ENGL293 - The Developing Database Culture

The Way We Were

• 40’s Bush and Weiner: From analogue to digital, cybernetics

• 60’s McLuhan: The medium is the message (mediated content)

• 90’s: Bolter & Grusin: remediation and digitextuality

• 2000s Everett - symptoms of: click theory

The Developing Database Culture

Lev Manovich Eugene Thacker

Overview

• Lev ManovichThe Database (2001)

• Eugene ThackerBiocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population (2005)

Lev Manovich• Interested in new media art, history and

theory of digital culture

• Professor of Visual Arts, UCSD

• Background in fine art, architecture, semiotics, computer programming

• M.A. Experimental PsychologyPh.D. Visual/Cultural Studies

• The Language of Media (MIT Press, 2001)

• excerpt from Database as a Symbolic Form

Article in a nutshell

• The rise of computer culture has redistributed the weight between databases and narratives as the lens for user experience and understanding of the world

• “Both have existed long before modern media...[and represent] two essential responses to the world” (Nayar 60)

• Narrative becomes syntagm|virtual|dematerialized while database becomes paradigm|privileged|material in new media

Key terms

• Database form can be defined as a structured collection of data.

• Data has equal significance

• No end, no beginning (editable)

• Open and editable

Key Concepts

• Database form and data structure as a cultural mirror.

• Computer age succeeds modern age

• Rise of idea of world as unstructured and endless collection of data

• Represents a new way to translate our experience of ourselves and the world

Key terms• Narrative form “… contents should be a

series of connected events caused or experienced by actors”. - Mieke Bal. literary scholar (Nayar 56)

• Linear, single trajectory

• Novels, cinema, comics, music

Why are database>narrative structure for new media objects?

• New media objects do not tell stories

• Traditional genres which already have a database logic are receptive to reinvention with new media storage

• OED, Chapters, Flickr, Wikipedia, Hotmail, CBC Radio 3

But what about new media objects experienced as narratives...

Such as games?

Key terms

• Algorithm: “a final sequence of simplified operations that a computer can execute to accomplish a given task.” (Nayar 53)

• “Hidden logic” a sequence of simple operation required to complete a task

Manovich’s Issues

• “The computerization of culture” “[C]omputer programming encapsulates the world according to its own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects which are complementary to each other: data structures and algorithms.” (Nayar 53)

• “the digitizing craze” “storage mania”

• Data does not just exist - it has to be generated, collected and organized

• New cultural algorithm (database logic as logic of culture):

reality ->media->data->database

Re: Everett’s Issue

• “By distancing technology from the body, we become less accountable to ourselves.”

• Issue of disconnecting information from the body.

Thacker’s Issue

• When we displace data from the body, does it gain additional significance? Is context lost in the datafication? (Re: McLuhan)

Eugene Thacker

• Interested in new media theory, digital arts, science fiction, bioscience and ethics, body and technology

• Associate Professor of Media Studies & film, The New School

• BA in English Literature M.A. and Ph.D.: Comparative Literature

• excerpt from The Global Genome (MIT Press, 2005)

Article in a nutshell

• The databasing of the population is problematic. The human population is reduced to three entities: biological material in a test tube, as a sequence in a computer database, and as economically valuable information in a patent.

• “… what techniques is bioinformatics reinterpreting and incorporating cultural difference?” (Nayar 241)

• Datification is a process fraught with semiotic meaning in both input and output (de Saussure).

Key Terms• Population Genomics: Genetic study of the

genomes of specific populations, through both statistics and medicine, genetics and technology(Nayar 223)

• Studies genetic elements that make human populations distinct from all humans (ie. ethnic groups.)

• Produces what population means in the context of genetics-based medicine and health care-paradigm.

• Omits nonbiological factors (environmental, geography, political, social)

• Related: Biopower, Bioinformatics as Biocapitalism

• Biopolitics: incorporating the life of a population into a set of economic and political concerns.

• defines population as mathematical, informatic-based statistics approach

• works by subdividing and creating internal differences in population to regulate political and economic health.

• produces and collects knowledge of the population in the form of manageable data, inserting that info back through the social-biological body of the population

Michel Foucault, French philosopher

Key Terms

Key Terms

• Biocolonialism: the appropriation (through force or coercion) of Third World biological bodies and populations by First World science, practice and research to feed into health care economies.

• Concept of race manifested within biosciences is encoded by Western science.

• Population databases are “... like value-added export products designed to circulate in a global rhetorical economy” (Nayar, 225)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HDjU6URqw

Key Issues

• Bioethical Concerns & the Database:

• privacy, ownership and access to data

• commodification of data by free market capitalism

• emphasis on marketable genes data over others

• genetic discrimination

• selected conservation of genetic difference.

• reinscribed data; variability of biological data

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apjebtal8bQ&feature=player_profilepage

Thank you

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