One of my favourite pieces for MSU (Make Shit Up)

Playing Peek-a-Boo: Superfluous Engagement By and For The Matrix

Without apology, I am continuing in my attempt to learn while having my own fun communicating by means of a somewhat discordant narrative. The PCOM 640 Week 9 readings herein referred to, service this purpose ideally as a kind of rabbit hole by which to enter into a better understanding of the latest stages of humanity's complex relationship with all forms of media or what Marshall McLuhan called "the Extensions of Man."

After reading the Week 9 literate shards, Lyon and Niedzviecki respectively, I have experienced an unexpected kind of deja vu. Upon some reflection this reaction relates back to two points of recall. The first, as alluded to in the first paragraph, comes from McLuhan who discerned a subtle interplay between our physical bodies and the media; the bodies come and go, but media keeps building itself through time: we come to the point where the media builds itself and completes itself merging with our bodies. The second point of recall comes from a previous scanning of Baudrillard’s description of the hyperreal and in particular his description of the “Great game of Exchange” ( Baudrillard, p.7), a game grounded in an endless exchange of nothing.

According to Niedzviecki we are deep in the throws of "peep culture": a tell-all, show-all, know-all digital phenomenon that is dramatically altering notions of privacy, individuality, security, and even humanity. Peep culture refers to reality TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn, surveillance technology, cell phones and more. Peep culture draws attention to the the irony that we are trying to look for community by moving in solitude into these technologies, for example it is more likely to see people in a social environment immersed in their IPhones and BlackBerrys instead of communicating with people in a room.

In consideration of my deja vu points of recall comes the first look down the rabbit hole. Rather than serving as antecedent of a narcissistic epoch I am instead drawn to a ‘McLuhanesque’ construct of an android hallucination that keeps us fixated on the content and not the effects. Another glance down the rabbit hole also reveals more clearly Baudrillard’s description of the “Great Game of Exchange” (p. 7), referring to an endless exchange of nothing; a game that leads in the end to the liquidation of everything and, “passing around the debt, the unreal unnameable thing you cannot get rid of” (p. 7). Niedzviecki’s peep culture is a portrayal of a media environment which creates and converts data into content which can be bought and sold. Ergo, peep culture merely serves to keep the economy operating. The phatic twittering, jabbering, texting, typing and talking (a digital matrix) is the endless exchange of nothing; its not the messages but rather it is the action of every one participating. As long as people are consuming and generating media we have an economy.

Both Lyon and Niedzviecki appear to be working with the idea that communication is shifting to being the exchange of visual images, and not the intuition and deduction of spoken phrases; a reversion from the aural to visual. A text received on a smart phone is not a conversation in the literate sense, it is an image. The text is the flashing of bright lights into the visual senses. Texting is not communication, it’s taking a flashlight to your corpus callosum just as McLuhan’s description of the nature of watching television. (McLuhan, 1988, p.47)

Overlaying the McLuhan / Baudrillard constructs, media culture and its analysis (this includes Lyon’s and Niedzviecki’s narratives) become an international common hallucination, an hallucination triggered by unprecedented visual interplay with our physical selves. The very act of engaging in theoretical constructs, arguing for their validity becomes and act of international common hallucination triggered by the digital matrix. Phatic discussion of who and how we are free, merely serves to further amplify a kind of paranoia of our digital age with its linch-pin being Orwellian allegory. As objects of ocular surveillance, our lives are depicted as no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum. Promoting the study of surveillance culture ultimately will deter any reference to the real but instead retrieve Orwellian analogies and further reaffirm our belief in the values associated with a mocked-up representation of the real; merely reaching, responding, and creating more content.

What people have been subjected to, i.e. the media completing itself and merging with our physicality, is beyond comprehension when held in comparison to the default Orwellian surveillance meme. Analyzing the digital matrix as a maturation chamber for emergent peep habits, or as a tool of surveillance is based on simple sender receiver constructs. Whereas McLuhan and Baudrillard show us media is about an experience which is beyond the dimensions of the physical body. We are all connecting our bodies into a massive network, creating a massive calculator. Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan's description of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, in retrospect, hits the bulls-eye when applied to our interactive-media world:

"... Burroughs, whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there
can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally
involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private
parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one
another, there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is
the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global
membrane of enclosure." (McLuhan, 1964).

Ironically, both Lyon and Niedzviecki are producing these matrix feeding weapons of mass instruction (a phrase borrowed from a book of the same title by John Taylor Gatto). The very processes they are attempting to subsume by illumination are relished by multinational markets craving to imbed the interaction of their laboratory designed, mass produced, digitized wealth. Facilitated by the flickering of millions of screens literate culture becomes a function of algorithms and digital outputs. What we regard as meaningful exploration of emerging social constructs is merely a literate media pantomime, an illusion of individuals participating in forms of media which is merely spectacle for the processing analyzing, filtering and transmitting of digital data into machines. This is not peep, pop, nor surveillance. Rather, it is the construct of digital computer networks building, completing, and merging themselves to the banality of a literate society flailing in the after-image of capitalism. (Bauldrillard, 2001)

Lyon and Niedzviecki have found their own rabbit hole, deep into the dialectic between culture and technology; striving to hoik up the political; seeking culpability, compliance, and legality by emphasizing a need to think about what privacy is and means to each individual. I’ve just begun to probe my own rabbit hole and I see that culture and technology have merged, and come alive. Technology has taken on a life of its own, and the digitized illusion of certainty has dissolved.

***

This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.
-Marshall McLuhan-


References:
Baudrillard, J. (2001). Impossible Exchanges. (C. Turner, Trans.). London: Verso. (Original work published 1999).
McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). The Nation, pp.517-19. retrieved April 2, 2009 from:
http://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/