The Screeds of Terri

(One opinion on) How to write a cultural studies paper.

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 03:51:42 GMT

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I consider the OBJECT, the QUESTION and the LENS to be the fundamental elements of a strong cultural studies paper.

First, the disclaimer: You also need to know that I more or less made up these terms, based on conversations with teachers, colleagues and editors over the years. If anyone is reading this and thinks I should give them credit for this terminology, I'm happy to. Just drop me a line.

If you know me, you know that I don't think this object/question/lens business is some big universal truth of good analytical writing. Nevertheless, I'm not a big fan of driving without a road map. Unless you can persuade me that you have a better plan for constructing your paper, we will be going with this one.Fair enough? Below, I explain what I mean when I speak about the object.

THE OBJECT

By "object" I mean the topic you wish to write about.In general, an object (which is in other courses called a "text") can be EITHER a specific finished product (such as a painting, book, film or musical recording, or television commercial) OR a social phenomenon (such as the use of "heroin chic" in the fashion industry, the rise of caller id in private homes, or the rise in "blue screen" acting techniques.)

I thought Melinda had an outstanding recommendation regarding picking an object for your mid-term. In her words:

I know we all ask ourselves questions about why certain things are the way they are- this is what you need to focus on. Is it music, socializing, shopping, fucking, eating, whatever- how does our world affect the way we do these things? Why does it seem like there is always an unexplained answer, but we go along with it anyway? Is my reality the same as your reality? I think this may be a start.

OBJECT: Regarding its size (and size does matter.)

Now that Melinda's got you thinking big, I'm going to shrink things down. The smaller the object, the more controllable your paper will be. For example: (And I apologize in advance for using a body image thing as an example!)

OPTION 1: "I want to talk about how messed up the advertising industry is." For our purposes, this is too broad an object.

OPTION 2: "I want to talk about how it seems that people are always encouraged to be thin in advertising." This is okay, but still needs refining.

OPTION 3: "I want to talk about this time when I was working at a modelling agency and I witnessed my bosses picking models for a specific shoot based on whether they could see the models' ribcages through their shirts.

Option 3, in my opinion, is a nicely sized object for a paper. Can you see why this would be?

OBJECT: Regarding the Importance of Narrative Progression.

Though there are many exceptions to this rule, most essays require a beginning, middle and end. Consider the following:

Option A: "I want to talk about my internal debate over getting caller ID"

Option B: "I want to talk about how my housemates began screening calls once we got caller ID installed"

Option C: "I want to talk about caller ID as a dehumanizing phenomenon."

In this case, I would suggest that Options A and B are "strong objects" for us, whereas Option C is weaker. Why? Because the "personal" examples have a logical trajectory (ie "before caller id, after caller id, my thoughts about the phenom. of caller id") than the "universal" example. Also, options A and B will naturally lead to a discussion of larger social questions.

Please note that I'm NOT saying you can't write in the style of Option C. It is just more difficult to do so. Contrary to what many expository writing teachers believe, I think it's troublesome ot begin with some huge statement and "shrink down" to the particular. To begin an essay with the statement "Technology X is dehumanizing" begs too many questions, from "Dehumanizing for whom?"to "Who are you to decide what constitutes a 'human' approach?"

If you simply MUST write inthe style of Option C, I am going to ask you to confer with me first, to avoid pitfalls.

OBJECT: On situating your narrator.

What else is good about option 3, above? Well, it nicely situates the narrator of the paper. In the case of Option 3, we know the speaker isn't some Grand Authority; rather, he's the employee of the advertising agency. This is going to effect his perspective, of course. Also important: a writer may have multiple roles in the stories they tell, and this matters HUGELY.

For instance, in Option 3, we know the person is an employee, but he may also be a student, an aspiring model himself, etc. All of these roles are going to effect what he sees in his analysis, and what he does not. When you choose your object, you are going to have to state and explore your position, as well.

Again, this is why I think stories are useful. Stories often include your position as the narrator, and de-stabilize the notion of you as The Authority. When you begin with a personal story, you are taking the rhetorical position not of the Expert, but of the individual with a incident to share.

For example: Think of Bryce's recent story on the mailing list about being in the examining room with her doctor and asking about advertsing and medicine. Consider her use of detail to demonstrate her position as the young female patient ("sitting half-dressed") versus the position of the older male doctor ("the doctor was open and available to my questions about my general health, but when I began to talk about ads he wouldnt' speak to me", etc.)

NOW think of how different Bryce's argument ("Doctors tend to silence discussion about advertising and medicine") might be if later on she disclosed that she was a doctor herself, or a writer for Consumer Reports, or considering taking a job with a major pharmaceutical advertiser after college.

(Please note: Some will argue that there are HUGE problems with the lie of the "ordinary person with an ordinary story" routine. The biggest problem critics have with this is that the "ordinary person" IS declaring him/herself an expert, just by the ACT writing on a topic. And what's more, s/he protects him/herself in a way an expert cannot: that is, by hiding behind the cover of "hey, I'm just an ordinary person." If you want to see this in action, check out Rush Limbaugh, for instance, or pretty much any moron on AM radio.

I agree with this critique. Still, for our purposes, I still think the "ordinary person" approach is the way to go, particularly since we WILL be interrogating our own perspectives vis a vis our "question", which I will discuss in a moment.

OBJECT: Before we move on...

Okay. Before we move to the next section, ask yourselves to define the following terms from this essay. If you can do so, you have understood me.

1. What is an Object? What is the object I want to examine ?

2. How am I making sure my object is of an appropriate size for a the page-length I'm being asked to produce?

3. What does it mean to provide "narrative progression" in my paper? What is the beginning, the middle and the end of my paper as I envision it right now? (note: this may change during the writing process.)

4. How am I understand myself as the narrator in my paper topic? Am I an employee in my story, or perhaps a student, or a friend, or a brother, or a television fan, or a number of these positions? How are these positions going to effect what I see or don't see as true, real, authentic, false, etc?

Now you can go on to The Question section.

THE QUESTION

After you locate your object, you'll want to come up with your question. For many of you, your question and your object will be intimately connected. For others, teasing out your question may take some work.

The "question" portion of your essay strategy is most easily dealt with by asking yourself, "What about my object fascinates me? How can I formulate my fascination as a one or two line interrogation?"

Let me give an example of what I mean, here.

QUESTION: How to ask a question of an object.

Recently, Bryce posted a story about an experience at her doctor's office. She related that as long as her questions were explicitly about her health, the doctor struck her as forthcoming in the extreme. Yet, when she began to ask about the relationship between advertising and medicine, the doctor refused to speak. We also know from the story that Bryce is young, and female, and that the doctor is older and male.

Now, there are a number of different questions raised by this story (which we'll call the "object").

For instance:

QUESTION: Possibility #1: The Spectacle Question.

"How does the spectacle of the medical examination open the way for some types of questions from patients, and yet close down others? How do good and bad questions define the power relationship of patients to their doctors?"

Note: The spectacle question asks things like "What comes to be treated as legitimate and illegitimate, in the scenario I'm describing?"

The "medical spectacle" is a huge topic right now for patient advocate communities I read on the Net. Especially with 'hard to treat' disorders like schizophrenia, the space between professional medical diagnosis and corporate advertising for the best new drug is actually quite blurry. I know many MANY ill people who get news on Internet support groups, often months before their physicians do. Yet those people often get ignored by doctors until findings come out in "proper" medical journals. Now, sometimes there are good reasons for this. Sometimes not. Do you see how someone could EASILY spend an entire paper discussing the spectacle question??

QUESTION: Possibility #2: Agency Question.

"How is Bryce's positioning in this story as a "half-clothed young woman" disabling her authority as a interrogator of the doctor? Would the situation have been different if the doctor were closer to Bryce's age, or a woman herself? How or how not? Many women have written about being comfortable with nudity everywhere EXCEPT in the doctor's office. How does power and spectacle work to make this so?"

Note: The agency question usually concerns our positions of power within the spectacle: as consumers, producers, listerners, patients, authorities, etc. In this example above, you might call the agency question the "woman's question," but I hope you see how it could be reworked with regard to any position. If, for example, a person without health insurance in a public clinic were asking these questions of a harried doctor, there might be a constellation of other questions to be dealt with, regarding class and power.

QUESTION: Possibility #3: The Market Question.

"Has doctor collaboration with advertisng agencies risen over the last ten years, or lessened, or stayed the same? Have any doctors spoken out about the kinds of problems Bryce is citing? What has their reception been in the medical community?"

Note: The "market" question stretches a personal situation out, and examines it as a social phenomenon. The Marxists call this "dialectical materialism." Sometimes, you'll get in a situation and want to know if it's you, or if this is something that's going on all over the country, or the world. Studying how the market has functioned with regard to your object can often help you answer this for yourself. Of course, once you figure out how the market functions in a spectacle, you will naturally want to ask yourself where YOU fit in, which leads to questions of agency, above.

MORE DISCLAIMERS AND A CAVEAT

Before I end this essay on the question, I want to make a few things clear.

First, these notions of "spectacle", "agency" and "market" questions are categories of my own making. If they are useful to you, use them. If not, please come up with questions of your own. There are many many MANY more types of questions you could use. Don't be afraid to try stuff. We can always refine things during private meetings.

Finally, to the coffee achievers in the crowd:YOU ONLY NEED TO ASK ONE SET OF QUESTIONS, NOT ALL OF THEM!!

Next up: The Lens!!

THE LENS

After the object and the question, the lens is our final element of paper preparation. The "lens", as I define it, is your demonstration that you know who else is thinking in your field. I liked Taylor's description of the lens very much. She wrote:

If the object is the thing/issue/problem that you want to investigate, then the lense is the medium through which you choose to view your object, i.e. what theories, etc. "

Consider this: your friend calls herself an innovator, and in a bar she tells you about her latest cool invention: a disk on which you play music. But when you tell her that the CD has been in production a decade now, she looks baffled, and then starts talking about how she "can't be expected to know everything." How weird would that be?

Whatever thoughts we are having on any topic, the chances are DAMN good that somebody else, probably somebody smarter than us, has been thinking about them somewhere else. It's your job to find those folks, and converse with AT LEAST ONE of them in your paper. By converse, I don't mean ring the poor people up. I mean dialogue with their ideas.

LENS: Use Search Engines to find Them.

The first thing I recommend that you do is start looking up keywords for your object on juicy Web search engines like http://www.google.com

I especially recommend searching by phrase type, like "authentic rock icons" or "rise of caller ID." Also search by Boolean terms like "caller idenfication AND depersonalization." See what comes up. Read any essays that catch your eye. Keep looking for people who are struggling with the sort of stuff that interests you. Tell me what you wind up with.

Remember, anybody smart can have a thought. The difference between a random smart person and a scholar is that a scholar is responsible for knowing WHO ELSE is thinking along the same lines they are. If you are struggling, I recommend the little essay I wrote on search hints for beginning cultural studies scholars.

LENS: Use Terri to find Them.

Sometimes it's hard to know where to begin to look for experts on the topic you want to investigate. Do not worry, because this is where I come in. Once you have at least tried to do some web searching, come to me for help, either in email or in person.

Remember, it is my JOB to help you find people to read on your topic (ie. Guy Debord, Luce Irgaray, Karl Marx, Simon Frith, Gilles Deleuze, Susan Bordo, Augusto Boal, etc etc etc. ) What's more, it's my job to help you define the intellectual genre in which these folks work (i.e. Situationsists, Feminists, Rock Music Critics, Riot Girls, Medical Activists, Advertising theorists, etc.)

LENS: A Final Word.

Your choice of lens will PROFOUNDLY AFFECT how you see your object. For instance, Edward Said (famous pro-Palestinean scholar) would write about the recent shooting we discussed with a very different lens than would a Pro-Israeli journalist. Different still might be a recently widowed mother from the West Bank who just wants all fighting to stop. All of these "authorities" can be found by doing a web search on the incident in question. All of them give vastly different readings of the same reality. This is something we will discuss together in our private meetings. I just wanted to give you a "heads up."

LENS: TO SUMMARIZE:

The "lens", as I define it, is your demonstration that you know who else is thinking in your field. Once you find at least ONE person to dialogue with in your paper on your topic, you safely can say you have your "lens" established.

Remember, you don't need to know everything written about your interests, but you do need to know *something* beyond your own thoughts.

WRITING YOUR PAPER in FOUR EASY PIECES

At the risk of giving an android-esque definition of a "good cultural studies paper", here goes:

PART ONE: Introduce yourself, your object and your questions.

Do not get overwhelmed or nervous. Remember, just TELL YOUR STORY to begin your paper. Many of you will find that your object and questions quite naturally rise out of the story-telling.

PART TWO: Answer the questions you raise, using your lens and your own thoughts.

Most people think they "get" stuff in popular culture. But what they don't understand is that were they to REALLY WRITE OUT their thinking, they would find out that this stuff is FAR more complex than they are led to believe. So get to it!

Start working on answering your own questions. If you get stuck, try talking about how other people have answered your questions. This is where your lens can come in handy. You can talk about other people's answers to the questions you raise, and compare them with your own views.

PART THREE: Check over your work to see that your thinking is demonstrating dialectical motion.

Since we've discussed dialectical motion at length before, I won't go into now. For our purposes, dialectical motion can be described as that experience a thinker has that goes:

"On the one hand, X (thesis). But on the other hand, the opposite Y, is the case at times (antithesis). And hmmm, now that I think of X and Y together (synthesis), that brings me to think Z (new thesis). This raises point A (new antithesis) and B (new synthesis).

Etc. Etc. Obviously you must stop the "endless march" somewhere, but you must know that this end is always a fiction of a sort. In truth, demonstrate that you are sophisticated enough to understand that things continue change, deteriorate, reconfigure with regard to your topic.

Part Four: Based on your answers, formulate your new questions, and then end that paper!

Everyone understands that a paper entirely made up of questions isn't acceptable. But what you might not understand is that a paper that consists of only ANSWERS won't work either.

The best cultural studies essays (in my opinion) begin with a question, or a series of questions, attempt some answers, and THEN raise even MORE questions at the end of the paper. One way to do this is to try to answer the question, "What have you learned from thinking about this topic, and what NEW questions are you left with?"

And please, I beg you, try to answer that question with non-boring prose. Nobody likes to read 30 essays that go, "What I learned is blah blah,and what I still wonder is blah blah." You know? Please attempt to be a LITTLE more creative than that.

Finally, at least *attempt* a snappy ending.You've come this far; you might as well give it a shot. If you get stuck, I suggest returning back to your story for final thoughts, quotes or plot twists. Returning to the story often re-grounds the reader: they think, "Oh wow, that's right, this did start with a story. Then we went on a magical mystery tour, and now we're back to where we started, only we're not back. We're somehow different than when we began."

And then you are FINISHED!

Questions? Comments? Lay them on me.

New Media Encyclopedia entry: Webcams

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 06:54:00 GMT

This stuff is pre-publication, and still in draft form, so please don't circulate. I put it up here because people always give me great suggestions, and also because I know people use my references in their own work. If you have suggestions to make for this, understand I am on a tight--1500 max--word count, and that I have to write in sort of dull encyclopedise to keep my bosses happy.

WEBCAM

Webcamming (also known as webcasting) is the broadcast of images, sometimes with sound, over the Internet. Webcamming has exploded in popularity, in part because it is the most inexpensive form of broadcasting currently available to the public today. To webcam, five things are needed: a computer, a modem, an Internet service provider (ISP), a place to send images online, and a web camera--also known as a webcam. The cheapest webcam can be had for less than one hundred dollars, and far and away, the most popular one is the inexpensive "eyeball" variety that sits on or near the computer. Alternately, one may hook an ordinary video camera into one's computer through a video capture device, and webcast that way. Though most digital cameras cannot function as web cameras at this time, this too is changing. In brief, if you can hook a camera up to your computer and manage to transfer images to the Web, you can webcast.

The very first webcam has origins that predate the World Wide Web, and by its creator's own admission, began as something of a joke. In 1991, computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser found himself frustrated in attempts to get a fresh cup of coffee from the continuously drained pot shared among computer scientists at Cambridge University. The Trojan Room Coffee Cam was born after Stafford-Fraser took a small camera, pointed it at the coffee machine, and wired the camera to the computing staff's network for public viewing. As he puts it, "The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee." Later, the Coffee Cam was put up on the World Wide Web for public viewing, thus becoming the most watched pot on the Internet.

In 1998, Sherri Uhrick of the Earthcam Directory estimated that sixty per cent of all cams are currently indoor cameras, and of all indoor cameras. Of these, autobiographical "homecams" are by far the most prevalent type being used today. The homecam phenomenon began in 1996, with Jennifer Ringley of Jennicam fame. After hearing about the "fishbowl cam", Jennifer began webcasting from her Dickinson College dorm room as a "social experiment" of sorts. Today, most people associate homecamming with the Jennicam and the site's attendant ideology: that of unfettered reality. This ideology was for years borne out on the splash page (opening document) of her web site. Done in simple courier font, with no images, Jennifer's "dictionary definition" of the Jennicam, read: "A real-time look into the real life of a young woman." Though that tag line has now been updated to "Life, online", the verite sentiment remains. Because her life story has now been covered in literally hundreds of media outlets, it is fair to say that Jennifer Ringley now has the distinction of being the Web's first "reality micro celebrity." In essence, she is famous (although to a much lesser degree than many television or film personalities) simply for being the first person to "be herself" in front of a webcam.

Webcamming now covers a wide range of activities, ranging from private videoconferencing between individuals, to semi-public surveillance via corporate intranets, to public broadcasting over the Web. Webcams can be found in nurseries, on street corners and public parks, in prisons and hospitals, inside offices (with or without employee knowledge), as part of news reporting efforts, and inside the most intimate of places in the home. In mainstream media, webcamming has served as a lightning rod of sorts, fueling debates (which show no signs of abating) about the proper uses of entertainment and surveillance in the digital age. And although anyone using common sense understands that the social ramifications of public prison surveillance differ from outdoor weather webcasts, which differ still from for-pay pornographic "peep cams", all of these examples use the same technology: the webcam.

No matter what its intended purposes, the power of all webcamming lies with its ability to convey telepresence: that is, its ability make things at a distance seem here, and now. It is important to understand, however, that the "telepresence effect" of webcams is something of an illusion, because there are always significant losses between what a broadcaster's webcamera sees and what a viewer ultimately gets. For instance, most popular webcams photograph with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, which is significantly lower resolution that most digital cameras display. What's more, images are often compressed before being uploaded to the Web to as low as 160 x 120 to accommodate end-viewers with slower modems. And finally, what is presented to a homecam viewer as "here and now" cannot never truly be so, in part because technologies like modem lines and general Internet congestion will always create time-delays.

Webcams capture motion as a series of still images called "frames," the same way video cameras do. As the old technique of the "flip book" demonstrates, when a series of frames is sped up, an illusion of continuous motion is established in the eye of a viewer. Likewise, the higher the number of frames per second a webcamera is set to record, the "smoother" the quality of the image projected through a webcam will appear. Most of the newer webcams on the market have speeds as high as thirty frames per second, as high as standard video rate. This is why current "videoconferencing" programs require nothing more sophisticated than a basic web camera, a decent microphone and a high-speed Internet connection. Indeed, one useful (if perhaps overly simplistic) way to think about how webcams work is to imagine turning a video camera on without a tape in it, hitting "record", and running the camera to the Internet.

But aside from one-on-one videoconferencing or "streaming media" (i.e. full-motion video online), frame rates has very little to do with how most webcameras are viewed on the Internet. The fact is, there are two main ways in which webcam images are generally delivered to viewers over the Net. The less common method, used only in practices like videoconferencing and on lucrative streaming sites, is called "server push." In this method, a viewer's browser is told (via HTML) to prepare itself to receive a series of images, which are then sent at the server's leisure. A technique called "fast push" is often used by companies that claim to support "near real time video" on the Web. The other, far more popular method is called "client pull." The client pull method works the way it sounds: a viewer is required to refresh single still images on their browser at set intervals in order to see new motion.

Though people routinely engage in one-on-one videoconferencing at a "fast push" rate of thirty frames per second, once they begin broadcasting to large amounts of people over the Web, they must make a choice. Either they switch to "client pull" and drop their frame rate down significantly, or they pay their Internet Service Provider additional bandwidth costs. Bandwidth is the rate at which a telecommunication system can transmit information to end-users, and it effects both webcamming broadcasters and viewers. From the broadcaster's perspective, the "bandwidth issue" is roughly analogous planning a performance space to accommodate ten people, and having one thousand show up for the performance. From the viewer's perspective, the problem is even more clearly stated: when a broadcast takes up too much bandwidth for one's resources, the computer will crash.

Bandwidth is a serious concern for streaming media companies and high-traffic homecammers like Jennifer Ringley. However, most people using webcams today avoid bandwidth problems by choosing to broadcast their surroundings as silent still images which only refresh only every few minutes on the Web. For some, this is a dissatisfying compromise, and they eagerly wait for the day they can take advantage of server-push opportunities already at the disposal of those with financial resources. The arrival of much-touted "broadband capacity", a range of technologies that enable access to the Internet at speeds 10 to 80 times faster than today's typical dial-up connection, may help these people in the near future.

Other webcammers, however, are happy to stay where they are technologically. These users concede that though refreshing silent still images are certainly not as "telepresent" as full motion video and audio, webcamming as it exists today has a charm and a usefulness of its own. Thus far, the advantages of webcams seem to be outweighing their limitations, at least in the marketplace. In 1999, Logitech, a leading manufacturer of webcams, reported selling its millionth unit. By the year 2000, that number was at two million. Over the next three months of the year 2000, 1.1 million more Quickcams were sold. That number is sure to rise further still, as webcams are bundled by manufacturers with home computers, cable modems and DSL connections. And in perhaps an ultimate vote of market confidence in the future of webcamming, the no longer functional original Trojan Coffee Pot was recently purchased for just under $5,000 U.S. dollars in an Ebay auction. According to a New York Times report, the buyer (German media conglomerate Spiegel) reportedly did it both "for a digital joke" and because they wanted a "piece of webcamming history."

Sources:

Parker, Elisabeth. The Little Web Cam Book. Peachpit Press, 1999.

Zeller, Tom. " Seen My Sock Drawer Lately?" The New York Times, Week in Review section. August 19, 2001. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/weekinreview/18ZELL.html

Dyson, Jonathan, "Ready for your close-up? A brief history of webcam TV." The Independent London. 10/31/1998: Features Section.

Teschland, Leland. "Live! Exposed! And on the Web! Machine Design v. 72 no16 (Aug. 17 2000) p. 42-8.

Mieszkowski, Katharine. "Nowhere left to Hide." Salon . June 18, 2001. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/18/webcam_privacy/index.html

Campanella, Thomas J. "Be there now." Salon, August 1997. http://www.salon.com/aug97/21st/cam970807.html

Firth, Simon. "Live! From my Bedroom! Salon. January 1998. http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/01/cov_08feature.html

Stafford-Fraser, Quentin, "The Life and Times of the First Web Cam When convenience was the mother of invention". Communications of the ACM, July 2001/Vol.44, No.7. Available online at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/cacm200107.html

Bruce Friedricks, Director of Product Marketing (Video Division) of Logitech. Corporation. Speech on Thursday, February 3, 2000 at Shout 2000 Conference, San Francisco, CA. Panel title: "Now You See It: The Cam Clan and Pictures that Move." Audio proceedings available online at http://www.shout2000.com/agenda.html

Churchill, Sam. Sam's Webcam Cookbook. http://www.teleport.com/~samc/bike/

Surveyor Corporation. The Webcam Resource. http://www.webcamresource.com/

Cyborgs and Cyberfeminisms

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:06:35 GMT

Warning: Longish. Skip if you have no interest in things like webcamming, cyborgs or cyberfeminism, okay?

This is a portion of the literature review of my dissertation. And since my dissertation is on women and homecamming, what I have to say below I might say differently under different circumstances. Still, it might answer some questions folks have about cyborg studies and cyberfeminisms and how they relate to one another. There is a portion of the dissertation that deals with "older generation" people, like Brenda Laurel and Sherry Turkle, but in the interest of space, I can post that later if someone wants to read it.

By the early 1990?s, tensions between genders regarding digital environments had been brewing for a decade. For many men, it was a time of William Gibson?s "cyberspace cowboy" and a software revolution that paid them highly as programmers. For many women, the advent of the software boom meant that they as secretaries were forced to learn an array of new desktop publishing and database packages just to keep their existing job and wage. Perhaps it is no wonder that the "goddess movement", which extolled agrarian values and non-technological mythology building, was quite popular with women around this time.

In her widely read "Manifesto for Cyborgs," Donna Haraway attempted to reconcile the technophiles and technophobes in the name of socialist feminism. For Haraway, feminist denunciations of technology were, while understandable, also profoundly out of touch with most lived reality. Technology was here to stay, she argued, citing examples in women?s lives as vast as bio-engineered food, drug-assisted fertility procedures and even computerized communications. They issue facing feminism, she argued, was not whether we want technology (we have no choice) but rather what sorts of relationships we make to it. For inspiration and coping skills, Haraway urged feminism to look to the cyborg, the body mixed of both organic and technological components. Indeed, in her now-famous quip, Haraway argued, "I?d rather be a cyborg, than a goddess."

Because her training was primarily in biological science and genetics, Haraway never spent much time writing about computers. However, her words inspired a generation of women who termed themselves alternately "cyborg feminists" and "cyberfeminists". One of the most influential of these is Allucqu?re Roseanne ("Sandy") Stone. Among other things, Sandy Stone was the first theorist to write explicitly about women using technology for the sex trade. Her essay, "Sex and Death among the Cyborgs", was originally intended to be a piece on sound data compression. Ultimately, Stone confessed:

I realized that phone sex was a practical application of data compression. Sex usually involves as many of the senses as possible - taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing. Phone-sex workers translate all those modalities of experience into sound, then boil that down into a series of highly compressed tokens. They squirt those tokens down a voice-grade line and someone at the other end just adds water, so to speak, to reconstitute the tokens into a fully detailed set of images and interactions in multiple sensory modes.

In her book, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Stone argues that identity is primarily a form of "communication prosthesis." In so doing, Stone combined Haraway?s writing on "cyborg prostheses" with Marshall McLuhan?s observation that communications media are extensions and interpenetrations of the self. Stone, who is herself transgendered, argues that talking about identity in an age of communications is like asking the question, "where does the candle flame go when you blow it out?" As she puts it:

Identities appear and they disappear. They go from virtual to real, from real to virtual, crossing back and forth over those boundaries, sometimes predictably and sometimes not?The presence of the prosthesis in the communication network is what makes the virtual persona become real.

Where cyborg feminism presented itself to women as a theoretical movement, cyberfeminism offered feminists the opportunity to express themselves in lived artistic practice. The first cyberfeminist manifesto to appear in print was Rosi Braidotti?s "Cyberfeminism with a difference," which addressed itself specifically to those young women who associate with "third wave" feminism. Like Haraway, Braidotti argued that the advent of postmodernity did not erase problems such as sexual, racial and class difference, but rather exacerbated and globalized them. In addition, Braidotti agreed that that the space between technology and what used to be called "creativity " was fast closing. But where older "goddess feminists" bemoaned the closing of this gap, Braidotti proposed to celebrate it. Arguing that some of the best feminist critiques of our technological times were being put forward not by theorists, but by individuals like science fiction writer Angela Carter, photographer Cindy Sherman, musician Laurie Anderson, installation artist Jenny Holtzer, and the performance group Guerilla Girls. Each of these artists, argues Braidotti, meshes private messages with public space, and each artist in her own way resists the sexist, racist promise of disembodiment that earlier "cyberpunk" aesthetics brought forth. Braidotti further argues further that each of these artists embraces a "riot girl" politics, a parodic art-making process that she likes to call the "what if" school of feminism.

The riot girl," Braidotti writes, "can impersonate femaleness in her extreme and extremely annoying fashion." In her celebration of the parodic potential of online life, Braidotti explicitly rejects the standard arguments that proponents of classical mimesis have long used to defend cyberspace. Braidotti?s feminist politics are quite clear: she is not advocating a mere psychological "working through" of personality online a la Sherry Turkle, nor is she talking about some sort of "separate but equal space" a la Rheingold. Instead, Braidotti looks to the work of artists themselves to propose that we use technology to re-invent the very concept of "woman" for ourselves, via mimicry and parody. As she writes, "My point is that the new is created by revisiting and burning up the old. Like the totemic meal recommended by Freud, you have to assimilate the dead before you can move onto a new order."

While cyberfeminism demonstrates a crucial pathway for those of us trying to understand the aesthetics of homecamming, Braidotti?s work is often somewhat limiting. For one thing, Braidotti, who trumpets the practicing artist over the theorizing critic, only mentions one Internet-based artists in her manifesto, video game designer Linda Dement. Indeed, it took the advent widespread use of the World Wide Web to make much of what Braidotti theorized possible. The Web added three important elements to the Internet that were not in abundance previously: hypertext, images and sound. Because it was easiest to manipulate, hypertext arrived first. Critics of hypertext originally decried that because it allowed end users to "surf" digital space in a non-hierarchical way, and because authority was difficult to secure, hypertext was a sort of second space of "real" narrative. Of course, an equal number of writers defended hypertext as a potentially liberating tool. In her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray makes a case that far from destabilizing legitimate communication, hypertext worked revitalize storytelling and narrative making in the digital age. Feminist scholar Dale Spender made the case that just as cyborgs are useful icons for postmodern feminism, hypertextual language is "women?s language." Recent work on hypertext and gender has complicated this over-simplification, however. In her essay "Hypertext has always been Political", Diane Grecco rightly argues:

Just as cyborgs integrate a variety of technological prostheses in order to constitute their own subjectivities, hypertext writing allows both reader and writer to weave their own meanings from a set of disparate textual elements?Of course, a hypertext resists closure; as others have argued, a hypertexts resists endings, final validations or refutations of the reader's point of view. ?But without an exploration of its implications, this observation of the uncanny resemblances between hypertext and cyborgs is merely academic?

When images and sound arrived over the Web, an entire new set of questions for feminism began. For many, images and sounds of women online were neatly subsumed under what Donna Haraway has called the "ontology of the cyborg." As Ann Balsamo explains, cyborgs can be thought of either "as a coupling between a human being and an electronic or mechanical apparatus," or "as the identity of organisms embedded in a cybernetic information system" (15). In his recent American Popular Culture Association presentation on the Jennicam, Robert Smith argues that:

The Jennicam would appear to fit both definitions and, in arguing that via the Jennicam its operator rewrites a social inscription, short-circuits the informatics of domination, transgresses the dominant cultural order, I am assigning her significant cyborg status. But in opposition to Haraway's declaration that she'd rather by a cyborg than a goddess, Ringley's answer would appear to be: why not be both?

It seems to me that one of the things Smith is attempting is to cyborg studies to save the term "camgirl" much the same way gender studies programs helped rescue the word "queer" for gays and lesbians. But such an easy refiguring of "camgirls as cyborgs" is problematic, if only because it makes pretty realism out of a number of conflicted and conflicting realities. Every camgirl I?ve interviewed seem to instinctively understand that what "cyborg celebrators" have forgotten, which is that the space between "celebrity goddess" and "mass-consumed whore" is a small one. Rather than dismiss their concerns as some sort of sort "internal misogyny", I?d rather engage the contradictions their feelings raise.

Martha Wilson, the director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, is no stranger to controversial issues around women, performance, pornography and digital life. In her essay, "Going Virtual", Martha Wilson discusses the mutation of the Franklin Furnace Archive from 1970?s avant-garde performance space, to an online performance venue for 2001. In an interesting parallel to "hypertext as feminine practice", Wilson originally established Franklin Furnace in order to was to promote "artist?s books." At the time, she explains, books by artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holtzer, which used text as a visual art medium weren?t considered "real books" at all, and artists had difficulty getting their work in this medium distributed. Wilson started Franklin Furnace in her storefront loft in 1976, and it quickly also became a venue for installation and performance art, as well as book distribution. As Wilson explains it, the overlap was quite natural, as many of the artists who used text as an art medium were also interested in installation work and performance. Again, this has a parallel in Net history, in that many women homecammers describe themselves as "homepage authors who then got cameras."

Wilson describes herself as a " woman artist whose works were scorned in 1972 by her male colleagues," and part of her mission with Franklin Furnace was to give legitimacy to women?s artwork that wasn?t getting treated as "real" in more traditional venues. As she puts it, "There was a vacuum, a hole in the art world at that time, and I decided to jump through it into the unknown. What was the worst that could happen to me? I would have to go back to work as a secretary again." In one sense, ?the worst that could happen?, did, when Franklin Furnace found their state arts funded decimated in 1990, and then came under public scrutiny for supporting the work of explicit performance artist, Karen Finley. Finley, as Wilson explains, had already garnered a reputation as the "yam woman", and had already caught the attention of the Religious Right. Following Finley?s exhibition, Franklin Furnace was turned in to the New York City Fire Department as an "illegal social club," closing the performance space.

In 1995, plagued by financial worries and existing in a climate of increasing censorship of explicit women artists, Wilson "took a radical concept to my board: I wanted to sell the damn building and concentrate the program on broadcasting artists' ideas." Happily, the board endorsed the decision, and the switch to "life online" for Franklin Furnace was underway. It was during this time that Wilson met performance artist Nina Sobell and artist Emily Hartzell of the group Park Bench. As Wilson relates:

It was Nina and Emily who, in 1994, performed and archived their first realtime Web performance via a remotely controlled Webcam and saw the potential of the Internet as an art medium, with its new textual and visual vocabulary, as well as its potential to draw artists and audiences into interactive art discourse.

Today, there are a number of homecammers (though certainly not all) who are familiar with the work of the Park Bench Group; in fact Stacy Pershall of Atomcam.com often collaborates with Nina Sobell. Unfortunately, however, not all artists are this forward-thinking about how art can exist as performance on the Internet. Wilson confesses that she is often struck by "how artists (often dancers) were unwilling (perhaps because they view their bodies as their instruments) to make the leap from the human body to the body of the Net, with its parallel circulatory system and interactivity." In order to combat some of these problems, Franklin Furnace is collaborating with Parsons School of Design, Digital Design Department. As Wilson relates, the hope is that "artists have access to the entire range of digital vocabulary (i.e., not just netcasting) and sufficient time to create "live art on the Internet"--whatever that may be."

"Going virtual has not been easy," concedes Wilson, but it has been worth it, overall. Today, Wilson points out, the Franklin Furnace audience has radically changed from "seventy-five people sitting on hard folding chairs" to an " international audience of aficionados who view netcasts on their computer terminals: artists, art professionals, college students, office workers--and we think geeks and young folks, though we're not sure." Wilson argues that this change in venue has brought about a fundamental shift in terms of the audience?s relationship to the artist, and vice-versa, as chat and other interactive feedback measures have been requested and granted. In addition, she argues, "Giving artists access to a "team" of programmers, engineers, and designers may change not only the art and the definition of artist as a lonely dude in a garret, but the potential of art to affect broad social concerns--to change the world."

Wilson speculates that "Perhaps this contemporary moment bears comparison with the "golden age" of American avant-garde practice in the 1970s, when artists were encouraged to experiment wildly; the Internet is still a wide open frontier with very few fences (read: censorship) in place. " In an essay called "Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism," critic Faith Wilding voices a similar hope, exhorting cyberfeminists to "draw on the researches and strategies of avant -garde feminist history." Wilding?s concern is specifically that younger women have been too easily adopting parody and riot girl aesthetics as badges of status, rather than as useful political tools. "In order to disrupt, resist, decode, and recode the masculinist structures of the new technologies," Wilding counsels, "the tough work of technical, theoretical, and political education has to begin." For both Wilding and Wilson, this "work" begins with the avant-garde.

As tempting as I find this theorizing, I must this point: most women homecammers don?t consider themselves to be artists. Indeed, of all the homecamming "types" I mentioned earlier in this chapter, only one would fit the model of avant-garde resistance Wilding and Wilson are lauding. The fact is, most homecamming isn't "edgy" or otherwise outside mainstream values. And while it is understandable why theorists might want to ignore "boring" homecammers (much the way drama professors used to ignore the "early" plays of Brecht or the "late romances" of Shakespeare because they spoiled an otherwise clean canon) I want to counsel against this. Just because we cover our eyes doesn?t mean something is invisible.

As far as I can understand it, the project of both the avant-garde and the cyberfeminist artist is a "reinvention" of contemporary notions of women and womanhood. While I understand and applaud art that works towards these ends, I think that homecamming is different than this. Rather than reinventing women, homecamming forces a reassessment of those parts of women?s current lives that most of us would rather ignore: drudgery, pettiness, insularity. In one of the few in-depth treatments on the topic to appear in print, Brooke Knight makes the following observation about the complex banality (or the banal complexity) of homecamming:

The webcam is remarkable because it presents the familiar, and in that presentation, asks us to question what we find so fascinating?Privacy becomes publicity, and the performance is the never-ending nonevent. Technology allows for an obsessive documentation, which, in these cases, empowers the one under surveillance. It is a self-portrait of great importance because it is of seemingly nothing important at all.

Where realism says, "this is a woman " and cyberfeminism asks "what if a woman were different than she is", homecamming asks a different set of questions entirely. "Is this it?" the homecam asks its viewer. "Are you sure?" it asks again. These questions aren?t fictional, or even science fictional, but existential. And as Simone DeBeauvoir pointed out so very long ago, the question of existence is of necessity a different one for women than for men.

Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Deconstruction!

Sat, 01 Sep 2001 16:29:51 GMT

1. What's Structuralism?

Structuralism is a school of art and social criticism . A structuralist is someone who rejects the notion that there is "inherent meaning" in a piece of art, or civilization, or any other object of study. Instead, she focuses her analyses on the formal structures of the object in question, attempting to "read" it as one would decipher parts of an interdependent
text.

Both post-structuralist and and deconstruction practices have developed from the basis of structuralism.

2. Who Was Saussure?

Structuralism begins with the study of linguistics, particularly the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. Before Saussure, linguists followed one of two main schools (historical and rational), both of which thought of language as a simple naming process, and both of which assumed a natural link between the name and its object.

Saussure was trained as a specialist in Sanskrit and ancient Indo-European languages, and much of his work challenged the idea that one could study "language" as a unfied field. (I think you had to read Sandskrit to even get away with a challenge like that, back in the day. ) By the of his lectures comprised in Course in General Linguisitics Saussure had decided instead to focus on the configurations of particular national languages, like English and French. He had learned something we take for granted today: that there is no History of Language, only histories of languages.

(Note: for those interested in dates, S. was a contemporary of Freud and Durkheim...)

3. Saussure's first question: What gives meaning in a language?

Looking carefully at particular language structures, Saussure asked : what is that permits the human mind to make meaning out of a spoken utterance?

Saussure noted that in speech, there are "phonetic contrasts" which permit us to distinguish between one word and another. So "I'm here now", for instance, is often heard as "AHEMHEERUHNAHOWE" or some such, with or without proper pauses between words. Our ears (and brain), trained to understand particular dialects and speech patterns, make sense of it all.

True to standard linguistic beliefs, Saussure conjectured that many phonetic speech contrasts probably some kind of natural history in human development (think of how we came up utterances like "Ow!" for instance.) He thought that this natural history of spoken sound might be somehow linked to it ultimate meaning, but he didn't really delve deeply into the particulars of this all. The problem of the natural origins of speech was later taken up by linguists like Noam Chomsky, and even hard-core child development specialists like hmmm I can't think of a name here!)

4. What's the Signifier and Signified Thing About?

Next, Saussure moved his analysis from spoken to written language. He asked, "When we think of the "meaning" of a spoken phoneme, and compare it to a written word, do we mean the same thing?" Contrary to the linguistic traditions of his day, Saussure's answer was a definite NO.

For Saussure, the written word is a radically different beast than the spoken one. Oral language based is on sound, and as such, it may make meaning between words and things (for example onomatopoeias). Written language, on the other hand, is based on signs, and therefore can only make meaning by way of "signifieds" and "signfiers."

People get confused by the signified/signifier thing, and I've found one of the easy ways to explain it, as well as Saussure's notion of "difference", is by talking about money. Here goes:

Did you ever wonder why a dollar bill is worth more than a penny? Of course the answer is that it isn't, in its purest sense. Because it can be melted down and used for tools, copper is worth more in some cultures than paper. Copper is what Marx would call a penny's "use value".

But as everyone knows, a dollar bill has another value--a culturally agreed upon value at which one paper dollar becomes equal to one hundred pennies, ten dimes, and so on. This culturally agreed upon value is what Marx would call "exchange value." For Marx, while use value is tied to an item's natural state, exchange value is the result of its cultural state.

A dollar bill is a signifier, because its meaning is culturally derived. There is no "thing" that a dollar bill is, save a piece of paper that has more cultural importance than other pieces of paper. The buying power of that dollar bill is its signified. The relationship of the dollar bill (exchange value) to its buying power (use value) is the relationship of the signifier to the signified.

Now, let's move from money to words. Like the paper on which a dollar bill is printed, printed words have a crappy use value (which is why when they are typed out of sequence we think of them as gibberish.) But relative to ONE ANOTHER, written words have significant exchange value. "Kill boy girl" means little to us. But "The boy killed the girl" and "the girl killed the boy" mean very different things, because in English, it is culturally agreed upon that word order denotes subject and object of a sentence.

Today, this seems like an obvious proposition. But it's important to remember, prior to Saussure, linguists were arguing that there was an inherent relationship between an object and its name (mostly suggesting that if one went back far enough, to say, Sanskrit, that relationship would become obvious.) Saussure, a Sanskrit scholar himself, did not agree. He felt that while a scream might be universal (that is, a scream is a scream in any language) all writing must be culturally constructed and agreed upon to have meaning at all. If you think this is hair-splitting, try remembering the Clinton impeachment hearings. Law, which is based upon nothing but written language with the force of police power, derives its sole authority by determining the legitimate placement of words in an argument.

5. Why is the Sign Arbitrary?

Saussure is famous for calling the meaning of signs "arbitrary", which means they are selected at random and without reason. This kind of flew in the face of the "universal logic of language" crowd. Saussure thought that signs are kind of like money. You can change a ten word sentence to a five word sentence and retain meaning, the same way you can use twenty nickels or ten dimes to make a dollar. Signifiers can be swapped out. Signifieds--the concepts pointed at by signifiers--can be swapped out, too. If the government declares tomorrow that the buying power of one dollar has shifted, that's a change in the signified.

Actually, the analogy Saussure liked to use was chess. In his wonderful _Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers_, John Lechte's explains that Saussure thought of language "both as a history lesson and a chess game." To see language historically is to give it a diachronic perspective, but to see language as a chess match is to give it a much-needed synchronic perspective. "In chess, not only is the present configuration of pieces on the board all that matters to a newcomer to the game, but any number of items can be switched around for pieces on the board (a button for a king, etc.)" Cryptography is a kind of chess game with words. So is poetry, or any kind of writing, really.

6. What's Difference for Saussure?

If the sign is arbitrary, then how do we make meaning in writing, and how come everything doesn't seem like crazy poetry? What allows you to read this paragraph, and see it as more than gibberish? This is where Saussure's idea of "difference" comes in.

Difference, for Saussure, is "the means whereby value is established in any system of linguistic signs." Kind of a stock market of linguistic meanings. Grammar, usage, custom, history, syntax, and spelling are all difference mechanisms, in that they define what words will mean when placed next to one another. Meaning is impossible to ascertain outside of the system of difference.

7. Structuralists After Saussure

After Saussure's work was rediscovered in the 1960's, there was an explosion of interest in theories of difference and formal "textual analysis", and not just of language, but of entire social systems. Today, we think nothing of referring to movies, sports events or psychological interactions as "texts" to be read.

One of the main critiques of Saussure's flavor of structuralism was that it was too closed off to social change. Because he was a big old Commie (it's a joke, people) Mikael Bakhtin was obsessed with using Saussure's methods to illuminate the "dialectical struggles" within words. In _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_, he argued that language happens primarily through of a "clash of social forces" between people who use words. To study the changes in signs, and to chart those changes, is to study the class struggles of society itself.

It is from Bakhtin that Michel Foucault draws the very useful notion of "normative language". "Normative" is a fancy way of saying, "Words that have become naturalized over time, and thus hide their power base. " For instance (to take Foucault's famous example) "Sanity" is equated with a particular brand of culturally sanctioned behavior. Over time, the term "sane" is normalized, and becomes synonymous with "the natural state." Insanity", on the other hand, shifts in meaning from "un-sane" to "un-natural."

In her book _Epistemology of the Closet_, Eve Segwick makes a similar claim about the term "homosexual", arguing that "natural" heterosexuality is an impossible idea without the creation of an "unnatural" sexuality--homosexuality. In truth, both sanity and insanity, as well as hetero and homosexuality, "mean" nothing outside their cultural exchange values--which is to say their differences.

I bring these examples up to demonstrate that structuralism is alive and well in contemporary thought. Indeed, you really can't engage in post-structuralist critique without resorting to structuralism at some point. As my friend Jennifer likes to say: "Can't go over it. Can't go under it. Gotta go through it."

8.What's Post-structuralism?

Structuralism was really big in the 1960's and 1970's, and though it still has its die-hard fans, it has been replaced in the academy by post-structuralism. Post-structuralism has an interesting historical beginning in the student uprisings at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968. It also comes as a result of some important moments in political history (the dawn of "second wave" feminism in the U.S. and parts of Europe, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.) Here, however, I will only concentrate on its status as a philosophical movement which seeks to redress some of the problems of structuralism.

For many folks, post-structuralism begins with Jacques Derrida, who adapts notion of Saussure's "difference" and changes it into "differance" (with some wacky French accents)-- which Derrida calls a combination of "difference" plus "deferral".

_The Bloomsbury Guide_explains it this way, "For Derrida, no word (or sign) can ever be brought directly into alignment with the object it purports to recall. This means that meaning is always deferred, and can never be final." Sounds good to me, but let's back up a second.

8. Structuralists say Yes to Meaning, and talk about Difference.

The difference (hahah) between Saussure and Derrida, indeed the very rift between structuralism and post structuralism, is a disagreement over the following question: If the sign is always arbitrary, is there anything that has meaning, prior to culture?

A structuralist answer is, "Yes, pre-cultural meaning exists." Different structuralist locate pre-cultural meaning differently. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau Ponty argue that pre-cultural meaning resides in the body's ability to gesture. Elaine Scary has argued that the body in pain is a pre-cultural source of meaning.

Psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan hinted that there were two kinds of pre-cultural meaning. One he called The Imaginary, was formed by pre-Oedipal drives of the psyche (Julia Kristeva calls this place "the chora.") The other, which he called The Real, has to do with the clash of social forces and language, and can only be apprehended in fragments.

Structuralist anthropologists like Levi-Strauss found pre-cultural meaning in tribal ritual and formation. .Certain structuralist linguists like Chomsky argue that there is pre-cultural meaning in certain particular universal sound patterns, like screams. And the list goes on

9. Post-structuralists say "No" to Meaning, and talk about Differance.

A post-structuralist answer is: "Pre-cultural meaning is at best a fantasy, and at worst a dream that hiding a series of class-based nightmares. Differance helps us to remind ourselves to continually defer assigning fixed meaning to anything within language."

In _Writing and Difference_, Derrida argues that the belief in the "meaning" is at its core, Platonic. The Greek philosopher Plato argued that for every idea (artificial), there is a corresponding form (natural). In Saussure's story, writing is the idea and speech is the natural form.

But, asks Derrida, is this really so? Saussure holds that speaking precedes writing for humans, and is thus a purer form of communication. But when you think about it, Saussure's chronology doesn't really hold. Did the "cave people" speak before they drew, or pointed? Does a child's gesturing at birth precede or follow her first cries? And what of deaf people, many of whom gesture (and gesture, because it is a sign, is considered "writing", here), before they speak? If speaking doesn't "come first", is it really more "natural" and privileged than writing? Of course, Derrida answers, No.

In _Speech and Phenomenon_, Derrida takes issue with the old-fashioned notion of philosophy which attempts to "explain" reality, or old-fashioned
critics who purport to "say" what art "really means." For Derrida, these constructions use speech metaphors (or other metaphors about embodiment) that they implicitly mean to be seem more truthful than writing. But the truth is, there is no such thing as "pure speech" outside of writing, just as there is no "meaning" outside of culture.

In Truth in Painting, Derrida argues that these are not his insights, but are rather buried within philosophy texts themselves. Kant concluded, for example, that God was an undecideable proposition, but in order to continue the work of philosophy, Kant made what he called a "leap of faith" and kept writing. Derrida refuses, or in his words "defers" the leap of faith necessary to make meaningful philosophy.

11. What's Deconstruction? (Note: I'd like to do a little more on this section, when I get time.)

When it refuses the leap of faith, Derrida argues, traditional philosophy cannot ultimately state what something "means", and finds itself rendered worthless.

For this reason, Derrida urges a new form of philosophy: deconstruction. A deconstructionist is a post-structuralist who acknowledges (to return to Saussurian terms) that there are no signifieds, only signifiers. Derrida, deconstruction forgoes the "why" of traditional philosophy, supplanting it with an extended analysis of the "how".

Derrida is famous for the deconstructionist statement, "there is nothing outside the text". People misinterpret Derrida's words here, thinking he means to say that written texts matter more than everything else in the world. What he means is exactly the opposite. To Derrida, EVERYTHING ALREADY is a text, and the job of the philosopher not to tell the universe what things mean writ large, but rather to be one of many "readers" of that text.

Because we live in a technological time, I'll use an analogy many people are more comfortable with: hypertext. Many of us understand the notion that "the world is always hypertext" to mean that these days, everything we experience seems to contain "links" (sometimes visible, sometimes not) to other things. I see a flower, that flower reminds me of my grandmother, which reminds me of her pie, and suddenly every time I see a rose I need to go to the diner and get pie a la mode, etc. I also understand that when my best friend sees a rose, she may need to go swimming, for a set of enirely diffferent (yet still connected to her personal story) reasons.

When I shake my head and say, "Wow it's all hyperlinked", I don't mean that nothing counts except for the World Wide Web. Rather, I mean that everything in the world functions as if it were a web page, according to the arbitrary logic of hyperlinking. This is Derrida's argument, as well.

12. Is Deconstruction Apolitical?

Contrary to critics who argue that deconstruction is tantamount to saying "everything is relative", a number of minoritarian scholars (feminists, queer theorists, Black Atlantic theorists, cultural studies thinkers) have pointed out that deconstruction can be a powerful political tool. Perhaps this is better explained through examples:

For legal critics like Barbara Johnson, there is no "justice" or "crime", but a series of decisions and events which shape the juridical system. Ironically, it is in its reading of legal matters that post-structuralist thinkers come heavily under attack. Some folks, particularly a group of Germans called the Frankfurt School (led by Jurgen Habermas), argue that in the wake of the Holocaust, the ideas of justice and society needs to be resurrected, not abandoned to the terrain of "word gamesmanship". The post-structuralist retort to this attack is, I hope, something you'll already know by now, so I won't detail it here.

Here's another example: To theorist Judith Butler, "sex" and "gender" don't really exist per se. Certainly, she concedes in Bodies that Matter, there are constellations of physiological signs that are understood to be (for example) "heterosexuality" or "femaleness." But in truth, these understandings are cultural inheritances rather than given facts." Ironically, she points out, the very fact that we have discourses around "the body" indicates its status as a shifting term, lacking any securable ultimate meaning.

Of course, just because something is difficult to define doesn't mean that the project of making definitions should be abandoned. And both Johnson and Butler, both of whom are quite actively politically, are hardly "moral relativists." Though some critics accuse them of doing so, post-structuralism thinkers rarely advocate nihilism or even relativism for that matter. Instead, they demand that philosophy turn away from the false conviction that it can say for certain what anything "is" outside of culture and history. This is why, when making decisions with a postructuralist outlook, principals like provisionality, standpoint analysis, and at times "strategic essentialism" often come in handy. Other things post-structuralists tend to employ are irony, parody, mimicry, and camp, all used as strategies to understand the ways in which different viewpoints radically affect what something philosophically "is".

Understood this way, post-structuralism needn't be off-putting, mind-blowing or scary. Instead, for many of us, it seems a rather a reasonable description of the way things "are" these days. The truth may well be, as the old saying goes, if we really knew what it was we thought we were talking about, we wouldn't talk about it so much!

At one level, post-structuralism is more playful than other ways of doing philosophy, but at another level it is quite profound. As the debates circulating around the "viability of the fetus" on one hand and "ethical euthanasia" on the other demonstrate even the thing we call "life" is difficult to secure via language. Anyone who has ever had to wrestle with a handful of arguments, a series of breath and brain wave patterns on a machine, and a hope that they can live with the consequences of their actions, knows what I mean.

Eric's History of Guy Cams/His own Cam

Sat, 10 Mar 2001 04:46:05 GMT

As promised, here is a copy of my mail from Eric Durchholz of Planet Concrete, a highly successful 24 hour webcam starring Eric! Any formatting errors are mine.

Terri,

The guycam phenomenom began with Timo at defycategory.com and was followed shortly by seanpatricklive.com (the most famous of guycams, recently retired). I think this was around the same time as jennicam.

Guys were slow to come to camming but eventually about 20 cams were listed at a site that now resides at www.gaycams.org. My site originated at www.ericd.com/concrete. I was listed at gaycams on 10/08/98. I enjoyed quick fame as the site's traffic increased to 20,000 visitors before I was shut off.

Unable to pay the $8,000 bill, my domain name was held hostage and www.planetconcrete.com was started in February of 1999. For awhile, I had a pay section to help pay the bills. There weren't that many guycams and gay men were voracious in their appetite for guycams. Being the new guy on the very small block put me to the forefront of the guycam phenomenon along with rex (www.rexsworld.com), John (www.johncamlive.com), and Rage(www.ragingzone.com). Those appetites eventually caused many sites to shut down.

For some reason, the majority of gay men thought guycam sites should be free. There were accusations of scams, fraud and other such nasty stuff posted at peeping moeswhich eventually led the guycam message board (once a great resource for guycams) to be shut down (moderated now).

And as free sites failed to deliver, the porn industry responded. Today, male webcamming as "life in progress" exists in small pockets on the web. There are very few 24/7 guycams that are free. The rest of the guycam community consists of former or current models or pornstars hanging out at home nude or "whole house" guycams where a bunch of guys live together.

I originally set up ericd.com to be my "writing resume" on the web. the /concrete portion was a monthly "zine" that contained satire, chapters of my novels and other such stuff including a cam into my home office. I didn't think anyone was watching, really. The popularity of my cam translated into interest in my novel "The Promise of Eden." I quickly set up Concrete Books to publish the book before interest waned. Interest didn't wane and TPOE went on to become a success for Concrete Books and enable me to continue writing and hopefully publish works from other authors.

But the most inspiring comment about planetconcrete comes from one of my longtime viewers. He says: "Eric takes us on a journey everyday. He left his soul-numbing corporate job to achieve his dreams and he let people watch as he agonized, laughed, created, fell in love, and managed to hold it all together. The journey is not over. And his journey is an inspiration to anyone who has ever had a dream." I have that printed out and posted above my computer as a daily reminder that people have made me a part of their lives over the past few years.

Today planetconcrete gives a glimpse into my home as well as my mind. Concrete Entertainment (of which planetconcrete is a division of) was set up to handle tax and legal stuff for websites, books, and eventually (hopefully) music, film and other media. I once "performed" for the camera, but now I just leave it or move it to where I am.

How's that?

Eric

Some of our questions for SXSW!

Fri, 09 Mar 2001 23:01:16 GMT

Here are some of our questions. If you have any, shout them out and maybe we'll get them in!!

OPEN QUESTIONS:

Describe the moment you first decided to start broadcasting yourself on a webcam.

How does your family react to your webcam? How do your friends react?

How important is the prospect of nudity in terms of creating an audience?

Under what circumstances would you cease to broadcast your life?

What does privacy mean to you? How do you achieve this state?

What is more revealing--your webcam or your web diary?

Is your webcam profitable?

What is the smartest thing you?ve ever done with your webcam? The dumbest?

THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ARE OPEN, but I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM the FOLLOWING PEOPLE FOR SURE!!

Ana: Given your experience with webcams, what is your opinion of so-called ?reality television.?

Eric:Three of the four speakers on this panel are women. Can you talk a bit about being a male webcammer? Do you feel that women webcammers are more popular than their male counterparts? Why?

Stacy: What kind of technological advancements would help your webcam? How would you like to improve your site in the next year? Is money an obstacle to such improvements?

Introductory notes for SXSW, I think...

Fri, 09 Mar 2001 22:57:01 GMT

Hey everyone:

Hugh said to assume people attending our panel did NOT know about what webcamming was, and didn't know any of the history around the webdcamming uh, universe. With this in mind, I cooked up about a five minute introduction to the phenomenon. My plan was to run this spiel in the beginning, hitting a few pages on the web while I talk, so people can see what I mean. I don't want this to take any more than five minutes...

I am totally weak on how guys fit into this history, though I'll do some
research. Eric, any thoughts?

Please let me know if this sounds okay to you, or if there is something CRUCIAL I've forgotten.

Thanks,
T

1. I'm sorry to say that Hugh Forrest actually lied, and the title for this panel is a fib. The sad fact is, we can't possibily tell you everything you'd ever want to know about webcamming.

In fact, because webcamming is actually a vast topic, I think it's important to limit what we are going to talk about in our ninety minutes, and what we probably won't get to. What we ARE talking about today is webcamming as a one-to-many broadcast form. That is, one person transmits images of their life over the web, and many people watch and respond.

What we WON'T have time to get to are other forms of webcamming that don't work on these parameters. For instance peer-to-peer transmission (for instance Net meeting or icuii) is absolutely fascinating, but I think it needs to be evaluated differently from what we are thinking aobut today. The same holds true for group webcasts like those at Spotlife or Citizen X.

So to reiterate: Today we're talking about the dynamics of what happens when ONE person broadcasts his/her life to MULTIPLE viewers over the web.

2. The history of webcam broadcasts actually began with a coffee pot in Cambridge, England (which was just retired a few days ago.) Credit for the first personal webcam, however, belongs to Jennifer Ringley of Jennicam fame. In 1996, after hearing about the "fishbowl cam" , Jennifer began webcasting from her Dickinson College dormroom as a "social experiment" of sorts. To this day, the Jennicam is still the most well-known of all personal webcams (that is, if we exclude the fictional Truman Show) garnering five million hits a week, on good weeks.

3. To this day, people still associate most home webcameras with Jennicam's "aesthetic of the non-aesthetic" . For many, the appeal of the webcam site is that it is "real", which is to say, it offers a completely neutral glimpse of someone's life. But even from the beginning, personal webcameras were not neutral. For one thing, nearly every personal home site--with or without a camera-- has text of some sort residing on it. Journals, copies of emails sent and received, and links to stories and poems written by the person on the camera have always colored how personal webcammers have been perceived by their public.

4. By the time Ana Voog arrived on the webcam scene in 1997 (?), the notion of webcam as neutral was already changing. A fan of the concept of the Jennicam and a musician herself, Ana made what at the time was a radical proclamation. She said that for her, webcamming was art. Note: this doesn't mean Ana, or anyone else, claimed ALL subsequent webcamming was art. In fact, Jennifer Ringley has vigorously denied that her webcam serves an artistic function.

5. Actually, Ana was using a new technology to articulate a twenty-year phenomenon within women's performance. People like Linda Montano had already claimed that women's lives were art (ie personal is political). Filmmakers like Chantal Ackerman were pointing out that you could film the everyday events lacking conventional plot. Cindy Sherman was already making her ordinary self into a photographic icon. And Annie Sprinkle was showing that the line between explcit female sexuality and art was thinner than one might think at first glance. Ana's work--which flipped between demonstrating the beauty of the ordinary and the fun of being an at-home glamorgirl--carried on this tradition, albeit with a brand new technology.

6. While Jennifer made her life-cam, and Ana made her art-cam, the the commercial pornography industry was finding its own niche on the Web. People like Danni Ashe at Danni's Hard Drive were mixing the aesthetics of pinup girl culture with the do it yourselfness of home pages. Invariably webcasting became part of this scene as well, and in fact the biggest advances technologically on the web (ie streaming, high bandwith communications) have always begun with porn.

7. I give all this background to demonstrate the fact that today, women webcammers come in at least three flavors: The "real lifers", the "art makers", and the "porn providers". Most personal webcam sites wind up a hybrid of these three trends. (Terri: do I need to detail this more?)

8. As people grew more interested in watching web cameras, broadcasters found themselves in a financial bind. In 1998 (?) Jennifer Ringley became the first self-proclaimed non-porn webcam site to begin charging a fee to viewers for an increased refresh rate. She blamed her newly won fame and the high bandwidth costs such fame incurred. Others followed suit. Today there are a number of pay sites on the web, but there are far more free sites. The most popular are a mix of the two.

9. With camgirl fame came the rise of webcam fan bases. First there were the five i's; then the Peeping Moes. And of course alt.fan.jennicam, which i am not sure came before or after the Moes. The fan bases differ from those of say, rock stars, because the cam personalities frequently come in and speak with those posting. The sense of community is more strong for this reason.

10. The rise of Blogger and Live Journal technologies have caused the community element of the camworld to increase tremendously this last year alone. Interestingly, as the possibility for community rises, the notion of "camgirl fame" diminishes. Fame depends, at least in part, on an inability to reach the famous person. The desire to know what a cam personality is "really like" (the psychic mechanism that moves fame) diminishes when one can have daily contact with him/her.

Camgirl Interview Questions.

Wed, 21 Feb 2001 20:38:06 GMT

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<Okay: Here is what I sent to some camgirls I wanted to interview. >

A quick note: There are many questions here. Please feel free to answer the ones that interest you. You may skip any question at any time! If you've already covered some of this material elsewhere, a quick note to the effect of "Terri, this on on my FAQ somewhere", or "Terri look at the interview I did with such and such" will suffice. I will go do the legwork, I promise :) OR if you think parts of this are just far better dealt with over the phone or in icq, let me know and we'll deal with those parts that way.

Okay? Okay.

Please feel free to answer this all at once, or in mini-bits that you mail my way. I also encourage you to o use anythng you write to me on your own site to encourage discussion, add to your FAQ's, whatever you'd like.

I'm looking for completed email interviews about mid-March. This way give you a quick ring, or icq or something to clear up last minute questions I have in time to write everything up. Please let me know if that timeline works for you.

Mostly, I am trying to get stories, as opposed to raw data. So feel free to tell tales! I'd rather have six juicy stories and nothing else than every single question answered. I like me some stories, yeah.

Okay, on with the show...

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR WEBCAM WOMEN
QUESTIONS ABOUT BEING A WEB CAM SITE OPERATOR:

1. Can you remember the first time you saw your own image over a web camera? What was it like for you?

2. How much training in visual image production/distribution did you have before you began web camming? Were you, for instance, a photographer, a filmmaker, a zine distributor or a stage performer of any kind?

3. What sorts of things would you say that web camming has taught you about being a producer of your own image and words? Perhaps it has taught you to use a camera in more creative ways? Perhaps you've learned the hard way that you never really control your own image distribution over the Web? Perhaps you've learned other things I haven't even thought about?

4. If you now have multiple cameras in your home, how are editorial
decisions made regarding which images make it to the main page of your site? Do you have anyone else helping you to do this? For instance, if I am at a site and see a long shot of you sitting on your couch, and then the next shot is a close up of your face, and you haven't yourself moved closer to the camera, how am I seeing that progression of shots?

5. How much of a writer were you prior to beginning your web site? For instance, did you keep a journal? Did you do well in English classes, etc?

6. What sorts of things would you say that hosting your own site has taught you about your writing process, and how your writing effects other people?

7. How much a talker would you say you were prior to beginning your web site? Would you consider yourself a shy person, or gregarious, or something in between?

8. How do you feel about the arrival of sound into the webcasting
experience? What are your feelings about having your voice broadcast with the same level of clarity that your images are now seen? What do you think camgirls will gain, and what do you think we'll lose, but such an addition?

9. In general, which are your favorite part(s) of your own web site, and why? Do you like the refreshing photo(s); the diary entries; the gallery stuff; the fan bbs's? Something else entirely?

10. In general, which are your least favorite part(s) of your own web site? If you don't like those parts, why not do away with them entirely? Do you feel at all compelled (by, say visitor desire or a sense of obligation) to keep some parts of your site alive?

11. Please describe for me your very first webcam/home page set up. How many cameras did you have, and where were they pointed? What sort of modemconnection did you have, and what computer hardware were you using? What sort of ISP arrangement did you have?

12. What sort of new technical features have you added to your site since you began? Have you added, for instance, a live journal, or streaming video?

13. Which technical change to your site has (in your opinion) worked out for the best? Adding more cameras? Getting more bandwidth capacities? Building a bbs function into your site?

14. Which technical change to your site has worked out for the worst? For instance, some women put streaming video on their site, but then wound up removing it because they felt it took away the mystery of a silent image. Others have had to censor portions of their livejournal because they are getting too much public abuse from trolls.

15. Here's the fun question! If I were to give you an unlimited budget and staff, tell me what your site would look like.

QUESTIONS ABOUT BEING A WELL-KNOWN CAMGIRL

1. Do you have any recollection of how and when the term "camgirl" came into being? In your estimation, how often should a woman have her web camera on before she refers to herself as a camgirl?

2. When did you realize that your site had become more than "some little experiment", and that you had to take it seriously as a business and/or art venture? Was it when the hits got too big for your ISP to handle? Was it when you couldn't answer all your viewer mail in a day? The first time a reporter asked to interview you? Describe for me if you can the feelings you were experiencing around all that.

3. Do you consider yourself famous? Do you think the web is altering what we mean when we say things like "celebrity"? How do you think camgirls enter into that change?

4. What, to you, are some of the best things about being a well-known camgirl? Perhaps you enjoy helping form community, or you relish the possibilities for well-viewed autobiography? Maybe you get a kick out of the social experiment of it all? All of the above? None of the above?

5. Conversely, which are your least favorite part(s) of camgirl life?
Perhaps you dislike the drama of it all, or the perpetual public scrutiny. Conversely, maybe you find being a camgirl awfully boring at times? Perhaps slavish fan droolings bug you, or academics trying to get you to fill out surveys?

6. In general, how do you feel about fan bulletin boards like Peeping Moe, designed to discuss the lives and decisions of camgirls? Are you flattered, not interested, enraged, active yourself on such boards? All of the above? None of the above?

7. What sort of ethical obligations to you think webcammers have to their viewing public? For instance, perhaps you feel they have no obligations at all? Or perhaps you feel that since they are putting themselves in the public eye, they should behave in a more circumspect fashion than someone who doesn't choose to live on cam, etc.

8. Do you think that the ethical responsibilities of a webcammer should increase as she/he becomes more well-known in mainstream media circles? Do you think high-profile cammers owe it to the Internet community to "represent the Net" responsibly? Or do you believe that this is asking too much of the webcammers?

QUESTIONS ABOUT WORK AND WORTH

1. How would answer the charge that camgirls don't "do" anything, besides hang around their house, and thus should not be compensated financially?

2. Do you think the notion of camgirls not "doing" anything is linked to larger devaluations of women's and/or artist's work? How, or how not?

3. Do you remember the first time you decided to run an advertisement, build a membership section, or ask for money for your web site? Can you describe what was going on in your mind at the time? Can you describe how people reacted?

4. Do you employ a business manager, accountant, or clerical worker to help you maintain your web site? Did the decision to hire someone like this cause you any sort of emotional turmoil at the time, or not? For instance, some camgirls think of hiring an accountant as an indicator of how they "couldn't handle things on their own". Others see it as the "time they stopped being indie." And some others were just relieved for the assistance.

5. Have you ever collaborated professionally with another existing Web venture? How have those experience been for you?

6. How much of your financial information are you comfortable disclosing to the general public? Do you think that will all the mis-information flying around the Web, it might be better to offer full disclosure, or is discretion (in financial matters) still the better part of valour?

6. What level of interaction do you feel a camgirl "owes" her viewing
public? For instance, how often do you feel she ought to update her diary, or post new images on her site? Or perhaps you feel she owes nothing at all in this respect, and is merely granted the public the right to view her life?

7. If you have a for-pay section on your site, what do you feel you are offering to the consumer? Is it a chance to support the concept of the cam, or a way for fans to gain entrance to the next level of fandom? Perhaps it's a way to get more access to you? None of these? All of these? Do you feel you "give your money's worth"?

QUESTIONS ON PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES TOPICS OF THE DAY

1. What do you understand the word "exhibitionist" to mean?

2. Do you consider yourself to be exhibitionist? Have people called you that before? What is your opinion of that judgement?

3. Do you think the term exhibitionism is changing over time with new
surveillance technologies, and if so, has this altered who and what you consider to be exhibitionist?

4. What do you consider the word, "narcissist" to mean?

5. Do you consider yourself a narcissist? Have people called you a
narcissist before? What is your opinion of that judgement?

6. Do you think that narcissism is a term overused with respect to
outspoken women and artists? Or do you think that the term is equally applied to all sorts of people?

7. How do you define the term, "pornography"?

8. Do you think of your web site as pornographic? Have others called you a pornographer before? What is your opinion of that judgement?

9. How do you define the term, "feminism"?

10. Do you think of yourself as feminist? Why or why not?

11. Some folks have argued that camgirls are "good for feminism" because they are women who control the means of their own image in media. Some have argued that camgirls are "bad for feminism" because the image they portray is inevitably made into the same old same old for many (i.e. even outspoken camgirls have the normal assortment of sexist and racist fans, most of whom could give a shit about their views on anything but nudity.) Do you have any thoughts vis a vis whether camgirls help or hinder women, overall?

12. Some people have pointed out that camgirls are almost without exception white women from North America or Western Europe. Ironically, there is a rapidly increasing segment of the African American and Latina population going online in the U.S, yet no significant camgirls have yet come out of that population. Why do you think this might be?

13. Whether you wish to be seen this way or not, young women may interpret you as a role model. Do you have any thoughts about your responsibilities (or lack thereof) in this regard?

TOPICS SUGGESTED BY FRIENDS:

1. What's the funniest thing that has happened to you in your experience as a webcammer?

2. What's the most sexually arousing thing that has happened?

3. What's the most disheartening thing?

4. What's the most inspiring thing?

5. What do you hope the next five years of webcamming brings to you?

6. What have I forgotten to ask you? :)

Camgirl Thoughts, from brilliant Alan:

Mon, 19 Feb 2001 04:59:22 GMT

Alan and I first met when I was doing research on webcam fans, and his answers to my questionnaire were provocative, to say the least. One of my favorite moments (now, not then) was when he accused me of behaving like the "Diane Fosse of camgirls". This phrase still cracks me up. I have no idea what it *really* means (camgirls are gorillas in my midst? I don't think so...) Nevertheless I would like to have "Diane Fosse of Camgirls" printed on a biz card someday.

Alan and I have been writing one another for about six months now, and my regard for his opinion grows each day. He's always quick with praise, and quick to call me on my shit out here. For instance, he was the first one to argue that it is disingenous of me to act like I'm not BOTH inside and outside of camming, because of my academic background. He told me about Ana's trouble with her mom, and insisted that I might be able to help somehow, by telling Ana directly that I thought her work served a feminist praxis .

Anyway, this is a long build-up, but it's important. Alan is very dear to me and his thinking always pushes mine up a notch. Here is a copy of his most recent note. By permission, of course.

A while ago, I asked the question, "What separates a girl with a cam, from a 'camgirl'?" Below, Alan is referring to the fact that he recently wrote and told me he thinks of *me* as a camgirl.

Dear Terri,

When writing "you are a camgirl to me" I wondered how you would
react. Perhaps it was, "Um, nice compliment. Hey! Wait a minute. I'm many other things first. Camgirl is far down the list." Does the label diminish or supersede other ways a person is perceived? Not to me. In fact, quite the opposite. But, I can understand why someone might object.

Andrea, (Here and Now) wrote:

"i do not want to be a cam girl. i do not want to be mtv. it seems that is all i do. but how does one circumvent this? how does one subvert the monopoly on 'real life' that mtv has, that all major tv stations have, that dictate what you expect to see at a site with live cams 24 hours a day?"

(used with permission)

There's something that I didn't add to my last bit on what qualifies a
camgirl because it seemed so obvious. However, the more I think about it, the more elusive it seems. The cam must be integrated with the rest of the website: journal, bio, essays, art, photo gallery, sound, archives, links, bulletin board, chat, membership, merchandise and the graphical layout. What elements serve as context and what are the performance? The distinction is fuzzy and maybe arbitrary. Any attempt to use this as a basis for a camgirl taxonomy produces an array of bats, penguins and
platypuses. (I must owe someone an apology for the last sentence.)

What should be the main qualifier, the cam, is not a given. I consider
Lisa to be a camgirl, even though she was the subject of the Here and Now cams, not her own. Lately, she has appeared only on borrowed cams. Her journal entries still have a heightened sense of reality for me. I think this is due to the continuity of the struggle to be herself on a cam. At first, the battle was against the weird social dynamics of the Here and Now house and, of course, the "show me your boobies" crowd. Autonomy usually has a economic cost. I hope she is able to re-establish a cam presence soon. This time, on her own terms.

Sound trumps written word. Image trumps sound. Real-time, high-res, streaming image with sound trumps everything. Or does it? For all of the technology, what I see at Here and Now seems the least real to me. Not that they aren't real people, but I suspect that they aren't *being* real. The cues all point to a bad MTV production. What does it take to subvert the popular media's hold on our perceptual grammar? It's increasing difficult as the camming concept is co-opted by "reality" TV. However, the basic elements of a well-designed camsite do form a consistent and unique set of cues that can't easily be faked.

So, who are the subversives and why? Ana and Stacy are, even while standing still. Jenni is admitted by the grandmother clause. And, a certain author, teacher, academic, etc. is by challenging the notion that an authority figure must maintain a respectable distance between her real self and the masses.

Alan

Terri's Top Ten Books: Feminism after 1985

Mon, 19 Feb 2001 01:04:07 GMT

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Luce Irigaray: Speculum of the Other Woman. Topics: philosophy, psychoanalysis.

Irigaray is the mad philosopher of feminism, and this book will show you how, and why. It starts somewhere mid-point in a crazed debate she is having with Plato, Descartes, Kant, Freud and Jacques Lacan all at once over the abandoned territory of the feminine in epistemology. And then it just gets wackier. I've read this text about six times and only understand parts of it. And yet, I keep quoting her, again and again. Essential essentialism for feminists.

Teresa DeLauretis: Technologies of Gender: Essays on Film, Theory, Fiction. Topics: film, psychoanalysis.

One of the most important feminist books on film in two decades, I think. This is the book to read after you've read Focault on sexuality, Laura Mulvey on "the gaze" in film, and Umberto Eco's stuff on semiotics. It challenges all these over-used paradigms, as only a genius Italian lesbian can do.

Patricia Williams: Alchemy of Race and Rights. Topics: Race, legal studies.

Though her focus is on law and race, Williams draws most of her stories from her life experience as an educated, articulate black woman in a country that isn't particularly interested in black women to begin with. One of the best examples of "academic memoir" in existence, and huge influence on my own writing style.

Linda Williams: Hard Core. Topics: film, pornography, Marxism, psychoanlysis.

Many people know that this is the only rigorous book written on the topic of, well, hard core pornography. What many people don't know is that this is also probably the most useful explication of classic Marxism as it applies to feminist theories of representation, as well. I've used this book countless times: some of them involve a discussion of Deep Throat, true. Mostly though, I use it when a clear explanation of terms like "commodity fetishism" is needed.

Drucilla Cornell:The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harrassment.Topics: law, philosophy

I think Cornell is the smartest feminist living today. Her grasp of philosophy, law and psychoanalysis is staggering, evidenced by the fact that she can take on three of the biggest hot botton topics in feminism and kick ass with them. The concept of the "imaginary domain" should be mandatory for any discussion on women's issues henceforth.

Gayatri Spivak: Outside in the Teaching Machine. Topics: international politics, Marxism, psychoanalysis

If you had to read just one book on the promises and perils of "international feminism" , this would be the one to read. Gayatri Spivak has made a life's work of complicating the ridiculous sexism and racism that fuels "do-good" programs like forced sterilization. She also makes you think twice about wife burning, bonded prostitution and other issues that seem to never be discussed in a rational way outside the pages of her books.

Judith Butler: Bodies the Matter. Topics: Queer theory.

Skip the now-famous Gender Trouble. This is the Judith Butler book you should read. Butler is unparralled in the area of queer theory, and every chapter in this book is mind blowing. Even if it is written in that infamous Butlerian prose.

Anne Fausto Sterling: Sexing the Body. Topics: biology, medical history.

Ever wonder how a medically trained feminist deals with the question"What is Gender"? Fausto-Sterling's essays span such enormous range--from discussions on brain chemistry, to medical debates regarding intersexuality, to historical models of endricinology--that she is a veribable one stop shop.

Donna Haraway: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan?_Meets_OncoMouse? Topics: Bio-ethics, cyberculture.

Yes, the title is ridiculous. Yes, the artwork is ridiculous. Yes it sprawls. But WHO ELSE is going to take on genetic engineering, sweatshop laborers and interace theory for feminists? Donna Haraway is smarter than all of us combined, and the things she writes that are mocked now are quoted like scripture ten years later. Mark my words.

It's a happening, man

Sun, 04 Feb 2001 21:13:15 GMT

Didja ever try to explain words like "happening" or 'art action' to people? I liked this defintion I found at the New Media Encyclopedia put together by those Frenchies at the Pompodiu or however you spell it.

Happening (event, performance, action)

The happening is an evolving action carried out within a defined environment. Notwithstanding a general direction established in advance, there remains a large margin for improvisation while it is in progress, and the reactions of the spectators may in turn influence the action under way.

The origins of the happening cannot to be traced to the theater, because of the difference in the choice of sites and participants, as well as the postulate of indetermination. Rather, the happening must be linked with the visual arts. In the course of the twentieth century, painting and sculpture gradually went beyond their respective two- and three-dimensional limits to gradually take the form of assemblages. These in turn were to evolve into environments and then, with the introduction of live participants, into happenings. Indeed, these events grew out of the search for more direct relations between artist and public, or between art and life, and the rejection of the power of the market over art.

In Japan, the nine members of the Guta? group, including Murakami Saburo, Kudo Tetsumi, and Shiraga Kazvo, made happenings their speciality from 1955 on through spectacular actions, such as the opening of a passageway through a succession of paper screens that were destroyed as the group advanced. The situation in the United States developed in parallel. As early as 1952, John Cage, who was then teaching at Black Mountain College, created an environment incorporating works by Robert Rauschenberg, a ballet by Merce Cunningham, a poem by Charles Olsen, and the music of David Tudor in a single space.

But the happening spread in the artworld through the efforts of Allan Kaprow, who created 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. The following year, French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel presented the Enterrement d'une chose (Burial of a Thing) in Venice. Among the other artists most representative of the early happenings were George Brecht, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, Ben Vautier, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell, as well as the Viennese threesome of Hermann Nitsch, G?nter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.

The happening was often a political (Beuys) or sociological (Ben, Vostell) gesture, but it might also take on a poetic or playful form (Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg). Other terms covering the offshoots of the happening may be associated with these different conceptions: event (a short, anodine action) for Brecht, concert for Fluxus, performance for Oldenburg, and action for Beuys.

Toward the end of the 1960s, two main trends emerged: the performance, which was more structured and sometimes narrative and which often put the public back in its role of spectator, and Body Art, where the artist's body became a veritable medium.

Bibliography: Jurgen Beckek and Wolf Vostell, Happening: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau R?alisme: eine dokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1965). Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (New York: Abrams, 1966). Jean-Jacques Lebel, Le Happening (Paris: Deno?l, 1966). Mariellen R. Sandford (ed.), Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995).

It's a happening, man

Sun, 04 Feb 2001 21:13:06 GMT

On Fidelity. (In Progress)

Sat, 03 Feb 2001 05:05:37 GMT

In an influential article that ran in Salon Magazine, Simon Firth argued that the appeal of the home aesthetic webcam lies in its "fidelity to the moment." By this, Firth meant the webcam's seeming commitment to show life as it unfolds, in all its detail and banality. A year ago I would have agreed with Firth without reservation. Today, though, I feel there is more at stake in webcam watching and broadcasting. In fact, I'd like to suggest that for many (though certainly not all) of us the honeymoon of "the moment" ended sometime ago.

For many of us, the pressing question isn't "Is what I'm seeing really here, and really now?" We all know any performance--mediated or not--can be altered, and even if it is presented unadultered, audience perception will change its 'reality'. To paraphrase an old commercial, at the very least, homecamming teaches us that something can be both real AND Memorex. To put it in psychonalytic feminist terms, the woman is both herself and her masquerade.

Some webcammers, like some feminists, are arguing that the questions raised by new technologies call for more than a yay or a nay, a verdict of real or fake, true or false. I'd like to think of myself as one of these people. To alter Firth's formulation , I'm less interested in homecamming's fidelty to the moment, than I am in the way it encourages me to observe myself, my friends, my enemies via screens and have the following dialogue with myself: "Okay, I don't believe this part of what I see/hear/read, but I DO believe THAT part."

To me, homecamming obeys the law of metonymy, not metaphor: one can grabs a piece of an image, of a diary entry, perhaps desiring the whole, perhaps not. For some of us, homecamming is a different way of teaching that knowledge of one another will always be partial, incomplete. That the most real thing also is unreal, if one turns the camera in a slightly different way and refocuses. At its core, I think, this is the lesson of postructuralism in general, and representational theories of feminism in particular.

CELLPHONE WEBCAMS COMING!

Thu, 01 Feb 2001 01:20:58 GMT

For Stacy et al:

Sprint and FlashPoint Partner to Enable Wireless Digital Imaging on the Sprint PCS Nationwide Network

Kansas City, MO and San Jose, CA - November 6, 2000 -

Sprint PCS (NYSE: PCS), the fastest growing wireless carrier in the United States, and FlashPoint Technology, today announced a partnership that will result in an innovative service enabling Sprint PCS enterprise customers to wirelessly send images to the Internet via the Sprint PCS nationwide network.? FlashPoint's Photivity? end-to-end digital imaging platform will provide a solution for business customers to send images from the point of capture to the Internet, using a digital camera connected to a Sprint PCS Internet-ready Phone.?
?
Photivity is a powerful, flexible platform that provides the underlying technology for the future of digital imaging. It allows partners and developers to create customized business and consumer applications designed to specifically meet their end customers' needs.? Integrating this platform with the Sprint PCS network makes it possible for business customers to transmit images, along with embedded information about the image, from remote locations to colleagues and corporate enterprises anywhere in the world. Images can be sent directly from a digital camera to a Sprint PCS hosted Web account where the photos can be stored, viewed and manipulated.?? It also allows customers to send e-mail directly from the camera so that colleagues and clients can be invited to view, make comments, evaluate and approve images on the hosted site, creating a dynamically shared photo album that bolsters and enhances workflow.

"Sprint PCS continues to strengthen its leadership position by launching cutting-edge, data-enabled wireless applications aimed at helping our enterprise customers be more productive, reduce costs and provide better customer service," said Jay Highley, vice president, business marketing.? "Using FlashPoint's Photivity platform, we will be able to offer an innovative and relevant wireless imaging solution to business customers across a broad range of industries.? Being able to send pictures to the Web from remote locations in real-time via the Sprint PCS all-digital nationwide network will be a valuable productivity tool that translates into a competitive advantage for businesses with a highly mobile workforce."

Wireless imaging has broad appeal with potential applications in several industries including real estate, insurance, construction, architectural, engineering, law enforcement and media.? For example, an insurance claims adjuster could visit a home damaged by a tornado and file the images on the spot by taking photos on a digital camera, connecting their camera to a Sprint PCS Internet-ready Phone, and sending the images to the insurance company's Sprint PCS-hosted Web site.? The onsite process will reduce the time necessary to process claims, leading to enhanced productivity and customer satisfaction. Or a real estate agent could capture images of listed homes, attach descriptions and quickly publish them for potential buyers to inspect online without going back to their office.? The real-time nature of this service ultimately saves the agent time, money and could mean higher sales.

"Sprint PCS is an ideal partner for FlashPoint's Photivity platform," said FlashPoint President Stephen Saylor.? "As the leader in mobile wireless data services, Sprint PCS is able to use our platform to offer a powerful wireless imaging solution to their business customers.? The Photivity platform was created as the underlying technology and industry standard for the future of imaging."

Sprint PCS will be engaged in customer trials throughout the rest of the year with commercial availability expected in early 2001.

"Photivity streamlines and accelerates the flow of communication between the office and its mobile workforce, making it more productive and better suited to collaborate over great distances," said Ron Glaz, program manager at International Data Corporation.? "FlashPoint and Sprint PCS are demonstrating why cameras went digital in the first place, by enhancing communication in a digital world."

About FlashPoint

FlashPoint Technology, Inc., is the creator of Photivity?, the industry standard platform for digital imaging. The Photivity capture-to-share platform provides the underlying technology for the future of digital imaging, allowing partners and developers to implement customized applications designed to meet the needs of their customers. Building on FlashPoint?s established Digita brand, Photivity incorporates the Digita operating system (OS), a powerful gateway infrastructure and a flexible Internet photo hosting system. The OS is the intelligence behind award-winning digital cameras and printers from Epson, Hewlett Packard, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax. FlashPoint Internet Services provides private-labeled photo hosting infrastructure. Through Photivity, FlashPoint is changing the way people work and play, giving them the freedom to share their images from anywhere. FlashPoint?s Web site is located at www.flashpoint.com.

About Sprint PCS
Sprint PCS operates the largest 100 percent digital, 100 percent PCS, voice and data nationwide wireless network in the United States, already serving the majority of the nation's metropolitan areas including more than 4,000 cities and communities across the country. Sprint PCS has licensed PCS coverage of nearly 270 million people in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin islands. For more information, visit the Sprint PCS web site atwww.sprintpcs.com.

Sprint PCS is a wholly-owned tracking group of Sprint Corporation trading on the NYSE under the symbol "PCS." Sprint is a global communications company - at the forefront of integrating long-distance, local and wireless communications services, and a large carrier of Internet traffic. Sprint built and operates the United States' first nationwide all-digital, fiber-optic network and is a leader in advanced data communications services. Sprint has $20 billion in annual revenues and serves more than 20 million business and residential customers.

back to press releases

?
Wireless Remote Control for Digita OS Digital Cameras Released??more...

Sprint and FlashPoint Partner to Enable Wireless Digital Imaging on the Sprint PCS Nationwide Network??more...

other press releases ...

HP PhotoSmart 912
HP PhotoSmart 618
HP PhotoSmart C500
Kodak DC290
Kodak DC265
Kodak DC260
Kodak DC220
Minolta EX 1500
Pentax EI-2000
Pentax EI-200
?

Photographing Backlit Subjects

Because you don't take pictures in a perfect world, You need to learn a few simple tricks to compensate for less than perfect lighting.

more...

?
Digita Applications
Digita Desktop
Digita File
Digita Presents
Slideshow
Jigsaw
Digita LogoCreator

Script Central

Home | First Steps | Digita Basics | On Assignment | DigitaScript | Digita Developers | Digita at Work
Contests | Newsletters | FAQs | Glossary | FlashPoint.com
Questions or comments? info@flashpoint.com ?2000 FlashPoint Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.digitaphoto.com/press/template_pr.emm?press_id=117

?

Note to a documentary person.

Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:02:16 GMT

So, every once in a while I get approached by a person doing a documentary on internet stuff--particularly sex and internet stuff. And every time, I seem to wind up having a version of this conversation. So I thought I'd post it here for your thoughts.

------
Dear XXXX

Thanks for writing. Your work sounds very interesting. Right now, I am pretty deeply involved writing my doctoral dissertation on women and webcams. Most of my work is auto-ethnographic, and I *am* one of "those people" living a large portion of my life on the Net.I've written on sexual uses of Net communications before, and I'm fine with talking about different venues people are using to express themselves sexually online.

However, I should be honest with you: I've been burned by documentary people before. What makes for good television, I've found, is not always what serves the interests and the stories of the people being covered. For example, I know it's a hot topic, but I shy away from people who use terms like "sexual addiction". I'm not entirely comfortable pathologizing people in that way, and I'm always surprised with the ease the term "addiction" is thrown around when talking about the Net.

I think it is somewhat disingenous to begin documentary with the supposition that, "We know what to expect in 'real life' but on the Internet...Well! It's a different kettle of fish!" To my knowledge, there is nothing that occurs over the Net that doesn't occur in a fleshly equivalent. The Net makes it easier for SOME people to get what they are looking for sexually, and for others, it is a hinderance. The Net makes it more possible for SOME people to act in compulsive ways, and for others, it is a place where they finally are able to break free of compulsions they've had for decades in everyday life. As Freud might say to McLuhan, sometimes a medium is a message, and sometimes it is just a medium.

Anyway, these are my initial feelings. Please forgive me if I seem a little defensive and prejudiced. I don't wish to be! I just thought it would be better to get my biases out in the open first and foremost. If you are still interested in talking, I'm happy to talk with you over the phone. I can be reached at XXXXXX

Best,
Terri Senft

This is what I mean, people.

Mon, 22 Jan 2001 18:45:25 GMT

Okay. as if to like PROVE my point, I just got this email a minute ago:
------------------
Hello:

back there in romania, i watch your imobile face (refresh rate = 1 min), wondering how many e-mails of this type you just received until now. kind of boring, ain't it?

in fact, there is not much to be said. the clock reads Monday, January 22, 20011:29:25 PM. I don't know the time lag from here to there (you're supposed to bein NY, i think). my clock says 20:42. i am about to leave office. i suppose my children will really know how tight your jeans are, molly...

la revedere, e-dominatrix mama! :o)

mirel palada (ambiguous Romanian first name, is she a he? is he a she?...) aka turin turambar (perhaps a he)

-----------

Can I just ask: who the hell is MOLLY???

What Makes a Camgirl?

Mon, 22 Jan 2001 18:42:45 GMT

Okay, here is the beginning of something. Let me know your thoughts and I will buy you liquor!

What makes the difference between a "girl with a webcam" and a camgirl? Surely, someone who turns on her Quickcam for an hour or so once a week isn't doing the same thing as someone broadcasting to millions, with nine cameras, 24 hours a day, seeven days a wee. Still, what's the dividing line between the two extremes?

Some people say that a camgirl is someone who charges money to her viewers. Yet nearly every for-pay web site has a "free" section, and many camgirls don't yet charge because they are working through technical logistics like on-site credit card validation. Still others, like the women on ifriends.com, charge viewers but what they are really offering is by the hour sex shows and little more.

Perhaps, some people say, a camgirl is constituted by the amount of time she spends on-camera. This is tempting as a definition: certainly 24/7 camera sites seem to be camgirl-worthy. But barring 24/7, how much time is enough time? Jennifer left for a cross-country trip and didn't have a camera on for three weeks, and I certainly stil think she is a camgirl. On the other side of the spectrum, I can't get my camera to work eight hours a day in a row, and I can comfortably chat with Ana and Stacy about "camgirl problems" (albeit not as extensively.) So what's that about?

This brings me to the idea of web celebrity, which is what some people believe a camgirl is. At first glance, it would seem that web celebrity is about amount of site hits one gets. The more hits, the more viewers (presumably), and the more viewers, the more known a person is. I think this is true to a certain extent. I had a link from the Jennicam site for three days and got more traffic than I got in a year to my site. That is the power of celebrity.

Celebrity and viewership seem synonymous, but that is a too-easy read of the dynamics of media, I think. For instance, I do NOT get interviewed on NPR and places like this because I have a zillion web hits and am thus emblematic of a camgirl. I get interviewed because as a girl-dissertating-on-webcams-with-her-own-webcam, it's a good media story. But the media coverage in turn *generates* web hits for me. Likewise, more people visited Jennicam after the David Letterman show, which in turn raised her stats, etc. More people visited Latitude 11 after NPR mentioned Courtney, etc. What I am trying to say is sometimes mainstream media *makes* a camgirl, whether she has hits to show for it or not.

Thus far, I've still not answered my question. If it's not amount of time on camera, number of viewers, or requests for payment, what DOES make a camgirl? How do we separate her from a girl who cams?

Perhaps one way to think of it is this: a girl who cams does it for fun, and a camgirl does it for work--whether or not financial compensation is involved. My definition of work is "labor expended", and I believe work can serve either as a vocation, an avocation or both. Obviously, some camgirls work harder at maintaining their sites than others do. And obviously, the market and the public aren't ready to call what camgirls do work, quite yet. But I don't see this situation as any different from that of actors or painters or whatnot.

It is common to hear people say that camgirls "do nothing". Of course, this is not true. Doing nothing with involve no camera, no audience, etc. I think what people are really trying to say when they argue camgirls "do nothing" is "they do nothing I couldn't do just as well." And perhaps this is true. A good analogy is photography, or writing. Everyone who takes a good photo or writes well thinks they have what it takes to do the job long-term. But weathering technical, financial and emotional challenges separates "writers" from "people who write." Perhaps it also separates camgirls from "girls with cams"?

I began running my own webcam site as a sort of supplement to my studies. I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. The fact is, it takes consistency, patience, and commitment to run a good webcam site. First, here are technical challenges of long-term webcamming: keeping the cable/dsl connection going, adding cams and storage space, dealing with server strain if the hits get too high (NOT a problem for me. Heh.)

There are also creative challenges. I believe that one mark of camgirl is a specifically designed camming web site. This site usually contains the following elements: a splash/welcome page; a link to journal entries; a FAQ of some sort; a link to a mailing list of some sort. Of course, there is also the link for the camera itself, usually with a little script written in to allow the cam image to appear as a pop-up window. This way it can sit on the viewer's desktop while she surfs.

Finally, there is a pressure to, for lack of a better term, entertain. I am not a 24/7 camgirl--I don't have the financial, hardware or emotional resources to do that. Still, people want that 24/7 connection with me. They complain whenever my camera isn't on. They think it is perfectly okay to repeatedly message me even when I say I am working. And they bitch if links on my site are bad, or if my journal isn't updated all the time.

Originally, these people were just friends looking at the site, and I could say in a good-natured way, "Oh, bite me." But when my work began getting media attention in places like Suck and Slate and Lingua Franca and stuff, visitors to my cam site started to include not just friends, but also the curious. So now my (horribly designed) chat room regularly has people I don't know, waiting to do I don't even know what.

Some people, like Kathy, are totally cool and I am glad I got to meet her. But many others are just odd. They come in and don't talk. They just sit in the chat. Why? What on earth are they there for? When I ask, the answer is always, "Well, you asked for it. You set up this thing." And they are right. Perhaps this answers why I am there, but it still doesn't quite get to why THEY are there. And that dialogue, while often amazing and important (see: Kathy) is also often creepy, disconcerting and odd.

It's emotional work to deal with this all and my site doesn't see 1/1000 of what Anas or Jennifers or Stacy's does. Seriously, I am like nobody in this camworld thing and I *like* it that way. I want people to read my books but if nobody ever saw my cam again, that would be cool for my ego.

I'm not bitching; more like trying to explain. I understand that for camgirls, dealing at some level with 'the viewer' comes with the territory. It's part of the job, and though it can be rewarding, it actually becomes just that --a job--after awhile.

I also--get this--think camgirls make art. My definition of art is "creation with intention." At least for today it is. I come from a background of contemporary performance stuff, so I am quite comfortable calling things like the Happenings of the 1970's "art". Your mileage may vary. :)

Just as Happenings were BOTH "a bunch of people getting together, no different than a damn party" AND a contemporary revisioning of what constituted an official art-making event, I believe home-webcamming is BOTH "just a girl sitting in front of a camera, no big deal" AND a re-articulation of both portrait photography and the performance of persona.

Sure, Warhol changed the stakes of persona and photography decades ago. And Cindy Sherman re-imagined what portrait photography could mean for women. But Warhol is dead and I don't have Cindy Sherman's skill set. What draws me to webcamming is not its technical virtuosity, but its promise of possibility. This is art I can do myself. I can understand that this alone is reason to be suspicious, and to accuse me of acting out of pure ego. Fine. I plead guilty. All art is ego first, canon later. I've got time to wait. For now, I'll work on my web site.

A screed for your perusal!

Tue, 16 Jan 2001 19:31:06 GMT

Okay, this is rough, and a whole lot of text comes before it. But this is what I've fleshed out this morning...

When people encourage me to physically meet camgirls--people who are on camera every day of their lives--I think they are unconsciously articulating their fear technological realism. To me, this is is an understandable and rightly held concern.

We understand that realism and reality are not the same thing, and yet it's an easy fact to forget. Since people began using fire to light stages, realism has been a matter of technological technique, rather than ontological truth.The technology of the telephone is more realistic than that of say, email, but does this mean the phone is more 'real' than email exchange? Of course not. For every story someone can tell about "going voice" there is a counter-story to be told about someone who had a terrible conversation on the phone and explained themselves via email.And yet even a phone message left on an answering machine "feels" more real than real-time text exchange (irc) and realer still than static email exchange.

On the grand scale of things, I think a the order of things goes: sound trumps image; image trumps sound. We live in a time where vision has primacy over all the over senses, so nothing feels more 'real' to us than seeing an image, I think. Even though the technology of the webcam is less realistic than the phone audio-wise, it is more realistic image-wise, and this is why many phone sex addicts have moved their predilections to places like icuii (though to be fair, I've found there is all sorts of contestation in mediated sex about whether sound or image is more important.)

For now, high quality image trumps everything. The reason camgirls try to get their hands on good video equipment is not because the image is more real on a Sony than on a Quickcam. It's because a quickcam shot looks less REALISTIC than a high-end Sony shot. Perhaps when the technologies improve, moving image WITH sound (ie video mail, etc) will trump the still shot in communications technolgies, but I don't see that as the case today. Still cameras for the web can be easily displayed and seen, whereas streaming video is still pretty much of a novelty, it seems to me.

The next five years of webcamming, I predict, will follow the path of most theatrical forms from realism to naturalism to expressionism to pure formalism. First we try to get as clear and accurate a shot as humanly possible. We go for big bandwidth and full-on realism. Then, when mobile cams come around (and they will) there will be a move to naturalism. From there, a break with naturalism and an obsession with form. Look at the NATO software for MAX, which gives you the ability to edit live webcasts, on the fly. From Ibsen to Stringberg to Albee, from Jennicam to AtomcamMobile to more Anacam experiments. It's already happening.

The paradox of webcamming, and all realistic art forms is as follows:the more natural an image or sound appears, the more technologically sophisticated it actually is. I think unconscioulsy, most of us know this. The natural impulse of an interviewer, then would be to physically meet the interviewee, to strip away the technology, to see the "real" individual. Most people concede that embodied physical affect matters when trying to determine what someone is "really" all about. The tremble of a voice, the amount (or lack) of eye contact, coldness of a hand--these all strike us rightly as signficant indicators of embodied truths of some sort.

Yet what people seem to conveniently forget is that opposite is also true. I'm thinking of Diderot's observation that the best actors NEVER feel what they successfully portray to their audiences. Diderot goes so far as to argue that the more one actually feels an emotion, the less effectively one communicates it.

Of course, "the paradox of acting", as Diderot called it, isn't limited to actors. Anyone who has sat on a jury has had to ask, "is he feeling, or is he faking?" Conversely, anyone who suffers from shyness can attest to the fact that the way they appear in public is at odds with what they are feeling internally. In truth, Diderot's paradox seems to occur any time we are forced to evaluate the performance of the 'self in everyday life' as sociologist Erving Goffman puts it.

In a way, it is our puzzlement over the paradox of acting that has fueled our obsession with what Baudrillard likes to call, "mediatization"--the use of technology to replay and reevalate live experience. What is the instant replay in sports but a re-technologizing of the natural body, in the search for a greater reality?

For every observation I make about the vocal sounds of an interviewee, or the feel of someone I hug, another part of me searches for the tape recorder and the videocamera, to make sure I get it all down, all right. Perhaps more telling, I feel myself functioning like a videocamera. I take a long shot in my mind, then move in for a midrange. Focus on a detail. Try to get a close up of a facial tick or a stray hair. Why? What is it I am trying to capture? Can technology do it better? Then the interview is over, I all but run to the computer to see if my subject has posted anything about our exchange.

Deep down, I think I understand Diderot's paradox all too well. On one hand, I believe in the power of the live meeting. On the other hand, I don't believe my own limited physical ability to take in sense data, and I turn to webcams, for instant-replays of the quotidean.Walter Benjamin once write, "the urge grows stonger to get hold of an object by way of its likeness, its reproduction." I couldn't agree more.

okay, here is my test message!

Tue, 16 Jan 2001 19:23:07 GMT

If this goes through, I'll put up the other thing I think. Yeah. Cool.