{"id":343,"date":"2013-02-07T22:53:41","date_gmt":"2013-02-07T22:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/memetechnology.wordpress.com\/?p=2514"},"modified":"2013-02-07T22:53:41","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T22:53:41","slug":"today-i-read-galloway-so-you-dont-have-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/2013\/02\/07\/today-i-read-galloway-so-you-dont-have-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Today I read Galloway (so you don\u2019t have to)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“There are very few books on new media worth reading.” (Galloway. A, 2012, 1)<\/p>\n

My supervisors said something very similar in our first meeting, but despite that assertion, exploring the university library last week, I came across The Interface Effect<\/em>\u00a0(2012 Alexander R Galloway)<\/a>. It looked interesting, so I took it out. As the blurb says “Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings \u00a0of video games, software, television, painting and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface.”<\/p>\n

Firstly, I’m not convinced it was written as a book. Each of the six chapters (four “chapter”s actually – but an introduction and a postscript) feels as though it was written as a\u00a0separate\u00a0article, and only minimally edited to make the collection connect (arguably) into a single narrative. Galloway also demonstrates a mild case of “philosopher’s itch” -\u00a0preferring\u00a0not to use an English word when a Greek one is available. For example, when discussing what anyone else would call the “forth wall” (he is referring to this picture<\/a>, from which Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman peeks at the reader)\u00a0he has to use the words “orthogonally outwards” (p38)<\/p>\n

He also asks one of the same questions I’m researching: “Are games fundamentally about play or about narrative?” (p23) which makes his refusal to suggest and answer somewhat frustrating.<\/p>\n

Galloway does use the book to make some good points though, for example, from the preface (pvii) “Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind” and “culture is history in representational form.” He expands upon interfaces are processes idea on page 18 “What if we refuse to embark from the premise of “technical media” and instead begin from the perspective of their supposed predicates: storing, transmitting and processing? With the Verbal nouns at the helm, a new set of possibilities appears. These are modes of mediation, not media per se.”<\/p>\n

I also like the passage in which Galloway\u00a0distinguishes\u00a0between the cinema and ICT \u00a0”In effect, the cinema forces us to don the\u00a0Ring of Gyges<\/a>, \u00a0making the self an invisible half-participant in the world… the computer is an anti-Ring of Gyges<\/em>. The\u00a0scenario\u00a0is inverted. The wearer of the ring is free to roam around in plain sight, while the world, invisible, retreats in absolute alterity. The world no longer indicates to us what it is. We indicate ourselves to it, and in doing so, the world materialises in our image.” (pp11 – 13) Cinema, he says, is an ontology (the branch of metaphysics dealing with a the nature of\u00a0being) “while the computer is, in\u00a0general, an ethic<\/em>… I make the distinction between an ethic, which describes the general principles for practice, and the realm of the ethical… And this is the interface effect again only in different language: the computer is not an object, or a creator of objects, it is a process or active threshold mediating between two states.” (pp22-23) This makes even more sense when he quotes, on page 32, Francois Dagognet’s assertion that “the interface… consists essetially of of an area of choice. It both separates mixes the two worlds that meet together there, that run into \u00a0it. It becomes a fertile nexus.” (Dagognet. F, 1982 Faces, Surfaces, and Interfaces<\/em> Paris, Librairie Philosphique J. Vrin)<\/p>\n

Galloway\u00a0takes a look at World of Warcraft<\/a>, and in doing so teaches me more Greek. Look at the screen when someone is playing and you’ll see two things. The player’s character walks around the world, fights etc. in the diegetic space. Diegesis is, I discover, the correct term for the world in which action takes place in any work of fiction. In WoW, there’s also a “nondiegetic space… The thin, two\u00a0dimensional\u00a0overlay containing icons text, progress bars, and numbers.” (p42)\u00a0He returns to the game later to ask “Why do games have Races and Classes? (p129) I might have told him the answer to that one – its because most of them are based on Dungeons and Dragons<\/a>, the grand-daddy pen and paper Role Playing Game created in the seventies. D&D was a development\u00a0Chainmail<\/a>, a medieval wargame played with toy figures, and races and classes were created to be a shortcut for players to\u00a0differentiate\u00a0their “characters” from the uniform rank and file soldiers that had previously populated the game-world (which I guess I should call the diegesis). Many tabletop roleplaying gamers quickly grew out of using such archetypes, and systems like Generic Universal RolePlaying System<\/a>, allow far more flexible and nuanced character creation. That said, much of the fiction written in the genre still features racial archetypes, so even GURPS still allows you to create an Elven Archer if you so desire. Galloway recognises that the Races and Classes in WoW are algorithmic short-cuts, just as they were in Dungeons and Dragons, and points out that “race is static and universal while class is variable and learned… What this means means is that race is ‘unplayable’ in any\u00a0conventional, for all the tangible details of gamic race (voice. visage, character animation, racial abilities, etc.) are\u00a0quarantined\u00a0into certain hardcoded machinic behaviors.” (pp131-2) This isn’t how even D&D was played, racial abilities (bonuses) might have been hard coded, but with the player’s imagination providing the rest of “the tangible details of gamic race” anything was possible. Pretty much anything is possible in the virtual world Second Life<\/a> too, but WoWs enduring popularity over that diegesis (! I better not wear this new word out) mirrors D&D’s enduring popularity over a myriad of more customisable pen and paper RPG systems. Galloway sees this a problem, and so it may be, but is it really analogous (as he suggests on page 133) to the disgraceful \u00a0”blackface minstrel” that was Jar Jar Binks<\/a>?\u00a0\u00a0Or is it just because using race and class archetypes is less work for the players than creating a rounded character from scratch?<\/p>\n

Galloway addresses work too, the the idea of the Chinese Gold Farmer as his springboard. “Recall the narrative again, that somewhere off in another land are a legions of Chinese gamers, working in near sweatshop conditions, playing games to earn real cash for virtual objects.” (p135) He argues that whatever the truth behind the narrative, we are all in fact gold farmers, “it is impossible to\u00a0differentiate cleanly between play and work…\u00a0The new consumer titans Google or Amazon are the masters in this domain. No longer simply a blogger,\u00a0someone\u00a0performs the necessary labor of knitting networks together. No longer simply a consumer, browsing through links on an e-commerce site, someone is offloading his or her tastes and\u00a0proclivities into a data-mining database with each click and scroll. No longer simply keeping up with email\u00a0correspondence, someone is presiding over the creation and maintenance of codified social relationships. Each and every day, anyone plugged into a network is performing hour after hour of unpaid micro labor.”<\/p>\n

The closest we get to an examination of narrative within the digital domain is not his examination of WoW, but rather an interpretation of the successful TV thriller, 24<\/a>. His assertion that the \u00a0interrogation\u00a0scenes are “merely the technique for information\u00a0retrieval. The body is the database, torture a query algorithm” (p112) is amusing but there’s more meat for me to explore when he moves away from the TV to look again at cinema. He describes films like Robert Altman’s Nashville<\/a> and Short Cuts<\/a>, among others, as “the visual and narrative equivalent of graph theory and social network theory” (p117).<\/p>\n

There are a few other lines which I want to think about more. For example: “A tension remains between software, which I suggest is fundamentally a machine, and ideology, which is generally understood as narrative of some sort of other… narrative cannot exist in code as such, but must be simulated, either as a “narrative” flow function governing specific semantic elements, or as an “image” of elements in relation as in the case of an array or database.”<\/p>\n

I find myself beginning to make\u00a0connections\u00a0between different things that I’m reading. Galloway throws a line away “the more\u00a0intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks\u00a0falling out of media althogether” (p25) which I think resonates with what Pinchbeck<\/a> was aiming for in his work on presence.<\/p>\n

I’m also interested in Galloway’s reference to “Manovich’s argument … about the waning of temporal montage, and the rise of spacial montage,” (5) so I’m going to seek out at least one more book on new media, The Language of New Media<\/em> (Manovich. L, 2001)<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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“There are very few books on new media worth reading.” (Galloway. A, 2012, 1) My supervisors said something very similar in our first meeting, but despite that assertion, exploring the university library last week, I came across The Interface Effect\u00a0(2012 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[128],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blog","column","threecol"],"yoast_head":"\nToday I read Galloway (so you don\u2019t have to) - Archaeology Blogs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/2013\/02\/07\/today-i-read-galloway-so-you-dont-have-to\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Today I read Galloway (so you don\u2019t have to) - Archaeology Blogs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“There are very few books on new media worth reading.” (Galloway. 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In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said \u201cwe could make a business out of this\u201d I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players\u2019 investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND\\\/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters\u2019 degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier\u2019s \u201cspace syntax,\u201d and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the \u201csmall business\u201d end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we\u2019ve returned Rudyard Kipling\u2019s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust\u2019s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams\u2019 achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/memetechnology.wordpress.com\\\/\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\\\/archaeology\\\/author\\\/matthew-tyler-jones\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Today I read Galloway (so you don\u2019t have to) - Archaeology Blogs","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/2013\/02\/07\/today-i-read-galloway-so-you-dont-have-to\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Today I read Galloway (so you don\u2019t have to) - Archaeology Blogs","og_description":"“There are very few books on new media worth reading.” (Galloway. 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In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said \u201cwe could make a business out of this\u201d I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players\u2019 investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND\/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters\u2019 degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier\u2019s \u201cspace syntax,\u201d and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the \u201csmall business\u201d end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we\u2019ve returned Rudyard Kipling\u2019s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust\u2019s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams\u2019 achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.","sameAs":["http:\/\/memetechnology.wordpress.com\/"],"url":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/author\/matthew-tyler-jones\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}