I’ve applied for a Fellowship at Cambridge, funded by Danish brewery Carslberg. We’ll see how it goes. So far, here is the project description I sent them.
The spaces and borders of cultural life are currently breaking down, being transgressed and challenged. No longer can we easily divide our lives into private and public spheres, real and virtual life or even human and technological life. Mobile phones, the social web and web 2.0, body prosthetics and plastic surgery blur the boundaries between culture and nature, human and technology. Instead, we need to view human life as a fully connected network, even the individual as a network, in order to describe our lives.
Technology has always impacted greatly on our society and culture, and we know from Paul Virilio that technology will always fulfill its own purpose; we are not fully masters of what we create, and as Alvin Toffler has argued our physical and psychological conditions will change in the face of technological developments. We must therefore re-conceptualize our understanding of contemporary life and culture.
It is the aim of this project to investigate the socio-cultural transformations brought about by technological developments, to argue for a new conception of time and space relations, to analyze instances of social, cultural and technological convergence and to create a vocabulary to deal with what David Harvey has referred to as time-space compression and what Vivian Sobchack has dubbed, the culture of quick-change. There are many instances where we can point out these social and cultural metamorphoses. In the following, ‘life’ is meanvirat to denote the whole fabric of social, cultural, and technological life, not primarily biologic life.
Life is converging
It is increasingly becoming impossible to separate contemporary life into discreet units of culture, technology and the individual. Rather, we live in a time of convergence where many different media blend together to form a network which does not distinguish between one media form to the next. The advent of digital media enables this convergence, but we must also consider the conflation between all forms of media literacy, resulting in Gregory Ulmer’s concept of ‘mystory’ - the complex network of self, culture and society.
Life is techno-logical
Life is not just technological, but it also conforms to the ideas and models of technology. The lines between the human and the non-human blurs as we incorporate the nonhuman into the human, be it baboon hearts or electronic pacemakers, as Gray Kochar-Lindgren has shown us. This is an extension of Virilio’s points – technology transforms our lives, whether we want it to or not.
Life is digital
It no longer makes sense to speak of virtual life, since the virtual has infected our lives so completely. We blog, share pictures, meet new people online, to the extent that our memory becomes digital; exists as much online as in our own embodiment. As Timothy Murray points out, the digital alters our perception of cultural and personal memory, as events become instances among many alternatives. Our lives are not fragments, but rather a number of nodes along the cultural network, where we encounter other people and our identity becomes spectral transmission.
Life is interstitial
Although – or perhaps exactly because – various webspaces have become immensely popular (MySpace, Live Spaces, etc), we must realize that contemporary life no longer separates into different spaces. Conceptions such as Jürgen Habermas’ public and private spheres, or Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural fields no longer work as descriptions of life; instead, the network needs to take their place, but not as a new, fixed, and determinate space. Life exists between the nodes of the network, in the viral flow – uncontrolled, decentered, constant – which composes the network.
Life is viral
Our communications are no longer broadcasts or mass media, but to a much larger extent social media, where ideas and developments disseminate in all directions. Meme theory and viral theory are attempts at understanding the dissemination of knowledge and trends as decentered and uncontrolled, originating not necessarily from any perceived center. Only by accepting that life – cultural and social, as well as technological – conforms to this complex movement, can we begin to articulate our present moment.
My project will be a methodological study, providing a vocabulary capable of dealing with all these connectivities, focussing specifically on the interactions between these previously separate fields. A such, the project is deeply interdisciplinary and will draw on critical and theoretical language from many traditions. Only be seriously adapting different terminologies, will I be able to articulate and discuss our culture of viral connectivity.
Specifically, my project will result in a book – tentatively titled Viral Connectivity: Culture, Society, Technology – which will consist of alternating theoretical and analytic chapters. A brief outline of expected chapters consists of:
- 1. Viral
- 2. William Burroughs and Language as Virus
- 3. Connectivity
- 4. The Social Web
- 5. Interstitial Spaces
- 6. Mobile Phones, PDAs and Laptops
- 7. Digital Aesthetics
- 8. The Cinema of Morphing
- 9. The Singularity
- 10. Posthumans
