More fire-exercises from the platoons who have taken up residence across the street. They have set up two camouflaged observation/guard posts and are firing from these positions towards the rail-road tracks, their comrades playing insurgents, firing pretend mortars from 200 meters away. The mis-en-scene is completed with colored smoke screens and a sniper who sets up in the tumbleweed.

In the evening I end up at the Wendover Night Club, what could be called a seedy joint in the corner of The Plaza strip mall that includes, what else, a stripper club complete with an Italian-looking bouncer sitting on a stool at the door, cigarette hanging from his mouth; there’s a Chinese restaurant, a smoke shop, and a computer gaming store.

I end up going to the Night Club because last week, one evening, I could hear some loud what I would term proto-Mariachi music playing within earshot of the residency. I put off going to check it out, but finally out of curiosity I drove in the direction of the music. End up four blocks away in one of the old airbase buildings. I pull up to see a group of swarthy-looking Latino guys hanging out. The music has stopped. I don’t know what they were thinking when I came up, gringo in shorts with white Crocs on, at any rate, turns out they are a band, Caxcanes Musical, most of the members are from the Mexican state of Zacatecas (the Caxcan are an indigenous group: Los caxcanes, lidereados por Tenamaxtle, peleaban bajo el lema ¡Ashcanquema tehual nehual! ‘¡Hasta tu muerte o la mía!’. Y el lema se cumplió, tanto en el triunfo como en la derrota. Ante la desproporcionada respuesta de los invasores, los guerreros prefirieron morir lanzándose al vacío.) I chat with them for a bit and though I’m sure they are thinking el gringo loco, they seem pleased at my enthusiasm and invite me to catch them at the Club in the Plaza.

I’m clearly the only gringo at the Club — at least I can order in Spanish! And I get there on time, as I don’t want to miss the show. On time from the time the guy gave me when I get to the empty Club at nine pm. He says the music starts at ten pm. He didn’t tell me there are three warm-up bands — or groups, not to be confused with bands. I hang out nursing a Coors. At any rate, I survived the first group, Tambura los Primos — audio is extant, then my memory card filled up on the H4 and I couldn’t figure out how to properly erase files to clear up space for the other groups. The whole scene was quite cool — clearly a rural audience, the guys with their really pointy shit-kickers and Stetsons, dancing with their gals in a stilted waltz move with the arms and hands never quite intertwined. Reminded me of country-folk in Finnish Lapland doing the tango on Midsummer’s night parties. Anyway, a fun evening, and I think they will play again on Cinco de Mayo which actually be on the second of May before I split for nether regions.

CLUI residency looms on a completely other tectonic regime. Travel to that point will traverse no zenith, instead will follow flat-lying salt-pans after The Canyon and other intense impingements on the eyeballs. While the volcano simmers on Fimmvörthuháls, Ice Land.

“When stars form, they form from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. And in the process of the gas and dust falling in, it doesn’t fall directly in — it sort of spirals in slowly,” Fazio says.

He adds understanding a star’s formation may someday help astronomers understand the formation of our galaxy. “How did we get here, and where are we going? That’s what we are trying to understand.”

Seems to be a basic couple questions. Both which eliminate religion from view when religion posits irrefutable answers to both, without exception. And which suggests the social role of science (what else is there?) approaching the same role as religion. The feigned disentangled observer in science is immersed in such wide pursuit while playing with little bits of material: traces of answer to those questions. Or merely caught in the race that dominates this time — that between religion and science. One proceeding from apparent Truth, the other converging on it.

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is (wistful) wasteful or even dangerous.

Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever. It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.

… back to the road …

The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!

The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.

The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

Selling individual vision to an Other: convincing, forming mental models that will allow compelling suasion; pressing opinions, argument, elegant frameworks; all constructed with language, words, characters, academic form, journalistic style, flaccid prose, basic text, with footnotes or hyperlinks; bibliographic references to other words, other texts: but where is a praxis? Praxis weakens to a barely-lived presence fighting to become in a dominant social structure of insipid spectacle that maintains the attentions of a vast majority of the population. Those being watched increase in number to challenge that of the passive watchers. In many cases the passive watchers are the watched, and vice-versa. The consumption of the passive watchers is expansive, limitless, a whorish gaping maw willing to not just taste, but to gorge on anything that is mediocre, maudlin, bland, and self-serving; safe, pre-digested, pureed, and acceptable. Worked over. ‘urrrrp’

Indigestible fodder, poison, anathema, bloating farce, and gaseous prophesy.

The world is drowning in verbiage.

All protocols lead to artifice.

without framing the precise context, a couple quick notes to Rob, regarding the Internet of Things (IOT) and social pro-activity:

and

Men’s opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable or blamable, are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which are as numerous as those which determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their reason — at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly, their desires or fears for themselves — their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest. Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. . . . Where, on the other hand, a class, formerly ascendant, has lost its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is unpopular, the prevailing moral sentiments frequently bear the impress of an impatient dislike of superiority. Another grand determining principle of the rules of conduct, both in act and forbearance which have been enforced by law or opinion, has been the servility of mankind towards the supposed preferences or aversions of their temporal masters, or of their gods. This servility though essentially selfish, is not hypocrisy; it gives rise to perfectly genuine sentiments of abhorrence; it made men burn magicians and heretics. — John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

Yes, definitely, opinion is affected by the directions of the wind. And add to the multifarious causes the role that contemporary media plays in opinion-forming. Counter-pointed by the influence that the controlling figures in those social media structures have — all as a result of the face-time, the attention spent by individuals on those channels of ‘information.’ It is precisely this passivity, or servility, as Mill calls it that forms the kernel of power in every regime or social organization.

In the contemporary framework of human encounter — dominated by instances of hyper-commerce and of tele-mediated presence — life changes to fit the mediation (it does not evolve in the same sense that Darwin’s idea of the process; instead it simply fits the technology), and the character of encounter with(in) life alters for each shift in the techno-social milieu that collectively generates the allowed pathways of exchange. Freedom is not a question in this situation. Nor is autonomy. Those are absolutes of the abstract: virginal conceptions not directly related to the contingencies of be-ing in and of the world. Absolutes and abstractions do not prepare the Self for the shifting potentialities of collective human encounter which proceed by degree and layered complexity. And indeed, when abstractions govern encounter, the full field of possibility of human encounter is quickly limited to a much-less-than-finite set of conditions, processes, and outcomes. There arises the alienation of emotive loss in this limitation, but that is another issue to raise elsewhere. Or perhaps this alienation is the reciprocal experience of the (unfulfilled) possibilities of creative encounter.

Or is all this just about losing or gaining procreative (evolutionary) advantage for the species (via technological augmentation), and nothing more?

The fact that the strongest, most beautiful, most intelligent are, overall, given social reward when compared to the least. (Recognizing this, the revolutionary community organizer, Jesus, said (as interpolated by Mathew) “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” to invert the perception of this evolutionary order, and the alternative fact that following his lead will actually alter the order. Was this a miraculous strike at limited potentialities? Or mere agitprop for political expediency?

Mills, using the key word, power, sketches out the relation between the individual and small groupings of people and their often problematic relation to those exercising power within The State. It is the terms abuse of power and exercising power which are most intriguing. What do they actually mean? I believe they are derived not from abstracted political relationships, but rather actualized movements of energy, deflected through socially-constructed pathways of relation, that may be read as the substance of the social system itself.

Power is yielded to some and stripped from others in a social system. It is apparently concentrated in the hands of some, and depleted from the reach of others. The State is one operational field or framework for the circulation or movement of power: the social system actually is the cumulative expression of re-configured energy flows. The State can only be the sum of energy expressed by the individual participants in it. When the participant in a social system is measured, the next reasonable step is that the results of that applied metric are used to place that individual within a scalar array of productive potential within the equation of state. All of this is predicated on the actual framework of what a social system is — a way of establishing a set of relations of power between individuals. (Back to the architecture of the continuum of relation — where the minimum granular unit, the individual, is in array with a certain number of other individuals in immediate relation. These minimum units of relations are replete with complex flows of individual life-time/life-energy: body energy expressed to maintain viability, needs filled by necessity.) Abuse of power is the routine deflection of flows of those energies in the service of maintaining some minimum order beneficial to a subset of individuals in a social system and conversely detrimental to the viability of others.

A democratic state should not be about anything else but the active facilitation of the viability of all participants, without exception. All concentrations of power should be directed in the service of this ideal, and great effort should be made to minimize the degree of concentrations of power with subsets of individuals of the system. That is, individuals must not surrender their autonomy to wider-scale State-sponsored reorganizations of power flows. [hehe, this sounds like an anarchists credo or at least a libertarian view of State -- with the qualification that it should be undertaken with deep thought and consequent action in the field of human obligations as opposed to human rights.]

All of this is not to say that there is a simplistic mathematical formula by which the State might be circumscribed, although this is often done. As with any abstracted model of complex systems, the State can be re-presented to varying degrees of accuracy. (The current obsession with The Market, as a hyper-simplistic model of the abstracted relations going on between nine billion people globally is a good example of the usefulness and the uselessness of such models — how well does this model circumscribe what is actually going on between peoples in the world? The unquestioned belief that the activities of the Market accurately indicate the status of relation and suggest ways to alter the character of those relations is both true but also very, very false.)

The ‘people’ who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the ‘self-government’ spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

… the practical question, where to place the limit — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. — John Mills, “On Liberty”

The confusion of the two nature’s and the consequent operation of the social system based on the results of this confusion is probably a chief factor in the inhumanity displayed within and at the edges (of power) of social systems predicated on such mistaken conceptions.

Mills does not examine the actualizations of energy that are the instruments or carriers of inter-personal exchanges of power. In order for his ideas (the liberties of thought) to be properly mapped back onto reality, they need to be connected to or mapped across the activated and dynamic matrix of flow, imho. This, combined with an exploration of the dynamic of human expressive activities where collective discourse and exchange takes place and where one becomes “capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience.” This process of change arrives “not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.” Enter the widened definition of dialogue, where the sharing of life-energies/life-times becomes the matrix for change.

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.

The distinction of human and machinic was a product of materialist thinking which detached the human being from the system of applied flows that the machinic imposes on the world. It is thus easier, mentally, for humans to imagine that there was a master/slave relationship between themselves and that ‘other’ world of technology: that they controlled the technology. This is clearly demonstrated to be a fallacious historical and contemporary view of that relation. Instead the relation is immersive, affective, and it is especially distortive of human-to-human relation. By distortive, going back to basic assumptions about technology, I mean that each expression of technology (which can more-or-less easily be seen as separate for the purposes of analysis of this affect), is seen to apply a set of conditioned flows of power (energy) in its genesis, operation, action, existence, and dissolution. These conditioned flows are formative of ‘natural’ energy flows which occur any/everywhere including between humans.

Right off, Ellul attacks the commonly held belief that there is a particular boundary between technology and science which, though historically indistinct and presently contentious is a fabrication. He contends that the domain of science, beyond “hypothesis and theory” cannot exist without technology. This is at least one small step in realizing that human presences and actions should not divided into arbitrary categories, but considered holistically and in concert with all other fields/flows that are present.

Neither science nor technology can exist without an originary research which is the process of experiencing and re-membering the flows that exist around us. That is, science and technology both rely on the basic functions of the human experiencing of the world, the reception of sensual energies that supply a psychical representation of that world. Science looks for the initial repetition of pattern, relying on memory (in some form) to overlay repeated patterns of flow. When there is a correspondence of flow re-membered, this is duly noted in resonant neural energy patterns in mind. Technology relies on this same re-membering of the flows that surround the social species, but, critically, moves one step ahead (affecting fundamental structures to the social): it applies the (collective) memory of those flows to alter those flows in congruence or consequence to those observed patterns. This is a critical difference, and one that easily circumscribes the relationship of the two ‘fields’ which are framed as distinct but inter-related, rendering them as simply two terms distinguishing similar patterns of human activity. Ellul calls them an “ensemble of means.”

This application of alteration and affectation, along with its resultant refined patterns of energy flow, become, as an cumulative expression of the presence of the human, the fabric of sociality itself.

My approach to technology is not about a return to Nature in that romantic or even Luddite sensibility, but instead, it is a wider understanding or impression of first what the cost is of the totality of altered flows that we as a life-form have imposed on the world, and then, more deeply, what does it mean that we, as simply another expression of life on the earth, have come to where we are as that life-form. Consequent decisions may then be made — to participate or not in certain of these defined energy flows. (more on that later!)

Discussion of the technological cannot exist simply in the realm of the technical or scientific, as the applied alterations to flows of energy as well as their affectations on the wider milieu cannot be completely (or accurately) circumscribed through numeracy.

I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, poli means people, ticks are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.

When slipping into an unknown (participatory) situation, immersing, the senses are in full-open configuration to read potential threats, opportunities, and possible pathways of expression. A process of extremely rapid differential comparison of patterns of flow occurs. In the subset of those situations that may be defined as having socio-cultural frameworks present, there is an explicit search within the Self for existing protocols of behavior — an awareness of resonant regions where known protocols have been internalized previously as emphatic neural patterns, and an awareness of dissonant points where protocols are unrecognized, unformed, or, literally, without meaning. What the hell is going on here?

Participation is a crucial role in any social system. As the reciprocal action to the projection of structured (participatory) situations by an Other, participation is half of a whole. It is in relation to the applied and, by nature, limited (imposed, proffered) situation. Without participation, a participatory social framework is no source of energy/power to be projected outward in fulfillment of the goals of the wider social system. Participation, whether understood to be explicit or implicit, is a tacit acknowledgment that the goals of the social system are acceptable to the participant. It also provides the system with its primary energy source in the form of the (attentive) life-time/life-energy of the participant.

On a side note, this is one of the weakest points in the deployment of numerous online playgrounds. Much thought is put into user-interface design, and the protocols of participation, but little is given to the actuality of there needing to be a set of active participants available and willing to put their life-energy into that particular protocol. A well-designed system of protocols, one that resonates with participants at the same time as allowing sufficient degrees of expressive freedom (from those existing protocols) will attract users. It appears that the algorithm-hunters at FaceBook are quite adept and put their highest goal to simply keep the user in FaceBook, whatever it takes. Stripped of artifice and pretense, it is a Machiavellian strategy, but one that makes total sense. All roads lead to Rome: good for the Roman Empire.

Take, for example the idea of sharing a photograph online. If one examines the layered protocols that exist and, in a very real way, direct the flows of energy. First there is the scene to be photographed. There is a set of energy flows available within that situation — which actually constitute the situation. The eye receives a sub-set of those energies, based on the evolutionary protocols of the eye. The brain senses a range of resonances and dissonances of affect of that impinging energy. Based on those reactions, combined with the awareness of a pre-existing concept of taking a photograph, one picks up the techno-socially constructed device called a camera. A small room with a hole on one side. The room (in this era) is a small and complex compilation of energy pathways which allow control of the hole and of the Light energy entering the hole from the outside. The complexity of the cumulative pathways are defined by a tremendous range of interlocking protocols developed by the Techno-Social system. Industrial standards are an expression of one level of the protocols along with basic social standards (which are the substance of the social system!) which accrete as a system (of human relation) evolves. The Light energy entering the hole is convolved with this set of pathways (through the CCD at the back of the room and a data transmission/storage system, etc — one can breakdown the system into numerous sub-systems each with a related set of quite rigid protocols-of-production). It is useful to keep in mind that the originary energy apprehended from the phenomenal scene has initiated this entire process and though it is reduced through the action of the protocols, it is still present (in another form if you need that material metaphor).

Compressing the numerous iterations of the step-wise process for the sake of brevity, the image file is transferred to a server which is connected to other connected devices which allows for an Other to receive the reduced trace of that originary energy.

It cannot be underestimated the affect on the originary flow of energy phenomena that the complex layering of protocols applies by the time the final radiation reaches the eyes of the Other. Without doing an in-depth study of all the device(s) involved in the process, it may not seem so overwhelming, but indeed, each sub-system and sub-sub-system has an entire prescribed set of protocols which precisely define how that device reacts to the passage of energy through it. The protocols are the result of more and more finely refining the production processes and begin with the particular processes that are imposed on the concentration of materials as they are pulled from the ground (no to mention those necessary for finding where to look in the ground for the right materials to begin with). Production processes have protocols for dimensional tolerance, purity, electrical conductivity, and other parameters, as well as meta-protocols on protocols. (see organizations like ISO which coordinate some of the hundreds of thousands of standards which humans have applied within their Techno-Social systems.)

It would appear that large numbers of people living in the so-called developed world are increasingly willing to submit to deeper and deeper layers of (globally-applied) protocols in order to maintain connection with other members of their tribe. Each deployment of protocol is a directed flow which taps off life-energy for the system imposing the (dominant) protocol.

Back to the original idea of participation. It is precisely the arrangement of protocols, guiding the flows of energy through the complex systems which will allow or disallow for individual participation. If the complexity of the protocols are too much — where the individual cannot refine his or her particular embodied energy expressions to fit the reductive pathway — the protocol will either continue to exist as a limited (possibly elite) pathway of expression and impression, or it will pass away. The history of technology is littered with dead protocols: ones which, for a time, shunted vast quantities of human energy in the service of the system, others which were created and used once and discarded as not efficient enough to tap the energy required to maintain their own hegemonic existence.

(Early adopters represent no revolutionary vanguard, but rather a type of individual motivated to adopt newly-imposed protocols. This with the thought that the adoption of these imposed protocols will somehow give evolutionary advantage. But in this Light, adoption may be seen as an expression of conformity to (and explicit support for!) the ever-more dominant Techno-Social system.)

more on participation later…

On Durkheim’s exploration of Rousseau and Montesquieu: the immediate impression is that Rousseau, when stripped of the colloquialisms of the time, has a greater precision in circumscribing the social order than Montesquieu. More on that later. But given the situation that Obama is currently mulling over, Afghanistan, a bit of Rousseau would probably have eliminated the entire issue in the years earlier, had the enormous hubris not entirely blinded those in power at the time:

Just as an architect, before putting up a tall building, studies and tests the ground to see whether it can bear the weight, so the wise organizer does not begin by drafting laws which are good in themselves, but first tries to determine whether the people for whom they are intended are able to submit to them. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Social Contract, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1987c[1762]) On The Social Contract in The Basic Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Donald A. Cress (trans. and ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett

What a lesson to learn! Completely counter to the previous US regime’s goal of bringing Democracy (with a Big Dee) to those places that they think need it, with no awareness of the actual suitability of that particular (theoretical no less!) social framework for that localized human situation. One needs to consider all prior flows extant in a social system in order to ascertain whether the system can stand a modification of those flows that are likely to be imposed by external forces. Oracle, prophesy, the I Ching, mixed with Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. And recognizing that variability is a human trait.

With a close-to-infinite availability of energy, an external power can accomplish finite changes in an arbitrarily limited system in a finite time. Imagine a squad of high-tech equipped Special Forces for every household in Afghanistan, staying for two or three generations. That would do. It would cast iron-order on the country, and re-educate any young people to the Amurikan way. Of course, you would need one Amurikan teacher for every five children for that entire time as well.

Durkheim, Emile (1960[1893]) Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, Georges Davy (trans.), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1960

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics, that approach to social inquiry being an expression of how the dominant world-view is itself dominated by abstracted elements rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, and largely govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-form of one. This energy arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body which allows for that expression, the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ between the two, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time) of the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation, when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

The concept of memory is related to my own work and practice — as an artist, part of my work does relate to the creation and preservation of my personal archive. Also, memory is a feature of collective Techno-Social Systems as a mapping of embodied participation in that system over time. It is also a concept to consider in the wider perspective of my work which examines human presence, encounter with the Other, collective social systems and their impact on the individual and finally, creative action.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the words of physicist David Bohm, that

… there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the individual (creator, participant).) The level of loss of autonomy are on a sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or provide to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a collective or individual archive? Is that why the Library of Alexandria burned?

as an example of the problematic of owning, and of property in general, as it is defined in Western social codes:

The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign — for all these titles are synonymous — imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings — kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion? — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

and

Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions. Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the mathematical progression of the life of nations. The downfall and death of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

A few minor references to energy and socio-cultural systems.

This view is simple, but outlines the fundamental situation. Research in thermodynamics (Prigogine, etc) has looked at the actual counter-intuitive problem of living systems countering thermodynamics. It may come back to the mystical view of Simone Weil:

Two forces rule the universe, light and gravity.

with gravity driving the coalescing of matter, the concentration of energy, or fluctuating densities (or simply fluctuation) of the cosmos. And Light, well, what may or may not be said about Light.

Looking at Foucault’s conception of discourse as a conflation of semiotics and postmodernism (gag on that stone-like term). Of course, the State (or, in my terms, the Techno-social system), when exercising power has to project power along more or less defined pathways. That is a fundamental characteristic of the TSS — its cumulative ability to (and process of) refining and ultimately reifying the pathways through which power (energy!) moves through the system. This power/energy ultimately and necessarily moves between human participants in the system and the pathways are, ultimately, sourced and targeted through the space of flows (between individual beings) to the individuals themselves, the Continuum of Relation. (see my comments on code in the previous posting, where code is a reified or institutionalized discourse pathway that carries energy between humans.) The expression of power, though, comes not from some externalized and monumental State. The concept of State is simply the active collectivization of individuals life-time/life-energy which dynamically coalesces into a relation or constellation which is a source of projected power. The force of projected power being the ability of a collective to gather excess energies, and organize them (negentropically) in such a way that they may be projected along a chosen pathway. This is where various levels of both subtle and overt control and coercion find their exercise — within individual lives as those lives are mapped into a collective space of more singular flow (vs flows).

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social infrastructure.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

If film can do this:

Film serves to train human beings in the practice of those apperceptions and reactions required by the frequentation of an apparatus whose role in their daily life ever increases. To make this whole enormous technological apparatus of our time into the object of human interiorization and appropriation [innervation] — that is the historic task in whose service film has its true meaning. — Walter Benjamin

Then is there any reason to doubt a connection between the declining power and influence of the (technocratic mediocracy of the) United States and the implementation of the Internet as-it-is today? Is there any connection between the tendencies of its population to spend their (limited) life-time in tele-communication (and tele-consumption!) and the demise of civil society? People seemingly now avoid confronting the (unknown) Other and rather cluster as mirrored-Selves, with a cumulative effect of breakdown of a (diverse) cultural fabric into a checker-board of self-interest groupings which spend time defending the borders of their squares from the surrounding Evil unknown.

this conclusion proposed in the sense that if film can have that profundity of affectation on human nervous systems (the primary interface with the world-as-mediated-by-body; or the primary EM antenna-structures), then what of all the wide press of technological development seeping into all parts and orifices of perception and reaction?

An attraction is in our understanding any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that combined with others possesses the characteristics of concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose…. The method of agitation through spectacle consists in the creation of a new chain of conditioned reflexes by associating selected phenomena with the unconditioned reflexes they produce. — Sergei Eisenstein

finding some interesting material from Leslie White, an anthropologist who wrote on cultural evolution and based his views on the idea that cultural systems are ultimately technological systems and that these systems can be ranked by their level of energy use and their capacity to access and utilize adequate energy resources. he had a troubled later life between his wife of 30 years dying and his slide into alcoholism. hmmmm

and then Fred Cottrell, a sociologist writing in his book Energy and Society (1955) about a social systems need for a net energy return. not sure if I can find a copy of this in the Australia uni library system, but hope to.

The evidence for Lotka’s position is not yet sufficient to make it clear that it should be formulated into a law. But the tendency it expresses … fits other evidence that ability to control energy conversion is one factor involved in the persistence of patterns that require energy for their replication. Certainly the patterns of observable human behavior fall into that category. Man cannot escape thermodynamics … his effectiveness in controlling energy conversion so that is serves his needs and satisfies his values is one measure of his probable survival in a habitat. — W. Fred Cottrell

structural organization. weaving this space of inquiry, exposé, or a web of deceit. a fabric of cloaking, or a dust cover for an old arm chair.

Van Leeuwen’s overview (in Multimodal Discourse) of an expressive situation that he labels semiotic production frames first a (situated) discourse which is then subject to design (to shape the delivery mechanism) which is materially formed in the production process followed by distribution (one-to-many propagation). these conceptual and actual stages are closely bound to a semiotics-based view which is rooted in the abstracted space of language and representation. this, despite the fact that the expressive action is indeed a real, tangible movement of energies from the producer to the receiver/consumer — it is not abstract. it is in this space between the models built in the abstracted semiotic space and the real executions that Dialogue, in the extended definition that I propose, occurs. it does not preclude any (most) semiotic models, but is sets the limits of their applicability that arise from the abstraction process that is inherent in language. the Dialogue model looks at these processes, steps in semiotic production as a continua of socially applied protocols which guide (provide a pathway for) energized expression from the Self to the Other — so that semiotic production is clearly not the thing itself, but an abstraction of it. (Van Leeuwen notes this when reflecting on the separation from embodiment that written language imposed on this abstraction process).

he suggests that two mechanisms for the establishment of ‘new’ forms of discourse — that of provenance and experiential meaning potential. the first providing memetic (not mimetic, btw) evolutionary input from other cultural sources, the second an internally generative source arising from lived experience.

multimodality clearly has an affect on the flow of energies (of expression) from the Self to the Other. the existence of socio-cultural value-systems as framed with and by abstracted linguistic (and semiotic) systems and protocols is a key formative element in the energy flow process. but again, it is not the thing itself, it merely forms a pathway for the expressive flow.

His use of terms articulation and interpretation would roughly correspond to transmission/expression and reception/impression.

In a materialistic model, the material is merely the means of semiotically-framed expression. In my model, the energy of expression is carried, in perhaps a poor metaphoric sense, through the pipe of linguistic/semiotic (and therefore social) protocol, but is another essence altogether from the pipe (which, again, is only a abstracted framework). As a social system builds up more and more complex pathways (which, in the end are blockages of open flows), it becomes more and more difficult for individuals operating within that system to find expressive pathways. This is especially apparent in social systems with sufficient or excessive energy resources. energy-poor social systems, those which are consequently, less stable, have more possibilities for less-defined actions, expressions.

It is in the consideration of the energy flow itself that many of the characteristics of formative social systems (ideologies, etc) become obvious, along with equally obvious solutions to the strictures that they apply to individual and collective human existence and consequent expression.

Understanding that my own task, to express an ideology, a weltanschauung, arises in the socio-cultural milieu that encourages certain expressions and discourages others. All social systems do this to one degree or another. And, as one key processural factor, I need for this expression to be idiosyncratic. As much so as is possible within this system. And if not within this system, then simply accept that it has to be done outside this system. eh?

But it is precisely at the edge of what a social system defines as acceptable or not is where transcendental change occurs both individually, and as a direct consequence, socio-culturally. Neither social or cultural systems are static entities which can be held or can hold to a particular standard protocol for expression indefinitely. Change is universal. And change occurs within liminal and undefined situations.

No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human network from which his actions arise and into which they are directed. — Norbert Elias

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation.

Our total sensual world is in part comprised of this dynamic and complex social system — an emergent system that embodies the expansion of the human population and the intensification of the global technological infrastructure. This contemporary social milieu may be described as a techno-social system which, among other affects it exhibits, more or less precisely prescribes the pathways of interaction between participating humans. This system may be modeled as a complex and multi-layered conflation of energized flows or signals which compete for both our attention as well as for the sources of energy which ultimately drive their expression. Sonic energy, given our evolutionary attributes, is a critical form for our energized presence and participation. The techno-social system that we have collectively constructed generates a tremendous variety of devices which impinge sonically on our lives and claim to offer practically everything including reproductive/evolutionary dominance and psycho-spiritual transcendence. But what of these devices, how do they form us and our relation with the world? How do they form the paths of impression and expression through which we establish and maintain our communities and our Selves? How do they arise within the techno-social system? How are our lives intertwined and affected by these pathways? How may we create sustainable systems of energy movement that augment the possibilities of human connection?

Amplification, as a fundamental process applied to different forms of energy, presents a model that is applicable across a tremendous range of systems from the basic biological to the complex technical. Amplification presumes the alteration of existing systems of energy movement from an ambient state to an altered one. This process of alteration has the effect of changing fundamental relationships of power within the entire localized (and distributed!) techno-social system through a process of energy density redistribution. All amplification systems rely on the existence of an energy source by which they accomplish their signal enhancement, and thus, their affects relate deeply to the contingencies of those sources among other factors. Amplification also introduces spurious flows of ‘waste’ energy into the situation. These flows often have destructive affects.

Amplification systems includes the entire range of electricity-based telepresence devices which are becoming ever more ubiquitous in our techno-social system. As a direct consequence, this system becomes more dependent on the structural and operational necessities that amplification requires. It is these requirements which apply deep formative forces on participants in the system as well as the system itself. When we use these devices, we are participating in a complex system that is characterized by fundamental and wholesale re-directions of energy. This re-direction is not a passive process nor does it affect trivial changes in the wider system. It forms an embedded matrix of alteration in the continuum of human relations — between individuals, collectives, and between human social systems and ‘natural’ systems. It affects all the fundamentals of human presence including those of place, memory, and be-ing.

A primary focus of this research is to extend and situate this model of amplification within the widest context, especially examining the effects of applied and ambient amplification on sustainable and creative cultural systems. As I note following in a basic outline of possible sources, this requires a wide exploration of whole fields of research (as the bibliography also indicates).

Specifically, though, I will explore the effects of amplification on creative action both from the point-of-view of the user as well as the entire system that the user is embedded within. For example, distributed creative action, as promoted by the availability of network systems such as “Web 2.0,” are completely dependent on complex systems of directed amplification. How do these dependencies affect the distributed creative processes taking place within? How do human networks interact with the formations of power and energy which are applied by amplification systems? How do the systems of amplification re-arrange relations of power in the social and the ‘natural’ system?

Personal Research Background

My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years centers around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of digital networks as the locus for creative presence and action. As access to bandwidth has gradually increased, opportunities for collaborative performance utilizing digital networks as the primary form mediation have expanded greatly while changing character significantly. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, music, and other expressive arts in collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence. Human presence is directly and indirectly affected by the digital network technologies that amplify and attenuate presence. I have a wide and deep experience base in expressing human presence across networked techno-social systems while exploring how that presence is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.

Tactical media, a term coined during the rise of network culture, includes the use of media — especially those operating through distributed network technologies — that specifically supports idiosyncratic expressions of small-scale social systems. My research and facilitation work explores the (often troubled) relationship between the large-scale deployments of standardized global network technologies and the need for local expression. The question arises: is it possible to utilize one of these standardized technologies without that very process of standardization flattening out idiosyncratic expression? One conclusion that I have come to is that despite even a high degree of mediation applied by a technological system, it is still possible to have a meaningful exchange if participants are aware of the actual affects and mechanisms of the mediation. This would include a good understanding of the actual movement of energy across the network system — a movement without which, human relation fails.

Relevant Literature

(please note that references here are all contained in the online bibliography located at http://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/biblio.html)

The ubiquitous use of digital devices arising from the rapid decrease in the relative cost of computing power has transformed information technology from an isolated domain for computer programming research into an integral part of a pervasive extended social research domain. And although the success of a contemporary social milieu is now often measured by the efficiency of integration of two broad distributed systems — the human (social) and the machinic (technological) — for the purposes of this proposal only, I will discuss previous research from this bifurcated point-of-view. It is important to note that there is significant cross-over and currently this particular dialectic is decidedly less productive.

In the specific topic of network theory, for example, advances spurred by research in previously unrelated fields such as genetics are creating totally new areas of research: bio-informatics. In this same light, existing research from a wide span of fields from cognitive science to consciousness studies to Quantum physics to genetics are also considered to be relevant to the production of the thesis. I will follow the technical and social sections by a few brief examples of possible research leads from other fields. As with any transdisciplinary undertaking this will be a core challenge: to be open to diverse threads of research, at the same time as not stretching too far. With this in mind, the primary hermeneutic goal is identifying fundamental principles from broad textual explorations.

Technical Research

Technical network research generally concentrates on the efficiency of power consumption, security, data transmission, software/hardware interface, and general materials constraints and usage — engineering issues of system structure and optimization.

For example, with the widespread deployment of wireless networks as communications signal amplifiers — where a majority of nodes are powered by batteries — there is great interest in techniques for optimizing fundamental energy usage and management (Papadimitriou, 2004, p.567; Kumar, 2005, p.415). Technological failure — the loss of system coherency and its subsequent inability to carry messages — is also an area of critical network research (Koroma, 2003, p. 47). In both these areas there is a direct correlation between the survivability and efficacy of network hardware systems as and the availability and efficient use of energy to construct, maintain, and operate such amplified communications system.

Research in network analysis proceeds either through sampling or capturing real network traffic (aggregate protocol and communications data) for generating metrics that determine the communicative topology and state of the network (Barabasi, 2001, p. 52), or through computer simulations of complex network systems. Simulation work subsists on the development of algorithmic solutions (often ultimately based in graph theory) which model relations between elements (objects and links) in the network occasionally combined with absolute energy optimization considerations. This range of research is characterized by projects like the Applied Network Research (ANR) Measurement and Network Analysis group (McGregor, 2001, et al). In considering the Internet as a whole, because of the sheer unregulated extent, mathematical simulations are less effective tools because they rarely capture emergent properties nor do they always reflect the actualities of such a complex system.

For example, a brief survey of commercial network diagnostic solutions shows existing metrics of which a primary one is the utilization of bandwidth. The bandwidth parameter has a direct correlation to the transmissive and receptive capabilities of a communications network (Danchak, 2001, p. 2). It is generally accepted that higher-bandwidth equates with better communications. Indeed, perceived progress in network technology is often predicated on availability of and access to greater bandwidth combined with less error-prone data transmission. Interestingly, higher-bandwidth systems (as signal amplifiers with access to more power) are also systems that have a greater amount of social capital energy invested in them, suggesting a correlation between the amount of total energy coming into a system and the level of order — where order in this case is measured by a favorable ratio of signal to noise (which can be seen as two types of energy being transferred by the system) — and where order is a direct expression of a non-equilibrium systems ability to controvert entropy.

Social Research

Social network research, also called simply network theory, is most often related to sociology, anthropology, social psychology, or organizational studies. It is generally concerned with the characteristics of emergent macro-level relationships between nodes (actors) within real or prototypical/simulated network systems.

There are, as well, areas of research such as HCI (human-computer interaction), CSCW (computer supported cooperative work), HCC (human-centered computing), that peripherally impact my research in their exploration of the ergonomic (functional-material), the semiotic (linguistic), and the broader social parameters of human interaction with others and interaction with computer-based digital systems. The process of knowledge-building, as one collective social goal of cooperative work, is an activity that has been modeled extensively and will provide input.

However, these areas of study rarely consider the combined scalar qualities of the dynamics of human relation that are mapped out between the (individual) Self and the Other — what I would call the granular level of a network. There is no general social network theory that specifically frames the nodes in a social network as the embodied Self and the Other as primary constituents. However, Alter (1999, p. 8) proposes a general theory of Information Systems in which he defines a “work system” as a “system in which human participants and/or machines perform a business process using information technology, and other resources…” Aside from the business reference, the equating of work with energy makes this an interesting approach that alludes to the fundamental relationship between energy (transfer) and granular/nodal systems comprised of interconnected humans — as they exist in the continuum of relation.

As a outgrowth of sociometry, Social Network Theory (SNT) (Barabasi, 2003, et.al.) grew out of quantitative analyses of social relation, and is currently a very active field of inquiry. Social network analysis applies algorithms from graph theory to identify both patterns and variables in the structural relationships of these networks (Wasserman, 1994, Kadushin, 2004). As with other threads of network analysis, SNT tends to weigh the collective over individual attributes, and the relation of the theory and its algorithms to the actual mediative network technology is not always explicit. It is, however, a useful direction of approach to the question of mediation and the architecture of relation which it obliquely includes.

Another approach is the social construction of technology (SCOT) which “distinguishes in its presuppositions and its metaphysical roots, between people and societies on the one hand, and the world of artifacts (and the natural world too) on the other.” (Law, 2003, p. 3) This approach provides an initial synergy, although the absolute division between things and people is a problematic relic of materialism which informs, but at some level is the anti-thesis of the model I am developing.

Actor Network Theory (ANT) is an approach of interest to “understand the mechanics of power and organization” (Law, 1992, p. 2) and because one of its base tenets is a form of scale-independent heterogeneity, a principle which is more inclusive of disparate elements (both abstract and material) and factors in modeling the dynamic of a social system. Law also posits that knowledge “always takes material forms,” and in doing this, he makes a clear connection to what we think of as the material world — though I will take this several steps further and describe the connection between material manifestations and energy relations. Although I do not see a precise application of ANT to my model, Law sees it as a means to a more holistic analysis of combined social-technological systems which are fundamentally dynamic processes, not objects — it is a promising starting point for connecting to current research.

Overall, the analysis of real networks is facing a complex challenge to be able to cope with large, adaptive, multi-agent systems. Computational tools are limited by incomplete data sets and the basic complexity of real — and consequently dynamic — networks (Carley, 2001, p.12). It is precisely the weakness of detailed computational (algorithmic) solutions that suggests that more holistic models, ones that contain fundamental principles “combining the methodologies of social networks and computer science” (Ibid) along with other innovative world views are necessary.

Other Areas of Research

Significant lateral input will come from areas of inquiry outside the general sphere of applied telecommunications, electrical engineering, computer science, and sociology. Areas of research in hard science (especially cosmology, Quantum physics, thermodynamics, and biology), social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, media and culture studies, and philosophy), cognitive science, management and organizational studies, consciousness studies, bio-informatics, and bio-genetics among other alternative model systems provide fundamental inputs — further interrogating the efficacy and robustness of the model.

For example, recent trends in network-based sonic collaboration also touch on the real dynamics of perceptive and energized human relation as well as the specific contingencies of amplified telecommunications networks (Barbosa, 2003, p.53). This trans-disciplinary technical research and artistic production dates back to the mid-1970′s and the California-based League of Automatic Music Composers in Local Area Networks (Bischoff, 1978, p. 26).

Relevant areas of cognitive science research examines abstracted social (linguistic) levels of interaction as mapped over systems of knowledge acquisition and propagation in the process of creating models for the mind, consciousness, or intelligence. This field of research presents several interesting paradigms which inform the relationship between individual presence and collective/social existence.

Although there are some who reject the metaphor of genes holding and transferring ‘information’ as a causal source for evolutionary impulses (Griffiths, 2001, p. 6), recent developments in gene regulatory networks (GRN) modeling, a branch of systems biology (or bio-informatics) also provide some interesting insights into cellular systems which are not modeled simply as information-processing devices, but as distributed metabolic signal amplification systems that appear to function as emergent scale-free networks (Jeong, et al, 2000, p. 652). By examining the specific links in a metabolic network, it is possible to map biochemical reactions which may also be characterized by absolute energy (state) transfers which are, essentially, amplifiers. As this area of interest matures, it is likely that research into metabolic network systems will produce insights that can be productively carried back to social and technological network theory.

Quantum computation, as it relates both to real energy state analysis of nano systems and algorithmic computational models also explores relevant issues that consider real energy state relations as (digital) computational systems. These nano-systems exhibit parameters governing energy flows that are quite different from normal macro-scaled high- and low-voltage circuitry and may provide fundamental insight into energy dynamics.

General Quantum, as a fundamental energy-based model, portrays the universe as a space-time continuum in which energy fields are the phenomena underlying all observed reality. Quantum provides a provocative point-of-view that supersedes the limits of traditional mechanistic thinking. In this sense alone it serves as an important guide for moving the model beyond dominant mechanistic perceptions of reality.

Conclusion

There are many possible threads to examine in contemporary research around the concepts of amplified (tele)communications, networks, and human relation. Many of the traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as socio-cultural frames-of-reference are being re-formed by the rapid pace of research, development, and deployment of telecom solutions.

The dialectic of human vs machine is a bit dated, though, and represents a conservative conceptual space that has to be transcended — initially it is a convenient conceptual tool — but a more holistic consideration of that hybrid system, the techno-social system, as it exists within the continuum of relation, is necessary.