This page is no longer on this server…

The theorist George Landow, writing on Hypertext, urges us to forget the usual conceptual elements which hold language together and, instead, use new substitutes ‘such as multilinearity, nodes, links, or networks.’ Elements of syntax - and, when, so, or - are now converted to a range of physical manoeuvres: mouse up, mouse over, mouse down etc. A click now links us to our mediated world.’

In this new world the internet is often described as a virtual landscape without a horizon but, with the average lifespan of a website measured in months rather than years, in practice it has surprisingly many broken links/dead-ends. Although the web links us to snapshots of ‘history’ in unlimited supply, it has no memory - just a post saying ‘this page is no longer on this server…’ When going ‘back’ is really going sideways, we can only link, in endless configurations of synchronicity, to the present.

This change to narrative structures is not a new phenomena; technology has always influenced the way we visually navigate our world. The narratives of story telling, songs and pictograms were gradually outmoded by the technological developments of the 19th Century. Walter Benjamin, writing at the time, describes a moving away from the traditional links of language - the narratives of story telling etc. were being replaced by the mechanically reproduced image which, like ‘mini explosions’, were displayed as photographs, cinema clips and so on.

Perhaps the link on the webpage is today’s mini explosion – each click takes us into a new realm: a new page, image or sonic experience. Web designer Peter Luining has created a site, clickclub, which is without content except link buttons, another web artist recently produced a faux porn site where, upon entering, you are shown a provocative image of a naked body with the genitals covered by a link button. Each time you click on the button you open another window with increasingly fractured images of naked bodies and more buttons…. You never get to the fully naked body. On this site, the frustration is two-fold, it reminds us of how we consume the visual image and how, like channel surfing, the link has become the fetish itself… constantly zapping to capture what we might be missing.

The question we ask; in our broadband, Wi Fi, Bluetooth linked world; is there anything left to miss?…

8 comments

Escapade Solitude

Apart from all the negative and positive connotation to the various terms thrown up in the article above, which we could argue forth and back already, I appreciate the views expressed in it. However I am not too happy about stating things and leaving the mentioned in the open without creating context around it. So I cease the opportunity to create (my) context.

The internet, as it seems to be the main focus of the statement, has its context - with positive and negative sides (who’s to judge?) - and is not just an accumulation of links. It is not simply clicking for the sake of instant reward and it is not some ‘space’ inhabited by nerds and shopping fanatics and ebay junkies. The internet is a platform, providing us with tools of incredible power, but only as long as we switch it off again. To draw a reference: I grew up with a TV in the house and although my parents never told us to, it never was and never will be a problem for me to switch it off. Neither TV nor Internet is to blame for the superficial surfing of its users rather than diving deep into a subject matter.

Why do I state the obvious? Because, funnily enough, it is not obvious anymore. I think the phenomenon of our strange electronic addictions (internet, TV, mobile phones, . . .) is to be seen in the wider context of our society. The article above is closely interlinked with both other blogs (about design politics and the slow society) and all of them have the same roots. I will go out on a limb here and say that we - as society - are currently missing the point of ourselves. (society = western society, the one that has access to all those tools to make this a better place, and also there are exemptions). I should really leave it right there and wait for hate-mail, but I will try to justify my statement a little.

We all know that life seems to speed up. We have access to many more things, we can travel everywhere, we call ourselves a global community, we are constantly connected. Life in London is a good example for that. It is extremely fast, it is extremely fascinating, it is full of cultural excitement, it offers a lot of attraction and also distraction. Great! Well - ok - there are high living costs, but we can put up with this (for the moment at least). So one starts to soak it up, to be involved, to know what is going on, to follow and dismiss trends, to interact, to connect and it is great, and it is exciting. There is energy, there is ‘a vibe’, there is a committed community! Although this may sound cynical, it actually is not! It is the most important thing one should go through if interested in urbanity and the life in it. You cannot, and if you want to survive will not, switch off. Also, there is no time to switch off! Possibilities are endless, and one is drawn from flame to flame. All these flames are energy which give you more insight and let you shine even brighter.

(For all the ones who have not gone through anything like it yet: Stop reading here! Everything that comes now could be used as an excuse for you to stay put and not engage. And consequently you will never experience the fascination of pace and cultural density!)

A slightly more critical look at the scenario mentioned above: In a high-energy environment like this, one starts to shine. The question is though: Am I really an energy source myself or am I merely reflecting other light sources, maybe adding a little bit to the overall glow. Am I swimming, or am I drifting with the flow. In order to find this out one has to seek distance. One has to disengage, disconnect and place oneself into a certain nothingness.

‘Escapade solitude’, as I would call it.

Human beings are social beings. And if you give them the means to connect to each other, they will use them. And it is good. But great things come from solitude. Great appreciation for community comes from solitude and it is in solitude that you take the time to work on subjects and issues yourself think are important. A great typographer, who lives quite far off the cultural ‘hot spots’, once told me to slow down and take enough time to prevent sedimentation of information from happening. I thought about this statement a lot in recent times and noted quite a few things, which distract me and don’t allow me to focus. The internet, email, mobile phone and TV are certainly part of it, and it is difficult to disengage. Solitude (not to be taken literally, but contextually - deliberately slowing down is, in this context, also solitude) is not an instinct, but it is a necessity. It needs to be learned and practiced. It can be done in any context as long as you’re able to switch off yourself. Don’t expect the TV to do this for you!

/Paulus 29/06/2005

the hypertext allows for a more holistic, exploratory form of writing and reading. it takes away the necessity of hierarchical left to right, top to bottom, front to back by leading us on linked sidetracks, related pages, pop up windows. they may come back to the ‘main’ page, or not.

interesting are also the wikipedias that are evolving all over the net; wikis are editable documents:
“Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content upon which no legal restriction has been placed that significantly interferes with people’s freedom to use, redistribute, improve, and share the content.”
Giving a new notion to authorship and shared knowledge/copyright.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content

Theoretic physicist David Bohm wrote “We must learn to view everything as part of undivided wholeness in flowing movement[in order to reach new realms]. A new kind of mind (…) begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-establisehed purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.”
(Unfolding Meaning, David Bohm, Routledge, Kegan+Paul, London, 1985, p.175)

/Adriana 29/06/2005

“Also, there is no time to switch off! Possibilities are endless, and one is drawn from flame to flame. All these flames are energy which give you more insight and let you shine even brighter…In a high-energy environment like this, one starts to shine. The question is though: Am I really an energy source myself or am I merely reflecting other light sources, maybe adding a little bit to the overall glow. Am I swimming, or am I drifting with the flow. In order to find this out one has to seek distance. One has to disengage, disconnect and place onesef into a certain nothingness.”

I’m not sure that one can ‘place oneself into nothingness’ - one withdraws and always in this new place (literal or not) starts to make new connections, links, friends…and so we come back to Paulus again…”Human beings are social beings. And if you give them the means to connect to each other, they will use them.” This process isn’t cyclical, or cyclonic, but rhizomatic - the links spring up anywhere, endlessly, in new formations ad infinitum.

Is the question really not about whether the link ‘links’ or not, but the quality of the link, whether it endures once the attention is flitting elsewhere. Candles, in the end, snuff out.

/Phillipe 11/07/2005

in ref to the above point about whether the little oases of ‘connection’ that are made can survive once the link has taken one elsewhere…well, one could obviously think about this in terms of human relations, but I think it’s worth thinking about in relation to Paulus’ point that that “Neither TV nor Internet is to blame for the superficial surfing of its users rather than diving deep into a subject matter.”
I can’t agree less.

In Neil Postman’s highly readable book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ he tells us that it isn’t the programmes on tv that are ‘in the sense they dumb us down’ but the words ‘And now for something else’…namely the links between, which suggest that everything that has just gone before is irrelevant now…for Postman, on the news ‘And finally…’ (usually followed by a pregnant dophin story or the like) is the worst offender.

/Ralph 11/07/2005

Paulus - why ‘escapade’ solitude?

/Anna Leighton 11/07/2005

The idea of the rhizomatic linking format brought up by Philippe is interesting because it reflects the wiki notion that Adriana discusses.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tell us in “A Thousand Plateuas: capitalism and schizophrenia” (1996) that ‘Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be…’ they link rhizomes intricately to the idea of plateaus, and tell us that ‘A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus…’ Of the book itself, they tell us ‘We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus…Each morning we would wake up and each of us would ask himself, what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like a column of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau.”

It’s criminal to use the work of Deleuze and Guattari - not least so out of context - but the rhizome idea does provide and interesting metaphor for thinking about contemporary communication.
For instance, it brings to mind the way that blogs develop…they seem to be exploring some of the ‘new dynamic relationships’ that Adriana quotes David Bohm on.
For instance, having read all of the comments in the Limited Language blogs, what comes to the fore is how topics cross-over, collide and link. Some participants having pointed this out - and choosing on occasion to use one post to talk about an adjacent one. Ideas, then, not only link, but cross-fertilise (or whatever metaphor we might want to use). Paulus makes a comment to this affect ‘The article above is closely interlinked with both other blogs (about design politics and the slow society) and all of them have the same roots.’

Adriana points out that wikis are ‘Giving a new notion to authorship and shared knowledge/copyright.’ If Limited Language were, even, to have a very small part in these sorts of explorations, we’d be pleased.

Moreover, it isn’t just traditional modes of conceptualising writing (or its relation to the author audience) which the rhizomatic metaphor helps us re-think. It’s quite useful to help us think about visual communication.

For, here, too, it helps us move discussion away from the restricting confines of the author/audience dualism so often used. Designers thinking of themselves as part of a rhizomatic structure gives a useful perspective for a few reasons. As Deleuze points out, ‘A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. ‘ The rhizome metaphor gets rid of the idea that communication is a dialogue between two points… It gets designers to think of themselves as nodes in a network of communication - portals through which meanings pass and, briefly, take shape.

Here, the designers themselves are not the plateaus, but the work - be it visual or written - in which, depending on the connections that have been made, a particular mini-narrative comes to the fore.

These mini-narratives are perhaps less spectacular than Walter Benjamin’s ‘mini explosions’, for he uses the term to express something concentrated and dynamic i.e. a cinema clip - rather like anger which builds up until it explodes). Nonetheless, they are dynamic in the sense that they are open to change…

/Monika and Colin 12/07/2005

ralph-” ‘And now for something else’…namely the links between, which suggest that everything that has just gone before is irrelevant now…for Postman, on the news ‘And finally…’ (usually followed by a pregnant dophin story or the like) is the worst offender.”

More on the negative side of links and de-structured language.
ever heard BBC radio 7? It is full of great and rarely heard comedy, usually repeats but from a very broad spectrum. listening on the web, where you have sought out the programme and chosen it out of evrything else on offer, rather than taking what the radio has given you, even then at the end of the show there will be a presenter openly scorning what you have just heard, with a big paly grin in his voice; something along the lines of ” …And that was King Cutler, first aired in 19?? on Radio ?, featurering the…unique!…voice of Ivor Cutler…What’s He On I wonder?…”
All the joy of following threads goes when you are hit with things like that. Ricky Gervais says he doesn’t like jokes ‘because you don’t know where they’ve been’, and listening to clips with their little tags on either end have something of that. They carry a context with them, and the same with pop-ups, porn or advertising, where ‘irrelevant’ content can be thrown at you, on the back of a clicked link, Trojan horses of one sort or another.

/wbs 13/07/2005

In November 2009 we released the book ‘Limited Language: Rewriting Design: Responding to a feedback culture’ which re-engaged with this original post.

For more on the book as a whole: http://bit.ly/bookcomments

Monika + Colin

/colin 15/11/2009

write a comment

we encourage people to recycle your comments in their own research as we may collage them into our own writing with the aim to publish the resulting articles (any post eventually used will be credited). We encourage comments to be 200 words or more.

line and paragraph breaks automatic. e-mail address will never be displayed. html allowed: <a href=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>