Of what these webcams I’ve been yapping about look like, here is a shot of the Miraflores lock, taken by the webcam there at local sunset.
At this point, I am seriously considering using the “recent changes” and “new pages” RSS feeds on wikipedia to capture raw data on all modifications to wikipedia for a given time period – thus enabling me to examine both very visible and very marginal (even deleted) sites within wikipedia. Does anyone reading this know of any similar wikipedia data capture attempts I might look at for comparison? I can roll the clock back using wikipedia’s own database on everything but deleted material…. but I’m intrgued by the notion of studying “a day on wikipedia” (though maybe a fraction of a day might be more reasonable). What do people think? Would anyone like to share this data if I do collect it?
(Note: the following fragment of a first draft of an introductory portion of my dissertation work continues from my previous post. I have posted here this here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here can and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
But this sense, of course, is an illusion. I may feel as if I am “seeing everything from nowhere,” that I am perfectly invisible, invulnerable, and autonomous, but I am not. The tourists collected on the viewing platform may not be able to detect my presence, but those who administer the web servers for the Panama Canal authority certainly can, if they care to look. Their logs will show my IP address requesting an image from their server once a minute for however long my program is running. The same is true for those who provide me with access to all the other webcams. On any given day, they probably never notice my presence, never think to look through the log files that would reveal the traces I had left, but if someone were to decide my behavior was in some way rude (because I was downloading too many images and using up more than a fair share of the server’s ability to transmit files) or even suspicious (because I had taken to closely monitoring at least three critical pieces of infrastructure: a major canal, a major airport and the United States’ primary space launch facility) it would be an easy enough task to shut off my access to the cameras and stop the travels of my electronic gaze cold in its tracks. If an entity were determined, and had the authority to compel my internet service provider to assist them, they might even trace my electronic gaze back to my physical body and subject that body to surveillance, interrogation, or punishment.
There are counter-moves I could make, of course. I could, for example, employ a proxy server to conceal my true IP address. There are also counter-counter moves that server operators and agencies of surveillance could make, and so on. But even if I were to successfully evade being seen in such a way, the act of evasion proves that I am not invisible, I am not viewing from some magically invisible “nowhere,” but that I have a specific, potentially visible location that I must actively attempt to conceal. For Haraway, understanding “the particularity and embodiment of all vision” (1991, 189) allows for a potential rehabilitation of this “much maligned sensory system.” (1991, 188) She writes that, once we see past the illusion of infinite and unbounded vision, “the ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.” (1991, 190)
Thus, each device sending images to my webcam browser represents, not a magic window faithfully re-presenting reality for me, but rather an active perceptual device constructing a view based on its position and sensory capabilities. Switching between the views shows clearly that even the view from high orbit is partial. It may see the terminator sweep across the disk of the Earth, but it is impossible to infer from this what a sunset and sunrise will look like along the canyons of Manhattan or behind the smooth rock face of the Half-Dome. The world looks different when viewed in visible light, infrared, radar waves. To use the terms of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour (an important influence of Haraway’s) the cameras are not “intermediaries,” or “what transports meaning or force without transformation,” but rather they are “mediators,” that is to say they “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.” (2005, 39)
Furthermore, as my discussion of the potential visibility of my webcam monitoring self revealed, the system taken as a whole, me sitting before the compound eye of my internet-enabled creation, must itself be considered a specific, embodied point of view. This point of view is itself a mediator, as I build a specific set of meanings from the images I see influenced, of course, both by the images themselves and the larger network of mediators I am myself embedded in. The recitation of my morning ritual provided here gives some clues as to some of the elements in this network. They include multinational corporations, workers, machine tools, chemical stimulants, international standards organizations, nation-states, volunteer programmers, copper wire, the english language, radio frequencies, the US Code of Public Law, and base 2, 10 and 16 mathematics. Making visible this web of associations shatters the illusion of autonomy provided by the “god trick” of infinite vision. I am not perfectly free but rather, as Latour writes, “made to act by a large star-shaped web of mediators flowing in and out.” (2005, 217) This is not to say that I am wholly determined by the forces interacting with me, since Latour holds that everything is a mediator, his understanding is that everything in the network exerts a form of partial agency. Using the example of the puppet he writes, “the puppeteer still holds many strings in her hands, but each of her fingers is itching to move in a way the marionette indicates.” (2005, 216, emphasis in original) The networks of human and non-human mediators I mobilize also mobilize me, and vice versa.
So, an examination of my morning reveals how my existence is thoroughly one of a cyborg, in Haraway’s sense of a “creature simultaneously animal and machine,” living in a world “ambiguously natural and crafted.” (1991a, 149) Furthermore, it demonstrates how I am living in a specific form of this cyborg experience, since (among others) workers in the plants building my computers, the owners of the plantations that grow my coffee, and the system administrators monitoring my use of the network are all linked to the same cyborg network of machines and humans I am, while occupying clearly different positions within it.
(Note: the following fragment of a first draft of an introductory portion of my dissertation work continues from my previous post. I have posted here this here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here can and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
For me, this experience of global channel surfing made the sometimes esoteric-sounding theory of Donna Haraway understandable in an immediate, visceral way. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway describes the power and danger of vision and the metaphors we affix to vision. She writes, “the eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything interests of unfettered power.” (1991, pg 188) Haraway points out that in the contemporary moment the metaphor linking vision to diembodied power has been reinforced by technologies that allow “the eye of any ordinary primate like us” to be “endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system.” (1991, pg 189) Under the conditions of this “technological feast,” she argues, “Vision […] becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put this myth into ordinary practice.” (1991, pg 189)
Clearly, it would only be fair to number me among those gorging themselves at the “technological feast” Haraway describes. A white-boy wanna-be hacker with his Linux box plugged into the global network from a non-descript apartment in an anonymous college town, my vision flits effortlessly across thousands of miles from high orbit, to the streets of Manhattan, to the Wyoming back-country, to the colonial artifact of the Panama Canal. My senses expand to include not only the visible spectrum my primate eyes can see but also the long, cool wavelengths of radio waves. For awhile, I was also viewing images taken using infrared (the GOES satelitte provides IR images) and ultraviolet light (the SOHO satelitte provides UV pictures of the Sun) but I chose to stop recieving these images because they bored me. The tourists lined up along the rail at the Miraflores lock, or along the walkway at Old Faithful are unaware of my gaze, they have no means of discerning my presence so they pay me no heed. I pay attention them, however, as a crowd of tourists may indicate an off-frame ship about to pass through the lock, or some rumble indicating the geyser is about to erupt. This sense of effortless movement, of disembodied vision, of superhuman power is clearly one of the sources of the pleasure I derive from my webcamera monitoring hobby.
But of course, this sense is an illusion.
(Note: the following fragment of a first draft of an introductory portion of my dissertation work continues from my previous post. I have posted here this here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here can and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
And then there is the webcam browser.
The webcam browser is something I am proud of, because, like the desktop computer it runs on, I assembled it myself out of available parts. Software parts, pieces of code shipped with the Linux operating system. Like Linux itself, the implementations of these pieces of software I am using have been worked on by various collectives of volunteer programmers, though some have much older roots. In brief I used the venerable Unix scheduler, cron, to tell the computer to run a simple program for fetching files from the network, wget, at regular intervals to grab images from web addresses where automatically updated images from web-connected cameras and other imagers are stored. Wget dumps these images into a folder on my machine, where a slideshow screensaver program, glslideshow, has been told to look for images to display on the screen. Once the screensaver activates, glslideshow cycles between random images drawn from web-connected cameras somewhere in the world once every 10 seconds or so.
The effect is quite meserizing. The screen goes blank as the screensaver activates. The first image appears: a view of the full round disk of the Earth from geostationary orbit, 22,240 miles up, assembled about 3 hours ago from a mosaic of images taken by the GOES-12 weather satelitte. A hurricane is visible in the Gulf. The terminator line, dividing night from day, is visible as a gentle arc running down the center of the North American landmass, across the Isthumus of Central America, and on into the Southern Pacific. The next image flashes up, from a source much closer to Earth, a department of transportation traffic camera watching an intersection on Interstate 75 just north of me. It shows traffic flowing, and the weather clear. This image is replaced by a display of local weather radar stations complied by the National Weather Service, showing a few rain storms over Indiana as dull green splotches, they could reach me by the afternoon. The next image is one of the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal, provided by the Panama Canal Authority. At the moment captured by the camera, a few seconds ago, the lock held a great green ship, stacked with rectangular shipping containers in blue, green, and dull red-orange. The image is high enough resolution that I can make out the name painted on her stern. She is the Ever Diamond, a 54,000 ton containership built by Mitsubishi heavy industries and managed by the Evergreen Marine company of the United Kingdom. She flies the Panamanian flag.
There have been days when I, ostensibly engaged in reading a book of theory or some other more respectable pursuit, have spent the better part of a day watching these images process across my screen. I watch the terminator slowly march across the Earth, from East to West, and with it the sunrise over San Francisco Bay (image provided courtesy of a local resident and webcam enthusiast), over Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and Yosemite’s Half Dome (images captured by National Parks Service cameras), over LAX (image of the tarmac provided by some Aviation fans in a nearby law office). I watch the light shift in the canyons of Manhattan streets (image provided by a NYC area community web-page with a camera stuck in the window of a mid-town skyscraper, looking south toward the Statue of Liberty and New Jersey). I watch radar reflections of thunderstorms springing up and processing across the mid-west plains. I watch ships rise and fall in the canal locks, and an Air Korea 747 frieghter disgorge its cargo. On one, lucky, day I watched the Space Shuttle roll ponderously up to its launch pad on its giant, tracked crawler.
For me, this experience of global channel surfing made the sometimes esoteric-sounding theory of Donna Haraway understandable in an immediate, visceral way. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway describes the power and danger of vision.
(Note the following is a fragment of a first draft of my dissertation work, posted here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here could and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
Introduction: Cyborg Sunrise
If Conrad’s pithy summary of the well-bounded condition of modern personhood, “we live as we dream, alone” was ever true, it is laughable now. We may dream alone, but we awake into networks. The morning ritual of this particular 21st century subject goes like this. I an awakened by my alarm-clock radio playing programming produced by National Public Radio. I proceed to the kitchen. I peel the blue plastic lid off of a metal cylinder of Columbian-grown coffee, marketed under the charmingly folksy “Maxwell House” brand, a division of the US based Kraft corporation (formerly a division of Philip Morris). I pour the coffee into a coffee-maker bearing the Gevalia brand (also a Kraft subsidiary), and add water delivered by the local municipal water utility. I wait for coffee-maker to extract stimulant alkaloids from the coffee by means of the brewing process. While waiting, I open the lid of my laptop computer, which bears the brand of the California-based Apple company and was manufactured in a facility located in mainland China. Opening the lid wakes the computer from its own energy saving “sleep cycle.” Its operating system, derived from the much earlier BSD Unix operating system developed by computer scientists at the University of California at Berkeley, dutifully proceeds to awake various systems, the hard-drive, the display, and most importantly the wireless networking device – which connects my tiny laptop to the globe-straddling expanse of the internet by means of a international wireless networking protocol (IEEE 802.11g) that allows it to talk to a wireless basestation device (Linksys corporation model WRT-52g) that connects it to a consumer-grade broadband internet connection (hardware and bandwidth provided by Time-Warner). While the laptop shakes the sleep out of its eyes, I reach down and toggle the power switch on the home-brew desktop system I assembled myself from: a Mainboard by the Taiwanese ASUS corporation, though it might have been assembled on the mainland or perhaps the Czech republic; a CPU by the Californian AMD corporation, probably manufactured in Dresden, Germany; and a hard-drive by Seagate Technology of California, possibly manufactured in Wuxi, China. The desktop runs Ubuntu Linux, an operating system developed by a volunteer consortium of programmers drawn from the ranks of amateur enthusiasts, academics, and employees of a wide variety of governments and firms. While the desktop completes its boot cycle I return to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of Coffee, enjoying a drug habit I share with 90% of American adults. I take a sip and enjoy the subjective effects of mingling a compound probably developed by Coffea arabica as a means of pest control with my neurochemistry. For me, the experience is one of mental clarity and a general sense of well-being.
My fix in hand, I return to my machines, both of which have now readied themselves for my use. On the laptop I startup the web-browser known as Mozilla Firefox (another piece of software produced by an assemblage of volunteers, this one shepherded over by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) and proceed to open web pages that provide me access to my e-mail account, and something known as an RSS aggregator, which is a piece of software that automatically retrives content for me from a variety of websites. Both my e-mail account and the aggregator are provided for me by the Google corporation of Mountain View, California (motto “don’t be evil”). My e-mail this morning is rather boring, a note from my mother, a notice from the Time-Warner informing me my bill is due, a list of upcoming local cultural events provided by my University (I have set the e-mail address my public University provides to me to forward messages sent to it on to my Google account) and some pleas from donations from a variety of political campaigns. My RSS reader has fetched for me a great cornucopia of articles from a list of sources too long to list here in any detail but which include major media outlets (such as: CNN, Reuters, and The New York Times), major political blogs (such as: Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos and Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo), activist blogs (such as Jessica Valenti’s Feministing), Epicurious, a recepie publishing website; Digg, a system that publishes links to web-content based on the votes of its users; more blogs run by economists, sociologists, media scholars, science-fiction authors and experts on IP law, each discussing his or her field of expertise; news from the Indymedia consortium of independent (generally leftist/anarchist affliated) news organizations; and the difficult-to-categorize BoingBoing.net, a self proclaimed “directory of wonderful things” that publishes a wide variety of geeky articles, ranging from Science-fiction short stories, to reviews of role-playing games, to discussions of copyright law, to pictures of retro-futurist cosplayers. Today I am greeted by about 400 articles. I skim through them quickly clicking on those that interest me, ignoring many more.
And these are not the only sources of information I am monitoring this morning. On my laptop I have opened a client for the micro-blogging service Twitter. This allows me to read short messages posted to the web by other Twitter users. I specifiy whose messages I want to recieve. Some of the people I am reading are friends, others are legal or political organizations working on issues I am interested in, others are authors and artists that have created work I have enjoyed. This morning on Twitter a noted Graphic novelist tells an obscene joke, a friend gripes about his un-appreciateive students, and another friend and I hold a brief debate about the relative merits of a recent political ad being run by the Democratic candidate for president. An instant messanger client also sits quietly on my desktop. Glancing at its window I see a variety of friends are online, but none I wish to chat with at this time.
And then there is the webcam browser.
Hello friends and colleagues,
I’m going to be using this blog to discuss my academic work, in particular my dissertation, over the course of the next few months. I’ll also be posting tidbits that I think may be of interest to two learning groups I am involved in, Radhika Gajjala’s Web 2.0 Learning Community here at BGSU, and David Parry’s UT Dallas class on Networked Knowledge Production, which he has graciously allowed me and some other grad students to sit in on via the web. I’ll have more on all this later.