Page 16 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014The motion of digital entities is never ceasing because they can not find any place for repose, an impossible aspiration in a space without places.Furthermore, there is another Net phenomenon which provokes this movement, even of that which is most inclined to remain stationary, the fact that the Net is fraying. The cause of this weakness in the mesh is obsolescence. It only seems like a weakness because it is due to the vitality of innovation. Hardware and software are starting to show malfunction, not because of wear and tear, but because of the appearance in the artificial ecosystem of innovations which are coming into competition with what has already been established, and in such a way that even that which has been maintained on the Net with the intention of storage and conservation has to move sooner or later under the threat of obsolescence, of being lost, clung to the Net’s frayed threads.Oral ityA tendency can be detected in the digital space towards orality. It might be thought surprising that such a powerful technological medium, one that provides ubiquity to everything it contains, is incapable of guaranteeing its permanence. The strategies for digital persistence are similar to those of orality. The strings of ones and zeros are as fleeting as the air of the spoken word. In oral cultures the way to persist and create memory, the way to resist the passing of time, is repetition. Conveying again and again whatever is to be maintained—insistence as persistence. Something is transmitted orally and to prevent it from being lost it has to be said again or for whoever has heard it to communicate it to others in their own words. Repetition and reverberation are the safeguards of memory in oral cultures. Notice that oral communication is composed of pieces like the digital ones we see in digital communication. Discourse in oral culture is built from pieces each of which is repeated on later occasions under different circumstances, recombined or in combination with others, as other oral discourse. The same things are always told again in a different way. It is, therefore, a way of ensuring persistence through insistence. If theAC/Eparts did not have this capacity for combination the only possibility would be to literally repeat what had originally been said. On the contrary, each part, each piece, which is not just a fragment, is saved from the passage of time by combination with others in a new situation and at another time. It is not plagiarism nor alteration, and neither is it fragmentation. The key to persistence in the digital world resides in everything being built from the small (pieces) and being open (recombinations). The challenge lies in the interpretation of this key for every specific case.Expanded there and nowPresence implies a here and now; a space‐time coincidence. When something artificial mediates, such as, for example, a sheet of paper in a letter, a page in a book, a canvas or celluloid, the perception of space and time becomes one of there and then. What we read,hear and seethrough amedium wasproduced inanother place(there) and atanother time(then).Electronic mediacan give us the experience of a there and now when there is live transmission. We are not in the place but it is happening at this moment in time. However, when we are surrounded by the mirror of digital space, things in the real world where we are, and we ourselves, find ourselves neither here nor there but somewhere in the middle, somewhere close, but on the other side of the mirror. We cross this barrier when we duplicate ourselves through the phenomenon of specularity: an image of ourselves, today still a blurred image but a recognisable one, appears on the other side of the mirror. We find the perception of our image there disturbing, just as our images in mirrors were that have inspired countless stories and myths in all cultures, or images captured by cameras which in some cultures even today lead people to cover their faces. Today it is the image that appears when we sit in front of a screen, theThe prints we leave behind in the digital space repeat themselves and recombine to trace an image of our personality which is like a reflection in a mirrorWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...16