Page 14 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014conference and the audience have to travel and spend time getting to the conference venue so the speaker’s address will have to last an hour to make it worthwhile attending. The same thing applies to a roll of celluloid with a film, a work meeting, the printed words transported in a book or an album of music contained on a disc. And this observation applies not only to the transmission of the information and access to it, but to any form of transport. When there are no distances nor delays in either transport or access, when everything is in a digital Aleph and can be held in the hand, the size of the packets of information are smaller. In the same way, it is possible, when people are together in the same place and at the same time, to have a conversation on the basis of exchanging short messages but it is impossible to have these short exchanges of information, which constitute a conversation, between an astronaut travelling close to Saturn and his control base on Earth (the delay in the transmission of each message is one hour and ten minutes). So both the astronaut and the control base must keep in contact with larger packets of information. It would be absurd to send a greeting and wait for another one in reply followed up by a brief phrase and so on continuously.We associate big with extensive, which is a way of getting over the problem of distance. And we associate small with reduced, that is to say, constrained by distance. When there are no distances big or small are not determining factors for a beneficial installation in this space.A world in partsA space without places helps bring about another order of things. The phenomenon that can then be observed is the granularity of the Net; a tendency towards the small. And its interpretation poses another challenge for exploiting the properties of digital space.Growing granularity runs the risk of crumbling apart and this will happen if what is small is as closed as marbles. These marbles may be made of coloured glass or clay, but they can only be together in a bag.AC/EIt is different if granularity produces fragments since they can be fitted together to recompose the whole whence they came. But the most fruitful kind of granularity is that in which every grain, every unit, is a piece—a piece of Lego. Fitting them together one way or another they can be recombined to produce different shapes. Fragments only make recomposition possible while pieces make recombination possible. Fragments produce a single result, pieces produce multiple results.With the analogy of pieces we can express the concept of the small and open as a building material in the digital world.In the spacewithout placeseverythingtends tocrumble. Thephenomenon ofthe smallappears where itwould be believed that there are only conditions for the big. On the basis of this granularity the challenge is in the conception and design of elements which, like pieces of Lego, can be recombined. Then the small achieves its potential for also being open. Small and open. In each case the interpretation of the concepts of small and open is key for the exploitation of this phenomenon of digital granularity. Escaping the crumbling away and fragmentation will be a creative task over the coming years. Objects or activities erode if we atomise them into small, closed units. Neither is it a solution if they are broken into fragments, although they can be used to recompose the original. The crucial thing is to conceive of pieces—small but open entities—that can be combined in many ways in which each combination produces a different composition.Where will this tendency towards a digital world of uncountable pieces in continuous recombination lead? In principle it could be argued that it will lead to an intensification of interaction. People are going to find a digital world in bulk as well as digitalA space without places promotes the granularity of the Net where frag‐ ments, like pieces of Lego, are combined to obtain different compositionsWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...14