Typewriters vs. imageboard
memes
In January 2013, a picture of a young
man typing on a mechanical typewriter while sitting on a
park bench went 'viral' on the popular website Reddit.
The image was presented in the typical style of an
'image macro' or 'imageboard meme' (Klok), with a
sarcastic caption in bold white Impact typeface that
read: "You're not a real hipster – until you take your
typewriter to the park".
The meme, which was still making news
at the time of writing this paper in late 2013
(Hermlin), nicely illustrates the rift between 'digital'
and 'post-digital' cultures. Imageboard memes are
arguably the best example of a contemporary popular mass
culture which emerged and developed entirely on the
Internet. Unlike earlier popular forms of visual culture
such as comic strips, they are anonymous creations – and
as such, even gave birth to the now-famous Anonymous
movement, as described by Klok (Klok).
The 'digital' imageboard meme portrays
the 'analog' typewriter hipster as its own polar
opposite – in a strictly technical sense however, even a
mechanical typewriter is a digital writing system, as I
will explain later in this text. Also, the typewriter's
keyboard makes it a direct precursor of today's personal
computer systems, which were used for typing the text of
the imageboard meme in question. Yet in a colloquial
sense, the typewriter is definitely an 'analog' machine,
as it does not contain any computational electronics.
In 2013, using a mechanical typewriter
rather than a mobile computing device is, as the
imageboard meme suggests, no longer a sign of being
old-fashioned. It is instead a deliberate choice of
renouncing electronic technology, thereby calling into
question the common assumption that computers, as
meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress
and therefore constitute a logical upgrade from any
older media technology – much in the same way as using a
bike today calls into question the common assumption, in
many Western countries since World War II, that the
automobile is by definition a rationally superior means
of transportation, regardless of the purpose or context.
|
Figure 1: "You're not a
real hipster – until you take your typewriter
to the park" |
Typewriters are not the only media
which have recently been resurrected as literally
post-digital devices: other examples include vinyl
records, and more recently also audio cassettes, as well
as analog photography and artists' print- making. And if
one examines the work of contemporary young artists and
designers, including art school students, it is obvious
that these 'old' media are vastly more popular than,
say, making imageboard memes.(1)
Post-digital: a term that sucks
but is useful
Disenchantment with 'digital'
I was first introduced to the term
'post-digital' in 2007 by my then-student Marc Chia –
now Tara Transitory, also performing under the moniker
One Man Nation. My first reflex was to dismiss the whole
concept as irrelevant in an age of cultural, social and
economic upheavals driven to a large extent by
computational digital technology. Today, in the age of
ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan
data operations of the NSA, Google and other global
players, the term may seem even more questionable than
it did in 2007: as either a sign of ignorance of our
contemporary reality, or else of some deliberate
Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from this reality.
More pragmatically, the term
'post-digital' can be used to describe either a
contemporary disenchantment with digital information
systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our
fascination with these systems and gadgets has become
historical – just like the dot-com age ultimately became
historical in the 2013 novels of Thomas Pynchon and Dave
Eggers. After Edward Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's
all-pervasive digital surveillance systems, this
disenchantment has quickly grown from a niche 'hipster'
phenomenon to a mainstream position – one which is
likely to have a serious impact on all cultural and
business practices based on networked electronic devices
and Internet services.
Revival of 'old' media
While a Thoreauvian-Luddite digital
withdrawal may seem a tempting option for many, it is
fundamentally a naïve position, particularly in an age
when even the availability of natural resources depends
on global computational logistics, and intelligence
agencies such as the NSA intercept paper mail as well as
digital communications. In the context of the arts, such
a withdrawal seems little more than a rerun of the
19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, with its
programme of handmade production as a means of
resistance to encroaching industrialisation. Such
(romanticist) attitudes undeniably play an important
role in today's renaissance of artists' printmaking,
handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions, the rebirth
of the audio cassette, mechanical typewriters, analog
cameras and analog synthesisers. An empirical study
conducted by our research centre Creating 010 in
Rotterdam among Bachelor students from most of the art
schools in the Netherlands indicated that contemporary
young artists and designers clearly prefer working with
non-electronic media: given the choice, some 70% of them
"would rather design a poster than a website" (Van Meer,
14). In the Netherlands at least, education programmes
for digital communication design have almost completely
shifted from art academies to engineering schools, while
digital media are often dismissed as commercial and
mainstream by art students (Van Meer, 5). Should we in
turn dismiss their position as romanticist and
neo-Luddite?
Post-what?
Post-digital = postcolonial;
post-digital ≠ post-histoire
On closer inspection however, the
dichotomy between digital big data and neo-analog
do-it-yourself (DIY) is really not so clear-cut.
Accordingly, 'post-digital' is arguably more than just a
sloppy descriptor for a contemporary (and possibly
nostalgic) cultural trend. It is an objective fact that
the age in which we now live is not a post-digital age,
neither in terms of technological developments – with no
end in sight to the trend towards further digitisation
and computerisation – nor from a historico-philosophical
perspective. Regarding the latter, Cox offers a valid
critique of the "periodising logic" embedded in the term
'post-digital', which places it in the dubious company
of other historico-philosophical'post'-isms, from
postmodernism to post-histoire.
However, 'post-digital' can be defined
more pragmatically and meaningfully within popular
cultural and colloquial frames of reference. This
applies to the prefix 'post' as well as the notion of
'digital'. The prefix 'post' should not be understood
here in the same sense as postmodernism and
post-histoire, but rather in the sense of post-punk (a
continuation of punk culture in ways which are somehow
still punk, yet also beyond punk); post-communism (as
the ongoing social-political reality in former Eastern
Bloc countries); post-feminism (as a critically revised
continuation of feminism, with blurry boundaries with
'traditional', unprefixed feminism); postcolonialism
(see next paragraph); and, to a lesser extent,
post-apocalyptic (a world in which the apocalypse is not
over, but has progressed from a discrete breaking point
to an ongoing condition – in Heideggerian terms, from
Ereignis to Being – and with a contemporary popular
iconography pioneered by the Mad Max films in the
1980s).
|
Figure 2: Popular
take-away restaurant in Rotterdam, echoing an
episode from 19th-century Dutch colonial
history, when members of the Chinese minority
living in Java (Indonesia, then a Dutch
colony) were brought as contract workers to a
government-run plantation in Suriname, another
Dutch colony. |
None of these terms – post-punk,
post-communism, post-feminism, postcolonialism,
post-apocalyptic – can be understood in a purely
Hegelian sense of an inevitable linear progression of
cultural and intellectual history. Rather, they describe
more subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations.
Postcolonialism does not in any way mean an end of
colonialism (akin to Hegel's and Fukuyama's "end of
history"), but rather its mutation into new power
structures, less obvious but no less pervasive, which
have a profound and lasting impact on languages and
cultures, and most significantly continue to govern
geopolitics and global production chains. In this sense,
the post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one:
the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused
by the computerisation and global digital networking of
communication, technical infrastructures, markets and
geopolitics.
'Digital' = sterile high tech?
Also, the 'digital' in 'post-digital'
should not be understood in any technical-scientific or
media-theoretical sense, but rather in the way the term
is broadly used in popular culture – the kind of
connotation best illustrated by a recent Google Image
Search result for the word 'digital':
The first thing we notice is how the
term 'digital' is, still in 2013, visually associated
with the colour blue. Blue is literally the coolest
colour in the colour spectrum (with a temperature of
15,000 to 27,000 Kelvin), with further suggestions of
cultural coolness and cleanness. The simplest definition
of 'post-digital' describes a media aesthetics which
opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity
cleanness. The term was coined in 2000 by the musician
Kim Cascone, in the context of glitch aesthetics in
contemporary electronic music (Cascone, 12). Also in
2000, the Australian sound and media artist Ian Andrews
used the term more broadly as part of a concept of
"post-digital aesthetics" which rejected the "idea of
digital progress" as well as "a teleological movement
toward 'perfect' representation" (Andrews).
Cascone and Andrews considered the
notion of 'post-digital' primarily as an antidote to
techno-Hegelianism. The underlying context for both
their papers was a culture of audio-visual production in
which 'digital' had long been synonymous with
'progress': the launch of the Fairlight CMI audio
sampler in 1979, the digital audio CD and the MIDI
standard (both in 1982), software-only digital audio
workstations in the early 1990s, real-time programmable
software synthesis with Max/MSP in 1997. Such
teleologies are still prevalent in video and TV
technology, with the ongoing transitions from SD to HD
and 4K, from DVD to BluRay, from 2D to 3D – always
marketed with a similar narrative of innovation,
improvement, and higher fidelity of reproduction. In
rejecting this narrative, Cascone and Andrews opposed
the paradigm of technical quality altogether.
|
Figure 3: Google.nl
image search result for 'digital', October
2013
|
Ironically, the use of the term 'post-digital' was
somewhat confusing in the context of Cascone's paper,
since the glitch music defined and advocated here
actually was digital, and even based on specifically
digital sound-processing artefacts. On the other hand,
and in the same sense as post-punk can be seen as a
reaction to punk, Cascone's concept of 'post-digital'
may best be understood as a reaction to an age in which
even camera tripods are being labelled as 'digital', in
an effort to market them as new and superior technology.
'Digital' = low-quality trash?
There is a peculiar overlap between on
one hand a post-digital rejection of digital high tech,
and on the other hand a post-digital rejection of
digital low quality. Consider for example the persisting
argument that vinyl LPs sound better than CDs (let alone
MP3s); that film photography looks better than digital
photography (let alone smartphone snapshots); that 35mm
film projection looks better than digital cinema
projection (let alone BitTorrent video downloads or
YouTube); that paper books are a richer medium than
websites and e-books; and that something typed on a
mechanical typewriter has more value than a throwaway
digital text file (let alone e-mail spam). In fact, the
glitch aesthetics advocated by Cascone as 'post-digital'
are precisely the same kind of digital trash dismissed
by 'post-digital' vinyl listeners.
|
Figure 4: 'Digital' camera
tripod
|
Digression: what is digital,
what is analog?
Digital ≠ binary; digital ≠
electronic
From a strictly technological or
scientific point of view, Cascone's use of the word
'digital' was inaccurate. This also applies to most of
what is commonly known as 'digital art', 'digital media'
and 'digital humanities'. Something can very well be
'digital' without being electronic, and without
involving binary zeroes and ones. It does not even have
to be related in any way to electronic computers or any
other kind of computational device.
Conversely, 'analog' does not
necessarily mean non-computational or precomputational.
There are also analog computers. Using water and two
measuring cups to compute additions and subtractions –
of quantities that can't be counted exactly – is a
simple example of analog computing.
'Digital' simply means that something
is divided into discrete, countable units – countable
using whatever system one chooses, whether zeroes and
ones, decimal numbers, tally marks on a scrap of paper,
or the fingers (digits) of one's hand – which is where
the word 'digital' comes from in the first place; in
French, for example, the word is 'numérique'.
Consequently, the Roman alphabet is a digital system;
the movable types of Gutenberg's printing press
constitute a digital system; the keys of a piano are a
digital system; Western musical notation is mostly
digital, with the exception of instructions with
non-discrete values such as adagio, piano, forte,
legato, portamento, tremolo and glissando. Floor mosaics
made of monochrome tiles are digitally composed images.
As all these examples demonstrate, 'digital' information
never exists in a perfect form, but is instead an
idealised abstraction of physical matter which, by its
material nature and the laws of physics, has chaotic
properties and often ambiguous states.(2)
The hipster's mechanical typewriter,
with its discrete set of letters, numbers and
punctuation marks, is therefore a 'digital' system as
defined by information science and analytic philosophy
(Goodman, 161). However, it is also 'analog' in the
colloquial sense of the word. This is also the
underlying connotation in the meme image, with its
mocking of 'hipster' retro culture. An art curator, on
the other hand, might consider the typewriter a
'post-digital' medium.
Analog = undivided; analog ≠
non-computational
Conversely, 'analog' means that the
information has not been chopped up into discrete,
countable units, but instead consists of one or more
signals which vary on a continuous scale, such as a
sound wave, a light wave, a magnetic field (for example
on an audio tape, but also on a computer hard disk), the
flow of electricity in any circuit including a computer
chip, or a gradual transition between colours, for
example in blended paint. (Goodman, 160) therefore
defines analog as "undifferentiated in the extreme" and
"the very antithesis of a notational system".
The fingerboard of a violin is analog:
it is fretless, and thus undivided and continuous. The
fingerboard of a guitar, on the other hand, is digital:
it is divided by frets into discrete notes. What is
commonly called 'analog' cinema film is actually a
digital-analog hybrid: the film emulsion is analog,
since its particles are undifferentiated blobs ordered
organically and chaotically, and thus not reliably
countable in the way that pixels are. The combined
frames of the film strip, however, are digital since
they are discrete, chopped up and unambiguously
countable.
The structure of an analog signal is
determined entirely by its correspondence (analogy) with
the original physical phenomenon which it mimics. In the
case of the photographic emulsion, the distribution of
the otherwise chaotic particles corresponds to the
distribution of light rays which make up an image
visible to the human eye. On the audio tape, the
fluctuations in magnetisation of the otherwise chaotic
iron or chrome particles correspond to fluctuations in
the sound wave which it reproduces.
However, the concept of 'post-digital'
as defined by Cascone ignored such technical-scientific
definitions of 'analog' and 'digital' in favour of a
purely colloquial understanding of these terms.
Post-digital = against the
universal machine
Proponents of 'post-digital' attitudes
may reject digital technology as either sterile high
tech or low-fidelity trash. In both cases, they dismiss
the idea of digital processing as the sole universal
all-purpose form of information processing.
Consequently, they also dismiss the notion of the
computer as the universal machine, and the notion of
digital computational devices as all-purpose media.
Prior to its broad application in
audio-visual signal processing and as the core engine of
mass-media consumer technology, computation had been
used primarily as a means of audio-visual composition.
For example, Philips ran a studio for contemporary
electronic music in the 1950s, before co-developing the
audio CD in the early 1980s. By this time, audio-visual
computing had shifted from being primarily a means of
production, to a means of reproduction. Conversely,
Cascone's 'post-digital' resistance to digital high-tech
reproduction echoed older forms of resistance to
formalist, mathematically-driven narratives of progress
in music production and composition – particularly the
opposition to serialist composition in 20th-century
contemporary music, which began with John Cage,
continued with the early minimal music of La Monte Young
and Terry Riley, and was further developed by
improvisation/composition collectives such as AMM,
Musica Elettronica Viva and Cornelius Cardew's Scratch
Orchestra. After all, the serialism of Stockhausen,
Boulez and their contemporaries was 'digital' in the
most literal sense of the word: it broke down all
parameters of musical composition into computable values
which could then be processed by means of numerical
transformations.
Yet most serialist music was not
electronic, but composed with pen and paper and
performed by orchestras. This demonstrates once again a
crucial issue: unlike the colloquial meaning of the term
'digital' as commonly used in the arts and humanities,
the technical-scientific notion of 'digital' can,
paradoxically enough, be used to describe devices which
would be considered 'analog' or 'post-digital' in the
arts and humanities.
What, then, is 'post-digital'?
(The following is an attempt to
recapitulate and order some observations which I have
formulated in previous publications.(3))
Post-digital = post-digitisation
Returning to Cascone and Andrews, but
also to post-punk, postcolonialism and Mad Max, the term
'post-digital' in its simplest sense describes the messy
state of media, arts and design after their digitisation
(or at least the digitisation of crucial aspects of the
channels through which they are communicated).
Sentiments of disenchantment and scepticism may also be
part of the equation, though this need not necessarily
be the case – sometimes, 'post-digital' can in fact mean
the exact opposite. Contemporary visual art, for
example, is only slowly starting to accept practitioners
of net art as regular contemporary artists – and then
again, preferably those like Cory Arcangel whose work is
white cube-compatible. Yet its discourse and networking
practices have been profoundly transformed by digital
media such as the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the
electronic e-flux journal. In terms of circulation,
power and influence, these media have largely superseded
printed art periodicals, at least as far as the art
system's in-crowd of artists and curators is concerned.
Likewise, when printed newspapers shift their emphasis
from daily news (which can be found quicker and cheaper
on the Internet) to investigative journalism and
commentary – like The Guardian's coverage of the NSA's
PRISM programme – they effectively transform themselves
into post-digital or post-digitisation media.
Post-digital = anti-'new media'
'Post-digital' thus refers to a state
in which the disruption brought upon by digital
information technology has already occurred. This can
mean, as it did for Cascone, that this technology is no
longer perceived as disruptive. Consequently,
'post-digital' stands in direct opposition to the very
notion of 'new media'. At the same time, as its negative
mirror image, it exposes – arguably even deconstructs –
the latter's hidden teleology: when the term
'post-digital' draws critical reactions focusing on the
dubious historico-philosophical connotations of the
prefix 'post', one cannot help but wonder about a
previous lack of such critical thinking regarding the
older (yet no less Hegelian) term 'new media'.
Post-digital = hybrids of 'old' and
'new' media
'Post-digital' describes a perspective
on digital information technology which no longer
focuses on technical innovation or improvement, but
instead rejects the kind of techno-positivist innovation
narratives exemplified by media such as Wired magazine,
Ray Kurzweil's Google-sponsored 'singularity' movement,
and of course Silicon Valley. Consequently,
'post-digital' eradicates the distinction between 'old'
and 'new' media, in theory as well as in practice.
Kenneth Goldsmith notes that his students "mix oil paint
while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage
vinyl while listening to their iPods" (Goldsmith, 226).
Working at an art school, I observe the
same. Young artists and designers choose media for their
own particular material aesthetic qualities (including
artefacts), regardless of whether these are a result of
analog material properties or of digital processing.
Lo-fi imperfections are embraced – the digital glitch
and jitter of Cascone's music along with the grain,
dust, scratches and hiss in analog reproduction – as a
form of practical exploration and research that examines
materials through their imperfections and malfunctions.
It is a post-digital hacker attitude of taking systems
apart and using them in ways which subvert the original
intention of the design.
|
Figure 5: Cassette Store Day: 2013 twist on
Record Store Day
|
Post-digital = retro?
No doubt, there is a great deal of
overlap between on one hand post-digital mimeograph
printmaking, audio cassette production, mechanical
typewriter experimentation and vinyl DJing, and on the
other hand various hipster-retro media trends –
including digital simulations of analog lo-fi in popular
smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and
iSupr8. But there is a qualitative difference between
simply using superficial and stereotypical ready-made
effects, and the thorough discipline and study required
to make true 'vintage' media work, driven by a desire
for non-formulaic aesthetics.
Still, such practices can only be
meaningfully called 'post-digital' when they do not
merely revive older media technologies, but functionally
repurpose them in relation to digital media
technologies: zines that become anti-blogs or non-blogs,
vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-MP3, analog
film as anti-video.
Post-digital = 'old' media used
like 'new media'
At the same time, new ethical and
cultural conventions which became mainstream with
Internet communities and Open Source culture are being
retroactively applied to the making of non-digital and
post-digital media products. A good example of this are
collaborative zine conventions, a thriving subculture
documented on the blog fanzines.tumblr.com and
elsewhere. These events, where people come together to
collectively create and exchange zines (i.e.
small-circulation, self-published magazines, usually
focusing on the maker's cultural and/or political areas
of interest), are in fact the exact opposite of the
'golden age' zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and
1990s, when most zines were the hyper-individualistic
product and personality platforms of one single maker.
If we were to describe a contemporary zine fair or
mimeography community art space using Lev Manovich's new
media taxonomy of 'Numerical Representation',
'Modularity', 'Automation', 'Variability' and
'Transcoding' (Manovich, The Language of New Media,
27-48), then 'Modularity', 'Variability' and – in a more
loosely metaphorical sense – 'Transcoding' would still
apply to the contemporary cultures working with these
'old' media. In these cases, the term 'post-digital'
usefully describes 'new media'-cultural approaches to
working with so-called 'old media'.
DIY vs. corporate media, rather
than 'new' vs. 'old' media
When hacker-style and community-centric
working methods are no longer specific to 'digital'
culture (since they are now just as likely to be found
at an 'analog' zine fair as in a 'digital' computer
lab), then the established dichotomy of 'old' and 'new'
media – as synonymous in practice with 'analog' and
'digital' – becomes obsolete, making way for a new
differentiation: one between shrink-wrapped culture and
do-it-yourself culture. The best example of this
development (at least among mainstream media) is surely
the magazine and website Make, published by O'Reilly
since 2005, and instrumental for the foundation of the
contemporary 'maker movement'. Make covers 3D printing,
Arduino hardware hacking, fab lab technology, as well as
classical DIY and crafts, and hybrids between various
'new' and 'old' technologies.
The 1990s/early 2000s assumption that
'old' mass media such as newspapers, movies, television
and radio are corporate, while 'new media' such as
websites are DIY, is no longer true now that
user-generated content has been co-opted into corporate
social media and mobile apps. The Internet as a self-run
alternative space – central to many online activist and
artist projects, from The Thing onwards – is no longer
taken for granted by anyone born after 1990: for younger
generations, the Internet is associated mainly with
corporate, registration-only services.(4)
Semiotic shift to the indexical
The 'maker movement' – as manifested in
fab labs, but also at zine fairs – represents a shift
from the symbolic, as the preferred semiotic mode of
digital systems (and of which the login is the perfect
example), toward the indexical: from code to traces, and
from text to context. 1980s post-punk zines, for
example, resembled the art manifestos of the 1920s
Berlin Dadaists, while 1980s Super 8 films, made in the
context of the Cinema of Transgression and other
post-punk movements, proposed underground narratives as
an alternative to mainstream cinema. The majority of
today's zines and experimental Super 8 films, however,
tend to focus less on content and more on pure
materiality, so that the medium, such as paper or
celluloid, is indeed the message – a shift from
semantics to pragmatics, and from metaphysics to
ontology.(5)
Technically, there is no such
thing as 'digital media' or 'digital aesthetics'
Media, in the technical sense of
storage, transmission, computation and display devices,
are always analog. The electricity in a computer chip is
analog, as its voltage can have arbitrary,
undifferentiated values within a specific range, just
like a fretless violin string. Only through filtering
can one make a certain sub-range of high voltages
correspond to a 'zero' and another sub-range of low
voltages to a 'one'. Hardware defects can cause bits to
flip, turning zeroes into ones and vice-versa. Also, the
sound waves produced by a sound card and a speaker are
analog, etc. This is what Kittler (Kittler, 81-90)
refers to, somewhat opaquely, when he argues that in
computing "there is no software". An LCD screen is a
hybrid digital-analog system: its display is made of
discrete, countable, single pixels, but the light
emitted by these pixels can be measured on an analog
continuum. Consequently, there is no such thing as
digital media, only digital or digitised information:
chopped-up numbers, letters, symbols and any other
abstracted units, as opposed to continuous, wave-like
signals such as physical sounds and visible light. Most
'digital media' devices are in fact
analog-to-digital-to-analog converters: an MP3 player
with a touchscreen interface for example, takes analog,
non-discrete gesture input and translates it into binary
control instructions which in turn trigger the
computational information processing of a digital file,
ultimately decoding it into an analog electrical signal
which another analog device, the electromagnetic
mechanism of a speaker or headphone, turns into analog
sound waves. The same principle applies to almost any
so-called digital media device, from a photo or video
camera to an unmanned military drone. Our senses can
only perceive information in the form of non-discrete
signals such as sound or light waves. Therefore,
anything aesthetic (in the literal sense of aisthesis,
perception) is, by strict technical definition, analog.
digital = analog = post-digital…?
A 'digital artwork' based on the
strictly technical definition of 'digital' would most
likely be considered 'post-digital' or even 'retro
analog' by art curators and humanities scholars: for
example, stone mosaic floors made from Internet
imageboard memes, mechanical typewriter installations (6),
countdown loops running in Super 8 or 16mm film
projection, but also computer installations exposing the
indexicality of electrical currents running through
circuits. The everyday colloquial definition of
'digital' embraces the fiction (or rather: the
abstraction) of the disembodied nature of digital
information processing. The colloquial use of 'digital'
also tends to be metonymical, so that anything connected
literally or figuratively to computational electronic
devices – even a camera tripod – can nowadays be called
'digital'. This notion, mainly cultivated by product
marketing and advertising, has been unquestioningly
adopted by the 'digital humanities' (as illustrated by
the very term 'digital humanities'). On the other hand,
'post-digital' art, design and media – whether or not
they should technically be considered post-digital –
challenge such uncritical notions of digitality, thus
making up for what often amounts to a lack of scrutiny
among 'digital media' critics and scholars.
Revisiting the typewriter
hipster meme
The alleged typewriter hipster later
turned out to be a writer who earned his livelihood by
selling custom-written stories from a bench in the park.
The imageboard meme photo was taken from an angle that
left out his sign, taped to his typewriter case:
"One-of-a-kind, unique stories while you wait". In an
article for the website The Awl, he recollects how the
meme made him "An Object Of Internet Ridicule" and even
open hatred.(7)
Knowing the whole story, one can only conclude that his
decision to bring a mechanical typewriter to the park
was pragmatically the best option. Electronic equipment
(a laptop with a printer) would have been cumbersome to
set up, dependent on limited battery power, and prone to
weather damage and theft, while handwriting would have
been too slow, insufficiently legible, and lacking the
appearance of a professional writer's work.
Had he been an art student, even in a
media arts programme, the typewriter would still have
been the right choice for this project. This is a
perfect example of a post-digital choice: using the
technology most suitable to the job, rather than
automatically 'defaulting' to the latest 'new media'
device. It also illustrates the post-digital hybridity
of 'old' and 'new' media, since the writer advertises
(again, on the sign on his typewriter case) his Twitter
account "@rovingtypist", and conversely uses this
account to promote his story-writing service. He has
effectively repurposed the typewriter from a prepress
tool to a personalised small press, thus giving the
'old' technology a new function usually associated with
'new media', by exploiting specific qualities of the
'old' which make up for the limitations of the 'new'.
Meanwhile, he also applies a 'new media' sensibility to
his use of 'old media': user-customised products,
created in a social environment, with a "donate what you
can" payment model. Or rather, the dichotomy of
community media vs. mass media has been flipped
upside-down, so that a typewriter is now a community
media device, while participatory websites have turned
into the likes of Reddit, assuming the role of yellow
press mass media – including mob hatred incited by
wilful misrepresentation.
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Figure 6: C.D. Hermlin,
the alleged typewriter hipster
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The desire for agency
Cascone and Andrews partly contradicted
themselves when they defined the concept of
'post-digital' in the year 2000. Though they rejected
the advocacy of 'new media', they also relied heavily on
it. Cascone's paper drew on Nicholas Negroponte's Wired
article "Beyond Digital" (Negroponte), while Ian
Andrews' paper referenced Lev Manovich's "Generation
Flash", an article which promoted the very opposite of
the analog/digital, retro/contemporary hybridisations
currently associated with the term 'post-digital'
(Manovich, "Generation Flash"). We could metaphorically
describe post-digital cultures as postcolonial practices
in a communications world taken over by a
military-industrial complex made up of only a handful of
global players. More simply, we could describe these
cultures as a rejection of such dystopian techno-utopias
as Ray Kurzweil's and Google's Singularity University,
the Quantified Self movement, and sensor-controlled
'Smart Cities'.
And yet, post-digital subculture,
whether in Detroit, Rotterdam or elsewhere, is on a
fundamental level not so different from such mainstream
Silicon Valley utopias. For (Van Meer), the main reason
why art students prefer designing posters to designing
websites is due to a fiction of agency - in this case,
an illusion of more control over the medium. Likewise,
'digital' cultures are driven by similar illusions of
free will and individual empowerment. The Quantified
Self movement, for example, is based on a fiction of
agency over one's own body. The entire concept of DIY,
whether non-digital, digital or post-digital, is based
on the fiction of agency implied by the very notion of
the self-made.
Each of these fictions of agency
represents one extreme in how individuals relate to the
techno-political and economic realities of our time:
either over-identification with systems, or rejection of
these same systems. Each of these extremes is, in its
own way, symptomatic of a systems crisis – not a crisis
of this or that system, but rather a crisis of the very
paradigm of 'system', as defined by General Systems
Theory, itself an offshoot of cybernetics. A term such
as "post-Snowden" describes only one (important) aspect
of a bigger picture:(8)
a crisis of the cybernetic notion of 'system' which
neither 'digital' nor 'post-digital' – two terms
ultimately rooted in systems theory – are able to leave
behind, or even adequately describe.
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