Brian Kim Stefans

The culture of “new media”—roughly any aspect of our world that has been transformed by digital technology, whether it be Hollywood films, mobile telephones, the way the body (as embryo, broken bone, or DNA strand) is depicted on screens, and the US government’s ability to wage war overseas from a boardroom in Washington—has not produced a range of thinkers who have attained “household name” status (or infamy): no Freuds, Nietzsches, Gibbonses, or Darwins have been coughed up by the hectic pace of technological innovation since the 1960s. And while I’m not the one to judge whether any specific new media innovator has produced the fecund, seemingly universal sea changes that The Interpretation of Dreams or The Origin of Species instigated, several of them, simply by describing their eccentric tinkering and loonier brand of theorizing, have more to say about the future than those one might call “philosophers” or “scientists.”

One excellent place to begin looking for potential paradigm shifters and their pioneering visions is The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003), edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. This latest addition to MIT Press’ incredible shelf of books crossing the nexus between art, science, and language—genuine encyclopedias such as Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery’s Imagining Language and Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts—is a stunner, perhaps the most convincing argument for this handsomely, at times lavishly, designed and edited series so far. A search of MIT’s online catalogue produces a welter of books from the past decade that include in their titles the words “information” (60 at least), “digital,” “new media” (including Lev Manovich’s seminal The Language of New Media), and “hypertext”; but it would be hard to imagine any of these volumes being as complete or as energetically, even giddily, edited. The delight of brainy duo Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort—their other collaborations liberally speckle net.art space—comes through not just in the longish preambles to each of the book’s 54 chapters and the reams of text on the accompanying CD-ROM, but in every additional 8-bit Atari game, forgotten manifesto, “Aristotelian” comic strip, and chunky piece of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari they managed to cram into the collection. Michael Crumpton’s innovative design and typography, including a timeline on each page and several different flavors of sidebar, makes negotiating this maelstrom of information intuitive and even—in that Mystic sort of way—a pleasurable maze of learning.

The New Media Reader contains most of the classic, if little read, staples of digital cultural theory, such as Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think,” an argument for the conversion of wartime experimental research into pacifistic technologies such as the “memex.” Created for secretaries, the memex was the information-retrieval equivalent of the washer-dryer combos that were just coming out—one that types, talks, and does much of what our present-day iMacs do, while storing everything on microfilm. There are also essays by Artificial Intelligence guru Alan Turing and the inventor of the term “cybernetics,” Norbert Wiener. But this first section of the reader, titled “The Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate,” starts with a short story by Jorge Luis Borges—“The Garden of Forking Paths” from 1941—and ends with a brief but rich anthology of writing by the Oulipo, that French group of writers who devised complex mathematical formulas by which to compel—rather than write it themselves—a “potential” literature. One prime example is Raymond Queneau’s “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems” (1961), ten sonnets whose lines are rendered interchangeable by cutting the pages, such that each line can substitute for its peer on another page—a paper computer. An essay by Allan Kaprow about ’60s Happenings and a bit by William S Burroughs describing the cut-up method land in the middle of the section, pages away from the white paper “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” (1963) by Ivan Sutherland. Replete with flowcharts and formulas, it describes the technology that would later produce graphical user interfaces. “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960) by JCR Licklider, a decidedly non-Burroughsian view of human and machine collaboration, is also included.

What Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort achieve by such a frottage of scientific and creative texts is manifold. The scientific papers, which can seem dated by the pace of technical innovation or obtuse by their jargon, are reframed in a way that renders them more than quaint or insufferable geek-talk. In fact, they are melded into the very inner psyche (or outer superego) that produced some of our most iconic cultural visions, making us see the Strangelove in the heart of every (decidedly not roaring) mouse. Indeed, Douglas Englelbart’s 1968 “mother of all demos” (included on the CD-ROM), spoken at a Stephen Hawking pace, of a basic form of the mouse, hypertext, interactive teleconferencing, and collaborative authorship, seems to argue for Englelbart’s species of researcher (and not that of the late H-bomb architect Edward Teller) as the inheritor of the prophet function in society after the age of Einstein. These early struggles among cyberticians can then be seen as a search for human forms and practices—like the sonnet or the Heimlich maneuver—that are unlikely to be improved upon.

This mingling also shows how often creative writers have outpaced technology itself. A most obvious (though perhaps contentious) example is how very simple Oulipian writing such as Queneau’s “Yours for the Telling” (1973)—a ridiculous choose-your-own-adventure about “three tall, lanky beanpoles” who have “deliciously oneiric” dreams—provides many if not more of the transcendental delights that hypertext was supposed to bring about in the hands of a competent, if not necessarily brilliant, writer of fiction. Many fine hypertext works have succeeded remarkably well and move far beyond what a standard codex could do; and some of these, such as Wardrip-Fruin’s own “The Impermanence Agent,” which bases its story on a user’s indifferent web browsing, have no author at all. But much of the Tron-like rush of participating in the random-access universe while in pursuit of a negligible, however charming, plot is contained in Queneau’s witty and concise literary parlor trick.

Section two of the book, “Collective Media, Personal Media,” includes bits by Deleuze and Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Williams, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Nam June Paik, and looks at some of the more cultural ramifications of a virtual, mediated horizon that is constantly revising the very rules of approach. A chapter of Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) is immediately followed by a very different work, the nearly Blakean mixture of drawings and often counter-cultural speculations that perhaps signals the true end of the white paper approach to computer writing, Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1970-1974)—“the most important book in the history of new media,” in the words of its author. Nelson avoids the trap of writing about specific uses for known technologies that will be outdated in a decade’s time, while adhering closely to precisely described visionary concepts, many of which he groups under the term “fantics,” a broad science of the study of humans and reactive or responsive machinic environments. “Design, Activity, and Action,” the third section of the reader, has its share of manifestos, and continues much of the man/machine speculation of Nelson’s—for instance, through the model of Greek theater in Brenda Laurel’s famous book Computers as Theater (1991), or through the image of the cyborg in Donna Haraway’s influential, if often misunderstood, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985).

The real charge of The New Media Reader comes in the political inclusions in the final section, titled with much bravado “Revolution, Resistance, and the Launch of the Web.” One realizes, first, that little in the previous 600 or so pages has concerned technologies that are being actively used today: the Internet, MP3s, digital film, P2P clients, recent video games, or (not unexpectedly) blogs. But a dramatic shift in scale has also occurred: the discussion has progressed from whether an isolated office worker will be able to locate an invoice via a pipe-infested thingamabob right out of Dr. Seuss or Brazil, to whether revolution itself—the physical kind, like what could have happened in Tiananmen Square—will be nurtured or squashed by, respectively, satellite communications or government surveillance technology (two sides of the same coin). Cybernetic space—an outgrowth of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”—sheds any sheen of naive technological optimism when we read of the Hacktivismo group cDc’s (Cult of the Dead Cow) practice of “disruptive compliance”—an obtuse offshoot of civil disobedience that involves the enabling, through contraband software, of the free flow of information in such zones as the Great Firewall of China, the mostly tightly controlled cyberspace in the world. (The romantic version of this is epitomized in the perhaps forgettable image of Ice-T transmitting the cure for AIDS through a dolphin in a football helmet in Johnny Mnemonic.)

Internet technology has little left to prove in organizational practices—the anti-globalization and anti-war movements rely heavily upon it for the accuracy and efficiency with which they coordinate millions of people worldwide with hourly precision. Underrecognized themes by the more seemingly aberrant thinkers today—such as the theory of copyleft rights, hacktivism in the cDc style, and the Critical Art Ensemble’s concept of “nomadic power”—may not always occasion, like suicide bombings and purchased elections, front-page headlines; but if any of this power is harnessed the way it could be—either for or against basic human liberties—you can bet they will. This would be a safe bet, if the scale of our symbiosis with the machine increases to the same degree it has from the first to the final inclusions in The New Media Reader. Its unwritten chapters are yours to write.

Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, digital artist, and critic. He is the creator of the website www.arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics and showcasing his own work. His most recent book is Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos Books).