Simulations from last week

Our group worked on the Haltman, Poster, and Baudrillard articles, and here are some highlights of our conversation:

Haltman- We discussed how Haltman reads the design of the upright telephone as invoking the human body in order to offer a sense of comfort and intimacy during the use of a complex impersonal technology. He reads this technology of telephonic communication as threatening, an intrusion into the domestic space that could not be removed, but could be made more palatable by a human-seeming mechanism of delivery. We felt that the implications for the larger social power relations connected to the phone mechanism were multiple -- the gendered labor relations connected to switchboard operation, the increasingly commonplace nature of phones and phone service as products of a major profit-oriented industry, the rise of long distance communication and the ways in which it contributed to the re-imagination of national borders and community, and the ultimate dependence on the technology that people would develop are all connected to the phone system, and somewhat masked by the phone's disarming design.

Poster- We considered how Poster sees technologies of virtuality as instruments that can create a space that, because of its decentralized and participatory function, allows for the exploration and evolution of community and subjectivity. We considered his distinction that virtual experience is neither isolated from nor identical to lived experience, but rather allows for individuals to explore contested, fragmented, reconstituted and altered versions of themselves. He sees this process of the change of the subject as applicable to social interaction in the non-virtual world, suggesting that through the re-conception of the subject reality itself will be changed--specifically with respect to dominant power relations, which do not fully hold in the virtual world, and therefor become easier for people to question and destabilize in the real world. We discussed the limits of the scope of Poster's vision, in that we could indeed see how virtual space has prompted us to re-imagine our non-virtual experiences, but weren't sure that such virtual spaces always fully and necessarily challenge dominant power relations (particularly with respect to economic structures and practices). We drew the conclusion that virtual technologies may contest certain power relations, but they haven't as yet proved to be politically revolutionary.

Baudrillard- We worked through how Baudrillard sees power and the dominant social order operating through simulation -- for him institutions and authority are only as good as the credibility people imbue them with. Power is exerted through simulation, which people in turn must accept, internalize, and then also begin to simulate the same patterns of social order. Thus people assert power, accept the influences of power, and bolster the effects of power through a constant process of simulation. For Baudrillard, technology is no longer a one way mechanism: media seeks to simulate some version of reality, which in turn people encounter and internalize and begin to simulate themselves, and this cycle of mutual constitution continues. The mechanisms of technology, the content thereof, the impressions of the viewers and the intentions of the makers are no longer all conscious, linear and neatly predictable, but rather interwoven, overlapping, simultaneous and fragmented. This situation leaves people on the individual level as highly dependent upon their perceptions of the simulations around them, some of which they then internalize and preform, which perpetuates the constant social process of simulation. For those interested in this piece, we found in our group work that the concrete examples he discusses are a bit easier to deal with-- we found his discussions of Disney World and Watergate particularly helpful in getting a handle on some of the more unwieldy concepts in the article.