Making the Spinplant Relevant: more from Friedrich Nietzsche
<update> See bottom of the post and the comments </ update>
About a week ago there was a small-scale furor on this blog and a Nettime-NL thread surrounding the spinplant. Laura (one of the very creative members of this blog) wrote a Wikipedia entry on the fictional plant, complete with a taxonomic category and a high-resolution photo. The article was deleted within the hour.
While this was basically a good thing for Wikipedia – a kind of anti-Siegenthaler moment – the reason given for the deletion was not. It turns out that the Wikipedian responsible simply queried ‘spinplant’, found no corresponding hits in Google, and that was that. Soon critics brought up the question: what happens when an encyclopedia relies so heavily on a commercial search engine, especially one with worrying censorship ‘issues’? When it comes to Wikipedia, or even Web knowledge more generally, does Google deal in capital-T truth?
In short, my answer is no. Firstly, it is unfair to tag the Wikipolice as lazy or uninformed. Anyone who spends their free time reverting bad edits on Wikipedia cannot but hold ‘exhaustiveness’ as a virtue.
Second, and more importantly, Google does not deal in truth at all. Like the cognitivists, the search engine giant has taken the pragmatic view that truth is immaterial – relevance is where it’s at.
On Google, the search for meaning ends when some presumption of relevance is satisfied (a feat normally achieved within a range of 10 hits) and not, say, once every option has been reviewed. Google has relevance theory, or something like it, at its core. There is a constructivist turn in the famous PageRank algorithm, too: Google bombs make it clear how contextual clues like anchor text (the words attached to a link) are ultimately what defines an object – that is, barring any manual editing. And the power John Battelle attributes to the database of intentions does not require searchers to become epistemologists, but simply to click on the link that looks good enough.
But pragmatic realism (if I’m using the appropriate term) is still realism. Google makes no claim about serving us reality, but nonetheless manages to produce ‘reality effects’. And Nietzsche still hates it:
Only as creators!— This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body: what at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such! How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality”! We can destroy only as creators!— But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things”. — The Gay Science, Book II (section 58).
In ditching ‘Truth’, Google is able to present itself as a demystifying agent, a poster child for a techno-libertarian worldview. But as Nietzsche says, we can destroy only as creators. So the question is not about truth, but what exactly Google has created in its place.
How relevant can we make the spinplant? [Try this: link to the non-page http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinplant with the anchor text ‘spinplant‘]
Update — “But let us not forget this either” … Premediating a Wikipedia entry is not the only way to get things done, and Laura has created some more pages for us to link to.
spinplant [http://www.lauravdv.nl/spinplant.html] and spinplant [http://home.student.uva.nl/laurina.vandervlies/spinplant.html]
This blog is a real magnet for pingback spam lately. While I’d like to take it as a sign of our growing popularity, that would be like being flattered by calls from telemarketers. Also, it probably says more about the arms race between spammers and spam-filters: the trend for a while now is for spammers is to use RSS feeds to syndicate. Now excerpts from our blog posts end up on spamblogs, where spammers include Google Ads and wait for the money to roll (or trickle) in. It’s all automated, and ends up looking like this:
But here’s the interesting point. Two years ago, Google implemented the nofollow html attribute to prevent this very same comment spam. Nofollow is the default setting for comments on blogging platforms, meaning links placed in blog comments (including pingbacks) do not ‘count’ in search engine rankings. It is overwhelmingly obvious that as a prevention mechanism, it simply doesn’t work – spamblogs and comment spam are just too easy and cheap. What nofollow does do, though, is help keep Google’s search engine rankings stable. If Google is serious about preventing comment spam, wouldn’t it make more sense to prevent these guys and girls from getting accounts on Google Ads?
Is Nietzsche’s Madman not a parable that is still appliable to the world of today? Let’s have a look and see for ourselves;
—-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I found God! I found God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Did you search? asked one. Or were you feeling lucky? asked another. —Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have Googled him—you and I. All of us are his finders. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God was lost, but has now been Googled.
Web 2.0 gave the old web a brand new face, and with that, it added cultural and technological changes. Cultural change in the form of weblogging and social networking/bookmarking, technological in the form of User Generated Content and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
For a change a want to address the latter. Because I’ve got the feeling that there is a cold war going on between Microsoft and Adobe, in their attempt to lure in designers and developers and to make them choose their RIA-products.
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends”
This quote applied to current weblogs/ blogculture what would be Nietzsche’s philosophical view on this web2.0 experience? Assuming this statement, would he approve of this personal medium as a way of expressing oneself?
What Nietzsche meant by this quote was that a writer must not think only of himself during his writing for his product must be read by others too. That way, his text will speak to more people and his books will be read more. (more…)
This tool makes a selection based on the categories you have selected. First, you have to register and install the toolbar, then you will be able to ‘stumble upon’ a collection of new inspirational sites.
Stumble upon is similar to Google’s ‘I feel lucky’ search, but it searches randomly in a pool of selected themes. This pool is replenished by the users of Stumbleupon, who have rated (like / dislike) websites they came across. It’s like zapping through the internet…
For now, I stumbled upon the following sites, which are now part of my pool of favourite websites.
http://www.iconfinder.net/index.php?q=internet
http://www.findsounds.com/
http://yugop.com/index.asp
http://www.sloganizer.net/en/
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/drum
http://www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic/
The Internet has brought up a lot of privacy issues over the years. For example personal information that leaks or identities that get stolen. But users can also change their own identity and pretent to be someone else. This tendency towards less privacy fits one of Friedrich Nietzsches quotes.
‘No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’
No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878)
Internet activism is having a profound impact on how we perceive and conceive of social and political relations on local and global scales. Growing communities bring their views online with them. The internet can sustain counterhegemonic discourses; people who are swimming against the tide of public opinion. Because of the all the online community networks who are out there, it is easy to find other people who are like-minded. This is especially usefull for people who are surpressed for who they are or what they think. But then it is a necessity that they have the right tools to organize, and that they know how to use these. (more…)
The current web 2.0 and the participatory culture are seen as the next big thing. Still, even after the participatory culture has proven to be able to build great things, Wikipedia amongst others, not everybody seems convinced of its value.
An interesting question would be to ask how philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have felt about our participatory culture. At first glance, he doesn’t seem too impressed with the ability of the masses to create anything, except for chaos:
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”[1]
This week’s assignment made us compare new media issues to Nietzsche quotes. I came across the following quote:
This quote immediately triggered the post-modern idea of differance, that all meaning gets postponed and that one will never get to the original intended meaning of a message. When you transfer this derridian idea to the internet, you will find that because of the intertextual behaviour of the web makes it really hard, if not impossible, to trace texts back to their original source. If you takes this fact as a given, it will theoretically devaluate all hypertext to interpretations, unless they cite their original non-digital (thus verifiable) sources.
Washmountain AKA together in my freezer.
Music made by Extraboy.
Video by Rosa Menkman.
This video was made the night before we went to The Video Vortex conference in Brussels.
Click
To see the video!
but it only works when you click on the post first.
Friday evening at Video Vortex in Brussels, Ana Kronschnabl and Tomas Rawlings showed “a selection of exceptional, witty and provoking Internet videos, compiled for the occassion by international and local guests”, which can be seen here. Most of us had already seen those videos and in class we wondered why they only showed the ‘most popular’ movies – those that had already become a meme. Especially because on the conference the speakers talked a lot about the re-use and re-mixability of existing content. The website 53 o’s for instance, is a website that explores this remixing. 100 meter marquee is my favorite.
Life Planetarium cosmic stars by Virtual Media planets tai chi relax chill
Inspire Space Park – Ultra chill space destination in Shinda
Shinda 60, 201, 218 (PG) inspire space park
Would Nietzsche have liked it? Probably yes. Doing the Jelly at Shinda, a planetary in space located in Second Life, where you can tai-chi, float and slowdance while snowflakes worn on pelvis shattering around and where indeed, God is very much dead.
In his first book, Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) Nietzsche discusses the Greek tragedy.
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“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann)
Nietzsche did not prefer men as an average being. In ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ he claims to consider men as a necessary step between the evolution of apes towards the Übermensch. In this book, Nietzsche refers to Zarathustra, a mythical Persian prophet who proclaimed to be the founder of Zoroastrism (Persian state-religion). This religion carried out a dualistic message between good and evil. According to Zarathustra, the best decision was to choose the spiritual being, which was forbidden to be portrayed. This was the one and only god (a divine Übermensch), and all the other gods were half-gods.
The concept of the Übermensch brings me to the notion of the databody, which is a body of personal data (an extensive profile) that is constructed by means of connecting databases. This body could be the next stage towards the realization of Nietzsche’s’ Übermensch. Steve Kurtz introduced the databody, which he referred to as the fascist sibling of the virtual body.
With the virtual body came its fascist sibling, the data body-a much more highly developed virtual form, and one that exists in complete service to the corporate and police state. (Steve Kurtz)
This concept and the notion of the Übermensch have fascist connotations. To clarify the notion of the databody and to relate it to men, I will be making use of a metaphor and will be referring to the image. To my opinion, the databody has more authority in making decisions that involve the government’s approval, then its human counterpart. For example, in case of an incorrect administrative data entry, a database gets corrupted (a corrupt databody) and someone could be denied to cross the border. This is why I am relegating to men as sometimes living in the shade of the databody. To conclude, the databody got rid of (bestially) emotions, which makes it less evolved than men kind, but – in Nietzsche’s sense – made a big step towards becoming an Übermensch.
This weekend Masters of Media visited Video Vortex in Brussels. Video Vortex is a recurring conference, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures and mainly focuses on the independent production and distribution of online video content. This time, the conference was concentrated on a couple questions of which one was: How are people utilizing the potential to independently produce and distribute independent video content on the Internet?
One of the speakers at the conference that tried to answer this question from a very personal point of view was the artist Peter Horvath. Peter Horvath works in video, sound, photo and new media. “Camera in hand since age 6, he inhaled darkroom fumes until his late 20’s, then began exploring time based art processes. He immersed himself in digital technologies at the birth of the Web, co-founded 6168.org, a site for net.art and adopted techniques of photo montage which he uses in his net and print based works.”
In his presentation, Peter gave a short introduction into his work and then showed a very beautiful selection. One of them, Tenderly yours (2005), stood out for me. In this work, Peter “resituates the personal, casual and ambiguous approach of French new wave cinema in a net.art narrative that explores love, loss and memory.” (more…)
German video maker Simon Ruschmeyer explores the borderline areas between traditional audiovisual narration and the new possibilities given by interactivity and networked communication. He explores this interface between classical moving media (film/video) and new interactive forms (web/media art) both in theory and in practice. Ruschmeyer has realized many video projects and has recently finished his paper “The moving Web – Forms and Functions of Moving Images on the Web.” At Video Vortex Ruschmeyer talks about The Artist Moving (through) the Web – New Forms of Artist Production and Distribution on the Web. The two topics he addresses are moving web video characteristics and the artist 2.0. In relation to the subtitle of this conference, Responses to YouTube, Ruschmeyer addresses the significance of YouTube by focusing on the artist.
<update>This project got quite a few positive responses, and many universities were interested in their own ‘profiles’. But the best was an endorsement by Virgil, who created the WikiScanner. He’s now made the Wikiscanner mashable, making this kind of research easier to do! – Michael 19.10.07</ update>
Under the banner of the Digital Methods Initiative, Erik and I have been working on a project called Repurposing the Wikiscanner. The following is an introduction to the project and the first of two case studies: this one deals with the presence of Dutch universities on Wikipedia, including how much they ‘anonymously’ contribute and the kinds of articles they edit. In the conclusion I suggest that the Wikiscanner, with some modifications, could prove a valuable tool for researching ‘local’ aspects of Wikipedia production.
Introduction
The Wikiscanner ‘de-anonymizes’ edits on Wikipedia, linking IP addresses to the organizations and institutions where the edits were made. Released in August 2007, it was quickly taken up on the Web and in the media, and within days a number of high-profile cases of misconduct were revealed. These included unsavory edits by “the Al-Jazeera network, Fox News Channel, staffers of Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and the CIA” and, here in the Netherlands, a revelation that ‘the Royals’ were touching up their involvement in the Mabel affair.
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In this post I will try to show that Nietzsche’s thoughts and aphorisms are still relevant in a modern Web 2.0 world. I have chosen a quote which I think is surprisingly true in the age of internet and maybe became even more true when online social networks started to take flight.
“Der Irrsinn ist bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes, – aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel.”
Madness can be rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 156
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With every major city in Europe calling itself ‘creative capitol’ these days, the question raises how creative these cities really are and in what way they distinct themselves from others. In a ‘creative race’ between Asia, the US and Europe in mobile services and locative media, the latter seems to be a step behind.
Without going focusing too much on the question why (which I think is very useful!), Living Labs is an initiative that offers a method in improving the ‘creative power’ of Europe in mobile applications/ services. Their own description:
Living Labs Europe opens up the potentials of innovative mobile applications and technologies to European citizens, companies, researchers and investors for the purpose of pioneering mobile applications for European end-users and markets, enhance Attractiveness for visitors, residents, business and to provide a European platform for collaboration and opening innovative markets.
If we take this text through the management-talk-filter, what living labs is actually about is to take research and development from the dusty attics into the streets. Pinpointing some european regions with unique qualities and rapid adaptation towards new technologies, Living Labs is trying to enhance these regions by linking academic research, business, creative industry and end-user, but moreover, by linking different regions within Europe to share knowledge and spread innovation.
(more…)
The main question that was posed in this lecture was ‘Why is this conferention about Youtube, and not one of the other websites that allow people to watch video’s online?’ Because Youtube isn’t the first website that offers people to use videos and images in this manner. Take for instance plugincinema.com of pop.com. Been there, done that?
No, there is something special about Youtube that makes it as big as it is.
Ana Kronschnabl wrote a manifesto called pluginmanifesto which is based on the Dogme 95 manifesto that was written by filmmakers in 1995 to ‘express the goal of countering ‘certain tendencies’ towards ‘cosmetics’ over content in the cinema today’. Partly, the films made by these guidelines can be specifically used on the Web. Eventually, not much of this came true. So Kronschnabl decided to make a point, write a new manifesto and try to let us forget about all that Hollywood has taught us.
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The subtitle of this conference is Responses to YouTube, and at least one alternative to the world’s largest supplier of piano-playing-cat videos comes in the form of ‘soft video’, via Australian media scholar Adrian Miles.
Some of the questions he asks: Where does an online video end – at what point is it ‘complete’? Are those limits imposed by technology or are they lingering clichés of narrative form (as opposed to Manovich’s ‘database’)? Can online video be imagined differently, outside the frames of cinema and TV?
Television Killed the Video Star
The problem with web video now is that it is not television but acts as if it is. YouTube aligns itself with some aspects of TV: it doesn’t allow users to manipulate content, and owns content generated by users. Its affinity with TV is made most obvious by the fact that the site centers around popular TV content (making its biggest problem copyright laws).
On the other hand, Miles says, YouTube helps de-naturalize some industry assumptions about ‘quality’ TV – what good is high resolution version of the Colbert Report if everyone is watching it online anyway? It also promotes dynamic pathways through content, and merely by being popular it contributes to the development of Web video standards (not necessarily a bad thing).
Actualizing the Virtual with Soft Video
Adopting the language of Gilles Deleuze, Miles makes the case for rethinking video. He says that if YouTube is to survive, it will have to make its content granular: tagging scenes and shots, linking between them, making it easy to remix content at the level of the smallest possible unit.
By opening up video – through both industry decisions and by building better remix software – a space opens up for what Miles calls soft video. This would be a move away from what he calls teleological editing – that bane of narrative form that says you need a third act, a fitting conclusion. Rather, following the database form of the Web, online video could become something new (there is no ‘last page’ on the Internet, Miles jokes). The aesthetics of soft video would be less those of cinema or televison, and more those of music: rhythm and repetition, feel and tone. Soft video would not be shaped by a need for closure, and every movement ‘forward’ would open up new trajectories rather than shut them down. Soft video would actualize the virtual.
The following post is a combination of a transcription of Manovich’s keynote and my own notes and commentary.
Introduction by Geert Lovink
Online video is renegotiating its (problematic) relationship with cinema. It deals with cinematographic principles versus the principles of the online age. We cannot directly transfer the cinematographic principles into the online age as new media has its own specificities. YouTube is not just video on the web but YouTube is a natively digital object.
Ten years ago Lev Manovich proposed to consider the database as the (new) dominant media form. The database is the hegemonic media form online, as can be seen on YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and Google. We should think beyond technology now the database is also becoming a dominant social form. The database is shaping the social.
Wikipedia compiles a list of Internet phenomenons, categorized under people, bands, games, videos, animation-based, images, films, web sites, and audio. Accordingly, only a “sample of Internet phenomena that have achieved recognition in contexts wider than that of the Internet, such as coverage in the mainstream media”, are present on the list of Wikipedia’s Internet phenomena.
Little Fatty refers to an Internet phenomenon that started in China. In 2002, a photographer took a picture of a 16-year-old high school student, Qian Zhijun, who was attending a traffic safety class. The picture of this overweight boy with his antagonistic glance made its way on the Internet shortly afterwards. Internet users soon started distributing superimposed images of this boy’s face on iconic images such as Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, and movie posters. Qian Zhijun, best known as Little Fatty became China’s most popular household name overnight.
But Little Fatty only appears on the list of images, and is not acknowledged by Wikipedia as a person who became an Internet phenomen. The review log for the deletion of this entry suggested that there are new versions posted about Little Fatty as an Internet phenomenon; but they focussed on the meme, and not the person involved. However, these postings were removed according to the G4 criteria. For those who are not familiar with Wikipedia’s terminology, G4 refers to ” substantially identical copy, by any title, of an article that was deleted according to the deletion policy. This does not apply to content in userspace, content that was speedily deleted, or to content undeleted according to undeletion policy”.
As a first-time user of Wikipedia, I have no idea why the original posting of Little Fatty was deleted in the first place. So I return to where I started. My own presumption is that Little Fatty did not reach as much mainstream media coverages as the people listed on Wikipedia’s Internet phenomenon. If according to Wikipedia, the person in question should achieve recognition in mainstream media coverage, Little Fatty made it in China Daily, the Independent, the Sun (UK), Reuters, and other local Chinese newspapers. Those on the list of Internet phenomena appeared on at least 20 mainstream media, including American news sources such as Washingpost, CNN, Wall street Journal. Little Fatty never made it this big, at least not outside of China.