If it’s not on Wikipedia, it doesn’t exist

Florian Brody is an internationally acclaimed digital media specialist with more than twenty years experience in electronic publishing in Europe and the U.S. He is the President of Brody Inc., a publishing company based in Los Angeles and Vienna that is dedicated to the emerging information society. With a background in linguistics and computer science, He teaches at Vienna University and Art Center College of Design. (1, page.xi) 

According to his personal webpage, “Florian has been instrumental in developing groundbreaking media solutions and communication strategies for Fortune 500 companies, including Kodak, Apple and Accenture. Florian co-invented Voyager’s Expanded Books, the first electronic books to be read on a laptop, in 1991. (…) Florian studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Vienna and worked as researcher in computer linguistics and film theory. (…) He frequently keynotes at events and is published in the field of digital media and electronic publishing.” (2)

In his 1999 article The Medium is the Memory, published as a chapter of The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media,  Florian Brody analyzes human development from the perspective of memory set in pure orality (ancient times) to machine-enhanced memory (modernity). Long gone are the times when knowledge was passed from mouth to mouth.  Long gone are the times when monks in the Middle Ages caligraphed each separate edition manually. Even long gone are the times when a family could rarely afford more books than a single edition of the Bible. „The book has always been used in personal ways, as an extension of memory“ (3, p.2), „Between the covers lies a promise: the possession of a book will mystically extend the mind of the owner“ (4, p.3), „The book is a personal item, an extension of an individual’s memory” (5, p. 3). As with all “new media”, with the development of the moving image it had been widely argued that  the rise of films will cause the demise of books. In the case of new computer-based media Brody argues that, unlike film, the digital media have the potential to emerge as a new type of book – “a memory machine in and of itself”.

The Memory Theatre, a concept used by Giulio Camillio, Giordano Bruno and later by the English hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd, was a theatre that would contain all the concepts and the knowledge of the world. By entering the theater, one would gain access to that knowledge and be able to grasp the concepts contained. The theatre was seen reversed – the information was set up in the auditorium and the user/reader was set on the stage, where he observed from him central position all the aspects presented to him: everything in the world, everything above and everything below. Later, the book becomes our memory theater. (6, p.7)

I read this and I instantly think about Kevin Kelly’s speech at the 2007 EG conference:

A computer connected to the Internet Internet IS the Memory Theatre! The amounts of information available online are vast and the growth of the Internet seems to be exponential. Kevin Kelly presented his statistics in 2007 and already then, after only 5,000 days of the Internet’s functioning, it was compared to the one of human brain.

Richard Koenigsberg comments on the video:

Sep 7 2009: Extremely interesting video. We are involved in a revolution. Without embracing the mystical dimension, what is clear is that the Web becomes a conduit for the thinking of the human race. Where does knowledge exist? It used to be that we identified libraries as the place of knowledge. Or bookstores. But am I really going to wander around the New York University library as I once did? The Web provides a center that contains all the knowledge one needs(…). (7)

Even university libraries offer access to their catalogues from home. In his book Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know  Randall Stross draws a very suggestive image of Google’s ambitions. The recent Google Wave tool will help Google access a lot of our personal data, while Google Books already offers access to huge amounts of copyrighted content (8). This was still not the case in 1999 when Brody wrote his article. Wikipedia was only launched in 2001 and the first public offering of Google’s search engine took place in 2004.

„It strikes me that we are in the midst of returning to a medieval model: deaccessioning our large scale personal libraries, unifying all our texts in the one place: the computer” (9, p.3). Writing this in the 90′s Brody couldn’t have known just how popular the MacBook will become. Our computers have indeed become our personal libraries, calendars, notebooks and in same cases, entire workstations.

In Brody’s eyes interactive multimedia, virtual reality and the Internet are hoped to serve as the ultimate memory machines which will help us to store everything forever: “(…) all knowledge, every story, the punch lines to the totality of human humor, all questions, the sum total of the answers” (10, p. 8). Is this not exactly what is happening right now? The Next Web has published a great iconographic of all of Google’s acquisitions thus far. Click on the link to see it. Industries mentioned stem from technology, web services, search to video, new, mobile, social, imaging and others. Google wants all the world’s information, is this not the case?

„Although text in a computer is far less stable than the written or printed word we assign it a very high truth-value. Early computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT remarked, <<My father used to say, „It is written in the holy books.”>> Today we say, „the computer tells us” (11, p.11). This is very much true. The computer tells us. Or to be more precise, Wikipedia tells us. The computer is the new book. I guess we can all agree with Brody that “The medium is the memory”. Wait, how did the original phrase go? - some of the less-exposed to McLuhan of us might ask. Just google it!

 

Other publications by Florian Brody:

The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing: Multimedia Publishing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Interaction Design. State of the Art and Future Developments. An argument for information design. Rockport Publishers 1998.

Books the Next Generation—Reading on the Electronic Frontier. Heidelberg: Springer,1996.

Tabula Rasa in: Cutting Edge Web Design, Rockport 1998.

My Home is my Memory is my Home. Mediamatic, Amsterdam 1995. (Doors of Perception  Conference 2)

 

References:

1. Brody, F. (1999). The Medium is the Memory In: Lunenfeld Peter (ed). The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, Brody’s chapter available online: available at: http://www.brody.org/Brody/The_Medium_is_the_Memory__files/Brody_MediumMemory.pdf

2. Florian Brody homepage: http://www.brody.org/Brody/About.html;

3. Brody, F. (1999). The Medium is the Memory In: Lunenfeld Peter (ed). The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts;

4. Ibid;

5. Ibid;

6. Ibid;

7. Richard Koenigsberg (2007), comment: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html;

8. Randall Stross (2008), Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know . Free Press;

9. Brody, F. (1999). The Medium is the Memory In: Lunenfeld Peter (ed). The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts;

10. Ibid;

11. Ibid.

“I’ve had the best breakfast ever” – say it using 14, 140 and 1400 symbols

Phatic communication is a term first used by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski to describe a communicative gesture that does not inform or exchange any meaningful information or facts about the world. Its purpose is a social one, to express sociability and maintain connections or bonds. We can call it small talk.

Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function, and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (1)

Phatic messages are not intended to carry information or substance for the receiver, they concern the process of communication. The fact of saying something is more important than what exactly is being told. They are meant to establish an atmosphere or maintain social contact rather than convey content. Examples of such phatic communications include courtesy titles in letters (“sincerely yours”, “all the best”), inquires about health or weather and a simple “how’s it going?”. (2)

With the enlargement of our social networks caused by greater connectedness we require the means to maintain sociability without spending too much time on it. The receivers of our messages do not necessarily need to be provided with “true” content. Sometimes an interesting link in a person’s status with a short comment can be more desired than an elaborate update on their daily lives. With such platforms as Facebook, private communication can be executed by the means of “private messages” while phatic communication can take place on the “wall” and through “status updates”. Platforms such as twitter provide solely for the need of phatic communication, enabling no private exchanges and limiting users to 140 symbols for status updates. Those small communicative gestures are not meant for exchanging meaningful information but for expressing sociability and maintaining interpersonal connections.

According to Vincent Miller it should not be assumed that “these phatic communications are ‘meaningless’, in fact, in many ways they are very meaningful, and imply the recognition, intimacy and sociability in which a strong sense of community is founded. Phatic messages potentially carry a lot more weight to them than the content itself suggests. However, although they may not always be ‘meaningless’, they are almost always content-less in any substantive sense. The overall result is that in phatic media culture, content is not king, but ‘keeping in touch’ is.” (3). In this spirit we can assume that the point of twitter is the maintenance of connected presence and sustainability of this presence, even though it is almost completely devoid of substantive content. The medium of twitter encourages the “disconnectedness” of communication. The above-mentioned 160 character limit and lack of private messages promote generic ‘announcements’ over dialogue or targeted conversation.

In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan we could even assert that when it comes to such electronic media as twitter or Facebook, “the user is the content”, as our phatic communication is a perfect source the marketing industry’s data mining. The shortness and density of communication enables for creating databases and key word searches. Lev Manovich argues that we are in the process of a shift from narrative forms (as novel/film) as the key form of cultural expression, to the database as the prominent cultural logic of the digital age. Narratives, he argues, are finite works with beginnings and endings. They can be also characterized by following a linear path which establishes cause and effect determined by an author. Databases, on the other hand, are “structured collections of data organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer” (4). Following this logic Miller concludes that:

“The movement from blogging, to social networking, to microblogging demonstrates the simultaneous movements away from communities, narratives, substantive communication, and towards networks, databases and phatic communion.” (5)

Manovich fits in perfectly within this observation, as he states that new media is dominated by cultural objects and products which:

“do not tell stories, they do not have a beginning or end, in fact, they do not have any development thematically that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other.” (6 )

This is essentially what twitter is all about – individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other. But if twitter helps us realize our needs for phatic communication while providing us with such a limited platform, what would you say about a 14 characters limit? Playing on twitter’s question: “what are you doing right now?” squeaker lets you tell your friends “what RU doing right now”. The authors hint you towards the possible uses of the platform:

What can you accomplish in 14 characters?

• - u cn use abbrs
• - no room 4links
• - … b creative

Squeaker is obviously meant as a parody of twitter. Join The Company, LLC. are the people behind both squeker and woofer. In case you hate small talk and don’t perceive being asked “how’s it going” (which is usually followed by the inquirer walking away without even waiting for your answer), you can shift to the latter platform. Woofer, while still playing on the concept of phatic communication, let’s you express yourself within… a minimum of 1400 characters. Join The Company, LLC. are not the only ones to parody twitter. If twitter is a microblogging site then woofer is a macroblogging site, while squeaker and flutter would be called nanoblogging sites. Flutter is an evil twin of twitter, enabling you to express yourself within the limit of 26 characters. “Let’s say my friend tweets something, like working on some new designs for the album cover and watching project runway in my underwear lol!” – the employee of fictional flutter explains that such a message could be automatically shortened by the site to “wrking 4 project underwear”. The joke mocumentary was created by the Slate Magazine to poke fun at our addiction to microblogging and the resulting shallowness of communication.

As with everything, it’s all about balance. I’m not a twitter user and I don’t really see where exactly its charm lies but I’m convinced it’s got to be somewhere out there. And I really don’t see anything harmful in a little small talk and announcing who had what for breakfast, as long as there are people who want to read about it. Phatic communication has been with us since the dawn of human kind. It might not be full of content but sometimes it’s nice to throw a solitary “man, the weather sucks”. Especially when you live in Amsterdam, where it seems to rain all the time.

References:

1. Malinowski, B. (1923) ‘Supplement 1: The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, in C. Ogden and I. Richards (eds) The Meaning of Meaning, pp. 296–336. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. p. 315

2. Miller, V. (2008). New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 2008; 14; 387

3. Ibid.

4. Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. p. 218

5. Miller, V. (2008). New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 2008; 14; 387, p. 396

6. Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. p. 218, p. 213