vilma

EN LT

2004-05-08

Renata : input

source_1
Lev Manovich. ‘Teleprsence: Illusion versus Action’, p.164-167. Is: The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London. 2001.

source_2
Jeff Rice. " What is Cool? Notes on Intellectualism, Popular Culture, and Writing", excerpt from: www.ctheory.net

source_3
Anders Henten, ‘Will Information Societies Be Welfare Societies?’, p. 77-79. Is: ‘Communication, Citizenship and Social Policy: Rethinking the times of the Welfare State’. Edited by Andew Calabrese and Jean-Claude Burgelman.

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source_1
Lev Manovich. ‘Teleprsence: Illusion versus Action’, p.164-167. Is: The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London. 2001.

In the opening sequence of the movie Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), we see an operator sitting at the controls. The operator is wearing a head-mounted display that shows an image transmitted from a remote location. This display allows him to remotely control a small vehicle, and with its help, explore the insides of the "Titanic" lying on the bottom of the ocean. In short, the operator is "telepresent."

With the rise of the Web, telepresence, which until recently was restricted to a few specialized industrial and military applications, has become a more familiar experience. A search on Yahoo! for "interesting devices connected to the Net" returns links to a variety of Net-based telepresence applications: coffee machines, robots, an interactive model railroad, audio devices and, of course, the ever-popular web cams.'*' Some of these devices, such as most web cams, do not allow for true telepresence—you get images from a remote location but you cannot act on them. Others, however, are true telepresence links that allow the user to perform actions remotely.

Remote video cameras and remotely navigated devices such as the one featured in Titanic exemplify the notion of being "present" in a physically remote location. At the same time, the experience of daily navigating the Web also involves telepresence on a more basic level. By following hyperlinks, the user "teleports" from one server to another, from one physical location to the next. If we are still fetishizing video-based telepresence as portrayed in Titanic, this is only because we are slow to accept the primacy of information space over physical space in computer culture. But in fact, the ability to "teleport" instantly from one server to another, to be able to explore a multitude of documents located on computers around the world, all from one location, is much more important chat being able to perform physical actions in one remote location.

I will discuss telepresence in this section in its accepted, more narrow meaning: the ability to see and act at a distance. And just as I constructed one possible archeology of digital compositing, here I would like to construct one possible historical trajectory leading to computer-based Telepresence. If digital compositing can be placed along with other technologies for creating fake reality such as fashion and makeup, realist paintings, dioramas, military decoys, and VR, telepresence can be thought of as one example of representational technologies used to enable action, that is. to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations. Other examples of these action-enabling technologies are maps, architectural drawings, and x-rays. All of them allow their users to act at a distance. Given this, what are the new possibilities for action offered by telepresence in contrast to these older technologies? This question will guide my discussion of telepresence here.

If we look at the word itself, telepresence means presence at a distance. But presence where? Interactive media designer and theorist Brenda Laurel defines telepresence as "a medium that allows you to take your body with you into some other environment. . . you get to take some subset of your senses with you into another environment. And that environment may be a computer-generated environment, it may be a camera-originated environment, or it may be a combination of the two."'8'4 According to this definition, telepresence encompasses two different situations—being "present" in a synthetic computer-generated environment (what is commonly referred to as "virtual reality") and being "present" in a real remote physical location via a live video image. Scott Fisher, one of the developers of the NASA Ames Virtual Environment Workstation—the first modern VR system—similarly does not distinguish between being "present" in a computer-generated environment or a real remote physical location. Describing the Ames system, he writes: "Virtual environments at the Ames system are synthesized with 3-D computer-generated imagery, or are remotely sensed by user-controlled, stereoscopic video camera configurations"45 Fisher uses "virtual environments" as an all-encompassing term, reserving "telepresence" for the second situation: "presence" in a remote physical location.4*" I will follow his usage here.

Popular media has downplayed the concept of telepresence in favor of virtual reality. Photographs of the Ames system, for instance, have often been featured to illustrate the idea of an escape from any physical space into a computer-generated world. The fact that a head-mounted display can also show a televised image of a remote physical location is hardly ever mentioned.

Yet, from the point of view of the history of the technologies of action, telepresence is a much more radical technology than virtual reality, or computer simulations in general. Let us consider the difference between the two. Like the fake reality technologies that preceded it, virtual reality provides the subject with the illusion of being present in a simulated world. Virtual reality adds a new capability: It allows the subject to actively change this world. In other words, the subject is given control over a fake reality, For instance, an architect can modify an architectural model, a chemist can try different molecule configurations, a tank driver can shoot at a model of a tank, and so on. But, what is modified in each case is nothing but data stored in a computer's memory! The user of any computer simulation has power over a virtual world, which only exists inside a computer.

Telepresence allows the subject to control not just the simulation but reality itself. Telepresence provides the ability to manipulate remotely physical reality in real time through its image. The body of the teleoperator is transmitted, in real time, to another location where it can act on the subject's behalf—repairing a space station, doing underwater excavation, or bombing a military base in Iraq or Yugoslavia,

Thus, the essence of telepresence is that it is anti-presence. I do not have to be physically present in a location to affect reality at this location. A better term would be teleaction. Acting over distance. In real time.

Catherine the Great was fooled into mistaking painted facades for real villages. Today, from thousands of miles away—as was demonstrated during the Gulf War—we can send a missile equipped with a television camera close enough to tell the difference between a target and a decoy. We can direct the flight of the missile using the image transmitted back by its camera, we can carefully fly towards the target, and using the same image, we can .blow the target away. All that is needed is to position the computer cursor over the right place in the image and press a button.

43. hrrp://www.yahoo.com.
44. Brenda Laurel, quoted in Rebecca Coyle, "The Genesis of Virtual Reality," in Future Visions: Neii,- Technologies ofiheStreea, ed, Philip Mayward and Tana WolJen (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 162.
45. Fisher, 430 (emphasis mine).
46. Fisher defines telepresence as "a technology which would allow remotely situated operators to receive enough sensory feedback to feel like they are really at a remote location and are able to do different kinds of tasks." Scott Fisher, "Visual Interface Environments," in The Art of Hit man-Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 427.
47. I am grateful to Thomas Elsaesser for suggesting the term "image-instrument" and also for making a number of other suggestions regarding the "Teleaction" section as a whole.
48. Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, 6(1986): 1—40.
49. Ibid., 22,

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source_2
Jeff Rice. " What is Cool? Notes on Intellectualism, Popular Culture, and Writing", excerpt from: www.ctheory.net

The November 2001 issue of Wired magazine ran a "special advertising section" called "The Phenomenon of Cool." The section highlights cool as a revolutionary force in the history of cultural and technological production. "Attempting to capture cool is a trap," the section begins. "Cool has emerged as a series of movements, an unwavering stance of individuality, and more recently, a flash of red-hot radiation." Even though cool supposedly can't be named, the pages that follow map an ideal that includes items as distinct as James Dean, television, cocktails, and Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool. The advertisement concludes with a homage to technology. Media multiplied. Technology shifted gears. Cool could be beamed into 100 million homes, tracked and data-processed. Downloaded from across an ocean. Or bounced off a satellite on your wrist.

Cool became remote, the opposite of mass. It morphed into the gadget, car, person, or party available to few but coveted by many.

The 21st century, long a sci-fi daydream, is here. Its slogan is simple: If your neighbors are in on it, it can't be cool. [1]

Somehow, at some point, if we are to believe the unnamed writers of this section, cool evolved from James Dean's rebellious image in Rebel Without a Cause to satellite TV. The question "What is Cool?" (offered by writer Marlene Connor in her book of the same name) escapes answer as Wired implicitly suggests it means everything and nothing at once. It incorporates popular images with technological breakthroughs.

Even more allusive than Wired's definition of cool, however, is the advertisement's audience, purpose, and product for sale. The oddly positioned section (in the magazine's expensive opening pages) with no indication of what it promotes prompts a number of questions regarding language employment in 21st century digital culture. What has happened to the throwaway term cool, a word once used merely to describe an individual's cultural status (he/she is cool) or an object's worth (these shoes are cool)? How does the mere placement of a series of cool images convey a message, as Wired's spread attempts? Granted, its presence in an advertising section reinforces Thomas Frank's conclusion in The Conquest of Cool that popular culture meanings, like the anti-establishment attitude associated with cool, eventually serve corporate interests in ways originally unintended. But how can the word mean rebellion and digital production, commercialism and individuality, all at once? What is cool and what do we mean by its usage?

Lest we not label the Wired issue an aberration, the April 11, 2002 Rolling Stone takes as its subtitle "The Cool Issue." More in depth than Wired for its coverage, Rolling Stone translates cool into a series of lists. Indeed, this is the form of cool most palatable to consumer audiences who often ask: what is cool and how can I purchase it? Pre-empting the issue's 60 pages devoted to the subject of cool, John Weir writes: "What's cool? It came out of mystery and is still mysterious. Some have it and some don't. Like the Supreme Court on pornography, we know it when we see it. Turn the page and see it." [2]

What appears in the magazine's following pages includes a hodgepodge of its selective choice of cool; the rationale for labeling these items cool seems as mysterious as the listed items' supposed make-up. Nestled amid the larger categories of Cool SUV, Cool Babe, and Cool TV, are the subtle micro-sections entitled Permanent Cool (Sullen Stares, Muddy Waters, and On the Road), Pissed-Off Cool (Piercings, Adbusters, and Sniffing Glue), and Senior Cool (Jack Nicholson, IBM Selectric, and Never Reuniting). Rolling Stone's point also is that cool is allusive and indefinable, its meanings perpetually shifting. Yet even so, the magazine feels a need to list a who's who of popular acceptability.

Rolling Stone reflects the listing phenomenon associated with cool. The desire to acknowledge all cool things transforms over into electronic culture where web portals like Yahoo or Netscape construct lengthy lists of hyperlinks worth visiting and label them "cool sites." The intellectual version of the cool list turns up in Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle: Laws of Cool, a website devoted to presenting cool not as out of the ordinary, eclectic websites (as Yahoo and Netscape propose), but as an anti-intellectual movement embedded in a global, information economy void of content and meaning. Even while listing cool sites, Liu critiques cool not for rebelling against the institutional order, but for supporting it. Indeed, when we consider Wired and Rolling Stone's transformation from anti-establishment publications to mainstream industry standards, Liu's position holds merit. His point is further raised by Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn whose Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America situates cool as the leading factor transforming American culture into nothing more than capitalism gone wild, a place where consumerism has not only become a lifestyle, but a language. Cool, Lasn writes, is "a heavily manipulative corporate ethos" motivating American culture.

Cool is indispensable-- and readily, endlessly, dispensed. You can get it on every corner (for the right price), though it's highly addictive and its effects are short-lived. If you're here for cool today, you'll almost certainly be back for more tomorrow. [3]

In this sense, the places where electronic culture (the Web), intellectualism (Voice of the Shuttle), and consumer culture represented as the generic term popular culture (Wired and Rolling Stone) merge are where cool dominates our daily lives in ways we have yet to thoughtfully consider.

Notes

[1] "A Special Advertising Section." Wired. November 2001. ix-xv.p. ix.

[2] Weir, John. "The Beautiful American Word 'Cool.'" Rolling Stone. April 2001.p. 67.

[3]Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Eagle Brook, 1999 pgs.xiii-xiv.

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source_3
Anders Henten, ‘Will Information Societies Be Welfare Societies?’, p. 77-79. Is: ‘Communication, Citizenship and Social Policy: Rethinking the times of the Welfare State’. Edited by Andew Calabrese and Jean-Claude Burgelman.

Whether or not information societies will be welfare societies will depend, to a large extent, on the balance of political forces in society. There is no automatic relationship between what might be termed an information society and the development of welfare politics. However, new technological and economic trends and features related to the application of information technologies in society constitute a basis on which welfare politics can be developed. In this sense, the question has meaning.
The question also has meaning in the sense that information society programs are put forward by politicians around the world as guidelines for welfare policies for the twenty-first century. In the United States, the Clinton-Gore initiative on a national information infrastructure clearly has this character (see Information Infrastructure Task force, 1993) and the same applies to information society programs in, for instance, Denmark and Sweden in Scandinavia (see Committee on the Information Society, 1994; and Government Commission on Information Technology, 1994).

But before rushing into a discussion concerning welfare politics in information societies, it may be necessary to define the two concepts, information society and welfare society. The first concept is by far the more nebulous. There is absolutely no common understanding of what it means. The welfare society concept, on the other hand, has been discussed for the past years, and although there may be many and deep differences in inter-pretation, there is a solid kernel of prosperity, distribution of wealth, and democratic behavior in the term.
In discussions that do not have a specific information society focus but that deal with similar matters from either an industrial- or economic-policy point of view, the central themes are information technology (IT) and globalization. These are the catchwords that appear most often in publications on the new conditions for international competition. They appear recurrently, for instance, in the voluminous report from 1995 from the Danish commission on future employment and business opportunities (Kommissio-nen om fremtidens beskteftigelses, 1995b) and in the public debate called the Welfare Commission. There is a growing political concern regarding what we (the wealthy nations) are going to live on in the coming decades.
Another discussion related to information society developments deals with so-called technoeconomic paradigms. According to the theory of tech-noeconomic paradigms, economic growth periods are related to the widespread and diversified diffusion and usage of specific sets of technologies (Perez, 1983}. At present, information technologies are considered as the technological basis for a new technoeconomic paradigm.

The concept of welfare society mostly deals with the distribution of wealth and the democratic institutions in society. However, the creation of wealth has also played an important role and has, lately, been assigned an increasing role in discourses on welfare. Furthermore, an additional element is entering the discussions of welfare politics, namely, environmental questions.

The fundamental building blocks of the capitalist state are (1) external ami internal security (military and police), (2) regulation of market relations (including labor markets), (3) support for productive sectors (direct support and infrastructure), (4) maintenance of labor power (education and health), and (5) transfer of income between groups of citizens. Welfare politics have mostly been related to income transfer, education and health, and labor-market regulation. However, other constituting elements of the capitalist state also have an impact on the welfare of citizens. Lately, mar-ket regulation and support for productive sectors have also come to the fore in welfare politics.

This was also true in the early years of the welfare state, although later mythologies concerning welfare politics have played down this fact. Wealth and welfare politics were two sides of the same class cooperation policies.

The reason for the concern that industrial development again be closely
intertwined with welfare politics is related to the internationalization of the economy, The world economy has once again entered a phase of restructuring, and political decision makers see their own initiatives in the light of a competition between nations for a good position in an international division of labour. This has led to an extended focus on supply-side politics and less focus on demand-side politics.

Welfare presupposes wealth in society – not an absolute level of wealth and not necessarily an ever increasing wealth, but a certain and stable level of welfare. An important question, when determining whether information societies will be welfare societies, must therefore be whether information technology constitutes a technological basis for a new economic growth period – a new technoeconomic paradigm.