Publicity and Surveillance

2006-05-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

Missed Posts – Philip Agre and Mark PosterThe capture-model of surveillance outlined by Philip Agre was one of the most useful and interesting articles we have read this semester. Representing a dramatic shift in the way that surveillance functions, turning increasingly to what one might call dataveillance, capture shows the way that social control is no longer a purely top-down and external

2006-05-21T11:01:00.000-04:00

Missed Posts – Coco FuscoSitting in the back of Coco Fusco’s talk with Julie, I was very much struck by the very issues that Julie raised in her own blog post about this event. The films itself was really fascinating because of the way that it highlighted certain aspects of interrogation and torture as well as the performativity of these things. This was perhaps what I found most striking and

2006-05-21T02:09:00.000-04:00

Missed Posts – Smart Mobs by Howard RheingoldRheingold’s account of emerging trends and technologies of mobile, wireless telecommunications was interesting for the way that it surveyed recent movements (pun intended) across a diverse range of fields, linking together cell phones and text messaging with the developing field of ubiquitous computing. While much of Rheingold’s book was an

2006-05-17T13:15:00.000-04:00

Web attacks end anti-spam effort The company has explained why its anti-spam effort is ending A series of web attacks by spammers have forced a security firm to end

2006-05-02T01:54:00.000-04:00

To the general enrichment of leftist theory-heads, both Society of the Spectacle and Empire use the form of manifesto to convey their ideas on power and vision/communication respectively. However, both seem to focus on the macro level of analysis and would be greatly enriched through engaging the "micro-physics of power." Is this a problem of the manifesto in general or just these texts?After

2006-05-01T23:30:00.000-04:00

In his book on _Smart Mobs_, Howard Rheingold discusses the way that mobile telecommunication technology is transforming the way that we (as subjects) interact with the space around us. Through his discussion of mobile telephony, ubiquitous computing and spontaneous social networks Rheingold explores the changing relations between subjects and objects, private and public, through these shifts in

2006-05-01T21:56:00.000-04:00

“The representation of actual death is also a form of obscenity—not a moral obscenity, as in the case of the sexual act, but a metaphysical obscenity. One cannot die twice. In this respect, photography lacks the power of film: a photograph can depict a person in the throes of death or a corpse, but not the elusive transition from one to the other… Before film, we knew only desecrated corpses

2006-04-26T03:35:00.000-04:00

Rheingolds observation of how mobile technology maps and creates social networks for adolescents seems particularly potent. He observes that young people often use the technology to maintain relationships that parents might not approve of. Here, ubiquitous electronic communications might combine with young peoples’ easier adoption of both technology and rebellion. Resistance to adult

2006-04-25T21:46:00.000-04:00

One of the more interesting aspects that seemed to emerge from the reading for this/last week is that of prediction. While Smart Mobs consistently deals with attempts to predict social reception/use of new technologies, commercial factors, and technological evolution from a design/development standpoint, as well as posing inquiries into how the changing state of mobile communications will alter

2006-04-25T14:26:00.000-04:00

an interesting article on pervasive computing, -cFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, link Sousveillance (IPA: /su??ve?l?ns/) refers both to inverse surveillance, as well as to the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity (i.e. personal experience capture). Sousveillance as a situationist critiqueof surveillance. This wearable wirelesswebcam imitates

2006-04-19T00:23:00.000-04:00

Posited by Hardt and Negri, we have moved from a society of nation-states and international power and to one where international rule only becomes relevant “within the dynamic of the biopolitical production of world order,” of Empire (31). This seems to be a useful mapping of the world geo-political system but I at first found it difficult to relate to our guiding topics: publicity and

2006-04-05T01:44:00.000-04:00

I found Frohne’s comments on intimacy as privilege and commodity most interesting. She writes “the more power and prominence a person embodies, the more he/she tends to conceal his/her private life. Precisely because today everyone potentially has access to the existence-generating medialization of one’s person, privacy has become the new privilege in post-capitalist society…” (272). Class

2006-04-05T01:01:00.000-04:00

The notion of surveillant pleasures that ran throughout the readings for this week was one that I found really interesting and compelling. It is easy to think of the social/political systems of power and vision as being some harsh and repressive imposition upon us without taking into account the pleasures inherent within this kind of subjection and surveillance. This has come into particular

2006-04-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

I think what is, perhaps, one of the more interesting points of Zizek’s article comes in his discussion of blurred boundaries between fiction and reality. Referring to the “reality soap,” Big Brother, Zizek writes: the subjects/actors “act their roles in an artificialy [sic] secluded space, they act them ‘for real,’ so that, literally, fiction becomes indistinguishable from reality: subjects get

2006-03-22T02:08:00.000-05:00

Josh’s eloquently named, Purloined Letter Effect, where a wealth of detail hides the obvious, and its connection to the photograph escaped my understanding upon reading it. Following Katti might help, “Observing simply means… distinguishing and indicating” and in distinguishing detail one must do so from the obvious (54). The obvious is placed outside the field of observation.Virilio’s

2006-03-22T01:12:00.000-05:00

As usual, I find that Virilio’s texts are intriguingly inscrutable. From Gericault’s art vivant to the (not unrelated) notion of the Gorgon, Virilio seems to be engaging with the notion of inaction that we were discussing last week but in terms of visibility/mobility (or immobility, in this case) – this is a axis of Virilio’s argument that I find really interesting but which, in its finer points

2006-03-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

Notes on The Giant:-was the man in the dept. store stealing a flashlight? shouldn't virilio be going crazy over this?-the "anthropomorphic camera movements" that virilio talks about (50) were rather startling - the pans and tilts, constant scanning of surv. cams. perhaps it was more the vhs than the camera quality, but i thought it was fascinating when the images streamed across the screen out

2006-03-21T13:51:00.000-05:00

Virilio's discussion of Gericault's portraits of mad people is confusing. "It is perhaps more apt to call them the artist's conversion of the clinical sign to enhance the painted work which then becomes a documentary, an image loaded with information: the conversation of a perception of the special detachment that enables the doctor or surgeon to make a diagnosis simply by using his senses and

2006-03-15T03:03:00.000-05:00

well i was going to go back and delete the cranky part of my post regarding representation in discourse and sensation, but now i can't.oh well. another quote to consider:"...the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification. To be sure, historical reality can be apprehended, known and filmed only in the course

2006-03-15T02:06:00.000-05:00

I was interested by this question from an earlier Blog response: "'You can’t combat alienation with alienated means.' But what’s all this about appropriation, then?" in reference to the Adorno reading precisely because Adorno and Horkheimer present such a pessimistic view of combatting anything at all when the individual is a product of society's economic and social apparatus. Even more than

2006-03-15T01:08:00.000-05:00

David's question about what is inherently inactive about the image seems to correspond with Cushman and Mestrovic's "Baudrillardian" hypothesis, suggesting that a lack of action results from the image's representational character, which "lend[s] an air of unreality" to that which is rendered as image, thus causing the spectator to "lose touch with reality" - thus, passivity, voyeurism, evil, etc.

2006-03-15T00:53:00.000-05:00

Debord’s account of the spectacle and Keenan’s articulation of the image seem to come together through the notion of inaction. For both it would seem that the image has a certain quality of arresting the flow of reasoned decision making and/or the movement of an active agency in the face of the specular (or spectacular). I thought Keenan’s article was interesting for the way that it explored

2006-03-14T23:27:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Keenan’s piece where he concludes the enlightenment/ publicity/ humanitarian action might not just have failed in Bosnia but might be at fault for creating a false public unable to act because the collapsing of image and reality stands as alibi to warfare (supposed to be an action in itself) and hides the image’s lack of inherent meaning thus not allowing there own

2006-03-08T18:51:00.001-05:00

I found one of the central questions of Liz Canner’s video on police brutality in LA most engaging: How does one include those marginalized by the mass media?Interestingly she must answer this question through innovation and creating new methods of production and distribution. One of her problems with traditional documentary making is that the filmmaker already knows the issues to be discussed

2006-03-07T02:47:00.000-05:00

Heidegger’s understanding of the changing nature of humanity was something I found both interesting and compelling in this week’s readings. While so often I find myself skeptical of the notion of essences within philosophy and critical discourse, the articulation of essence put forward in The Age of the World Picture – as a feature of a Thing that is mutable and dynamic – seems to resonate with

2006-03-06T13:58:00.000-05:00

all the postcards we need -- http://postsecret.blogspot.com

2006-03-05T16:33:00.000-05:00

I'm confused about this notion of "the world of mass media" as "a nightmare regime of 'calculable and representable subjectivity'..." (Dienst quoting Derrida, 140). Dienst writes of how subjectivity, inserted within the order of representation, causes a doubling back of the notion that "representation makes objects visible to subjects," leaving the subject "in the 'open circle of the

2006-03-01T02:06:00.000-05:00

Although a comparison of Anderson's print capitalism and the production of imagined communities with Dean's communitve capitalism and a fantasised unified public might be very fruitful, the drive of the theories seems very different.To me, Anderson's print capitalism displaces peoples vertically organized down from the king with horizontal connections where people are organized by an awareness of

2006-03-01T00:57:00.000-05:00

One more thing?Dean's discussion of the dissemination of a singular, central power (Big Brother), and the formation of a network of Little Brothers and power as operating like an "assembly language" (86), reminded me of something that came up during our Panopticon seminar. It seems like this destruction of "centralizing, paternalistic authority" could be seen as a result of an expanded knowledge

2006-03-01T00:47:00.000-05:00

In response to Josh's connection to _Imagined Communities_ I think there is an interesting connection between the illusory public sphere that Dean articulates and Anderson's notion of fiction in the imagined community. I think that this comes down to Deans understanding of ideology and the way that ideology, according to this version of an ideological critique, fills in the gaps and

2006-03-01T00:46:00.000-05:00

Overall, I quite liked Dean’s book and I found that it posed some really interesting questions around the foundations of democracy and the forum of public opinion. Perhaps predictably, I was pleased by the account of ideology that Dean used. Particularly so since I thought it was really engaged with many questions of the irrational subject and the way that ideology does more than simply dupe

2006-02-28T22:22:00.000-05:00

And..I thought one of the strongest moments of Dean's text was the close of chapter 2, where she discusses how the Web may change our notion of prior conceptions of the public sphere. Dean: "...perhaps all along the public sphere was only 60 minutes, Nightline, and the evening news. Perhpas we were never more a public than when we gathered around our television sets watching a giant step for

2006-02-28T20:33:00.000-05:00

Something that got me thinking from Dean’s Publicity’s Secret, is her discussion of Zizek’s notion of ideology as separate from knowledge, of actions/acting materializing a set of beliefs. Dean: “So, in Zizek’s account of ideology, actions and belief go together. They stand apart from knowledge. Actions manifest an underlying belief that persists, regardless of what one knows” (5). In the

2006-02-21T21:59:00.000-05:00

Last week really got me thinking about the role of the ‘informational double’ within the context of modern disciplinary strategies and how one might consider the fixed and real location of this information within some archive (perhaps more troublingly, a private archive…) and the way that this might counter the notions of mobility and control that have become so prevalent – notions that we will

2006-02-21T20:35:00.000-05:00

If there is any driving force that collects this weeks readings together, perhaps it is that the old models/entities of public(ity), private and surveillance are no longer adequate for discourses about both the past and present. I found Hortense Spillers’ use of body as opposed to private person most interesting in this regard.In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers makes clear that the concept

2006-02-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

In “Privacy is not the antidote to surveillance,” I thought it was interesting that Stalder described the recording, analysis and storage of cell phone/credit card use, doctor appointments, government interaction, etc., as a “picture” that continues to grow “finer and fatter” (120) – as if our ‘data doubles’ and ‘shadow bodies’ are forming an alternate, increasingly accurate image of what

2006-02-15T00:54:00.000-05:00

It was interesting that Foucault’s account of the emergence of panopticism began with the plague. The problem of contagion brings about techniques of observation and separation that are so characteristic of modern modes and regimes of power and discipline, particularly when conceived of within the urban settings of Europe at the end of the seventeenth century – a scene of life that seems very

2006-02-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

There are four of us students.Equipping ourselves with video cameras, we each take a separate corner in a room. The room has a single door serving as entrance/exit. We point the cameras at the center of the room, zoomed out as wide as possible. With all of our cameras, every inch of the room is visible and capable of being recorded – there are no corners out of sight. In the center of the

2006-02-14T17:42:00.000-05:00

Surveillance through TechnologyPanopticonPhotographyCCTVcomputersWebcamerasJust to piggyback on the question of objective technology, I found Sekula’s links between the history of technology (photography) and how the body is read with the use of these surveillance tools. “…photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look-the typology-and

2006-02-13T18:59:00.000-05:00

A short marker for the readings on Discipline and Surveillance.In Discipline and Punish Foucault states “Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea of

2006-02-01T01:30:00.000-05:00

Aside from some occasionally overwhelming historical detail, Habermas’ account of the evolution of the public sphere as an outgrowth of a bourgeois form of culture was particularly interesting in the way that it revealed the origins of criticism as a modern phenomenon. Developing from the emergent public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of Europe criticism began to circulate throughout

2006-01-31T22:09:00.000-05:00

Not to belabor the issue of the commodification of culture, but..."Inasmuch as culture became a commodity and thus finally evolved into "culture" in the specific sense (as something that pretended to exist merely for its own sake), it was claimed as the ready topic of a discussion through which an audience-oriented subjectivity communicated with itself (29)."This sentence which touches upon the

2006-01-31T22:01:00.000-05:00

Habermas and cultural consumption-posted by Chris EatonHabermas argues that as the sphere of private autonomy expanded, via public status, beyond the owners of private property to include everyone, the public shifted from culture-debating to culture-consuming (161). “The world of letters,” he writes “has turned into a conduit for social forces channeled into the conjugal family’s inner space by

2006-01-31T18:56:00.000-05:00

Habermas----During Habermas’ discussion of the bourgeois family in section 6 of Structural Transformation, Habermas presents a rather conflicted picture of the private sphere as centered in “the patriarchal conjugal family” (43). Citing architectural changes in the organization of bourgeois homes, Habermas notes the “process of privatization” that oriented family space more towards a collection

2006-01-26T10:01:00.000-05:00

Here's my very brief intro to Habermas from the first day:Start with a historical and sociological study of the public sphereWarning: a lot of students find H a bit tedious, certainly a lot of reading for this week, but it’s good for youWhether or not you agree with H’s interpretation (course certainly offer critiques of it), text the definitive one on the public sphereTraces out the relationship

2006-01-26T09:32:00.000-05:00

publicity and surveillance introduction

2006-01-24T22:33:00.000-05:00

Hi All,Welcome to the MC150.09 Publicity and Surveillance Blog.

2004-02-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

Class Notes: Food for thought Elizabeth: Sorry, I missed your project idea and comments Zach: Think about space in your piece. Also, volume. How are you making your viewer feel? Does the argument address the spectator? John: Your execution sounds like it's under control. Focus on your content. Think about why you're doing all this building and how to maximize the use of your space? What

2004-02-26T19:38:00.000-05:00

2003-12-07T18:38:00.000-05:00

PROJECT PROPOSAL In /Discipline and Punish/ Foucault wrote that in the disciplinary society "the body is the prisoner of the soul." This hints that personhood and consciousness as we know, far from being givens of human nature, result from panopticism. The question I'd like to explore in my paper is: Does surveillance produce consciousness, and what does this mean? In addition to Foucault, I

2003-12-07T17:40:00.000-05:00

We read so much compelling and difficult theory this semester, and sometimes it went by so fast that I didn't feel like I was able to fully consider and synthesize it. So my primary ambition for the paper is just to go back over two or more of my favorite texts (which included Foucault, Habermas, Keenan (both), Dean, Williams, Hart and Negri, Ernst, Frohne, and Dienst), in hopes of deepening my

2003-12-06T03:41:00.000-05:00

I would like to address issues of space, most particularly commodification, cooption, rebellion and reclaiming space in terms of the public/private, physical/electronic dichotomy. Is it possible for places that are secure within the system, or outside the spectacle, can true resistance be achieved even while existing within the network? How free and transparent is sitting in the park or posting

2003-12-06T03:12:00.000-05:00

“Emo,” the term, obviously more than a genre of contemporary music, functionally a category of cultural analysis, is easily more a modulation than a mold. Its theorized transformation from “mold” to “modulation” is the source of unending discourse, with is not necessarily rational or critical by most usages of those two terms. It is this discourse that will constitute the “subject” of my

2003-12-06T02:35:00.000-05:00

[tentatively--] I want to focus on the question of interpretation and how the local, specific, ‘private?’, national(?) can or cannot be translated. This could be from the angle of manipulations in transmission (like in Chow’s “The Force of Surfaces”), or it could be more a question of how we are or are not going to translate ‘other’ local struggles to make sense for our own (like in EMPIRE,

2003-12-06T00:07:00.000-05:00

"What happens to Dean's celebrity subject when it's the actual celebrity?" My final paper will examine the recent Michael Jackson mugshot. To begin, I will explore the loopholes in Sekula's argument in relation to Jackson's image. How does the circulation of the mugshot on the Internet act as an archive of the MJ myth? Here, I will place the current image against the countless other images

2003-12-05T22:48:00.000-05:00

I think that my focusing question will be something like: What sorts of opportunities for agency, action, and resistance does the emergent formulation of surveilling society/control society/Empire generate, dissipate, or render illegible? I think that this is a hard question to answer and will require a lot of initial framing of terms (What do you mean by the surveilling society/control society,

2003-12-05T21:38:00.000-05:00

I want to analyze how new power relations and distributions are constructed by the elite society as shift from archaic to electronic space is taking place. I will consider its construction is based on the tecnological opening of internet. I will ask the question of how invisibility effects and displaces those involved in the process. Are all the consipiracy theories true or fruits of vivid

2003-12-05T19:03:00.000-05:00

For my final paper, I want to look at the Spillers and Dean pieces via Angela Davis. In some ways the “collapse of the Father” in the age of technoculture resembles the chaos resulting from the African slave’s ambiguous ancestry, and Angela Davis’ experience reveals the conflation of these two forces in the formation of black female subjectivity today. The people who recognize Davis only as

2003-12-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

I would like my final to concentrate on the Smalls essay. What is so unsettling / arousing about these images? Specifically, I am interested in what we can extract from Tagg’s theory of photography regarding Van Vetchten’s “fetish and fantasy” works. What does the “pseudo history” of Van Vetchten’s primitivized black male subject say about the medium itself? Are there documentary elements in

2003-12-05T17:02:00.000-05:00

When I was debating what I wanted to write about, I thought back to what I posted about earlier for the class. And I realized the one thing that really got me going (maybe not in a good way) was Michael Jackson. Then last week, I was reading an article in the LA Weekly that said "The standard Afrocentric point of view interprets Michael Jackson as an example of racial self-hatred. Okay, that’s

2003-12-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

Me, Nazli and Caroline are planning to video tape a short-length reality program called “Big Sister”. The three of us will exchange places as being in front and at the back of the camera. The project will be examining aspects of “control” and the “pleasure principle” which includes the notion of exhibitionism and voyeurism. We will discuss the ability for average people to produce (stage) a

2003-12-05T16:19:00.000-05:00

Is seeing ourselves on television the modern-day manifestation of the pleasure principle? For my paper, I want to examine subject positioning for the post-panoptic, constantly surveilled subject. What is at stake when we're always on camera and begin to like it that way? I'll discuss the pleasure principle via Weibel and examine Frohne's performing subject. I'll do this both in the context of

2003-12-05T15:38:00.000-05:00

I want to write my final paper on The Giant, analyzing it in conjunction with readings of Virillio and Crary. I particularly want to look at the modern notion of attention and focus. Following on our last discussion, we talked about this sort of low-level attentiveness that our computer culture requires and enables. I’ll discuss how this type of attentiveness has truly changed human life in its

2003-12-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

Adrian and I are currently waiting to receive some materials in the mail that would allow us to give a better/more accurate/precise description of our final project. Without having gone over the materials, here;'s a basic outline of what we plan to do. We are going to investigate the US news media's construction of the pro-war subject by examining newspaper articles (which are the materials

2003-12-05T12:10:00.000-05:00

For my final paper, I am interested in the following quote by Ernst: "While it might officially be the function of public (...) cameras to prevent crimes, the TV camera, on the contrary, not only wants to document, but even to generate the event. That is why Big Brother has manifested such a revolution in the panoptic episteme. Not only is the anonymous power of the surveilling eye no longer

2003-12-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

I think among all the articles we read for this semester, the one that made most impression on me was 'the culture industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception'. It summarizes how we have reached to the point we are. It is obvious that there have been some developments that effected negatively human mind since enlightenment. The only way we can erect these mistakes is by knowing the facts we have

2003-12-04T08:25:00.000-05:00

I am also not quite convinced by crypto-anarchy. Basically, his argument is based on the truism “The Net is an anarchy.” In this way I feel like the basis of his argument is incomplete. The Net could be considered anarchic but only to the extent that it exists in the first place. It seems this is the step that May brushed over: What is and is not the Net? Is the net made up of every

2003-12-04T06:37:00.000-05:00

I particularly enjoyed this week’s readings, though I felt as if there was a general hesistancy amongst the authors’ to make larger generalizations about the next best step in preserving equitable discourse and freedom alongside the proliferation of modern communication technologies...it seems most people were unable to decide whether the possibility for the great internet hope could feasilbly

2003-12-04T04:15:00.000-05:00

Wow, Julie! I really appreciate the way you’ve delineated the (dis)appearances of privacy and subjectivities in the materials we’ve dealt with. I had wanted to post on something related to this problem, but wasn’t sure how to engage it, and you’ve provided a way to think about it. bell hooks’s article made me want to think about the idea of the ‘counter-public’ spheres that have emerged in the

2003-12-04T03:25:00.001-05:00

AIDS, Action, and Empire- Today I was speaking with an AIDS activist/economist/women’s studies professor named Kiaran from Harvard about the work that she does interviewing folks that are part of anti-AIDS initiatives in parts of Africa (some areas with rates of infection of 40%), and I was struck by how relevant so many of our class themes have been to the situation of fighting diseases in

2003-12-04T03:25:00.000-05:00

I'd like to touch on a few highlights of a theme which has been more or less in the background all semester (at least in my filthy mind): sex -- privacy, pornography, perversion, etc. I've experienced the class as sort of in two parts, which don't necessarily correspond to the official sections on the syllabus. Through the first Dean reading for 10/9, we focused primarily on philosophical and

2003-12-04T00:33:00.000-05:00

After reading Dibbell’s article on Pirate Utopias, I question the information quoted by the cyberwar expert. He or she claimed that “you very well could have a photograph and image with the time and information of an attack sitting on your computer, and you would never know it;” the expert explained that terrorists had the ability to hide messages within websites. I find myself skeptical of

2003-12-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

I'm going to speak broadly on the "post-panoptic" (if there is such a thing) subject in hopes of narrowing the field a bit for my paper. We start with Ernst, in which publicity to the extreme, and particularly publication, systematically replaces the old panoptic regime. Instead of internalizing the fact that we may always be being watched and thus envisioning ourselves and therefore

2003-12-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

"Instead of punishment, surveillance becomes pleasure." (Weibel) One of the major issues around which this course centers is the issue of pleasure. When examining subject formation through publicity, theorists seems to be divided on the question of the experience of the person. Is camera-shyness a coy display of erotic affection toward the lens or an expression of the anxiety toward

2003-12-03T22:03:00.000-05:00

In response to Ajay's post: I agree that May's argument fails in creating a true picture of privacy. However, I think it's important to recognize the capability that the internet really does hold. If nothing else, a sense of the private is created in user groups, etc. Although, it is important, as Prof. Chun pointed out, that opacity is truly impossible due to the links one must inadvertantly use

2003-12-03T21:20:00.000-05:00

On a personal note: The total surrender of the individual subject to the regime of the gaze is problematic to me. The logic of self-surveillance that permeates Frohne’s argument as well. Just a thought: I have not internalized surveillance. Perhaps it is so powerful in me, that I do not even realize it. However, I doubt this. Sure, perhaps in public spaces, like airports or even when logged on

2003-12-03T20:55:00.000-05:00

In the article, on the magazine "Foreign Policy", it was written that 'The Internet has not only inspired invention, it has also inspired publication in a way that would never have been produced by the world of existing publishers.' This is true for all kinds of practices, not only for what is published on the internet but also the general way of responding. We became much more product-oriented.

2003-12-03T20:24:00.000-05:00

Julie brought up the issue of morality in class, and I’d like to pursue it a little bit further in relationship to May’s defense of cryptography. May takes an ambivalent position towards morality in relationship to encryption. At times, he is reluctant to make moral judgments about “evil” uses of encryption techniques ( “I make no moral judgments here about people who use these methods”) while

2003-12-03T20:21:00.000-05:00

The analysis of steganography and cryptography in May and Dibbell struck me as particularly fitting in our discussion of transmission and autonomy. These subverted messages that reach the addressee in undetected manners also connected to the limits of perception which we have been confronted with again and again throughout the course. The increasing impossibility and even, irrelevance of human

2003-12-03T19:26:00.000-05:00

From Nazli: Today, I want to write about Peter Weibel since I am going to be using his text for the final paper as well. He really has described the shift of the pleasure principle of the voyeur, to see everything and the pleasure principle of the exhibitionist to show all, from the fates of private drives to social norms very well. They have transformed from individual-psychological criteria

2003-12-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

From Nazli: “Commons are features for all cultures,” says Lawrence Lessig in his essay “Internet Under Siege”. I totally agree with this and also think that it in a way brings together or combines all cultures. It is a common ground for everyone, from different cultures, races, ages and places. It is a very unique space that welcomes innovations since it is open and free. However these

2003-12-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

Dibell writes "it's not so mucht he quality of the tech as the quality of the dreams behind the tech that gives the tenor of the times." (p.7) I can relate to this: when I was 12 years old and reading William Gibson novels, I thought the Internet was awesome and tried everything I could to learn how hack, but now I find almost as boring as television. (I never got much beyond learning the basics

2003-11-25T11:05:00.000-05:00

Dienst makes some contradictory points within his essay about television, in my opinion. Dienst writes on page 141 that TV "makes representations visible and accessible to each other and makes a profit only when that visibility can be approximated, calculated, programmed." He goes on to write that the relay of representations is what is described by Raymond Williams as 'TV flow.' On page 142

2003-11-25T09:15:00.000-05:00

From Elisabeth: Did Coppola predict the third-generation surveillance camera? From the last shot of The Conversation, it sure seems like it. And as the Levin article suggests, "the locus of surveillance has thus shifted, imperceptibly but decidedly, away from the space of the story, to the very condition of possibility of that story" (Levin, 583). The idea of surveillance as "the condition of

2003-11-25T03:32:00.000-05:00

It's been years since I'd seen this movie and it was really interesting to return to it in the context of the material we've covered in this class. A couple of notes of the top off my head first though. In the Will Smith/Bruckheimer movie "Enemy of the State," Gene Hackman essentially rehases his role as a bugged out surveilence guy, minus the religion (in one scene, he shows a picture that is

2003-11-25T03:00:00.000-05:00

To add to Julie & Jackie’s discussion of visual surveillance in The Conversation (vs. audio): I agree with Julie that the repeated shots/flashes of the couple are disputably figments of Harry’s imagination, I think they do other work, as well. In light of Levin’s reading of the final scene, I think we can see these moments as symptoms of narrative-cinema-as-surveillance—and, simultaneously, of

2003-11-25T02:58:00.000-05:00

In the beginning of the movie, Gene Hackman's character overhears the two characters he's surveilling say, "if he finds out he'll KILL us." What he does initally hear is this: "if he finds out, he'll kill US." The first construction refers to the gravity of the the persons' anger. It emphasizes the intensity of the act of revenge that this man will take. The claim amounts to more than saying

2003-11-25T01:32:00.000-05:00

Well, Julie got to it first; I was going to talk about the audio surveillance/aural emphasis in The Conversation (TC) vs. the video surveillance/visual emphasis in the Levine. I think she did a really great job already. Where we semi-diverged, though, was that I thought that the film did end up over-indulging the visual side of surveillance quite a bit (remembering that Harry’s project was not

2003-11-25T00:30:00.000-05:00

What a fantastic movie! Levin obviously offers only a very brief and selective reading of The Conversation, and I'd like to suggest some directions for an expansion of this discussion. The greatest point of tension in the film for me, in terms of the "rhetorics of surveillance" that Levin treats, was the disharmony between audio and visual surveillance. Because audio surveillance was the "

2003-11-25T00:04:00.000-05:00

Well, now I can finally understand why The Conversation is constantly playing in List...the constant shifting between camera as narrator as bug as dream state as surveillance as publicity (or do we only see the microphones in the reporter scene?), etc. makes for an MCM wet dream. Though I don’t think I would have understood the conclusion as it was portrayed in Levin without having read the

2003-11-24T23:18:00.000-05:00

From Sebastien: Concerning Levin's discussion of "dataveillance," I'm interested in going beyond control through credit cards, machine-readable passports, etc. in order to focus more closely on the very comtemporary facial recognition that is making its way in society. I found out in a newspaper article that the most "up and coming" face recognition system is called "Viisage", which has

2003-11-24T23:17:00.000-05:00

From Bridget Immediately after “The Conversation” began, I started to wonder what Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) represented. As a person, whose job is to survey others, he is far more paranoid than those being surveyed. And what do those being surveyed by Caul represent? Although they suspect that they are under surveillance, or rather that they could be under surveillance at any time, they are

2003-11-24T23:05:00.000-05:00

In “From Post Cards to Smart Bombs,” Dienst reminds us of Derrida’s “Derrida’s refusal to ‘delimit’ textuality to ‘the text’” (132). Levin approaches the concept of real-time within several specific films - I am interested in how we can go about reading real-time outside the confines of the cinematic text. What does real-time say about the social context that produces it? If cinema is

2003-11-24T23:01:00.000-05:00

I will attempt to connect Richard Dienst's piece to THE CONVERSATION. Even though Dienst specifically discusses television flow and image, he also engages with Derrida's concept of "transmition." For the sake of my posting, I will claim that audio transmission, because it creates an image in the imagination of the listener (especially in the film where the city quad scene is visually repeated

2003-11-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

Re: Levin. The most interesting part of this is the transition posited from a regime of spatial indexicality recording onto VCR toward a temporal indexicality of real time. The transition is motivated by "semiotic compensation". Any given surveillance image could potentially be EITHER a playback from recording or a live feed--we don't necessarily know which it is while we are watching the

2003-11-20T08:08:00.000-05:00

“As a post-script: one issue that neither Freud or Dean explore much is the pleasure paranoiacs seem to get from formulating their delusions of conspiracy. How can we bring pleasure back into the question of the post-modern normalization of paranoia?”--Julie I will try to respond to Julie’s question about pleasure in paranoia as it emerges from Freud’s argument(so not with relation to the

2003-11-20T05:36:00.000-05:00

I was impressed and illuminated by the valiant efforts some of you made to draw connections between Freud's "Case of Paranoia" and Dean's conspiring subject. Kate suggests that Freud's theory that in paranoia “the persecutor is at bottom someone whom the patient loves or has loved in the past” may shed light on the virulent hostility toward betrayed ideals of democracy and publicity expressed in

2003-11-20T02:09:00.000-05:00

Nolan’s post made me contemplate how subjective conspiracy theory is and how conspiracy theorists are regarded in modern America. Why does the mainstream always have to exert control? Why is conspiracy theory usually scoffed upon and regarded disdainfully? Why do most people consider conspiracy theory as foolish and far-fetched? Are these feelings rooted in fear of the other and a

2003-11-20T00:33:00.000-05:00

After posting, I was haunted by the sounds of the Michael Jackson song "You Are Not Alone." Indeed, this one song can be viewed as the eye of the Michael Jackson/R. Kelly hurricane of child molestation. Michael performed the song and made the famously unconvincing video featuring he and his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (herself the daughter of one of the most conspiracy theory surrounded

2003-11-20T00:05:00.000-05:00

I found Dean’s dissection of conspiracy theories in our country to be interesting, if sometimes a bit obvious and spotty. A couple things I found notable were her conclusion about the critique of conspiracy theory that “They produce the normal by excluding conspiracy theory as pathological. At the same time, they normalize paranoia as a predominant logic of the public sphere. The fantasy of