10 Academic quotes a week

(Ghosts of My Life from Fisher is not really academic however, but it should totally be read!)

Probably better to describe them as closer to paragraphs rather than quotes for this weeks iteration. Hope you enjoy!

Technopoly — Neil Postman (1992)

[…] new technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their worldview.

This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that a medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool — the alphabet attaacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word.

When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision. (p.16)

zeros + ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture — Sadie Plant (1997)

The impossibility of getting a grip, and grasping the changes underway is itself one of the most disturbing effects to emerge from the current mood of cultural change. The prospect of being in a position to know, and preferably control, changes manifest on the social scale has been crucial to modern conceptions of what used to be called man’s place in the grand scheme of things.

Technology itself was supposed to be a vital means of exerting this explanatory and organizational power. But the revolutions in telecommunications, media, intelligence gathering, and information processing they unleashed have coincided with an unprecedented sense of disorder and unease, not only in societies, states, economies, families, sexes, but also in species, bodies, brains, weather patterns, ecological systems.

There is turbulence at so many scales that reality itself seems suddenly on edge. Centers are subsumed by peripheries, mainstreams overwhelmed by their backwaters, cores eroded by the skins which were once supposed to be protecting them. Organizers have found themselves eaten up by whatever they were trying to organize. Master copies lose their mastery, and everything valued for its size and strength finds itself overrun by microprocessings once supposed too small and insignificant to count. (p.45-46)

Discipline and Punish — Michel Foucault (1975)

The function of punishment as example was to be found long before the eighteenth-century reform. That punishment looks towards the future, and that at least one of its major functions is to prevent crime had, for centuries, been one of the current justifications of the right to punish.

But the difference was that the prevention that was expected as an effect of the punishment and its spectacle — and therefore of its excess — tended now to become the principle of its economy and the measure of its just proportions.

One must punish exactly enough to prevent repetition. (p.93)

The Disneyization of Society — Alan Bryman (1999)

It is sometimes suggested that we live in an entertainment economy in which the constant exposure to forms of entertainment – most notably through television, the movies, and computer games – leads us to expect that we will be entertained even when entertainment is not the main focus of the activity.

Relatedly, when so much of the consumer’s landscape is made up of homogenized, standardized fare – near identical malls, shops, restaurants – entertainment provides an additional level of enjoyment that adds a layer of charm to, and helps to differentiate, the same and the similar. Ritzer, for example, argues that theming and similar strategies help to enchant sites of consumption in an increasingly McDonaldized and hence standardized world. (p.16)

The Skin of Culture — Derrick de Kerckhove (1995)

Indeed, we seem to want our personal machines, whether it is a car or computer, to be endowed with powers far in excess of the use we may make of them.

Though few of us would seriously consider automobile racing, let alone have the chacne to practise it, we want our Toyota to be capable of being driven at twice the expressway speed limit. (p.3)

The System of Objects — Jean Baudrillard (1996)

The Logic of Father Christmas

What children are actually consuming through this figure, fiction, or cover story (which in a sense they continue to believe in even after they have ceased to do so) is the action of magical parental solicitude and the care taken by the parents to continue colluding with their children’s embrace of the fable. […]

Advertising functions in much the same way. Neither its rhetoric nor even the informational aspect of its discourse has a decisive effect on the buyer. What the individual does respond to, on the other hand, is advertising’s underlying leitmotiv of protection and gratification, the intimation that its solicitations and attempt to persuade are the sign, indecipherable at the conscious level, that somewhere there is is an agency which has taken it upon itself to inform of his own desires, and to foresee and rationalize these desires to his own satisfaction.

He thus no more ‘believes’ in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas, but this in no way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile situation, and to act accordingly. Herein lies the very real effectiveness of advertising, founded on its obedience to a logic which, though not that of the conditioned reflex, is nonetheless very rigorous: a logic of belief and regression. (p.181-182)

The Quantified Self — Deborah Lupton (2016)

As digital technologies have transmuted into digital forms, particularly into smaller and more easily wearable forms, it becomes less obvious where the body ends and the technology begins. This is most overtly the case of such technologies as heart pacemakers, insulin pumps and cochlear implants, all of which are inserted into the body in unobtrusive ways.

But this loss of boundary between body and gadget is also — and increasingly — an element in all the types of digital technologies that we use for self-tracking bodily functions and activities: smartphones, armbands, clothing or watches embedded with sensors. In terms of nonwearable sensors, when the environments in which we occupy space — be they our beds, our homes, our cars or public spaces — are embedded with sensors, our bodies become incorporated into these places, interact with them and come to be the subjects of these sensors.

We may carry our sensors on us, but we also enter into sensor-equipped places that automatically start to generate data in response to us. We become incorporated into these code/spaces for the time we are occupying them. (p.71)

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life — Erving Goffman (1959)

Performance disruptions, then, have consequences at three levels of abstraction: personality, interaction, and social structure. While the likelihood of disruption will vary widely from interaction to interaction, and while the social importance of likely disruptions will vary from interaction to interaction, still it seems that there is no interaction in which the participants do not take an appreciable chance of being slightly embarassed or a slight chance of being deeply humiliated.

Life may not be much of a gamble, but interaction is. (p.243)

Ghosts of My Life — Mark Fisher (2014)

That is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock’s standard downer states, but depression: depression, whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered The (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform – there’s no point, everything is a sham. (p.60)

The great debates over Joy Division – were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes? Were they Fascists? Was Curtis’ suicide inevitable or preventable? – all turn on the relationship between Art and Life. We should resist the temptation to be Lorelei-lured by either the Aesthete-Romantics (in other words, us, as we were) or the lumpen empiricists. The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. ‘Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand…’ It’s important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions – the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were ‘just a laff’ – at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males. (p.63)

The Death and Life of Digital Audio – Jonathan Sterne (2013)

Audiophiles may consider digital audio – especially in its compressed form – as a giant step backward in a story of ever increasing sonic definition, but that story of progress never really quite happened. Every time the signal got clearer, artists, musicians and engineers sought out new methods of distortion.23 And every time the bandwidth grew, engineers looked for new ways to make recorded or transmitted sound more mobile, more flexible and more ever present. The history of digital audio is only partly a story about the definition of sound. It is also a history of transmission. Indeed, current corporate experiments with digital rights management are aimed precisely at making it more difficult for people to move digital recordings around.

To generalise about the nature of digital audio (as a whole) is a fraught enterprise in the best of conditions. But if we were to do so, we would have to up-end the hypothesis that digitisation kills audio bit by bit. Regardless of whether potential definition is increased or compromised in a particular form, digital audio is incredibly mobile and incredibly social. Where critics have found the chasm of death in the spaces between frames of a digital recording, they should have found vivacious life instead. (p.345-346)