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On the 9th of April I was, together with Giselinde Kuipers and Niels van Doorn from the University of Amsterdam, in a panel to discuss Andrew Keen's book The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy.

Keen is a bitter ex-believer in the dot-com dream, who failed to make money with Internet business models in Sillicon Valley. He found out that the only way to make money with self-created content is by writing a book about how bad the Internet is. Sounds familiar?

Keen's business card tells he is 'the antichrist of Sillicon Valley'. On the flipside of his card - yes, I have one! - a picture of his book, plus a recommendation from the New York Times: 'shrewdly argued, he writes with acuity and passion'. Passion, yes - acuity and accuracy no, as Karin Spaink so eloquently had told him in the night before. He was not amused, he told us. Duh.

I think Andrew Keen is a victim of the Web 2.0 hype. He is a believer of the hype, though an inverse believer. Plain believers think that finally on Web 2.0 users are in control. And that this is good, that it brings democracy, equality and truth. Inverse believers also think that users are in control on Web 2.0, but that this is bad: an assault on quality, culture and objective truth.

But they are both wrong. Users are not in control on Web 2.0; software is.

Here is the text I spoke on this occasion.

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Here an update of my musings on transcoding metaphors, in the form of an article which has been submitted to Configurations.
Comments are welcome!

Interfacing by icons and metaphors

In this article I explore the role of mediating metaphors in our daily use of software. More specifically, how we deal with the desktop interface and its common 'icons', such as the mailbox icon. It will be shown how digital iconicity tends to metaphorical condensation and reification, a material-semiotic process which not only represents but also depresents what is going on inside a computer on the level of code and machinic transferences. This instance of reifying 'icontology' obscures the indexical transferences set in action by software. The article will show how and why computer interfaces are different from other machine interfaces, and how its buttons and switches function as condensed metaphorical sign-tools, usually in the form of 'icons'. These sign-tools have to be analytically decomposed in order to see what they hide and how they perform their signifying and executing job. The mailbox icon will be subsequently considered as a Peircian sign, as a Heideggerian tool, and finally as a material metaphor, in order to open up the black box and disentangle the sign-tool-machine oscillation at work in our computing practices.

Complete text: Interfacing by icons and metaphors

An update of my musings on transcoding metaphors,  submitted to SPIEL.
Comments are welcome!

Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn

Hegel once wrote, rather regretful: ?The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk? (Hegel 1820). With this metaphor he indicated that philosophy understands phenomena only at the end of the day, when things have already passed. Wisdom always comes by hindsight, but at that moment the phenomenon at stake might be gone already. Hegel's winged words are still up to date. Thus, when philosophers and media scholars proclaim a mediatic or a medial turn, and start building conceptual frameworks, disciplines, and research programs around (New) Media Philosophy (Rodowick 2001, M?nker e.a. 2003, Sandbothe 2005), we could have a gut feeling that this media thing might be already behind us.
And indeed, right at the moment scholars start thinking about what media are, what they do, how they constitute what we conceive as reality and truth, and what this implies for ethics, politics, education and culture at large, media seem to be gone. Or at least they are on the move. Contemporary media seem to have lost their stable ontology as apparatus, they can no longer be located in particular carriers, devices, modalities or institutions. They seem to be ubiquitous, everywhere and nowhere. They have become floating signifiers, ready to embark on any instance of articulation or communication, ready to mediate anything at hand. And, as usual in philosophy, with the wisdom of hindsight, we realize retrospectively that after all no medium ? be it print, film, or television ? ever had a stable ontology.
What do we have then? A minimum definition would be: we have processes instead of ?things? ? mediations instead of media.

Complete text: Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn

Marianne van den Boomen, "Van gemeenschap via webnetwerk naar datawolk". In: Jan Steyaert and Jos de Haan (eds.) Jaarboek ICT en samenleving 2007: Gewoon digitaal p.129-148. Amsterdam: Boom, 2007.

Van gemeenschap via webnetwerk naar datawolk

Het is inmiddels een open deur om te zeggen dat het internet niet meer weg te denken is uit de samenleving. Gebruikers zijn allang niet meer de professionals en nerds van weleer maar gewone mensen. Grootouders mailen met hun kleinkinderen, scholieren vinden elkaar op MSN en Hyves, studenten bloggen hun opdrachten, en rond elke kwaal, hobby, leefstijl of interesse bestaan online communities. Het internet is gewoon geworden, mainstream, vanzelfsprekend vervlochten met het dagelijks leven (Herring 2004, Pew 2005).
In deze bijdrage wil ik nagaan hoe die sociale vervlechting de afgelopen decennia tot stand is gekomen. Ik onderscheid daartoe drie vormen van e-sociabiliteit, opgevat als specifieke configuraties van internettechnologie en sociale toe-eigening. Die drie soorten configuraties ? kortweg: virtuele gemeenschappen, instant webnetwerken en gedistribueerde datawolken ? vormen min of meer opeenvolgende generaties, maar bestaan tegelijkertijd uit sedimentaties en getransformeerde voortzettingen van elkaar. Hoewel zo'n benadering noch historisch noch analytisch volledig is, valt zo een lijn te ontwaren van een toenemende online-offlinevervlechting parallel aan een afname van publieke communicatie in lokaliseerbare online ruimtes. Ik zal eindigen met de vraag of deze ontwikkelingen niet nopen tot het herijken van de concepten waarmee sociabiliteit van oudsher werd geanalyseerd.

Complete tekst:
Van gemeenschap via webnetwerk naar datawolk in: Jan Steyaert and Jos de Haan (eds.) Jaarboek ICT en samenleving 2007: Gewoon digitaal p.129-148. Amsterdam: Boom, 2007.

Deze week doet Vrij Nederland heel stoer. Journalist David Kleijwegt doet verslag van zijn downloadavonturen met zijn Ipod - poe, poe, hij downloadt wel 15 CD's per week. De cover toont een bricolage van de Ipod shadow reclame gemixt met de man met de zeis. De CD killer. De hoofdredactie erkent pontificaal het plegen van 'strafbare handelingen. En dat nog wel als medewerker van VN'. Nogal gratuit, want in Nederland is downloaden niet strafbaar, alleen uploaden. Niet zozeer omdat minister Donner dat heeft gezegd, maar omdat dat vastligt in de auteurswet. Wat de Stichting Brein ook beweert.
Op zich laat het stuk fraai zien hoe consumptie en distributie van muziek zich aan het verleggen is door het gebruik van digitale technologie, sharen en downloaden. En hoe dat een serieus probleem is voor de muziekindustrie en de gangbare business modellen. Op zich wisten we dat al, maar deze reportage in de vorm van een persoonlijke dagboek (blog-ge?nspireerd?) plus interviews met belanghebbenden zet het mooi op een rijtje.
De pontificale aankondiging - op de cover, in een hoofdredactionele introductie - doet vermoeden dat men hoopt op een lekkere media rel in komkommertijd, maar interessanter is iets anders dat dit artikel verraadt: het absolute onbenul over de technologie waarmee dit alles gebeurt.
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In the week from 21 May to 28 May I attended for the third time the annual conference of the ICA, the International Communication Association. This year the location was in San Francisco ? what an amazingly friendly, relaxed city that is! - and as usual it was huge. Approximately 2000 communication scholars were presenting their work in 480 sessions consisting of four paper presentations each (with some so called high density sessions with 10-50 poster presentations).
The motto for this year was Creating Communication: Content, Control & Critique. While this sounds as critical and cutting edge new media studies, there also was ? as usual ? a lot of boring classical communication stuff.

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Is it a hype? Yes.
Is it something real? Yes, also.
Is it good? No.
Is it bad? No.
Is it neutral? No!

What is it then? It is a metaphor.
Metaphors are funny things. They elude questions of truth and reality, and at the same time they produce truths and realities. They produce meanings and qualifications, frames of thought and action. They show things and aspects, and they hide other things. They compress and they decompress.
Especially when it comes to digital code they are extremely useful.
What's more, they are indispensable here. Read more… »

Marijke Ekelschot heeft een schitterende site gebouwd cq laten bouwen met het complete archief van de Bonte Was: www.radicaalfeminisme.nl. Beedlschoon vormgegeven, maar ja, helemaal dichtgetimmerd met java scripts zodat Google geen link kan vinden en indexeren. Even 'gehackt' en de links hier hapklaar gemaakt voor zoekbots.
Ach, Googlebotje, je komt hier toch dagelijks langs volgens mijn statistiekprogje, dus als je toch bezig bent, pak dan effe het Nederlandse radicaal-femisme mee en ontsluit het voor miljoenen…

Vrouwenbeweging
Moederschap
Werk en geld
Antiracisme
Acties
Anneke van Baalen
Boeken en artikelen
Fotogallery

I bumped onto 3 very interesting lectures by Charles Forceville, Amsterdam based metaphor researcher, working on pictorial metaphors. He is currently working on a book called Multimodal metaphor (Mouton-de Gruyter 2007), and he is giving a A Course in Pictorial and Mulimodal Metaphor. The first three lectures can be found at
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/cforcevilleout.pdf
But I think there is something funny with his work on computer metaphors…
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Last week we - me and my collegues Imar de Vries and Mirko Sch?fer - were in Paris, for our bi-annual Paris-Utrecht Mini Symposium. PUMS is an initiative of the department New Media & Digital Culture (Institute Media & Re/presentation, Utrecht University) and the Laboratoire Paragraphe (Universit? Paris 8 ). Or better, the PhD-slaves from both departments.

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