly playing against other people (probably) and we were all subscribing much closer to the same general fiction. We were all playing the same game and an implicit agreement had been made that we were using the same rules.
While I wanted to draw the comparison to social media, the recognition that my recognition (Can I use “recognition” more?) that my feelings changed between whether I was playing against Mann or Machine also led me to recognize that social media works differently. When I’m interacting with someone through social media (or even through other networked communication technologies) there is an implicit assumption that we’re all indexing our “true” selves.
This American Life discusses this a bit in a recent (as of December 2015) episode appropriately titles “Status Update.” Two young girls discuss the comments left on their Instagram photos in the prologue. They seem to recognize that all of the comments (lots of “beautiful,” “pretty,” “hot,” etc.) don’t necessarily correlate to actual feelings or opinions, but rather simply as reinforcements of their friendships. They are publicly performing their friendship, using a tuned language that they then need to parse for the actual meaning, effectively adding yet another layer of mediation to their communication. Even though the girls in the podcast know that their friends don’t necessarily mean the words they’re using, they still have an implicit (Okay, I promise it won’t happen that many more times.) agreement about what their language actually indexes.
But the difference between the games and social media is that the game rules are set by the developers. (For the most part. While it’s interesting in its own right, now isn’t really the time to start discussing metagames.) In social media, and communication in general, we are all working with a different set of rules and are actively involved in changing those rules as we go along.
Catherine Malabou proposes, by way of Katherine Hayles, that we should “use neural plasticity to become conscious of our own possibilities for self-fashioning. (Emphasis mine)” Hayles goes on to mention the differences between our “proto-self” — or inner self — and the conscious, narrated, autobiographical self — the one we think of ourselves as — pointing out that, by definition, we are not conscious of our non-conscious selves. There is still another level, however, and that’s the self that other people see, and it changes based on who or what is perceiving. So, yeah, the way I approach a medium does have the greatest affect on how I interact with it. It seems so obvious to me.
Hayles discusses in chapter 5 of her book [It’s called How We Think, by the way, and it is far less related to my topic in the way that I originally thought. But it still works. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012. I read a PDF copy from the WSU library.] how the “database is unlikely to displace narrative as a human way of knowing.” This is much closer to my original-original premise, about how stories shape the way people think. We not only interact with explicit fictions, but we also interact heavily with implicit fictions. We create narratives in our heads about interactions with people (“He only said that because he was mad,” “She’s the type of woman who does this.”), and even technologies and companies. Tumblr has a personality and a narrative behind it, when in actuality it’s only a publishing platform that allows a great deal of freedom. The users ended up providing the content and the personality, but we apply it to the platform as a whole.
But we rarely pay attention to the fact that we’re interacting with stories, not people or companies. A company’s stock will plummet over the actions of one of it’s executives, regardless of how good the product is. We judge people based on their clothes, before we get a chance to even get to know them. As a third example: Advertising. Just advertising.
So, what does this have to with games? Well, I know that the narrative that I approached playing the games with changed the affect I felt from them, just like the narrative that I approach social media with changes the affects I feel from them. Team Fortress 2 is more fun with other people, because it makes me feel more, because it seems like it’s more real. Final Fantasy makes start to die of boredom. Facebook is a boring time waster, and I approach it as such, paying it little head after I’ve accomplished the limited set of goals I have in using it. Twitter on the other hand, is an interesting news and humor source, easily parsed, and useful for the broader set of goals I assign to it. I have positive feelings towards some, and negative towards the others, and I kind of ignore that I played a part in forming those affects. The benefit of games is that the rules are clear, while most other more mediated communications have murkier rules.
Wait, did I spend all of this time just to argue for confirmation bias?
No, also fiction and performativity! It’s a little more difficult to find people talking about performativity outside of sexual or gender performance. But if these things we see as so fundamental to our existence — gender, sexuality, and, as Sanjay Sharma points out, race/ethnicity — then it only stands to reason that most of our outward affectations of personality, of “us,” is also performative, and must become increasingly so as we delve into realms separate from our biological bodies. So, I guess, we never had much of a chance at really communicating with one another as human beings.
We’re only communicating as stories, as narratives. Intertextual narratives. Which are all narratives. Or which all narrative are.
Next, I’m going to try to wrap up some final thoughts, as this is, once again, bordering on too long. Of course, I’m making that Mega Man post first. Just because I love the little guy.
Lates.
-ED
