Introduction

“Presence” is a major focus for researchers and artists of digital culture, computer networks and new medical, communication and entertainment technologies (Donati and Prado, 2001; Lombard and Ditton, 1997; Mitchell, 1999; Murphy, 2000; Ryan, 1999; Sheridan, 1992). Presence refers to the degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/or psychological proximity through the use of particular communication technologies. In areas as diverse as virtual reality, video conferencing, MUDs (multi-user domain), newsgroups, electronic discussion lists, telemedicine, web-based education, flight simulation software and computer gaming, a sense of presence is vital for the success of the particular application.

It ought to be noted that the term “telepresence” has been used both interchangeably with and in opposition to the term presence. Jonathan Steuer, for example, adopts the latter use arguing that the point of departure between the two terms depends on the degree to which the subject experiences their environment as technologically mediated. As he explains, presence ‘refers to the experience of natural surroundings … in which sensory input impinges directly upon the organs of sense’. [1] In contrast, telepresence refers to ‘the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium’ (Jonathan Steuer, 1992: 75-76). Steuer’s model, however, has been criticised because it relies on a mistaken dichotomy between, on the one hand, “real”, “natural” presence and on the other hand, “mediated” telepresence. This, argue Giuseppe Mantovani and Giuseppe Riva, fails to acknowledge the mediated, culturally constructed nature of all communication environments. As they put it:

presence is always mediated by both physical and conceptual tools that belong to a given culture: “physical” presence in an environment is in principle no more “real” or more true than telepresence or immersion in a simulated virtual environment. (Mantovani and Riva, 1999: 547)

In addition to these critiques, a number of writers have attempted to historicise the socio-critical formulations of presence, telepresence and virtual presence but these phenomena have usually been confined to representations within electronic media (eg Coyne, 2001; Sconce, 2000; Sobchack, 1994). The past several decades have also produced a substantial body of work that explores the ways that global communication networks reconfigure our experience of time and space. As a result of the rapid flow of data through digital information systems, distance appears to shrink and time seems to collapse. The speed up of communication and the concomitant perception of a collapsing time and space will often produce an intense, quasi-spiritual sense of presence: ‘through the computer, thought seems to come across like a flowing stream from mind to mind’ (Heim, 1986: 283). This sentence is instructive because it collocates “disembodiment”, “presence”, and an eclipse of the material vehicle of communication, conditions, that, as we shall see, are a defining formal property of the communication systems under investigation. However, current theorising about what David Harvey calls ‘time-space compression’ (1990), generally limits itself to a history that begins with technological inventions such as the telegraph. What remains under-examined is the extent to which older technologies, such as the postal service, also foster the sense that the constraints of space and time can be overcome. In response, this paper traces the persistence of tropes of presence and intimacy though the texts and socio-technological representations of three sites of communication: letters, postcards and email.

Epistolary presence

The construction of imaginary presence is a fundamental feature of letter writing. In Claudio Guillén’s words,

there is hardly an act in our daily experience, rooted in life itself, that is as likely as the writing of a letter to propel us toward inventiveness and interpretation … [T]he ‘I’ who writes may not only be pretending to act upon a friend …. but acting also upon himself, upon his evolving mirror image. (Guillén, 1994: 2)

These epistolary inventions are both performance and interpretation. The letter writer performs a version of self and the recipient reads that performance. These interpretive acts help to produce the imagined bodies of epistolary communication. As Ruth Perry has observed, through the ‘solitary pleasures’ of reading and writing, the lovers of epistolary relationships ‘summon up images of each other, without need for the visible presence of the other, and then react joyfully to their own creations’ (Perry, 1980: 101).

In face-to-face communication, questions of presence can seem unproblematic. Epistolary communication underlines the fact that, as Jacques Derrida has argued, presence depends on and is the effect of a complex set of assumptions and strategies (1976; 1978). As I shall argue, “presence” is dependent on (and in part created by) rhetorical strategies and effects such as intimacy, immediacy, spontaneity and disembodiment. At first sight, the last of these terms might appear not to belong to this list; yet in email and epistolary correspondence, presence often depends paradoxically on a type of disembodiment. In some instances this involves the eclipse of the material medium that supports and the temporal or physical obstacles that would otherwise thwart communication. As the author Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) remarks to one of her closest epistolary friends: ‘thanks warmest & truest, my dearest Miss Mitford, for your delightful letter, which is certainly delightful, as it made me feel just as if I were sitting face to face to you, hearing you talk’ (16 September, 1844, 9:136). [2] Disembodiment, as this quotation suggests, is in epistolary communication coincident with the emergence of a fantasy of bodily proximity or presence.

In a letter sent to Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855), Barrett Browning provides insight into the ways in which the signifiers of presence operate within epistolary discourse. Barrett Browning writes:

If I do not empty my heart out with a great splash on the paper, every time I have a letter from you, & speak my gladness & thankfulness, it is lest I shd. weary you of thanksgivings! (EBB, 24 March, 1842, 5: 269)

Barrett Browning’s claim that she writes letters by emptying her ‘heart out with a great splash on the paper’ suggests authenticity, intimacy, immediacy and spontaneity. However, Barrett Browning’s claims that her letters are written in blood that spurts from the author’s heart also draws attention, in a somewhat macabre fashion, to the body. Within a discourse of disembodiment, there is a complex relation between the imagined body of epistolary discourse and the real “flesh and blood” corporeality of the epistolary actors. Since one is not physically co-present with one’s interlocutor, references to the corporeal body play significant rhetorical and social functions in the production of meaning within letter writing practice. The physical absence of one’s epistolary partner provides both the impetus and the “material” for a range of strategies, language uses and technological functions aimed at creating an imagined sense of presence. References to the physical body, to the scene of writing, to the place where the letter is received or to postal technology are often used by letter writers to convey and invoke a sense of immediacy, intimacy and presence: ‘Mr Kenyon is here. I must end & see him – for the post will be fast upon his heels’ (EBB, 24 March, 1842, 5: 268); ‘this tiresome post, going when I had so much more to say’ (EBB, 19 September, 1842, 6:83).

You will never guess what I am doing – my beloved friend – or rather suffering! – oh – you will never guess. I am sitting … rather lying for my picture. That sounds like vanity between two worlds, indeed! – only the explanation excuses me. (EBB, 16 April, 1841, 5:36)

By referring to the “here and now” of corporeality – ‘you will never guess what I am doing … lying for my picture’ – these correspondents strive to collapse the time and distance that separate them. Depending on the skill and eloquence of the letter writer, the recipient can feel as if he/she is actually face-to-face with them. But, of course, a key point is contained in that small phrase ‘as if.’ Were the two writers present to one another, there would be no need to correspond. Yet for many letter writers of the nineteenth century, the face-to-face encounter is not necessarily superior to epistolary communication. Indeed, on some occasions, epistolary discourse may be the superior mode. Letters can provide one with the opportunity to express what was unsaid, or could not be said, during a physical meeting. After Mitford had visited her friend Barrett Browning in London, for example, the former wrote:

My beloved friend how can I thank you enough! You came – you went away like a dream and as if it were a real dream, I never expressed or tried to express all the thankfulness & sense of your great goodness, which penetrated me through and through. You will let me thank you now, will you not? – and you will believe in the earnestness of the thoughts which revert to that day & go forward to you? (MRM, 18 November, 1843, 8:50)

For many correspondents, “absence” is creative; it opens a discursive space in which desires and subjectivities that might not otherwise be articulated can be explored.

A defining feature of epistolary discourse, then, is the dance between absence and presence: writing a letter signals the absence of the recipient and, simultaneously, aims to bridge the gap between writer and recipient. As William Decker puts it, ‘exchange of letter sheet thus articulates and substantiates the central paradox of epistolary discourse: that the exchange of personally inscribed texts confirms even as it would mitigate separation’ (1998: 46-47). Letters – like postcards and electronic mail – are conventionally understood as a technology that allows communication between bodies that are absent from each other. Epistolary communication is to that extent “disembodied”. Yet the boundary between disembodiment and embodiment in epistolary practice is difficult to maintain strictly. Writing and reading letters are, of course, operations in which the body must play a role. As noted, the body of the absent correspondent can become “visible” in letter exchanges when, for example, the author refers to the epistolary scene of writing, its material supports and delivery systems or makes mention of the letter’s temporality. These strategies aim for a sense of immediacy and presence by foregrounding the body of the writer. A related but not identical epistolary convention is one where the materiality of the letter is made to stand for the correspondent’s body. Due to its physical proximity or contact with its author the letter can work metonymically; a function most obvious in amorous epistolary discourse where the letter is kissed, held, cried over or adored in place of the lover’s body. In this way, the gap between letter writer and reader seems bridged. As Barrett Browning writes in a letter to Mitford, ‘I should like to be near you my beloved friend, to kiss both the dear hands twenty times which wrote & touched the paper of this most tender letter!’(30 March, 1842, 5:286).

Illustrations such as these may seem relatively unproblematic as signifiers of “embodiment”, proof that the fleshly body of the epistolary author is “present” at the time of writing and therefore can guarantee authenticity of communication. But even in cases we may call unproblematic, the sign that stands for the body seems at times to eclipse its own materiality. Still more remarkably, at times the materiality of the body that writes, along with the signs it makes on the paper, are eclipsed for the reader by a strong sense of communion between minds or spirits.

Barrett Browning gives an eloquent illustration of this “eclipse” in a letter written shortly after Mitford had visited:

My dearest friend’s letter was like a shadow of her presence thrown back & brought to mind so strongly all the pleasure I had had in the “dear Sunshine” that the letter itself was for the moment annihilated … not thought of! I thought of YOU too much. Oh, what a happy week for me! (EBB, 19 June, 1844, 9:23)

Barrett Browning is describing a transparency which many forms of communication have as an unachievable ideal: in the moment described, the material conditions of representation are effaced, ‘annihilate’, ‘not thought of’. Interestingly, then, this suggests that on occasion the media of epistolary systems may need to be forgotten in order to function efficiently, or conversely, that there are times when the materiality of a letter seems actually to get in the way of its ability to communicate. Arguably, this is a feature of representation in general; the desire to experience unmediated “reality” appears satisfied when the material conditions of representation (the pen, the screen, the keyboard) are eclipsed. The presence, intimacy and immediacy created between epistolary subjects relies upon a complex dynamic between, on the one hand, materiality, physical locatedness and embodiment and, on the other hand, references to the material conditions of epistolary communication and the corporeal body. In order to create a sense of presence and immediacy one may refer to the material conditions of the postal service or the corporeality of the letter writer. But if too much attention is drawn to the vehicle that is creating the sense of presence, then the construction and artifice of this “immediacy” becomes apparent; one sees the signifier not the signified. What, at first glance, may appear to be a reference to the materiality or “embodied” quality of letter writing actually might be operating at a different register since the letter’s materiality turns into a sign for the presence of the absent correspondent: ‘Your letter, my dearest friend, is twenty times welcome – & stands for you, for that coveted presence, right worthily’ (EBB, 21 November, 1843, 8: 53).

Paradoxically, then, references to the real, lived, situated, physical body of the epistolary exchange can produce a “fantasised body”. That is, the letter form allows correspondents to enact an identity and even adopt a persona that may differ from their “real” or lived body and personae. This is not meant to imply there exists an authentic self from which the letter writer departs. Rather, this “imagined body” or virtual self is a productive effect of the epistolary exchange. As Lori Lebow notes, ‘letter writing involves the writing self as a joint venture undertaken by the writer and reader. Writer and reader construct identity from textual cues based on the received responses from the selected audience’ (1999: 75). The performance of presence in nineteenth century epistolary culture is enacted by a complex interplay between absent letter writers, face-to-face meetings and the material, epistolary system that renders problematic a strict dichotomy between embodiment and disembodiment.

Postcard presence

Epistolary communication has been formally and aetiologically viewed as closely related to privacy, the ‘confidential inscription of private, inward, individual experience’ (Decker, 1998: 79). For Decker, the expectation of privacy and confidentiality is the ‘enabling condition’ for the production of intimacy (1998: 5). What happens, then, to the “discourse network” (Kittler, 1990) of the nineteenth century when these categories of affect are put in question by the 1865 invention of the postcard? Descriptions of the shift from a system dominated by the letter to one that employed letters and postcards are often couched in terms of apocalyptic loss and destruction: ‘Differing from a letter, a post card is a letter to the extent that nothing of it remains that is, or that holds. It destines the letter to its ruin’ (Derrida, 1987: 249). [3] Indeed, the postcard has provided critical practice with an eloquent trope for representing transformations to certain regimes of symbolic and material organisation (Seltzer, 2000; Siegert, 1997).

For correspondents of the late nineteenth-century, the postcard introduced a new system of postal writing in which traditional epistolary values and protocols were challenged and questions of class were raised. Fears were regularly expressed that postal clerks or servants would spend their time reading the postcards that passed through their hands. A newspaper of 1870 warned of the ‘absurdity of writing private information on an open piece of card-board, that might be read by half a dozen persons before it reached its destination’ (Carline, 1971: 55). Yet, those who have noted the threat to epistolary privacy posed by the postcard have invariably overlooked the point that in some sense, at least, the privacy of epistolary communication has often been at risk. During the mid nineteenth-century, for example, there was the distinct possibility that government officials, on the pretext of protecting national security, might open one’s letters (Robinson, 1948: 337-53). Even if one’s letter arrived inviolate, one could not always assume that it would remain with its intended recipient. Quite often Barrett Browning, Mitford and their other friends would circulate letters without first securing the permission of their authors.

The disjunction between the imagined privacy of communication and the actual or possible dissemination, of this message to a wide audience, suggest that the latter must at least in part be occluded if epistolary communication based on the former is to continue. When intimacy or immediacy is the desired effect of a letter (not all letters strive for these qualities: business communication, for example, is informed by other characteristics), correspondents assume a level of privacy and act accordingly. It is worth noting, then, that privacy is a historically contingent and culturally determined term. Cultural theorists who posit the postcard’s erosion of privacy, are fantasising about a level of epistolary privacy that, perhaps, has never been available. This is not to deny that the postcard dramatically changed postal communication. Perhaps for the first time the postcard made visible the discursive practices of the general public. The texts of “the everyday,” the products of “ordinary” writers, were now being circulated and read in a manner and on a scale that had not previously been possible. Nevertheless, this loss of actual (as opposed to imagined) “privacy” did not make impossible epistolary effects such as intimacy, immediacy and presence.

The correspondence between William and Elsie Fuller provides a rich archive for mapping the degree to which narratives of presence and intimacy play out in postcard communication. William Robert Fuller was born in 1899 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. In 1915 he enlisted in the Australian Army, serving as Lance Corporal with the 21st Battalion and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal in June 1918. He was repatriated to Australia on 20 October 1918 and died of Spanish influenza in July of 1919 aged twenty. [4] The earliest postcard in the collection is dated February 1916 and the last is August 1918. During this eighteen-month period, Fuller sent his sister, Elsie, about 140 cards. [5]

An important element in the production of presence and intimacy in the Fuller correspondence is the image carried by the postcard. These pictures convey a range of emotions, desires and fears as well as fulfilling particular rhetorical functions. Fuller commonly uses the postcard to reproduce for his sister something he has seen or felt. The assumption seems to be that if both writer and reader look at the “same” sight, the latter will share the experience of the former: ‘at that building I have been on duty and where you see that person sitting I have also sat’ (Fuller, 27 May, 1916).

The relation between picture and message is complex and takes a number of different forms. Sometimes, as with the above example, William appears to have seen the same monument, figure or streetscape that the card depicts. On other occasions, however, presence is produced despite the fact that William may not have seen the actual monument to which the postcard refers: ‘these are a few photos of what I have seen or intend to see, I have not seen the pyramids yet but I intend to see them. They are only a few miles out of Cairo. I will tell you about them’ (13 March, 1916). In this case, a shared present is created by the fact that neither William nor Elsie have seen the pyramids. It is strengthened by, perhaps, their shared desire to see the pyramids and by the simulacrum of the pyramids that they have both seen on the postcard. In this case, the simulacrum helps to effect an intimacy one assumes is felt as natural and spontaneous.

A sense of intimacy, therefore, is not dependent on a close relation between image and text. One of the postcards sent to his sister, for example, carries on one side a picture of ‘the mosques of Sultan Hassan and Al Rifai’ in Cairo. On the other side of the postcard, however, William describes a scene one would not expect to see on a commercially available postcard:

While we were waiting for the train to go, at Suez, I saw a terrible sight, it was a young native boy about sixteen, he had legs about one inch thick and could not walk on them so had to walk on his hands with his knees doubled up under his chin. Just for all the world like a monkey poor chap. I gave him four piastres (one piastre worth 2 ½d) and he almost went mad. Some of our chaps got onto the river and just to pass the time away they would push the natives into the water. It was very funny to see six of them in the water at once, but it did not hurt them for I could almost swear most of them never had a wash for months. (13 March, 1916)

While conveying the young boy’s plight, William reveals something of his own “position” as a young Australian soldier. The language – a mix of emotional commentary and masculine bravado – tells much about the colonial discourses that help shape his views. This establishes an intimacy that is heightened by descriptions of difference and “foreignness”. Although Elise does not view a visual representation of what William is able to see – the picture on the card is not the image, event or feeling that William wants to tell her about – a sense of intimacy is generated by the ideological position they share.

These instances provide the basis for thinking through the claims made by contemporary media theory that the postcard, as emblematic of a certain institutional and technological regime, brings to an end structures of intimacy, presence and affect. As noted above, a number of theorists focus on the letter as articulating a certain symbolic capital and cultural formation. The epistolary subject, so it is argued, is autonomous, has faith in authorial power, and believes that communication is the transparent exchange of thoughts from one consciousness to another. In short this is the Romantic subject re-worked by Postmodernism. Siegert, for example, argues that the combination of photography and the postcard had a significant impact upon contemporary regimes of representation and the belief in the originality of subjectivity. He writes:

In addition to standard postage, standard format and standard text, there now was a standard picture, as well. With the advent of the picture postcard, visual memories departed from the human soul, only to await people thereafter on the routes of the World Postal Union. The picture postcard opened up the territory of the World Postal Union as an immense space of forgetting, the object of which was the world itself … Once memories circulated as picture postcards that could be sent any place on the globe …. travelling itself became unnecessary. (Siegert, 1997: 161)

Yet people continued to travel. However standardised early nineteenth-century correspondents felt their postcard images to be, they did not stop collecting and sending them. Siegert’s argument about the relation between letters and postcards is based on a misreading of the cultural significance of “standardisation”. It misses a key point about how dreams of presence, immediacy and intimacy endure in the postcard era rather than, as he seems to suggest, dissipate. The difficulty with Siegert’s argument is that he opposes the formal, standardised, mass-produced format of the postcard to notions of intimacy, privacy, presence and individuality. The latter qualities, he argues, are tied to the epistolary era and are thus made problematic with the new media of the postcard. But why should standardisation rule out the subjective and individual realms? After all, commodity culture and mass production are shored up by the belief in the individual and the rhetoric of “choice”.

Contrary to popular and academic belief, therefore, the postcard did not destroy postal intimacy. Refuting commonly-held views that the standardisation of postcard media threatened individuality because it removed the privacy in turn assumed to be necessary for intimacy, the Fuller correspondence demonstrates that postcard communication can in fact increase levels of individuality, presence, intimacy and affect. The postcards exchanged between Elsie and William illustrate the extent to which privacy is performed and imagined rather than existing as a real, empirical condition. Despite the fact that the Fullers’ correspondence was available for the wartime censors to read, a fact of which the Fullers were aware, these siblings found ways to construct their correspondence as private and intimate.

Email presence

Rose Mulvale, long-time member and passionate champion of the email discussion group Cybermind, died on 18 October 2002. [6] Although her death saddened many list members, it did not come as a complete shock since, two years earlier, Mulvale had announced to the list she was ill. In a series of vivid, descriptive yet oddly prosaic emails, she explained that she had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and needed an oesophagectomy. Requiring ten hours of surgery, this procedure results in partial or total removal of the oesophagus. She had the operation on Monday 11 December 2000, writing to the group on the Friday before that,

if all goes well ( one option is that the whole re-positioned tum might “fall apart”) I’ll be at my brother’s place by Dec.21, and home here in time for Christmas (no heavy lugging, but I’ll be able to take care of myself by myself). What greater Christmas gifts than privacy and autonomy – and the sure knowledge that both can be shattered by a simple call for help! (2000) [7]

Throughout the next two years, Mulvale regularly wrote to the group about her illness. During periods when she was too ill to write, other list members would report on her progress, having contacted her family by private email. Two years before the list lamented Mulvale’s death, she had faced her partner’s quite sudden death. Mulvale wrote to Cybermind advising the group that her partner, also a list member, had died:

Kerry died this morning. I thought that writing those words time after time would blunt their impact. It doesn’t. I thought that seeking purpose in his death would divert grief. It doesn’t. I thought that thinking has the power to dispel emotion. It doesn’t. So much for thought. (2000)

Death and illness are not infrequent topics of discussion for the members of Cybermind. Indeed, attempts to articulate pain, death and grief play a pivotal role in the construction of presence, affect and intimacy within Cybermind.

But why do some forms of email communication give us a sense of presence, as if we occupied the same physical or conceptual space as our interlocutor? How do the words we read on a screen seem to “embody” or represent their author? To draw a relation, as many of the participants in Cybermind seem to do, between the subject posting emails and the particular communications technology involved and even between the subject posting emails and the persona that subject wishes to portray, presupposes some kind of expressive relation between writing, the textual presence conjured by that writing, and the author. In other words, we assume the text expresses or stands in for the author.

In general, Cybermind list members treat posts as authentic expressions of their authors. Thus, Cybermind group members regularly comment upon each other’s “personalities”. This phenomenon is exemplified in those instances when a group member writes in a manner that seems “out of character”. In such cases, members either deplore the writer’s deviation from what had seemed their character or invent ways of re-establishing that connection (the divergence is not substantial, we see a new side of the person’s character, we have previously been misled, there has been a misunderstanding and so on). On one occasion, for example, a recently subscribed, female member of Cybermind, Tara, suspected that another member, Markku, was, in some manner, stalking her. She believed this person knew more about her email system than would be discernible simply through list interaction. Although the thread continued for a few days, none of the list members contributing to the discussion believed that Tara was being stalked. Some suggested to her that she had misread the original email from Markku; others claimed Markku was not capable of such action. Tara, however, continued to believe that Markku represented some form of danger to her. He had sent her rude emails “backchannel” (an email sent privately rather than to the list), she noted, and the ‘constant patting of Markku online’ was unfair (Tara, 2001). At this stage in the thread Rowena replied with the following post:

Tara, you obviously dislike Markku, that is of course totally within your right. But I, and many of us, do like him, consider him a friend. So, it is not more than logical from our point of view that when we (or at least: I) see him accused of something we don’t think is [in] line with his character as we perceive it and that on the basis of something that was clearly (as I think is now quite clear) a misunderstanding on your part of one line in a post of him, we reply in pointing out that you’ve misinterpreted his words and that as far as we know Markku is not the type to do what you’ve accused him of. (2001)

It is, in part, because email list interaction is able to create a sense of presence, intimacy and immediacy that Cybermind members feel they can judge the authenticity of each other’s actions.

This evidence offers a certain resistance to early cyberculture narratives in which the subject was liberated from the exigencies of materiality. In these narratives of freedom, “online” subjectivity is playful, performative, flexible and decentred (Danet, 1998; McRae, 1997; Poster, 1990; Reid, 1995; Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995). A fragmented, decentred, multiple self is in a “position”, so to speak, to refuse to occupy the power structures of hegemonic subject positions. Recent cyberculture research, however, is less sanguine about the possibility for “online” environments to produce the decontexualised, incorporeal, genderless, raceless and ageless subject (eg. Burkhalter, 1999; Hall, 1996; Kolko and Reid, 1998; Sahay, 1997).

To a large degree, the “identities” of Cybermind, the various personalities and selves that are constituted though the list, operate in a manner that is relatively predictable and therefore fairly stable. This is not to ignore the fact that “identity” is always, in varying degrees, a performance: it is the result of complex cultural, technological, economic and institutional forces rather than being a natural, somatic or psychological process that is fundamentally independent of historical influence. This cultural determinism, however, may mean that “online subjectivity” is less “flexible”, “mutable” and “radical” than was predicted by early media theory. As Jon Marshall comments:

Though it has frequently been suggested that people use the Internet to explore a “postmodern” multiple or decentered self, this does not appear to be the case in practice. On Cybermind and the other lists and MOOs I have experienced, the main aim, or expectation, seems to be to uncover, or display, the authentic self. (Marshall, 2000: chapter 7)

Similarly, I would argue that whether subjectivity is represented as, on the one hand, “singular”, “rational and autonomous” or, on the other hand, “multiple”, “fragmented” and “decentred”, the assumption is that the self can be made present on Cybermind. To a large degree, the selves of Cybermind conform to a Romantic or “expressivist” paradigm – ‘the internal made external’ – as M. H. Abrams puts it (1953: 22). Authors assume that the material signifiers of writing can be deployed to express, to make present, the particular version of subjectivity they wish to convey. Moreover, even the representations of multiple and playful selves are, in fact, quite carefully governed by their authors.

I conclude this section by making some preliminary observations about the contrasts between these different socio-technological representations of presence. To what degree are the epistolary narratives of disembodiment and intimacy different from those evident in email exchanges? In their one-to-one communications, the subjects of epistolary discourse engage in what we might call a dialogic performance, whereas for their email counterparts the one-to-many performance is more properly described as theatrical. The latter is, arguably, more difficult to regulate, since communication involves the participation of multiple subjects. Although, of course, misunderstanding and misrepresentation are possible in epistolary communication, in email discussion groups this possibility is amplified. Subjects must negotiate not only the portrayal of self but also the audience response to this portrayal and, subsequently, their own response to the audience’s reaction.

Arguably, the theatricality and the potentially instantaneous exchange of communication means the sense of presence and intimacy experienced by participants in Cybermind is less stable than that generated between epistolary partners. Part of this is due to the “interactivity” of a theatrical audience. As Brenda Laurel has argued, conceiving of ‘computers as theatre’ helps to explain the function of interactivity in the shaping of CMC performance. As she puts it, ‘the audience’s audible and visible responses .… are often used by the actors to tweak their performance in real time [which] reminds us that theatrical audiences are not strictly ‘passive’ and may be said to influence the action’ (Laurel, 1993: 16). Thus, on Cybermind one is keenly aware of writing as performance or writing “for publication”. Moreover, it is possible to occupy the role of both audience and actor because one encounters one’s own email as if it were sent from another participant. I email a version of myself to the discussion group and it arrives in my mail inbox along with posts from other members. I do not, however, “own” this version of self; other members of the group can intervene to “read” me differently, to rupture and challenge the stability of my image.

This contrasts with the dialogic situation of epistolary practice where the “audience” does not constrain and regulate the performance of identity in quite the same manner. Perhaps this suggests that, in relation to the correspondents of this paper at least, the identities constructed through the exchange of letters are less constrained by socio-technological factors than the identities constructed through email systems. In a sense, this is a surprising discovery. As noted, the subject of cybercultural discourse is frequently viewed as more “multiple”, “radical” and, therefore, capable of experiencing more “freedom” than the subject constituted by earlier forms of communication. If the subject of email discussion groups experiences his/her identity as in some sense “threatened” or unstable, this does not lead to a decrease in intimacy and presence. Indeed, it is a testament to the persistence of the desire for presence that despite the potentially disruptive, interactive and theatrical nature of email discussion lists, subjects are able to express feelings of intimacy with, and warmth and affection for, one another.

Occupying a “mid-point” between epistolary and email technologies is the postcard. With regard to the type of performance, the postcard represents a transitional phase between the dialogic situation of epistolary communication and the theatricality of email discussion lists. To the extent that postcards are generally intended as a one-to-one communication they are similar to letter writing. However, the fact that their contents are potentially available for public scrutiny qualifies this evaluation, providing a larger audience than is the case with epistolary practice. This latter point is why, of course, Internet Service Providers and other institutions often use the postcard’s design to represent the lack of privacy in email communication. As one legal advisor puts it ‘sending confidential or sensitive information through e-mail is like sending information on the back of a postcard’ (anon., 1999). However, as this paper has argued, privacy is often an “effect” of discourse, a culturally and historically contingent term. Correspondents of letters, postcards and email assume a level of privacy (that may or may not be technologically, materially or institutionally supported) in order to experience presence and intimacy.

Conclusion: toward a historicised critical media practice

Many comparisons of electronic mail and the paper-based postal system identify the so-called “immateriality” of the former as one of the key points where it departs from the latter. The assumed immateriality of email is then associated with affective qualities such as “impermanence”, “impersonality” or “transience”. This is a common rhetorical move within academic contexts and the popular media, as the following quotations suggest:

There is something very personal about a handwritten letter or even a typed letter that you just don’t get with an email and unless you print an email out you’ve got no record of it. Once you move onto the next screen, that’s the end of it. So there is something permanent, something personal about a letter …. you can preserve it, you can keep it. You can’t keep the email, unless you print it out but it looks very uninteresting printed out. (Breen, 2002)

Every few months, I climb the ladder though a hatch into my attic. Over near a dusty beam, I see a grey shoebox of letters. Here’s a valentine from when I was ten; a postcard from my best friend. A love letter from my college sweetheart … Network mail, even decade old e-mail lacks warmth. The paper doesn’t age, the signatures don’t fade … Give me a shoebox of old letters. (Stoll, 1995: 157)

For other writers, the so-called “virtuality” of email is a virtue rather than a vice: because email communication involves ‘no material mediation’, it is less labour intensive than communicating by post (Stratton, 1997: 33). This (relative) freedom from material constrains allows email correspondents greater freedom, intimacy and presence than their postal counterparts. According to Jon Stratton, the “virtual” nature of email combined with its speed produces a different kind of intimacy than that experienced in epistolary communication:

The material letter reinforces the absence of bodily contact, the virtual email, arriving instantaneously, emphasises a non-bodily intimacy .… The instantaneity of email, that it arrives so quickly after it was sent, something which provides a sense of closeness, of an immediacy that suggests presence, is heightened by the lack of the apparatus that goes with letter writing … The most intimate letters are handwritten because they involve the body directly, and handwriting has an individualised quality. Email can only use the computer keyboard, this decreases the bodily involvement, and the bodily intimacy. (1997: 33)

Stratton is right to assume that within epistolary practice, handwriting, together with references to the corporeal body, can operate as signifiers of presence. As we noted earlier, epistolary partners can evoke immediacy, intimacy and presence by referring to the scene of the letter’s construction or reception. Letter writers often draw attention to the materiality of the postal vehicle and the corporeality of their own bodies in the writing process. However, as we also discovered, the materiality of the epistolary exchange (the letter and the postal service for example) and the corporeality of the epistolary partners are often eclipsed by a “disembodied”, imagined sense of each other. Indeed, one enabling condition of presence seems to be the partial or complete eclipse of the material conditions of communication.

While the “immateriality” of email is for some commentators evidence of its impersonality and lack of life, and for others the same quality intensifies the experience of intimacy and presence, it is striking that both sides align email with the immaterial and letters with the material. These correlations and the contrasts they enable are not self-evidently true. As I have argued, correspondents in the nineteenth century used letters and the postal system to construct an imaginary, spiritual body while eliding or “looking through” its material infrastructure. Similarly, the Fullers’ postcard communication revealed that the material exigencies of wartime correspondence were often eclipsed to produce an incorporeal sense of intimacy and presence. Why, then, should the older communication technology be routinely cast as more material when compared with newer technologies? One of the answers to this question is that in modernity the past is often construed as a material impediment from which the present struggles to be liberated. In this instance, the unfettered bodies and selves of email have been freed from the material conditions imposed by an older technology. This discursive logic parallels that at work in the narrative of disembodiment, as it applies to the individual subject. That is, just as subjects struggle to escape the confines of corporeality in order to express their “real” but “immaterial” essence, so too digital technologies release human communication from the material conditions that had previously impeded it. Paradoxically, the desire to free information from its material and technological bases – what Richard Grusin calls ‘the recurrent trope of dematerialisation’ (1996: 51) – has very real, material, consequences (see Brook and Boal, 1995).

While attempting not to underestimate the transformative powers of technology, this paper argues for the remarkable persistence of the ideology of presence. Analysing a range of socio-material practices it demonstrates the complex interrelation between technological modalities, cultural assumptions and symbolic capital in the performance of presence. In so doing, it attempts to avoid the binary that has captured much of the research on digital media; namely, either technological materialities effect decisive, irreversible changes in the systems of communication (technological determinism) or the socio-cultural articulation that is under investigation transcends the particularities of the material infrastructure (cultural determinism). Rather than view these foci as strict binaries, then, I argue that they are involved in a symbiotic and dynamic relation. That is, fantasies of presence are embedded within material infrastructures and practices. These dynamic relations underwrite the use by postcard correspondents, for example, of public communications systems to convey private emotions such as desire, fear and intimacy. Similarly, the public nature of an email discussion list often enhances the sense of presence and intimacy generated for and by its participants. This paradox – a public signifying system used as the site for the articulation of intimacy – reminds us of one of the fundamental paradoxes of cultural communication, namely that shared material signifiers and public communication systems can be used to conjure a sense of intimacy and mutual understanding between individuals, and even of the incorporeal presence of one correspondent to the other.

Author’s Biography

Esther Milne lectures in Media & Communications at Swinburne University and is currently completing her PhD in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis traces fantasies of presence, disembodiment, intimacy and affect through postal and email technologies.Esther is a facilitator for Fibreculture. She also enjoys speaking of herself in the third person in the relentlessly reflexive voice of the bio.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Peter Otto and Andrew Kenyon for their invaluable discussions concerning critical themes explored in this paper.

Notes

[1] The emphasis appears in the original. For the remainder of this paper I note only those instances where the emphasis has been added by me. It may be assumed, therefore, that if there is no notation, the emphasis appears in the original quotation.

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[2] All the letters referred to in the text are from Kelley, Philip and Hudson, Ronald (eds) (1984). The in-text citations provide details of the date of letter, volume number and page number. For the purpose of the in-text citation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is abbreviated to “EBB” and Mary Russell Mitford is abbreviated to “MRM”.

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[3] Eschatological and apocalyptic tropes are, of course, common narrative expressions for the interpretation of cyberculture and the movement of global capital. See, for example, Baudrillard (1990; 2000) and Virilio (2000).

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[4] Biographical and historical notes about the Fuller family are obtained from two sources: Papers of William Robert Fuller, Accession Number MS 9701, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne and Australian War Memorial database: .

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[5] This calculation includes only the cards that bear messages. Fuller also sent Elsie cards without messages and counting these the full collection of postcards numbers about 170. Since William and Elsie share a last name, they will be referred to in the text by their first names.

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[6] For a comprehensive ethnographic history of Cybermind, see Marshall (2000).

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[7] The archives of Cybermind have moved through at least two servers each with quite different storage policies. During 2000, without warning AOL deleted two years of list email. Despite requests from Cybermind members, the missing data were not retrieved. However, the author holds copies of all emails cited.

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The terms new media, new media studies and new media research are being taken up in a number of ways with different traditions, methodologies, and ways of constituting object(s) of study. In an article entitled ‘What is New Media Research?’ (2001), Chris Chesher has considered what distinguishes the research on new media amongst this proliferation of approaches and methodologies. He notes that many in these traditions just get on with producing new media without engaging with the question of how these media are new. Yet his concern is with a more critical and theoretical New Media Studies, and he has continued to articulate and advocate the kind (brand) of new media studies and new media research paradigm that he would identify with.

It is also this kind of new media studies that I identify with. Chesher’s intervention opens up the question of the research paradigm of new media studies/research. He notes that ‘new media are nothing new’, and advocates the use of the term new media against the problematic use of medium specific terms which date quickly (Chesher, 2001:229). Configuring a research paradigm in this context suggests that what must be engaged with is precisely how new media can be thought as “new”. In thinking the “new” of new media, the question firstly turns to, not what are new media (as particular media technologies), but rather what is new media studies/new media research.

In this paper, I will pick up some of the threads of the arguments and ideas Chesher presents, and also add some thoughts on precisely how such a new media studies can be thought as a productive engagement with culture and (new media) technologies. There are two related aspects of his paper that I want to address. Firstly, that new media research is not defined by its object of study, and secondly, the question of the “new” of new media. The question, Chesher says, is not ‘how to build a new discipline with clear parameters and boundaries, but how to sustain and foster more research of this kind without deciding in advance what it should actually do’ (Chesher, 2001: 228).

Deciding in advance involves all of the potential problematics of a colonising theoretical paradigm, which ultimately returns the object to known forms, or to the terms of known forms with the attendant likelihood of homogenising any radical otherness. Of course, new forms or objects of study arise out of cultural activities (social, political, economic, etc.) rather than out of a vacuum and such continuities need accounting for, as for example we can find in the ‘remediation’ argument from Bolter and Grusin (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Remediation is the name Bolter and Grusin give to ‘the representation of one medium in another’, and they argue that ‘remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 45). This argument asserts that historically new media have always “borrowed”, “repurposed”, “reused”, “reappropriated”, and essentially “re-mediated” older media forms.

Deciding in advance and all that implies turns us away from all that is radically imbricated in the “new” of new media. If “new” is taken instrumentally and technocentrically, in a linear progression of emerging/evolving technologies, it implies little more than a technologically determinist world whose forms and events are primarily designed by software and other technology corporations. Here, “new” must not be thought in terms of technologies, as discrete media forms that follow after each other in a progressive series. To think the “new” radically, the question becomes one of value and meaning, and hence of an ethics and politics of the “new” in this context. If we think the meaning of the term in this more radical context, technologies come towards us from the present we have projected them from, and are already imbricated with culture. The question becomes how we can think this orientation towards the future without becoming mired in either a predictive structure or the progression of a technological determinism where we simply react to “new” (media) technologies.

I suggest that this would need to be based in how we think of the “arrival” of new (media) technologies, and of the eventness of this arrival. [1] That is, how we culturally generate and return technology to ourselves, as if for the first time. Rather than defining the field of study in terms of an apparent object I suggest that what distinguishes the new media field, and what allows us to engage the question of the “new”, is that it is marked by a change in orientation to its task (somewhat akin to what Derrida would term a change in tone). [2]

The key to understanding this question of the “new” in new media in this orientation is through three closely allied concepts from Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger: the “future-to-come” (spectrality) from Derrida; the “yet-to-come” (virtuality) from Deleuze (via Bergson); and “projection” from Heidegger. For Heidegger, projection belongs to Dasein (being-in-the-world, a being of the same ontological sort as ourselves). [3] The word Heidegger uses for projection is Entwurf, the basic meaning of which his translator tells us ‘is that of “throwing” something “off” or “away” from one’ (Heidegger, 1973: 185, n1). In relation to Dasein, then, it is a pro-jecting, a throwing of existence ahead of itself. It has nothing to do with ‘comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out’ but, on the contrary, Heidegger says ‘any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting’ (Heidegger, 1973: 185). This connects to the structure of understanding as projection, understanding throws possibilities ahead of itself, and ‘in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such’ (Heidegger, 1973: 185). Deleuze’s “virtual” has a similar structure, and it is not to be confused with the “virtual” that appears in the popular notion of “virtual reality”. In the first instance, the virtual can be approximated to Massumi’s concise designation of Deleuze’s “virtual” as ‘the future past of the present: a thing’s destiny and condition of existence’ (Massumi, 1993: 37). This concept of the virtual demonstrates how can we speak of the future, how can we speak of it and with it when it is not yet, when it has not yet arrived.

What we would need in order to demonstrate this and to address its implications is a particular instance, and photography provides us with such an instance. This instance shows us two distinctive things: firstly, it illustrates the power of the concept of the virtual. Second, photography provides an instance which demonstrates the very thesis of this essay: that what will be shown as a precursory instance of a new medium in advance of itself demonstrates how we can begin to think the to-come of the present – the virtuality of our time.

Although photography involves the emergence of a particular technology, similar things could be said of any technology, or more broadly, of any cultural form. Geoffrey Batchen’s work on photography is especially illustrative in this regard. In Desiring Production Itself: Notes on the Invention of Photography, Batchen begins by pointing to conventional histories of photography and their emphasis on the invention of photography by Daguerre and Talbot in 1839 (Batchen, 1991). He argues that this emphasis on 1839 obscures the wider significance of photography’s emergence in culture.

Batchen pursues a Foucauldian archaeology which, rather than searching for inventions, attempts ‘to uncover the regularity of a discursive practice’ (Foucault in Batchen, 1991: 15). Batchen shifts the emphasis from 1839 to what occurs prior to that date, where what he seeks is the ‘appearance of a regular discursive practice for which photography is the desired object’. His question, then, is not who invented photography and when, but rather ‘at what moment in history did the discursive desire to photograph emerge and begin to insistently manifest itself?’ (Batchen, 1991: 15).

In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Batchen finds increasing evidence of a desire that might be called photographic, a desire that is ‘figured in the fields of literature, philosophy, and aesthetic criticism’. In particular, he locates this in the period from 1790 to 1839, prior to the existence of the actual technology of photography (Batchen, 1991: 16-17). This desire is the imperative that produces, or rather actualises, the technology of photography. It is this period that we would in the first instance call photography’s “virtual”. It is real yet not actual: it is virtual.

Batchen has been able to perform this Foucauldian archaeology on photography in order to locate this discursive desire because he already knows what the object is: this is the object called “photography”. Prior to 1839, however, it could not be called photography: prior to 1839 we could not refer to an object called photography, we could only call it, as Batchen does, from our position post-1839, “that-which-would-become photography”. What is at stake during the period 1790-1839, then, is photography’s coming-to-presence.

And this coming to presence was by no means a certain matter. If we were to be placed in that period, struggling to manifest this desire to photograph without yet knowing what that object would be, this desire would be oriented towards something that would be yet to come; something that causes us to reach or project ahead of ourselves, projecting towards (yet without reaching) that particular future which would become photography. For photography, in the present of the period from 1790-1839, the essence of photography would be the future-past of this present: that is, not quite the future as such but preceding it and yet still being ahead of the present. The region that this describes is between the present and the particular future that will become photography. This, following Deleuze’s virtual, accords with Massumi’s definition of the virtual as the ‘future-past of the present: a thing’s destiny and condition of existence’.

The virtuality that belongs to photography can be seen here as that which generates its actuality – the particular instances of its technical apparatus and attendant practices. This is the sense in which photography can be seen to precede itself – an exemplary instance of the thesis of this paper, a new medium in advance of itself. However, the determination of the technics of photography emerges through something (the virtual) that initially appears to be indeterminate. To see how this is not so, we will need to draw out a more sophisticated sense of Deleuze’s virtual than this preliminary determination, via Massumi, allows.

Deleuze’s concept of the virtual has been developed primarily from readings of Bergson, and is elaborated primarily in Deleuze’s Bergsonism (Deleuze, 1991) and in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994). In Difference and Repetition we find that Deleuze is aware of the confusion that is generated around the concept of the virtual. This confusion precedes, if not computing itself, at least the discourses around computing and notions of virtual reality in the cyber-literature: the original French edition of Difference and Repetition (Differénce et Repetition) was published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1968. Deleuze points directly towards this confusion: he writes ‘We have ceaselessly invoked the virtual. In so doing, have we not fallen into the vagueness of a notion closer to the undetermined than to the determinations of difference?’ (Deleuze, 1994: 208).

It is precisely this vagueness, however, that Deleuze wished to avoid in relation to the virtual. To this point in his discourse, he says, ‘We opposed the virtual and the real’, and he has done this, he says, because he could not have been more precise beforehand. At this point he states that this terminology “must be corrected”. He is now explicit in his determination of the virtual: ‘The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual’ (Deleuze, 1994: 208). But of what does this reality of the virtual consist? For Deleuze, the reality of the virtual ‘must be defined as strictly part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension’ (Deleuze, 1994: 209). And this reality of the virtual consists

of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have. We have seen that a double process of reciprocal determination and complete determination defined that reality: far from being undetermined, the virtual is completely determined. (Deleuze, 1994: 209)

For Deleuze, we must note that there are two parts to difference so that when the virtual content of an Idea (such as “that-which-would-become photography”) is actualised, there are in fact two determinations. The determination of the virtual content of an Idea (“that-which-would-become photography”) he calls “differentiation”; while the actualisation of that virtuality into “species and distinguished parts” (technologies, discourses etc.) is called “differenciation” (Deleuze, 1994: 207). Differenciation of species or parts is always carried out in relation to a differentiated problem (or the differentiated conditions of a problem). (This double movement is found in later Deleuze in the operation of the abstract machine.) For Deleuze, the aspect of difference that is differenciation equates to actualisation. Differenciation is not the inverse of differentiation but, rather, is an original process: ‘differenciation expresses the actualisation of this virtual’. Deleuze designates differenciation as the second part of difference but, ‘in order to designate the integrity or integrality of the object’, he says, we require the ‘complex notion of different/ciation’ (Deleuze, 1994: 209). This complex notion is the double articulation in which every object ‘is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image. They are unequal odd halves’ (Deleuze, 1994: 209-210). The only danger in all this, Deleuze says, is that the virtual could be confused with the possible, which would in turn suggest that the virtual and actual resemble each other. However, Deleuze distinguishes the virtual and the possible in three ways.

Firstly, the possible is opposed to the real, and the possible is thereby subject to a process of “realisation”. ‘By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation’ (Deleuze, 1994: 211). For Deleuze, this terminology is not a “verbal dispute”, but, rather, ‘a question of existence itself’. Whenever the question of existence arises in terms of the possible and the real we are forced to ‘conceive of existence as brute eruption, a pure act or leap which always occurs behind our backs and is subject to a law of all or nothing’ since, he says, there can be no difference between the existent and the non-existent if the non-existent is already possible. The virtual, however, is ‘the characteristic state of Ideas: it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced, in accordance with a time and a space that is immanent in the Idea’ (Deleuze, 1994: 211).

Deleuze secondly distinguishes the virtual and the possible by the fact that the latter refers to ‘the form of identity in the concept’ while the virtual designates ‘a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition’ (Deleuze, 1994: 211-212). The third way in which Deleuze distinguishes them is that, in terms of the possible’s possibility of “realisation”, the possible ‘is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible’. This is what he calls the defect of the possible: that in fact it is produced after the fact – ‘as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it’ (Deleuze, 1994: 212).

As opposed to the realisation of the possible, the crucial point about the actualisation of the virtual is that it always occurs by ‘difference, divergence or differenciation’ (Deleuze, 1994: 212). Actualisation, for Deleuze, breaks with both resemblance as a process and with identity as a principle. Actualisation (or differenciation) is ‘always a genuine creation’ that is not limited by, nor does it result from, ‘any limitation of a pre-existing possibility’. He writes that for ‘a potential or virtual object, to be actualised is to create divergent lines which correspond to – without resembling – a virtual multiplicity’ (Deleuze, 1994: 212).

And it is in this sense, and for these reasons, that the notion of the virtual breaks with a representational model. It is not about resemblance, identity, simulation or representation. It is, rather, about creation within the real. It is difference and repetition in the virtual which ‘ground the movement of actualisation, of differenciation as creation. They are thereby substituted for the identity and the resemblance of the possible, which only inspires a pseudo-movement, the false movement of realisation understood as abstract limitation’ (Deleuze, 1994: 212).

The mistake that is often made in areas such as new media studies is precisely this confusion of the virtual and the possible. This then leads to the virtual, rather than the possible, being placed in opposition to the real. This mistake cannot be over-emphasised, it is crucial – because the effect of this mistake is that the virtual is accommodated to the order of simulation and representation and therefore loses its reality. In this accommodation, we lose the principle of operation of the virtual – the virtual, in effect, loses its virtue. Deleuze is very specific about the magnitude of the effects of this mistake in that ‘Any hesitation between the virtual and the possible, the order of the Idea and the order of the concept, is disastrous, since it abolishes the reality of the virtual’ (Deleuze, 1994: 212).

We can demonstrate now, in terms of Deleuze’s concept of difference, how the virtual can be reduced to the possible which, in this view, means that the virtual (which is now merely the possible) is not real and therefore must be “realised”. In this view, technology “realises” the possible. This view therefore overlooks the reality of the virtual as such. In this view, technology comes to stand in for realisation. Also in this view, as a result of the erasure of the reality of the virtual, the actual, and the creativity of the process of actualisation, are bracketed out. It is often from within this view of technology – as that which realises the possible – that the celebration of the digital, the idea that something new – something technically determined – is being produced, arises. But, as we have found in Deleuze, the identity and resemblance of the possible ‘only inspires a pseudo-movement’.

Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, then, describes an unsettled region, a zone of potential, that nonetheless contains the real material or content, and above all the idea, of what, for example, will become photography. “That-which-would-become photography” becomes photography through the struggles (indeed a struggle for a language which would be adequate to the task) within culture to manifest this desire for some kind of imaging practice. In order to do this, this desire continually refers beyond the present by attempting to grasp something that is not yet. The virtual in this sense describes a movement towards (in Heidegger’s terms, this is a pro-jecting, a throwing of existence ahead of itself) the object that is in the process of coming to presence. In the instance of photography, this is the coming to presence of the idea of photography, manifesting as Batchen demonstrates, as this discursive desire to photograph.

In general, we find that the notion of the virtual is inherent in the concept of technology as such, in its essence. The virtual is essential to technology’s activity as a mode of revealing. Technology, as such, is virtual. What the essence of technology generates, as specific desires struggle for form, language and expression, are actual technologies. This is what happens in the case of photography. The virtual which inheres in photography, of course, does not end in 1839, but continues and subsists within and as the idea of photography. This subsistence of the virtual within photography is essential to photography’s continued existence – there must always be a photography-to-come. We recall from Deleuze that when the virtual content of an idea is actualised there are two determinations: “differenciation”, the actualisation of that virtuality into ’species and distinguished parts’, led to specific technologies and discourses (the “advances” in photography – new cameras, new techniques, new film, the digital etc.). The determination of the virtual content (“differentiation”), however, folds back into the virtual to become part of future actualisations towards that-which-photography-will-become. This demonstrates the necessity for the continuous iterative structure of the virtual-actual circuit. It is this virtual of photography through its continuous process of actualisation or becoming, that generates the specific technologies, and all that might become “new” for the photography-to-come.

In this way, through the concept of the virtual, we can approach the emergence of “new” (media) technologies in terms of the discursive desires they are attempting to manifest. We can look within the present social world for desires that are struggling for form and expression: that is, to examine the virtuality of the future to come. Much of my own work has been in this area and, specifically, has been oriented towards something that can be designated or determined as a “post-print” age. That is, that we can find such discursive desires implicit (folded-in) and complicit (folded-with) with and within the current social world which concern a desire for another kind of textual model as the textual model of the age of print begins to overflow its limit.

The print-based textual system has always presented an infrastructure that consists of a two-dimensional surface to which it sutures a subject in a face-to-face relationship – the requirement is for a certain kind of text, a certain kind of subject, and a certain kind of relationship between them – a highly prescribed and circumscribed textual infrastructure. What would constitute a post-print age?

The kind of difference that is at stake here concerns Deleuze’s notion of the cultural image of thought where each era thinks itself by producing its particular image of thought. This image of thought is what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence which is

not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 37)

The notion of the post-print concerns a shift in this sense: that what we are moving towards, or perhaps what is moving towards us, is a textual system concerned with movement and three dimensionality. We see the gestures towards this with current multimedia/new media presenting simulated three dimensionality on print-age screens and monitors.

What we would need in order to think this further would be an instance which manifests this desire, a series of actualisations which would fold back into the virtual. We can find this instance in the notion of the hologram. The hologram provides us with an image of thought which can account for desires which are insistently pushing at the limits of our current textual model. The hologram can be seen as achieving a kind of pre-eminent form that this imaging and imagining takes. We see this in similar areas to those in which Batchen located the desire for the kind of imaging that was to become photography. Holography, as a practice, was considered during the 1960s as a kind of three dimensional photography. It achieved prominence during the 1970s as a result of the new age cosmology that became known as the Holographic Paradigm, predicated primarily on the work of neurosurgeon, Karl Pribram, and physicist, David Bohm. [4] It became prominent in Cyberpunk fiction, especially in the work of William Gibson whose first published story was Fragments of a Hologram Rose in 1977 (Gibson, 1988). [5] This text is particularly interesting in this context in that it prefigures a holographic society as a ’shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition’ (Gibson, 1988: 56-57). The holographic is worked in various ways through many of Gibson’s texts with perhaps the most sophisticated rendering in Idoru (Gibson, 1996) where there is a sustained exploration and engagement with the textuality of the holographic. Also in popular culture there have been the holodecks of Star Trek, both in ‘The Next Generation’ and ‘Voyager’ series, and especially the holographic Doctor in the ‘Voyager’ series. Projection has particular significance in relation to the hologram. In the optical physics of holography, the hologram is literally (a) projection. For the holographic Doctor, his projection is his ontology, his approaching-Dasein.

These cultural practices/artefacts are all indicators of a desire for a three dimensional textuality. This desire is also evident in the substantial technological investments going towards actualising holographic technologies. This investment is in part because the hologram is not merely a benign image – it in fact has real physical properties, and therefore interactive potential. A hologram of a magnifying glass for example really does magnify objects placed behind it. For these same reasons we find that holographic elements are being used in telescopes for astronomy, and the US military uses holographic elements in some of its “smart bombs”. The United States military research laboratories have been developing a photo-refractive crystal which they claim will allow them to produce holographic field manuals – that is, three dimensional motion holography to demonstrate the use of sophisticated military technologies in the field. We’ve seen this kind of use prefigured in popular culture already: the holographic video of Princess Leia in Star Wars for example. There is also research into the development of holographic computing interfaces, especially in connection with voice recognition technology.

The hologram, in this sense, is more than just a transitory phenomenon. It appears rather as a figure which is attempting to manifest an image of thought appropriate to the era that we are projecting ourselves towards. Such an image of thought has radical implications. What we will find is something beyond representational thinking or, rather, something that precedes it. What will be disrupted is the whole representational structure of the age of print: its texts, its subjects, and the relations between them. The crucial point about the hologram is not the thing itself, the technical instance of a holographic image, nor even its properties, although these all contribute significantly to what it is. The crucial point about the hologram, rather, is that the trope of the hologram is brought into the domain of writing – as an aspect of virtuality, a culture of writing-to-come.

For new media studies, and for those amongst the various disciplines that come to bear on this field of new media in terms of a more critical and theoretical new media studies, we are still struggling for language(s), practice(s) and way(s) of thinking that are “yet-to-come”. What new media is in this sense, is still virtual, and its current diverse and collective instantiations can be seen as partial actualisations, instances of what might be for the technologies, practices and ways of thinking that we can name as “that-which-new media studies-will-become”. It is in this sense that new media studies is not defined by an object of study but, rather, by its virtuality. This concept of virtuality, I suggest, needs to be addressed as a necessary and productive engagement with culture and (new media) technologies. This is precisely what Derrida points us towards in ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, he says:

Virtuality now reaches right into the structure of the eventual event and imprints itself there; it affects both the time and the space of images, discourses, and “news” or “information” – in fact everything which connects us to actuality, to the unappeasable reality of its supposed present. In order to “think their time”, philosophers today need to attend to the implications and effects of this virtual time – both to the new technical uses to which it can be put, and to how they echo and recall some far more ancient possibilities (Derrida, 1994: 29-30).

Author’s Biography

Phillip Roe teaches within a multimedia studies program in the School of Contemporary Communication at Central Queensland University. His research interests include new media theory, arts, practice and pedagogy; poststructuralist literary theory; culture, information and technology; web design and development.

Notes

[1] “Arrival” and “event” should be thought here in the senses given by Derrida:

An arrival must be absolutely different: the other that I expect to be unexpected, that I do not await. The expectation of an arrival is a non-expectation; it lacks what philosophy calls a horizon of expectation, through which knowledge anticipates the future and deadens it in advance. If I am sure that something will happen, then it will not be an event. (Derrida, 1994b: 33)

The event is what does not allow itself to be subsumed under any other concept, not even that of being. (Derrida, 1994b: 32)

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[2] A change in tone would involve a different, almost bodily stance towards the object(s) of study. Tone is a question of voicing for Derrida, and particularly of the non-discursive voice. Derrida articulates tone in terms of the notion of the “to-come”, asserting that the word “come”, its semantics, or the concept of the “to-come” are not what counts in this regard. Crucially, what counts is:

that the thought of “to come” or the event itself depended on the uttering [prolifération], on the performative call of “come”, and that this is not exhausted by its meaning. Addressing the other, I say, the “coming” to the other. I say “come” but I mean an event that is not to be confused with the word “come” as it is said in language. It is something that can be replaced by a sign, by an ‘Ah’, by a cry, that means “come”. It is not itself a full presence; it is a differential, that is to say, it is relayed through the tone and the gradations or gaps of tonality. (Derrida, 1994a: 21)

The question of writing for Derrida always concerns the differentiality of tone, ’since tone is never present to itself’, and changes in tone, and hence always consists in pluralising the tone. It is this pluralising of tone, he says, which does not allow him ‘to be confined to a single interlocutor or a single moment’ (Derrida, 1994a: 22). The crucial effect of this differentiality of tone is spatialisation – ‘a dispersion of voices, of tones that space themselves, that automatically spatialize themselves’. Derrida says:

And this effect of spatialization – in my texts as well as others’ texts – sometimes scares them even more than do spatial works themselves, because even spatial works that should produce this effect still give the impression of a kind of gathering [rassemblement]. We can say the work is there, it’s a terrible thing, it’s unbearable, it’s menacing, but in fact it’s within a frame, or it’s made of stone, or it’s a film that begins and ends; there is a simulacrum of gathering and thus the possibility of mastery, the possibility of protection for spectator or addressee. But there are types of texts that don’t end or begin, or disperse their voices, which say different things, and which as a result hinder this gathering. One can listen but can’t manage to objectify the thing. (Derrida, 1994a: 21)

A change in tone, then, would enable new media studies to resist the “simulacrum of gathering” which would close off a field such that it becomes an object of study which then resists the possibility of embracing radical difference to the paradigm so constituted. And this change of tone is oriented towards the difference that is imbricated within the notion of the “to-come”.

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[3] Dasein is not a mentalist or representationalist category. Rather, from Okrent (1988) and McHoul’s (1998) pragmaticist readings of Heidegger, Dasein is an eminently direct and practical mode of being in the world which by no means depends on the centrality of consciousness or any other capacity for self-representation.

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[4] A comprehensive account of the Holographic Paradigm can be gained from the work of Bohm (1980), Pribram (1969), Talbot (1996), and Wilber (1985).

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[5] ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ was first published in 1977. Bruce Stirling notes in the preface that it was also Gibson’s first published story (Gibson, 1988: 10).
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References

Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Desiring Production Itself: Notes on the Invention of Photography’, in Roslyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 13-26.

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

Chesher, Chris. ‘What is New Media Research?’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds),Politics of a Digital Present (Fibreculture Publicatons, 2001), 227-232.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

____. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994).

Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Spatial Arts: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Oxford: Cambridge University Press. 1994a), 9-32.

____. ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Radical Philosophy 68 (Autumn 1994b): 28-41.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1974).

Gibson, William. ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’, in William Gibson, Burning Chrome (London: Grafton Books, 1988), 51-58.

____. Idoru (London: Viking, 1996).

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973).

Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).

McHoul, Alec. ‘How can Ethnomethodology be Heideggerian?’, Human Studies 21 (1998): 13-26.

Okrent, Mark. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Pribram, Karl. ‘The Neurophysiology of Remembering’, Scientific American 220 (January 1969): 73-86.

Star Trek Voyager (Paramount Pictures, 1993).

Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe (London: Harper Collins, 1996).

Wilber, Ken (ed.). The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (London and Boston: Shambala, 1985).

The impetus for this paper comes from two related events: the first is my initial contact with the online education ‘courseware’ package or Managed Learning Environment (MLE) called Web Course Tools (commonly abbreviated as WebCT); and the other is the University of Western Australia’s (UWA’s) purchase of a campus-wide site license for WebCT and the resulting expectation that all e-learning at UWA will be standardised via WebCT mediated delivery. There are a number of reasons for the decision to manage all course content using WebCT and the IT policy section of the UWA website illuminates some of these:

The future of online learning at UWA is towards [sic] an enterprise-wide approach and away from a “cottage industry” approach, whilst retaining and harnessing the considerable skills and enthusiasm demonstrated in the relatively high level of use of online materials achieved to date.

The Learning Management System WebCT has become a centrally supported platform for all staff to use, in order to encourage greater consistency, portability and durability of online learning materials. (University of Western Australia, 2003)

Interpreting this statement and the extended policy from which it is drawn, the reasoning behind the campus-wide WebCT purchase can be broken down into economic, managemental and pedagogical motivations. Economically, the centralisation of all e-delivery using one platform means that the one price paid supposedly covers the entire university’s needs. Extending this economic rationale, the smaller scale or so-called “cottage industry” e-learning packages – such as The Forum (http://forum.uwa.edu.au) and Jellyfish (http://fish.mech.uwa.edu.au) – are thus viewed as superfluous and they are no longer developed, funded or supported. Managementally, centralisation means that all staff training can be standardised and that all support services for the MLE can be handled centrally rather than needing discipline specific or faculty level WebCT support. In more specific administration terms, one platform also allows Student Administration automatically to grant and deny access to specific courses on the basis of student enrolment. WebCT is also an “enterprise-wide” platform in that it both covers all areas of the university and also is thought to have all the tools necessary for the needs of all teaching and learning areas. Finally, pedagogically, the argument is made that one portal and platform will be easier for students and staff to access and learn rather than potentially having to use several different e-learning interfaces. While economic, managemental and pedagogical reasons are all related, reading the UWA IT Policy does suggest that pedagogy is being driven by economic rationale rather than the other way around.

Before continuing to analyse some of the specific features of WebCT, I want to emphasise that this paper contains my initial reaction to WebCT; while I have had the opportunity to participate in a course delivered via WebCT and have been given an overview of the design interface for course construction, I have not extensively developed course material using the MLE. The observations and concerns raised in this paper are tentative and subject to change as the situation at UWA necessitates deeper engagement with the platform. However, in this paper I hope to utilise the naiveté of my engagement with WebCT to ask some broader questions about the politics of the package that for some more experienced users may get obscured by the processes and investment of using and designing courses with WebCT.

Initial Comparisons

At this point I want to contextualise my engagement with WebCT and make explicit that I am examining WebCT after previously using an alternative e-learning delivery system called The Forum. The Forum was designed and run by the Multimedia Centre at the University of Western Australia and has been the delivery system for the majority of units in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The Forum is certainly not as large a package as WebCT, and its more streamlined design is restricted to information and content delivery. After initially logging in, students are presented with four main options. The first is the ‘Notice Board’ which opens by default and contains any additional important notices or messages from the unit coordinator. The second option is ‘Unit Work’, which contains copies of the course outlines, any additional handouts, as well as anything else the course coordinator wishes to post, such as supplementary web pages. The third option is ‘Recordings’ which gives students access to digital recordings of the lectures using the students’ choice of either the Realplayer or QuickTime media plug-in programs. And the last main section is the ‘Bulletin Board’ which allows access to a Bulletin Board system which may or may not be utilised formally in the course.

For those already familiar with WebCT, two major differences will be apparent: firstly, that The Forum is a very small suite limited to delivering content; and secondly, that The Forum does not have any assessment tools such as the option to design quizzes or to facilitate student submission of assessment in electronic form.

Size: Is Bigger Really Better?

Ostensibly, the size and complexity of a fully-fledged courseware package such as WebCT appears self-justified since the size correlates with the amount of different functions that package can perform. For courses which are mainly taught online and which make use of the package to deliver content, facilitate discussion through chat or bulletin board type environments and which utilise assessment tools, WebCT probably appears (and may very well be) the ideal choice. However, what about units which use online delivery only as a supplement to traditional techniques? There are, for example, a considerable number of units in the Discipline of English, Communication and Cultural Studies at UWA which limit their online presence to the delivery of course handouts and lectures in electronic form as a secondary resource in case students are unable to make scheduled lecture times. For these units, WebCT may be less appealing for a number of reasons. For one, the course coordinator will need to familiarise themselves with the content creation tools in order to use WebCT even if they only wish to put a tiny amount of information online. This difficulty is often exacerbated because many educational institutions insist that staff must take a course on WebCT before they can use it for their units.

While a sound idea in principle, these courses regularly run upwards of four hours and the length can often prevent already busy staff from becoming WebCT qualified. Alternatively, if unit coordinators do spend considerable amounts of time learning to use WebCT, often the temptation is to try and justify the time by creating extra electronic content and “try out” the package, even if that extra content is, in all fairness, of very little benefit to students. Similarly, becoming WebCT qualified rather than more general training on e-learning principles gives the impression that everything that educators need to know about online education is addressed by understanding WebCT. The platform is, in effect, driving pedagogy. Moreover, the idea that a single American platform is sufficient for the specific needs of an Australian university points to the increasingly monopolistic and US-centred deployment of educational software. By contrast, a more critical approach would see teaching methodology scrutinized and evaluated with the potentials uses of MLEs in mind, and only after careful consideration would specific platforms be investigated. However, the current trends in the Australian tertiary sector of increasing staff workloads and larger classroom sizes combined with more administrative responsibilities mean that even finding time to attend a basic WebCT course is optimistic for many educators.

From a student perspective, WebCT’s size can also have a downside. When students initially log in to WebCT they are presented with a ‘myWebCT’ page which is basically their personalised doorway to the courseware package. This page is very full, containing links to courses in which the student is enrolled, a campus-wide notice board, several (non-customisable) links to WebCT’s American homepage, bookmarks which can be altered by the student, institutionally defined bookmarks, help options and so forth. From a design perspective, this first page suffers from “information overload” since the number of options can be quite overwhelming. However, once students are comfortable with the variety of choices, there are other issues. The ability to create and manage bookmarks – that is, links to other websites – can be very distracting as with other customisation options. The underlying architecture of the page is similar to that of customisable homepages elsewhere on the Internet, such as the interface for the commercial Yahoo!™ web portal. While not a concern in itself, having an e-learning package homepage that is specifically designed to encourage users to utilise WebCT for personal reasons, such as storing bookmarks and maintaining a personal calendar, does raise the question whether there should be some sort of boundary between educational and personal use online. Also, going back to the example of courses which use e-learning tools in a fairly limited way, students run the risk of spending as much time tinkering with the options of WebCT as they do actually looking at course content.

Design Tools: Inward or Outward Facing?

I want to turn now to look at the way course content is written in and transferred onto the WebCT platform. WebCT comes complete with course creation tools which are accessible only to the course coordinator and which allow differing degrees of design and flexibility. The WebCT corporate “white paper” advertises that with these tools, ‘professors needn’t become Web programmers’ (WebCT, 2002B) to create online content. These tools are similar to ‘What You See Is What You Get’ or WYSIWYG online development programs which simplify web page construction, meaning users do not have to learn the underlying hypertext markup language (HTML). Obviously, not having to learn HTML is an advantage in terms of time. However, most WYSIWYG programs acknowledge that it is still important for designers to have the choice of examining the code they are producing, which can usually be displayed at the click of a button (the Macromedia design package Dreamweaver is an excellent example of the dual view, in that it can display both ‘code’ and ‘design’ windows simultaneously). This option allows designers to track, scrutinise and over time comprehend how HTML (or, indeed, XML or whichever language designers are utilising) works. These tools are thus outward facing in that their design allows users to become fluent in the basic language of the Internet and thus gain an understanding and skills which can be used across a wide range of different programs. In contrast, WebCT’s course construction tools have no such flexibility. WebCT’s tools are thus inward facing in that learning to use these tools is only of use when designing within the WebCT environment. While inward facing tools may appear a fairly minor gripe, I contend that it is an indicative of the corporate mentality which drives the WebCT package; these tools do not teach generic skills, but rather WebCT skills and thus serve to shore up WebCT’s continued use since users would have to expend time learning new skills if they were to use any other program. WebCT’s tools are, in effect, driven by a philosophy of corporate monopolism.

Surveillance: Who Watches the Students?

Another of WebCT’s troubling features, and the one most often commented on in critical literature, is the imbedded surveillance of students (Merrick and Willson, 2001; Brent, 2001; Mullen, 2001; Land and Bayne, 2002). As Helen Merrick and Michele Willson point out, WebCT tracks students use in a number of ways:

The number of times that they visit content pages are noted, the date and time of their last access is noted, as are the number of postings that they have made and/or the breakdown of these into original and follow-on posts [as well as] … when they last accessed a page, and what pages they have accessed. (2001: 247-8)

The large quantity of surveillance data recorded against each student is easily accessible to course coordinators in the form of tables and graphs generated internally by WebCT. Even if this information is not directly accessed for each student, a disclaimer is usually issued to students making them aware of the possibility. These types of surveillance correlate with Michel Foucault’s concept of panoptic surveillance wherein individuals act as if they were always being surveyed due to the possibility that they might be surveyed at any time (Foucault, 1979). Even if course coordinators choose never to examine information gathered by WebCT, the possibility that they could do so may have the same effect. Mark Mullen has extended this concept and argues that the surveillance possibilities of MLEs such as WebCT and the major competitor Blackboard, actually illuminate a ‘pedagogy of suspicion’ which emphasises the need to watch and punish students rather than encouraging students’ personal responsibility for learning (2001). Indeed, if such information is regularly available, will course coordinators be able to choose not to access it? In the era of increasing litigation in which we live, there is often an expectation that so-called responsible use of information means that if available it must be accessed and if needs be, acted upon. If course coordinators become aware that students never spend more than five minutes on readings, will they be required to chastise the student? Will tutors have to make sure students make a minimum number of posts in any given bulletin board topic? These and other questions raised by WebCT’s imbedded surveillance could have serious ramifications for the activities and responsibilities of educators. Although, it should be noted, these concerns seem to construct a fairly monolithic top-down reading of WebCT. Laterally thinking students who are aware of the surveillance in WebCT may be canny enough to subvert this system, for example, by logging onto pages and leaving them open while doing other things, thus appearing to have read their course content for long periods of time.

Corporate Education?

As mentioned earlier, there is considerable evidence of the corporate mentality driving the design and operation of WebCT. Students are presented with customisable homepages to encourage repeated and often personal use, and the associated course construction tools are useful and develop skills exclusive to the WebCT framework. Of more serious concern, however, is the development of WebCT’s ‘e-Packs’. E-Packs are pre-packaged WebCT-based courses which according to WebCT’s homepage come ‘including video animations, sample syllabi, lecture notes, quiz and test banks, and glossaries, all combined with the functionality of WebCT’s e-learning solution’ (WebCT, 2002A). While academic colleagues often share course material with one another, the idea of buying a complete ready-made course is of a different magnitude altogether. Indeed, the combination of WebCT’s dominance of the courseware market and the increasing development of e-Packs has the potential to impact heavily on new course construction. Given the increasing workload of many educators, the temptation to purchase and run an e-Pack based course rather than develop a new course from scratch and transfer it onto WebCT, could prove too great. And despite WebCT’s emphasis on the flexibility and customisation options of e-Packs, working from the same material would inevitably homogenise tertiary teaching and learning. While the common use of e-Pack courses may appear a rather far-fetched or paranoid scenario, the potential is there and should at least be examined. More to the point, if e-Packs do get utilised in some universities and these institutions manage, in effect, to construct courses in a quarter of the time it would normally take, then the pressure on others to follow suit would no doubt increase. The combination of modular pre-packaged courses with the economic rationalism and bottom line managementalism could potentially homogenise course content in ways unheard of before large-scale courseware packages; e-learning may become simply rebranded and packaged homogeneous e-delivery.

Some Thoughts for the Future

In concluding this exploratory paper, I want quickly to summarise the features of WebCT which I find of most concern:

1. WebCT’s bulk can be a burden for courses only utilising partial online delivery.

2. The customisation options from the student side may encourage procrastination and WebCT being used in ways which routinely deflect students away from core teaching and learning objectives.

3. The course construction tools are inwardly and exclusively WebCT-oriented and do not teach outward facing generic skills.

4. The imbedded surveillance options can substantially infringe on student privacy.

5. E-Packs and other modular options may potentially homogenise tertiary teaching and learning.

I should qualify that these concerns focus on the negative side of WebCT and while the program has its problems, it can be very useful if used in a reflexive way, keeping its potential flaws in mind. Certainly e-learning has the potential to enhance teaching and learning experiences, as long as tackled in a critical manner. However, the development of better options should not simply be restricted to making the most of WebCT. As the growing trend in Australian universities of using the open source Linux operating system instead of Microsoft’s Windows demonstrates, there are alternatives being developed and they may prove superior to even the most dominant products. If the money spent on licenses and support for the American WebCT package in Australian universities was channelled into the continued development and improvement of existing local programs then a better option might be found right here at home.

Author’s Biography

Tama Leaver is currently researching a doctoral thesis at the University of Western Australia entitled ‘Artificialities: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial People – Representations and Constructions of Identity and Embodiment in Contemporary Speculative Texts’. He also teaches cultural studies, gender studies and literary theory. Recent publications include an analysis of William Gibson’s second trilogy, and an article on gender, the Borg and Star Trek: Voyager. When not thinking up ridiculously long titles, his research interests include cybercultural studies, contemporary cinema and science fiction.

References

Brent, Doug. ‘Web Courseware Authoring Packages: Some Troubled Thoughts’, Inkshed: Newsletter of the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning 18.3 (2001),
http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed/nlett101/brent.htm

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

Land, R. and Bayne, S. ‘Screen or Monitor? Surveillance and Disciplinary Power in Online Learning Environments’ (2002),
http://jimmy.qmuc.ac.uk/usr/sbayne/surveillancepaper.htm

Merrick, Helen and Willson, Michele. ‘All Wired Up: Reflections on Teaching and Learning Online’, in Hugh Brown, et al. (eds.) Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001).

Mullen, Mark. ‘“If You’re Not Mark Mullen, Click Here”: Web-Based Courseware and the Pedagogy of Suspicion’, Workplace 5.1 (2001),
http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue5p1/mullen.html

University of Western Australia, ‘Draft Revised IT Strategic Plan’ (2003),
http://www.uwa.edu.au/it/strategy/revisedstrategy/teachlearn

WebCT. ‘E-Packs for Instructors’, WebCT.com (2002a),
http://www.webct.com/content/viewpage?name=content_why_use_epacks

WebCT. ‘Leveraging Technology to Transform the Educational Experience’, WebCT.com (2002b),
http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=4464759

Learning objects sneaked into educational technology vernacular in the latter half of the 1990s. [1] Its origin can be traced back to military training, where the Sharable Content Object Reference Model was invented (ADL 2003). Through workplace training and learning/ content management systems, these obscure objects have recently made their way into higher and K-12 education. At the time of writing, various Australian projects have started involving educational institutions in higher education (COLIS), K-12 (Learning Federation, EduNet) as well as vocational education and training (OTEN-DE).

Despite their popularity in e-learning, no one has a definitive answer to the question of what learning objects are, though a range of opinions have been expressed. Some answers are intuitive while others are more technically sophisticated. In the introductory chapter of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, David Wiley gives an exemplary introduction to these objects:

Learning objects are elements of a new type of computer-based instruction grounded in the object-oriented paradigm of computer science. Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called “objects”) that can be reused… in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea behind learning objects: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. (Wiley, 2000b, my emphasis)

This quote represents the general view of an instructional designer, for whom a learning object approach implies designing learning materials in bite-size chunks that learners can take “just-in-time, just-in-place” and in an amount that is “just enough” (Hodgins, 2001). These chunks of learning materials have the additional benefits of reduced production cost and effort through sharing or reusing between producers (Downes, 2000; Wiley, 2000a).

Different concerns are raised by university educators. Stephen Downes, an academic at the University of Alberta, stresses the potential benefits of applying the learning object concept to sharing university teaching resources. As these resources often reside in Learning Management Systems, he thus defines learning objects as ‘online course components that are sharable and interoperable between Learning Management Systems’ (Downes, 2000).

On the technical end, renowned standards bodies like the ISO (International Organisation of Standards) and IEEE’s (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) Learning Technology Standard Committee have committed to developing standards for learning objects’ associated technologies (Hodgins and Conner, 2000). For example, the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) launched a Learning Object Metadata working group in 1997 to define a minimal set of metadata attributes that can adequately manage, locate and evaluate learning objects (LOM, 2001). For the purposes of developing technical standards for metadata, a definition of learning objects is needed. The IEEE thus defined the learning object as follows:

Learning Objects are defined here as any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning… Examples of Learning Objects include multimedia content, instructional content, learning objectives, instructional software and software tools, and persons, organizations, or events referenced during technology supported learning. (LOM, 2001)

The IEEE technical definition for learning objects is deemed to be too broad for educators. David Wiley condemns it for its failure to exclude anything under the sun. In reaction to the all inclusive definition posed by the IEEE, Wiley proposed a restricted definition of learning objects as ‘any digital resource that can be reused to support learning’ (Wiley, 2000b). In addition, as an instructional designer, he emphasises the importance of thoughtful use of these objects to support learning (rather than have them simply referenced during learning).

The definition Wiley proposes happily marries education and computer science. The definition reinforces the associations the term itself arouses – learning in education, and objects in object-oriented programming. [2] Consider again the quote at the beginning of this paper. By substituting “instructional designers” and “instructional components” with “programmers” and “program codes”, Wiley has channelled the concept of programming objects into education discourse. [3] Three benefits of using learning objects are highlighted – reuse, simultaneous access by multiple users, and immediate updates of new versions – all relating to their technical nature. While the latter two benefits directly relate to using the Internet as the delivery medium, reuse is the well-known quality of object-oriented programming.

Reuse appeals to both software companies and educational institutions for the same reasons: minimisation of labour and ease of management for the ever-present desire of cost reduction. While some have attempted to argue that learning objects result in better learning experiences for students, most of the debates surround the return of investment in such objects. A brief survey of such arguments will reveal a computer science logic in them that can be roughly summarised as: because software reuse is economical, if we design learning objects like software objects, then education design can also be economical.

What has been missing in the learning object debate is the recognition of these digital resources as new media objects. By comparing learning objects with Manovich’s new media objects, I will first show that learning objects are culturally translated from programming objects through the use of new media in education, and some characteristics of programming objects simply do not apply to them. Second, I will show how one of the grandest promises for learning objects – reuse – fails both in programming objects and in learning objects. Third, I will discuss some common issues that are faced by new media producers and learning object producers. Using the work of new media theorist Lev Manovich, this paper will find a way to sort through the haze of great learning objects promises.

New Media Objects vs. Programming Objects

Round 1: Rapid Application Design and Selection

Advocating the benefits of learning objects, Canadian researcher Stephen Downes argues that traditional learning material production has always been an artisan work (2002). University lecturers often create new course materials for each semester from scratch. As a solution, Downes offers two processes borrowed from computer science: Rapid Application Design (RAD) and Object-Oriented Design. Rapid Application Design refers to the way ‘a designer can select and apply a set of pre-defined subroutines from a menu or selection within a programming environment’ (2002). Object-oriented design, as defined by Downes, is the idea that ‘prototypical entities are defined, which are then cloned and used by a piece of software as needed’ (2002). Downes concludes:

Online course developers, pressed for time and unable to sustain $24,000 development costs, will begin to employ similar methodologies. An online course, viewed as a piece of software, may be seen as a collection of re-usable subroutines and applications. An online course, viewed as a collection of learning objects, may be seen as a collection of re-usable learning materials. The heart – and essence – of a learning object economy is the merging of these concepts, of viewing re-usable learning materials as re-usable subroutines and applications. (Downes, 2002)

Lev Manovich discusses the operations of selecting and applying pre-defined operations associated with RAD in a wider cultural context. In discussing how art has changed over the last few centuries, he notes the painstakingly slow process of art-making in pre-industrial artisan culture. With the move into mass production and automation in the twentieth century, some artists began to assemble collages and montages from already existing cultural parts. There comes a turning point where ‘the industrial method of production entered the realm of art’ (2001b: 121). Manovich writes:

In contrast, electronic art from its very beginning was based on a new principle: modification of an already existing signal… The artist was no longer a romantic genius generating a new world purely out of his imagination; he became a technician turning a knob here, pressing switch there – an accessory to the machine. (Manovich, 2001b: 121-2)

Manovich shows how this new principle is applied to various software programs:

Adobe Photoshop 5.0 comes with more than 100 filters which allow the user to modify an image in numerous ways; After Effects 4.0, the standard for compositing moving images, is shipped with 80 effects plug-ins; thousands more are available from third parties. Macromedia Director 7 comes with an extensive library of “behaviors” – ready-to-use pieces of computer code. (Manovich, 2001b: 120)

What is noteworthy for our discussion is that these software programs are commonly used in new media course material design. The same tools that construct new media objects are used to construct learning objects. From the point of view of those producing these objects – including teachers and instructional designers – the current process is more like that of an artist than that of a programmer. Nonetheless, just as art production is now facilitated by software, learning object productions are also benefiting from RAD.

The benefits discussed above are different to those originally proposed by Downes. There is a crucial difference between saving cost through using software that supports designers in the new media/ learning object production process, and software that replaces the human designer. What is at stake here is that while the teacher/ instructional designer, like Manovich’s artist, becomes ‘an accessory to the machine’, their activity is not dictated by an algorithm. To view an online course as a “collection” of course materials (or learning objects) is problematic because the assembling of the collection is still the most costly part of the construction. The convolution of the two has led many to jump into a “learning object solution” which promised to save cost in the long run, but they found that their initiative investment never remunerated.

Round 2: Metadata and Automation

The initial investment in learning object projects are usually put into producing large numbers of learning objects that are supposed to be usable in multiple contexts. To be used by different people who do not know about their existence poses a demand on learning objects to be “discoverable” or “accessible”. To accomplish this goal, most learning object projects involve metadata tagging.

Metadata literally means data about data. Anyone who has used a library catalogue would not find them too unfamiliar. The catalog record of a library book is the metadata for that book. Librarians have long been “meta-tagging” library books and resources. The process is laborious and requires professional training, but results in the sort of efficient discoverability that we have enjoyed in our libraries.

In the case of learning objects, a metadata record means information (data) about a particular learning object. It would consist of a number of fields, including a description, its author, date of creation and other information that would help people find the learning object efficiently.

In new media contexts, the World Wide Web was made usable when it was opened for searching. Early methods of free-text search resulted in dumps of unrelated pages. Later search engines, such as Google, improved search results by methods such as tracking the popularity of individual pages, rather than by indexing the words and the levels assigned by tags present. The technology is constantly improving, and in 2001, the World Wide Web Consortium has also taken an initiative in moving towards a “semantic web”. Using technologies like RDF (Resource Description Framework), robots can crawl through web pages and pull out semantically relevant pages, not simple matches by surface meanings (W3C 2001).

In a similar way, “discoverability” or “accessibility” is a pressing problem for learning objects. The problem is most commonly approached using the traditional library method – the metadata tag. In fact, metadata standards occupy a vital position in learning object discussions. In addition to the IEEE Learning Object Metadata working group mentioned earlier, a wide range of learning object metadata standards have been defined, including names like the Dublin Core (2002), IMS (2002), and CanCore (2002). The choice of library methods for this learning object problem should not be surprising when one considers the ongoing intimate relationship between education and libraries. Nonetheless, a number of research projects on using semantic web technologies for searching learning objects are also in progress. [4]

Whether it is metadata or methods borrowed from the semantic web, the short-term goal of the research is to enable reliable searching. A long-term goal, exemplified by the statement of purpose of the IEEE project, is ‘to enable computer agents to automatically and dynamically compose personalized lessons for an individual learner’ (LOM 2001). Here we meet another of Manovich’s principles of new media, the principle of automation.

The relationship between metadata and automation is two-fold. Low-level forms of automation in the digital age include automation in generating presentations from templates, applying filters on images, and dynamic web pages. Low-level automation makes object creation much easier than traditional forms of media. The ease of object-creation also means a proliferation of the number of objects created. ‘By the end of the twentieth century, the problem was no longer how to create a new media object such as an image; the new problem was how to find an object that already exists somewhere’ (Manovich, 2001a: 35). Here we find the motivation in meta-tagging every learning object and the desire for “high-level” automation, where computer agents understand the deep meaning of these objects, and eventually, are able to compose lessons without human intervention.

The presence of metadata makes learning objects awkward in comparing them to programming objects. There is not an equivalent need for searching for objects in programming. The closest to them are documentations, which are designed specifically to be not machine-readable, but human-readable.

New media objects do not usually have equivalents of metadata. The sheer mass of new media objects available on the Internet makes it impractical to meta-tag them. Meta-tagging only occurs in closed resource libraries, where collections are acquired with specific guidelines and usually for specific purposes. Examples include audio and video libraries in a production house. In light of this, learning object repositories are not radically different to other new media object libraries.

In employing metadata, learning objects are made equal to books. Yet the analogy is problematic because unlike books, being digital means learning objects are likely to be variable. Variability is another of Manovich’s principles of new media objects, which blatantly challenges one dichotomy often used in learning object discourse – reusability and repurposability.

Round 3: Reusability, Repurposability and Variability

As a computer scientist, Wiley emphasises the importance of distinguishing between the two:

By reusability, I mean the ability to take a learning object as is and reuse it wholesale. By repurposability, I mean the ability to extract portions of a learning object and adapt them to new learning contexts. (Wiley, 1999: 2)

In short, reusability differs from repurposability in that the former leaves the object unmodified. His view is that reusability is what is important for learning objects because the value of object-oriented code is that it requires no modifications. That is, no extra work will be needed to use the same code in a different program. Programming codes are notorious for their illegibility, and having programmers “opening the black-box” to repurpose the code is extremely undesirable.

According to Wiley, reusability is inversely proportional to repurposability. In other words, the more reusable an object, the less repurposable it is, and vice versa. The relationship is mediated by another concept that he names granularity (Wiley, 1999: 6). [5] Granularity roughly maps to the size of an object, though no one in the field has come to a precise definition. Nonetheless, the consensus is that the more granular (simpler, smaller) an object is, the more reusable it becomes. Wiley illustrates this point by comparing two objects: one photograph with no captions, and the same photograph with captions:

[The image with caption] has more meaning than [the one without]. Could [the captioned image] be used in a matching exercise on an assessment instrument? No. Would it be useful to an art student creating a collage? Probably not. Adding the label, box (to make the relationship between the caption and the image clear), and the caption increases the context of the photo, and therefore the meaning of the object, but it also decreases the number of ways the object could be recontextualized. (Wiley, 1999: 5)

If we apply this general principle to text and multimedia productions, when an object is large and contains more contextual information, it is usually not suitable to another situation. Smaller objects can “fit” into more contexts and hence are more reusable.

The same desire for reusability is shared by media producers for its appeal in minimising cost and effort. However, new media objects demand a fuzzier divide between reusability and repurposability. Manovich identifies variability and modularity as two of his principles of new media. Variability denotes how a new media object ‘is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions’ (2001a: 36). Being variable, new media objects are expected to adapt to different contexts. Both the image, and the image with caption, will be subjected to repurposing if the need arises. Thanks to the ease of image manipulation with digital technology, the captioned image is just as useful for an art student creating a collage as the one without a caption. Today, most operating systems come with image manipulation programs. Even the most basic Paint program that comes with all Windows operating systems can perform cropping as a simple two-step operation (selecting, then cropping).

Like new media objects, learning objects yearn for adaptation or “contextualisation”. In addition to the stigma associated with plagiarism and possible infringement of copyright, academic practice is hardly ever a matter of copy and paste. In a study that compares the issues in the reuse of resources in schools and colleges, Littlejohn, Jung and Broumley (2003) note that ‘commonality of curricula does not necessarily mean that staff will reuse externally produced materials, unless the materials can be contextualized by the teacher’ (Littlejohn, Jung and Broumley, 2003: 219).

In summary, the problem with Wiley’s arguments is that they show ignorance towards the medium. The reuse/repurpose divide is a false dichotomy in the face of the medium and teaching culture.

The Truth about Reuse

My discussion thus far has argued for a distinction between what reusability means for programming objects and new media objects, but in the following pages, I will suggest that reusability is really an ideal that is never actualised even in computer programming. A digression into the origin of object-oriented programming will clarify my point.

The first object-oriented programming language, SIMULA (SIMUlation LAnguage), was developed between 1962 and 1967. The language’s main development goal was to provide means to conceptualise a complex system (Holmevik, 1995). It was intended to be both a system description and a programming language, and ‘its construction would thus require both systems reasoning and programming skills’ (Holmevik, 1995).

This gave birth to the concept of objects and classes, and systems conceptualised as made up of objects that perform actions at run time. Objects are particular instances of classes, or prototypes. A real world example for a class may be cars, and an example of an object from the class car is my Camry. As a member of the class car, you would expect my Camry to have properties of a car, with a few variations. My Camry can also perform actions, such as drive, reverse, and stop.

To deepen this discussion, let us look at a common programming class, String. An instance of a String can be any particular string of alphanumeric characters, for instance, “hello world” or “one two three 456″. A property of a String (a letter string) class may be the number of characters it contains. A String can also perform actions (or methods in computer science jargon) such as concatenate with another string, or return the number of characters it contains.

Object-oriented design is said to be reusable when classes are imported from other programs into a new program. For example, if I am modeling a system that asks a string to do something, I can write my own class, or I can simply borrow a String class that you wrote. In other words, reuse your code.

While this seems to be an attractive idea, code reuse rarely happens in practice. In an extract from the USENIX proceedings, Johnson (1994) explains the problem:

So, I want to use your string package, but I want your string package to use my arena-based allocator. But, almost certainly, you have encapsulated knowledge of storage allocation so that I can’t have any contact with it (that is a feature of OOP, after all), so I can’t use your package with my storage allocator. Actually, I would probably have more luck reusing your package had it been in C [which is not an object-oriented language, KW], since I could supply my own malloc and free routines [to control memory allocation, KW] (although that has its own set of problems). (Johnson, 1994)

In short, reusing classes has not been particularly successful in OOP. If reuse is said to exist in OOP, it is the sort of reuse that was already present in structured programming – the reuse of code libraries and modules.

It should now be clear that it is unfruitful to talk about learning objects as reusable by drawing parallels with computer science, since there is a lack of empirical support for reuse in OOP in the first place. Yet, this does not refute the link between OOP and learning objects. Instead, by using Manovich’s understanding of new media objects, it becomes clearer that the linkage works culturally through the work practices of learning object producers. Manovich conceives of new media as constituted by a ‘cultural layer’ and a ‘computer layer’. These layers influence each other and result in a new computer culture – ‘a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it’ (2001a: 46). In the case of learning objects, it signals a new computer education culture. This new culture has two overarching themes that flow naturally from an object culture – mass production and commodification.

Mass Production

Manovich chooses to use the term new media object over new media product, artwork or interactive media for three reasons. First, the term is generic enough so that it does not limit the scope of his principles. Second, object makes a connection with computing science and the computing industry. We have already seen the term used in object-oriented programming. Third, it points toward the factory and industrial mass production rather than the traditional artist’s studio, and it implies ‘the ideals of rational organization of labor and engineering efficiency that artists wanted to bring into their own work’ (Manovich, 2001a:14).

The third reason is important in learning object discourse. Stephen Downes criticises the traditional method of course development precisely because it was “artisan work” (2000). Adopting an object-oriented approach to course development means more than establishing technical standards, it involves implementing new policies and reorganising workflow in production houses. One excellent example of this is the OTEN-DE’s TAFE Online project.

In this project, content writers were challenged to write pieces of text that could stand alone, which students could study independently of other components of the course. OTEN-DE’s instructional designers worked hard to keep their Sharable Learning Objects (SLOs) unmodified from module to module while maintaining the flow of argument within a module. Initially, instructional designers analyse the content of each module and list its learning objectives. Basically, for each objective a Sharable Learning Object (SLO) is created to teach that objective. These SLOs are the basic building blocks of modules. The modules are then compared and where two modules share the same learning objective, a single SLO, rather than two, is created. In other words, this approach saves production work by taking advantage of the overlapping components of the curriculum across modules in the TAFE courses.

For example, one of OTEN-DE’s SLO teaches the skill ‘Determine and analyse client requirements’. This SLO is shared across 6 modules:

1. Connect Internal Hardware Components;
2. Install and Optimise System Software;
3. Provide Advice to Clients;
4. Develop Macros and Templates for Clients;
5. Customise Packages Software Applications; and
6. Provide Basic System Administration.

Each of these modules contain several SLOs. A SLO is a plain text document that contains instructional content for the stated objective.

This approach defines clearly the boundaries of each role, and in eliminating ambiguity, it achieves what Manovich terms ‘rational organization of labor and engineering efficiency’ (Manovich, 2001a: 14). In enforcing the learning object approach, OTEN-DE redefined and clarified the roles of the instructional designers and the content writers. Though Manovich is referring to artists, the same principle applies to the process of learning object development in this instance. It is yet to be seen how this mindset of rational organisation plays out in university and school education, where the culture values creativity, critical thinking, and “people” elements highly.

Commodification

Learning objects do not only promise economic savings through mass production. As discreet pieces with metadata ready to act as price tags, they are only one step removed from becoming commodified assets.

However, one characteristic of new media objects has caused hiccups within the commodification process. The problem is caused by modularity. Modularity refers to the fractal-like nature of new media objects. ‘Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities’ (Manovich, 2001a: 30). For example, an HTML document is modular because it can reference images, video and audio files. These components can be easily substituted and deleted, but together they form a web page, a coherent object.

In the context of Wiley’s captioned image example, new media objects typically would store the text (HTML) as separate from the image (JPEG or GIF file). Modularity means that both the text and the image, as well as the whole web page (which encompasses the former two) are all in the order of an “object”. Manovich uses the term “object” to emphasise that his ‘general principles of new media [are] true across all media types, all forms of organization, and all scales’ (Manovich, 2001a: 14).

When applied to learning objects, producers have had problems defining the optimal granularity of an object. There is a dilemma in maintaining the balance between having objects too big so they do not get “reused” often, and too small so they are too petty to handle. Plus, assets too “raw” are incapable of achieving learning objectives. Lacking in a clear purpose can inhibit use, let alone re-use.

One of the factors that is supposed to help determine the optimal size of a learning object is what yields the maximum return of investment. Under this light, granularity still causes more problems than it solves. While smaller objects are theoretically more reusable, they can cause company losses in other ways. Consider the common watermarks found on online image libraries. Companies URLs are embedded into their images to decrease illegitimate use, or repurposing without the producers’ consent. Here, the notions of repurposability/ reusability are deemed too simplistic for business returns. The lack of conceptual clarity of granularity has proved to be useless in determining the commercial value of learning objects.

The breadth of the term “object” – which Manovich deems a virtue – has backfired in learning objects when it comes to assigning intellectual property rights. It is tempting to revert back to distinguishing between reusability and repurposability to make things simpler. In light of the intellectual property issues, it is not surprising that David Wiley, the advocate of the reuse/ repurpose distinction, is also the creator of the Open Content licence.

The ideology behind the Open Content licence is that content should be made available to all people who are interested, and open content will be continually improved as different people work on it. Wiley borrowed the concept of Open Content from the Open Source software movement :

In plain English, the [Open Content] licence relieves the author of any liability or implication of warranty, grants others permission to use the Content in whole or in part, and insures that the original author will be properly credited when Content is used. It also grants others permission to modify and redistribute the Content if they clearly mark what changes have been made, when they were made, and who made them. Finally, the license insures that if someone else bases a work on Open Content, that the resultant work will be made available as Open Content as well. (Open Content, 2002) [6]

The licence is designed to complement the work done in the Open Source software movement. ‘Open Content is freely available for modification, use, and redistribution under a license similar to those used by the Open Source / Free Software community.’ The content in Open Content ‘is just about anything that isn’t executable’ (Open Content, 2002).

The motivation to create the Open Content Licence stemmed from Wiley’s enthusiasm to share his course materials with others while retaining some rights over how the content is modified (Grossman, 1998). The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, whose editor is David Wiley himself, is published under the Open Content Licence and made both available free online and purchasable in print. Such is Wiley’s conception of a new economic model for educational content.

Wiley rejects the one-teacher-to-many-students-under-one-institution model of content creation. Learning objects with the Open Content licence embody the belief that many-teachers-to-many-students will significantly reduce the cost for the lone teacher to create learning resources and that students will benefit from higher quality content. This view favours the lone teacher and student, whom Wiley views as somewhat similar to isolated programmers participating in the Open Source software movement.

Once the ratio of production cost to number of uses nears zero, access to learning objects can be made available for free. Better yet, Open Source development models can be adopted to drive the cost of learning object creation toward zero (the ratio of development work to volunteer developers), making learning objects freely available from their genesis… Each of these scenarios can provide teachers and learners with access to high quality educational materials they could never afford to produce individually. (Wiley, Gibbons and Recker, 2000; emphasis in original)

The integration of the Open Source concept into learning objects is evident when one compares open, web-based learning object repositories (e.g., AEShareNet, 2002; CAREO, 2002; MERLOT, 2002) with repositories of Open Source software (e.g., Freshmeat, 2002). [7] Both types of repositories usually consist of records of the object’s description, author, version number, and licence type. Users are able to download and use the objects according to the licensing agreement. The process of participating in instructional design with learning objects, using content from these repositories, is not very different from that of programmers participating in Open Source software development.

Furthermore, the fact that the Open Content licence demands every modification be marked is in tension with the variability afforded in new media. Wiley’s promotion of reusability over repurposability can be seen as an attempt to limit variability through simplifying and regularising the reuse of these new media/ learning objects. The principle of modularity also leaves the question of intellectual property rights uncomfortably open: When someone modifies an image within a web page, should he or she refer to the changes they made in regard to the image or the whole web page?

While Open Content is only a minor initiative in the wider field of learning objects digital rights management (DRM), it illustrates how the extra layer of copyright complicates the relationship between new media and learning objects. Other initiatives like ODRL from the W3C are gaining popularity, but the question of embracing the modularity and the variability of new media/ learning objects remains unresolved. The same problem haunts new media producers, and one solution was through the Creative Commons project, where media producers are offered a range of user licences to assign to their new media objects (Creative Commons, 2003).

In the field of learning objects, Higgs, Meredith and Hand (2002) have suggested a distinction be made between “Enforced DRM” and “Attributed DRM”. Enforced DRM is the current model for the recording and movie industries, and Attributed DRM, like the approach taken in Creative Commons, allows the creators of the content decide what rights they allocate to the user.

Conclusion

In highlighting the relationship between new media objects and learning objects over that of programming objects and learning objects, I have shown how new media principles are applicable to learning object designs. The problem with an object-oriented programming view of learning objects is that it takes digital resources out from their educational technology context and places them with computer software. The latter categorisation does nothing to help teachers decide how these learning objects can contribute to their teaching. The hyped learning object discourse appeals to managers as it implies a reduction in production costs. However, in questioning the relationship between learning objects and programming objects, it is clear that the claim of reusability is ill-founded.

More importantly, the object-oriented view to education skews teachers to consider a content-oriented form of teaching, rather than a student-centred approach. It presents a risk of regressing into a behavioural model of education which was prevalent in the 1960s. As the human teachers/ designers are being black-boxed, and learning is seen as an algorithm that can be run, the student is subjugated to the content.

Learning object debates resonate with new media debates because of the common medium. Learning objects have cultural issues specific to education. This article has concerned itself with the task of separating issues that belong to the medium from those belonging to management and education, and a team-based approach to learning object production with experts in new media, management and education is necessary for all learning object productions.

Author’s Biography

Karen Woo is a PhD candidate at the Media and Communications school at UNSW researching film piracy. Currently, she is working on a COLIS project based at Macquarie University that looks at the users’ perspective of learning objects. Previously, Karen has worked with OTEN-DE on the development of learning objects in the VET sector, and has written her Honours thesis on the cultural roots of learning objects.

Notes

[1] Though this paper is dedicated to thinking about the object part of learning objects, I was told a number of times by others working in the field that “learning resources” or “learning aids” instead of “learning objects” should be used when we talk to teachers. The term is simply deemed “too techy” by many. How the terminology slips from one context to another is interesting but is beyond the scope of this paper.

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[2] I am only contending for a weak link between computer science and learning objects. Historically, the link may be stronger than that suggested here.

Perhaps the first to make the conceptual link between computer objects and education was John Spohrer, the founder of the Education Object Economy. His project began in 1994. Its goal was to create Java applets to be shared by educators around the world. As all EOE objects were all Java applets, they were real programming objects. Some themes of learning objects were already present in this early project, including sharing and reusability (EOE, 2002b). The relationship between computer science and the present learning objects are obviously less closely related.

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[3] I am using the Foucauldian definition of the word. Discourse is not limited to language and organising rational thought. Rather, it assumes a political approach, and sees discourse as a way of doing (Love, 2002).

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[4] For example, at the 2002 World Wide Web Conference, a paper was presented to address the link between semantic web and e-learning (Nilsson, Palmer and Naeve 2002).

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[5] Granularity is another concept borrowed from object-oriented programming. In a computer science context, it refers roughly to how simple or complicated a programming routine should be in order to achieve maximum reusability.

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[6] The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. ‘We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits. Open Source Initiative exists to make this case to the commercial world’ (Open Source, 2002).

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[7] CAREO is an open repository developed by the University of Alberta in Canada. The repository contains a collection of learning objects that can be freely downloaded and it welcomes contributions by educators around the world (CAREO, 2002).

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References

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Wiley, D. A. ‘Connecting Learning Objects to Instructional Design Theory: A Definition, a Metaphor, and a Taxonomy’, in The Instructional Use of Learning Objects (2000b),
http://reusability.org/read/

In what ways do electronic media, and, in particular, online media or hypertext, have the potential to change the ways in which we acquire and generate knowledge? How does writing hypertextually transform the learner’s experience of the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in contrast to the kinds of learning that takes place when students engage with the proprietary systems used for online course delivery in universities. While online learning systems are believed by many in higher education to be a viable alternative to face to face teaching, many proprietary delivery systems neglect the role of the student as learner, emphasising instead the student as a consumer of course materials. Halflives: A Mystory (http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au) was and continues to be a research project that has enabled me to consider these questions from the perspective of a learner engaged in constructing knowledge hypertextually. [1]

My approach to this investigation comes out of Greg Ulmer’s research into the development of a rhetoric for the electronic apparatus. Ulmer’s interest in the ways in which the transformation of rhetoric is brought about by new technologies and the impact that this may have on educational practices does not make him unique. [2] Nor does his interest in the practical application of poststructuralist theories to education. [3] What really interests me with regards to Ulmer, and the reason I have singled his work out in Halflives and in this paper, is that his work is derived from and specifically targeted at the discipline of media studies, while still maintaining an applicability across of range of other disciplines. More importantly, Ulmer’s understanding of what constitutes media studies is far more expansive than what is often recognised, within the academy and outside of it, as legitimate. Rather than emphasising the study of media (aesthetically, institutionally, politically, historically, philosophically) or the acquisition of media related skills for the purpose of making media, Ulmer emphasises the necessity of the integration of these approaches. One can have one eye on Bataille and one eye on Photoshop without any sense of disjuncture.

For that reason, I am interested in Ulmer’s description, in his books Teletheory (1989) and Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2003), of mystory as a way of inventing electronic rhetoric because it allows for both the making/studying of media and the making/studying of theory simultaneously. Constructing a mystory, Ulmer suggests, helps us anticipate or actually invent a rhetoric or poetics for electronic space, for it leads us to practice the “picto-ideo-phonographic writing” fostered by electronic technology and theorised by Derrida. He writes:

[Mystorys] were designed to simulate the experience of invention, the crossing of discourses that has been shown to occur in the invention process. (Ulmer, 1994: xxi)

Halflives: A Mystory is the product generated from the process of attempting to think cogently about the possible pedagogical impacts that mystory may have on learners as they simultaneously write about media with media. It is also an attempt to think through and practice a new kind of scholarship that is more suited to electronic culture.

From literacy to electracy

The transition from a predominantly literate culture to an electronic culture is already engendering changes in the ways in which we think, write and exchange ideas. Ulmer has been concerned with the kinds of changes that take place as a result of this transition and his primary concern has been a pedagogical one – that is, he is interested in how learning is transformed by the shift from the apparatus of literacy to the apparatus of what he comes to term ‘electracy’. The term apparatus is important here as it refers not only to the technologies of print or computing but also to the ideologies and institutional practices assigned to or produced by those technologies. As Ulmer points out:

In terms of the academic apparatus, [theorists of the apparatus] would relate the technology of print and alphabetic literacy with the ideology of the individual, autonomous subject of knowledge, self-conscious, capable of rational decisions free from the influences of prejudice and emotion; and to the practice of criticism, manifested in the treatise, and even the essay, assuming the articulation of subject/object, objective distance, seriousness and rigor, and a clear and simple style. The “originality” we require from the students engaged in making such works as well as the copyright with which we protect intellectual property are features of this apparatus. (Ulmer, 1989: 4)

The question that Ulmer posits in Teletheory (1989) and pursues in that book and in his subsequent books, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994) and Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2003), revolves around how one might go about inventing practices that may institutionalize the electronic apparatus in terms of schooling, and to produce new subjectivities, or ways of knowing about oneself and the world.

Ulmer’s response to this question in both of these books relates to the role of invention in the process of learning. In Teletheory, he calls for the invention of a new genre of academic writing, which he terms ‘mystory’. In Heuretics, he argues for the supplementation of the currently dominant critical and interpretative modes of inquiry in learning (critique and hermeneutics) by a more experimental mode known as heuretics (Ulmer, 1994: xii). Taken together, Ulmer posits mystory as a new genre of writing that can be generated by the application of a process of working heuretically rather than through critique and hermeneutics. His reasons for doing so lie in his argument that:

[t]he modes of academic writing now taught in school tend to be positioned on the side of the already known rather than on the side of wanting to find out (of theoretical curiosity) and hence discourage learning how to learn. (Ulmer, 1994: xii)

Ulmer’s complaint in relation to the inadequacy of current modes of learning, and his invocation of heuretics as an alternative to the currently dominant processes of knowledge acquisition, draws attention to the role that rhetoric or composition plays in the formation and dissemination of knowledge through writing.

The purposeful use of language makes knowing possible. As the Sophists (and many others subsequently) noted, language necessarily affects the truths that it can say or name. How we write is as important as what we write. From this perspective, rhetoric aims at knowledge, or makes it available. How it is made available will vary according to the apparatus in which it is generated. It could be argued that the academic essay, as it has come to be institutionalised within the humanities, is a writing that demonstrates all the virtues of mainstream literacy – unity, coherence, perspicuity, closure and correctness. However, what students learn from the process of writing essays which, rhetorically, have been stripped of the art of invention, is to close discourse down, to let the conclusion dictate their thinking and to necessarily censor whatever imagined possibilities seem irrelevant or inappropriate. ‘What they learn is a trained incapacity to speculate or raise questions, to try stylistic and formal alternatives’ (Corvino, 1998: 210). Ulmer points out that, in this sense, the privileging of the essay/treatise in school is ideological in that it promotes the development of a particular kind of subjectivity in the learner – a subjectivity that is aligned closely with the desires of Enlightenment logocentric reason.

The move from the apparatus of literacy to the electronic apparatus means more, then, than merely a change in technology. It involves changes also in the ways in which we produce and assess the process of knowledge acquisition and, as a consequence, changes in subjectivity. The kinds of subjectivities that might be produced by an electronic apparatus are difficult to determine in advance. As Ulmer argues:

In the same way that the practice of reading privately and silently contributed to the formation of “self”, so too will performing hyperrhetoric contribute to a new subjectivication in the electronic apparatus (in which one will have to find a new term of self-reference, neither “parrot” [to use Lacan’s example] as in the clan identity of the oral apparatus nor “me” in the individualism of literacy. (Ulmer, 1994: 38)

Ulmer argues that the introduction of electracy to schooling has the potential to overcome the impasse that faces anyone seeking to move beyond the limits of Enlightenment reason. The necessity for such a move is determined by the desire to formulate not only new knowledge but also new ways of generating knowledge. As he points out:

Most of the writers calling attention to the symptoms of the closure of conceptual reason do not want to abandon the principles of the Enlightenment. They retain a desire to act in the world, to make life better for all humanity, but they admit to an experience of impasse. (Ulmer, 1994: 20)

This impasse is brought about by the realisation that knowing and knowledge can, in fact, be resisted. He argues:

We have been aware for some time, after all, of the limitations of the finest institutional instantiations of logical and conceptual reasoning – of critique and hermeneutics in the human sciences and of empiricism in the natural sciences – to the point that critique has become cynical. As Peter Sloterdijk explained, what was not foreseen in the invention of conceptual reason was the possibility of ‘enlightened false consciousness’, which arose when the enlightened got into power. What these Aufklärer learned was that knowledge can be resisted; that knowing can leave people unaffected; that ‘people can stick to their positions for anything but “rational” reasons’. (Ulmer, 1994: 19)

Ulmer’s project then is a political one in the sense that his call for the invention of new modes of knowledge acquisition and dissemination is grounded in a desire to overcome the impasse produced by this critique of the limits of conceptual reason.

Hyperlogic, invention and the electronic apparatus

While many hypertext theorists have been prepared to argue that hypertext, as a technology of electronic writing, is by its very nature revolutionary – embodying a poststructuralist view of language – Ulmer argues that we need an electronic theoria. [4] That is, writing electonically does not automatically take us outside literate practices or involve the development of new rhetorical strategies. Any cursory glance at the metaphors used in computing – the desktop, folders and files, webpages, and so on – indicates the ways in which electronic writing is still tied up with the practices of print literacy. What is needed to achieve the transition is the invention of new modes of writing specific to the electronic environment itself, taking into account the full potential of literacy as it converges with a new apparatus, and remembering that the technology of electronic writing is only one aspect of the apparatus. It would be useful at this point to examine what constitutes a mystory and how it aims to transform rhetoric in the name of electracy.

The greatest difficulty one has in attempting to write a mystory (or even understand what it is) lies in Ulmer’s refusal to provide his readers with a model from which to work. This is brought about by Ulmer’s articulation of the difference between reproduction and exploration. In arguing that ‘[r]eproducing as a method or way has to do with the power effect of subject positioning in a dominant ideology’, Ulmer is alluding to the tendency in pedagogy to reproduce in students not only knowledge but ways of approaching and disseminating that knowledge (Ulmer, 1989: 170). The invention of hyperrhetoric, of which mystory is an example, positions the student differently in relation to language and discourse as neither a writer nor a reader but as an ‘active receiver’ capable of receiving and generating ideas according their specific relation to knowledge rather than to a general principle. Mystory, then, attempts to act as a relay rather than as a method. He states:

This alternative – the relay organized by speed, rather than the gravity of the monument – will be one of the most difficult and important issues for teletheory: how to bring the particular or singular into relation with the general or global in the manner of the relay rather than the model. Is there a contradiction, then, in trying to invent a genre for teletheory (mystory)? Perhaps not, if we keep in mind that unlike the treatise, or the conventional genres of academic scholarship, the mystory does not repeat, is not reproduced, in that no two are alike. (Ulmer, 1989: 170)

That said, Ulmer does provide us with a range of parameters which contribute to the invention of mystory as a genre. In Chapter Three of Teletheory, under the heading of Mystoriography, Ulmer states:

As a conceptual neologism, “mystory” is the title for a collection or set of elements gathered together temporarily in order to represent my comprehension of the scene of academic discourse. It is an idea of sorts, if nothing like a platonic eidos, whose name alludes to several constituent features (generated by the puncept of “mystory”). (Ulmer, 1989: 83)

These elements are history, herstory, mystery, my story and envois. Each element contributes part of itself to the invention of the word mystory and each element deals in part with the concerns of mystoriography. The following section elaborates on each element of mystory and how they relate to the composition of Halflives as a mystory.

The first element, history, serves as a reminder of the way in which patterning as a form of referential cognition is suppressed in a traditional historiography that emphasises and privileges the analytico-referential discourse of science. Where traditional historiography seeks to produce treatises bound to the demands of rigorous procedures of verification and justification, mystory attempts to reintroduce the particular into historiography by allowing the mystoriographer to focus on the patterns that they discern in the materials that they uncover, emphasising the individual learner’s role in the construction of knowledge. Mystory allows for the idiosyncratic generation of knowledge in ways that are meaningful for the learner. This process contributes to the formation of what might be termed ‘electronic cognition’ in that it mimics the way in which memory is organised in computing. As Ulmer argues in Heuretics:

In the hardware of computers, connectionism or parallel processing (multiple low-level memory units linked in a network) is replacing (experimentally) the more standard serial processing (a central processor addressing large storage units). In short, the change in thinking from linear indexical to network associational – a shift often used to summarize the difference between alphabetic and electronic cognitive styles (or between masculine and feminine styles, for that matter) – is happening at the level of the technology itself. (Ulmer, 1994: 36)

Another way of describing this kind of thinking is hyperlogic, a term used by Darren Tofts in his essay ‘Hyperlogic, the Avant-garde and Other Intransitive Acts’ (Tofts, 1999). Where traditional historiography is bound by the linearity of logic, mystory is made possible by the introduction of hyperlogic to historiography. Tofts argues:

One of the advantages of this kind of historiography, as Greil Marcus has demonstrated, is the formation of alternative histories, generated according to the principles of serendipity, audacious comparisons and unexpected links. (Tofts, 1999: 23-24)

To illustrate this concept, Tofts quotes from Greil Marcus’ history of punk rock, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century:

…late in 1976 a record called Anarchy in the U.K. was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock ‘n’ roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals. First organized in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International, the group gained its greatest notoriety during the French revolt of May 1968, when the premises of its critique were distilled into crudely poetic slogans and spray-painted across the walls of Paris, after which the critique was given up to history and the group disappeared. The group looked back to the surrealists of the 1920’s, the dadaists who made their name during and just after the First World War, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, various mediaeval heretics, and the Knights of the Round Table. (cited in Tofts, 1999: 23-24)

Tofts goes on to argue:

Alternative histories are interesting in that they provide another way of conceiving a particular terrain, in the process uncovering the assumptions that underlie “official” histories. (Tofts, 1999: 23-24)

Mystory is capable of activating hyperlogic, situating the mystoriographer within a designated subjectivity that is context sensitive. It does not aim to produce universal truths but rather lets ’specified subjectivities speak in the full context of their localities’ (Tofts, 1999: 24). The pedagogical value of this lies in the positioning of the learner as an active participant in the production of knowledge rather than as a consumer of already decided “truths”.

Halflives addresses this notion of history in a number of ways. The interpolation of genealogy and traditional historiography in the site derived from my interest in the way that these two approaches attempt to bring the past ‘back to life’. In both instances, the emphasis lies in trying to recreate the past through evidence and thus remain immanent to themselves. However, as the term ‘back to life’ connotes, historiography and genealogy are both haunted by a spectrality that challenges their epistemological certainty. Derrida’s invocation of the revenant in Specters of Marx seemed an apt way of investigating this spectrality which haunts historiography and genealogy. In particular, the ghost as revenant, that which exists only by virtue of its return, reminds us that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is always constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the future. Hence, one of the main themes of Halflives draws on Derrida’s theory of hauntology as a way of unsettling the epistemological certainties of historiography and genealogy.

Thinking hyperlogically about hauntology then suggested thinking about the kinds of things that are suppressed within historiography and genealogy. This then led me to haunting, spiritualism and spirit photography. This in turn led to the analogy between genealogy and ghost hunting (in particular, see http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/hl053.html). Rather than resist these flows of thought as “illogical”, a mystoriographical approach helped me to focus on the patterns that I began to discern in the material I was encountering in my research. The idiosyncratic nature of those connections, both specific to my experience and the context of their production, is an important outcome of mystoriographical production and its contribution to the formation of electronic cognition.

The second element of mystory, herstory, directly relates to this element by emphasising the role that mastery plays in the institutionalisation of knowledge acquisition. As Ulmer argues:

The pun on maistrie … suggests the problem, shared with feminism, of finding an alternative to mastery and assertion as they are practiced in conventional academic discourse. How to think that which, being a scholar, scholarship takes for granted? What has been given to us, in what place, compromising every question we ask? (Ulmer, 1989: 83)

Feminist desires to reintroduce experience to the practice of knowledge acquisition by legitimating both the personal and the popular as knowledge is also an important aspect of mystoriography. In mystory, the subject and the object of knowledge are brought together allowing the learner to bring their own culturally specific experiences in terms of class, gender, nationality, popular culture and private life.

The theme of family history in Halflives attempts to legitimate the popular activity of genealogy as a form of knowledge acquisition within academic historiography. In particular, Halflives emphasizes the ways in which personal memories and public histories matter less than the manner in which our desire shapes and remakes the past in ways to suit the present. Whereas the disciplinary role of the historian in historiography supposedly keeps the historian and the history they produce separate, the family historian is always the subject and object of knowledge in their endeavours – they are part of the history that they desire to create.

The third element of mystory is that of mystery – a speculative mode that requires that the mystoriographer approach her material in a way that promotes conjecture, as a mystery, rather than calculation. Calculation involves a set of rules or the imposition of an empirical grid that delimits the possibility of chance encounters by relegating intuition to the margins of inquiry. Intuition, on the other hand, is more personal and visceral, relying as it does on feelings. As Ulmer, quoting Carlo Ginzberg, argues:

The key term to identify the kind of knowledge that defies all rules, that enables the lover to identify the beloved as unique is “intuition”, which has its “high” forms, as in Arabic firasa (‘the capacity to leap from the known to the unknown by inference on the basis of a set of clues’), and its “low” forms (rooted in the senses). (Ulmer, 1989: 88)

To write intuitively requires the development of the ‘middle voice’, described by Roland Barthes in ‘To write: An intransitive verb?’ and recalled by Ulmer:

In the case of the active voice, the action is accomplished outside the subject. In the case of the middle voice, on the contrary, the subject affects himself in acting; he always remains inside the action, even if an object is involved….Thus defined, the middle voice corresponds exactly to the state of the verb to write: today to write is to make oneself the center of the action of speech; it is to effect writing in being affected oneself; it is to leave the writer inside the writing, not as a psychological subject, but as the agent of the action. (Barthes, 1989: 164-165)

One does not remain outside, at an objective distance from the object under examination, but is always within the work when working intuitively by means of conjecture – and all research relies on conjecture to some degree. Mystory encourages the mystoriographer to develop the capacity for conjecture by learning to leap from the known to the unknown by inference on the basis of clues, thereby writing themselves into the writing. This kind of reasoning is suited to hyperlogic’s tendency towards “lines of flight” rather than the linear, hierarchical model of analytical modes of reasoning.

Writing as intuition rather than as analysis is well suited to the electronic environment, as Ulmer argues in Heuretics:

The multichanneled interactivity of hypermedia provides for the first time a machine whose operations match the variable sensorial encoding that is the basis for intuition, a technology in which cross-modality may be simulated and manipulated for the writing of an insight, including the interaction of verbal and non-verbal materials and the guidance of analysis by intuition, which constitute creative or inventive thinking. (Ulmer, 1994: 140-141)

Intuitions may not always be, in the end, “right”. But they can provide an avenue for experimentation that allows the learner to speculate – remembering that the root of the word speculate is spectare, to see – and to find a direction through writing rather than writing coming “after the fact”, so to speak. This ability to find a direction through writing is helpful when you consider that electronic rhetoric has yet to be invented, or rather, is only in the process of being invented, unlike the rhetoric of print, which is well established (though, of course, open to constant revision and experimentation).

Figure 1 – Lillian Swan

Figure: Lillian Swan and the ghost of my grandfather

The application of intuition to the composition of Halflives allowed me to speculate on possible connections within the material I was researching. This included such connections as those between genealogy, historiography, hauntology and spiritualism. It provided me with a way into the material by focussing my attention on the photograph with which the project begins – that of my grandmother and my grandfather’s shadow (see left). My identification of the punctum of that photograph, my grandfather’s shadow, was the catalyst that led me to see other connections in the site. The photograph suggested my grandfather’s presence by virtue of the shadow in the lower right hand corner. But it simultaneously suggested his absence as well. His ghostly presence led me to think about Derrida’s concern with revenants or ghosts in Specters of Marx (1994), where he discusses the spectrality of many areas of meaning, seeing ghostly hauntings as traces of possible meanings. This connection to hauntology then led to me to thinking about the ways in which ghosts have figured more generally in our culture, which led me to both spiritualism and spirit photography. The application of intuition generated the very personal nature of these associations allowing me to write myself into the research.

The fourth element of mystory is My Story, an element which again invokes the register of the middle voice by requiring that the mystoriographer relate their material to themselves in the manner of a relay that may not keep its charge but must be passed on. Remember that the relay (as opposed to method) positions the mystoriographer differently in relation to language and discourse as neither a writer nor a reader but as an “active receiver” capable of receiving and generating ideas according to their specific relation to knowledge rather than to a general principle. Rather than the autonomous narrator of a series of ideas, the mystoriographer occupies a heteronomic position, engaging their own stories in the information set forth as scholarship. This, Ulmer argues, is the charge of mystory, reasoning in the mode of conduction. In contrast to the established movement of inference between things and ideas in academic discourse (abduction, deduction, induction), conduction involves a movement between things. Where abduction, deduction and induction all involve a relation between the general and the particular, conduction remains at the level of the particular. The mystoriographer is not concerned with getting to the bottom of things, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, but rather in seeing the possibility of connections between things without having to expand or reduce particularities to general principles.

Conduction has a double meaning for Ulmer, alluding to the type of movement produced by a relay and the way in which we “conduct” research.The allusion to movement brings to mind the conduction of electricity moving at speed from one relay point to another. Perhaps even the movement of information packets across a network. Or, to use an example Ulmer provides, the flow of energy through a circuit. But the allusion to the way in which we conduct research reminds us that this process is “autographical” – that we write ourselves into our own research.

This relates to the fifth element of mystory and the idea of envois – that is, the present of any idea as always pre-sent. Using the example of Derrida’s description of Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, Ulmer argues that mystory belongs to a genre of writing that invents and discovers as it writes itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud opens with the words, ‘In psychoanalytic theory …’. In doing so, Freud signals that psychoanalytic theory exists, even though it only makes it first public appearance with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud thus positions himself as both the subject and the producer of psychoanalytic theory. The autobiographical and anecdotal status of Freud’s text are significant here as Freud simultaneously undertakes self-analysis and invents it. Derrida’s, and latterly Ulmer’s, interest in this lies in the possibility of taking psychoanalysis ‘as a potential model for a new order of reasoning, suggesting how individual idioms may be generalized into theoretical formations’ (Ulmer, 1989: 91). The performance and production of “psychoanalysis” occurs simultaneously, and the acknowledgement of this suggests of a way to think about the temporality of mystory. As Ulmer notes,’[t]he mystorical essay is not scholarship, not the communication of a prior sense, but the discovery of a direction by means of writing’ (Ulmer, 1989: 90).

Halflives did not present itself to me before the fact with a ready formed structure and set of relationships within itself. It only became so in the process of being constructed.

Taken together, these elements suggest that the methodology for how to write a mystory is analogous to the recipe rather than a model. This analogy of the recipe is a useful one, for whereas models aim for reproduction, recipes are more like relays in that they require the input of a range of ingredients, including the cook, to make them work. It is the role of the cook to apply a technique to the process in order for some transformation in the ingredients to occur. The use of the word technique rather than method is critical here. A method is referred to in the Shorter Oxford dictionary as a ‘systematic arrangement’ and the ‘orderly arrangement of ideas and topics’. This objectivity of the method is perfectly suited to the apparatus of literacy in its application to academic discourse as it currently exists as it matches the rhetorical strategies used by that discourse. However, mystory, intervening on the side of the apparatus of electracy, requires, not the application of a method, but rather the application of a technique where technique is taken to mean the ‘manner of artistic execution or performance in relation to practical details’ (OED, 1973: 2253).

Remembering that mystory seeks to put into question ‘[reproduction] as a method or way [which] has to do with the power effect of subject positioning in a dominant ideology’ (Ulmer, 1989: 4), the manner in which the artistic execution or performance of mystory takes place, according to Ulmer, is the collage. Whereas representation reproduces, collage, Ulmer argues, works to reactivate as in the manner of a relay. In the visual arts, collage is an abstract form of art in which various elements are juxtaposed on the same pictorial surface. ‘In critical theory as in literature collage takes the form of citation’ (Ulmer, 1989: 147).

I find Ulmer’s invocation of collage as a technique for the production of mystory is problematic. [5] Ulmer’s preference for relays that retain the flavour of high cultural production (video over television, for example) undercut the desire for an integration of the popular into mystoriography. As Niall Lucy argues in Beyond Semiotics:

An effect of this preference is to lessen what might be learned, if only because the context in which pedagogy is developed is rather more a schooled than a schooling one. By this I mean that the Ulmer of Teletheory seems far more at home reading Derrida than watching telesoap, more comfortable with John Cage than Johnny Rotten. When he does refer to popular texts and performers, these tend to have be approved already by high culture as worthy of interest: Barthes on the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, for instance, commands several pages of Ulmers’ attention, outweighing that paid to any other instance of the popular. (Lucy, 2001: 129)

Rather than collage, I prefer decoupage as a technique for mystoriography. Decoupage, derived from the French decouper, means ‘to cut out’ usually with the intention of reassembling , pasting and varnishing onto objects for the purposes of decoration. As far back as the 12th century, Chinese peasants were creating paper cutouts in vivid colours to decorate windows, lanterns, gift boxes and other objects.

The origins of decoupage in China appeal to me for personal reasons that relate to my family’s history. But it is the fact that decoupage is considered l’arte del povero (the poor man’s art) that suits my intentions in Halflives. Decoupage is an amateur rather than an expert art. Like all crafts, it is a technique that can be easily learned and applied. The grafting together of disparate elements is an important feature of the craft and depends heavily on what is to hand. A reliance on ready-mades is well suited to mystory where the mystoriographer works with materials that they ‘happen to unearth’ (Ulmer, 1989: 83).

And so, the technique that guides the compilation of the mystoriographical recipe in Halflives is decoupage, fusing together the ingredients of Ulmer’s mystory with my family’s various histories and archives, Derrida’s hauntology, 19th century Spiritualism and Spirit photography, Barthes ruminations on photography and speculations about the importance of genealogy and memory to traditional historiography.

From Here to Electracy

The object of the research undertaken for the Halflives project was to uncover the possible pedagogical impacts that mystory as a mode of online or electronic writing may have on learners, using myself as the testing ground. Halflives is a mystory composed as an experiment to find out about how we might begin to invent an electronic rhetoric suitable for the apparatus of electracy. Writing Halflives helped me to think about what it means to undertake research in an electronic environment and also what it means to think electronically. It also raised questions more generally about the scene of teaching and learning as it currently exists in first world institutions of higher education. How does learning currently take place? What is the impact of new technologies on the learning environment? Will they open up new modes of teaching and learning that promote the application of inventive strategies to knowledge acquisition over the more reproductive strategies currently in place? As an academic working in a field fundamentally impacted by new technologies but whom, like many of my peers, is not an educational researcher, these questions are crucial. Not only in the sense that they ask about possibilities, but also in the sense that they draw our attention to the modes of teaching and learning currently in place and prompt us to consider the most productive ways to respond rather than react to the changing environment. They offer, I believe, a path of resistance to the kinds of corporate product driven education currently being forced upon academics across a range of disciplines, not just in media and new media studies.

In 1992, one hundred and forty years after John Henry Newman’s classic discourse of the university as an institution (Newman, 1952), Jaroslav Pelikan revisited Newman’s ideas in his book, The Idea of the University (1992). He identified four knowledge management roles played by the university, assigning each role equal importance:

[T]he advancement of knowledge through research, the transmission of knowledge through teaching, the preservation of knowledge through scholarly collections, and the diffusion of knowledge through publishing are the four legs of the table, no one of which can stand for very long unless all are strong. (Pelikan, 1992: 16-17)

The separation of knowledge advancement through research and the transmission of knowledge through teaching, one that is maintained in many Western universities, positions the academic as the advancer of knowledge and the student as receiver of knowledge. It does not promote active learning in the sense of allowing the recipient of teaching, the student, to participate in the production of knowledge. Mystory, I believe, allows the learner to straddle these roles more effectively by positioning the student as an “active receiver”.

The greatest test facing the application of mystoriography to learning in the electronic classroom, however, lies in the ways in which knowledge advancement through research is currently taking shape in our culture as a result of fiscal and technological pressures. In a recent article for Southern Review, Mads Haahr argues:

Knowledge advancement can be seen as a three-step feedback loop where researchers receive impressions for example through journals, books and conferences (input); reflect and develop hypotheses and conduct experiments to support or explode them (process the input); and eventually document and diffuse the findings (output). Feedback loops such as these are found everywhere, and as discussed elsewhere (Haahr 2001), there is a strong trend in current society to focus on the input/output portions of these loops, rather than the reflection/processing portions. For the loop associated with knowledge advancement, all three steps are important: the input stage because good ideas require proper stimulation and meaningful analysis can only be performed on carefully collected data; the processing stage because this is where the insight and understanding takes place, where information is turned into knowledge; and the output stage because this is where the findings are communicated to peers and students. (Haahr, 2002)

Mystory is dependent upon students and teachers having the time and space to be able to adequately engage in the reflection/processing stage of the loop. With increasing student numbers and the greater demands made on academics, engaging students in the kind of extensive experimentation required to write a mystory is time consuming.

However, on the basis of my experience of the process, it is time that must be found. The evolution of a new apparatus of electracy will proceed with or without our input. However, we would do well to ensure that its evolution is guided towards the ends that we would value rather than leaving it to chance.

Writing Halflives opened me up to thinking about my own strategies as a learner and helped me to understand the value of a heuretic approach to knowledge. The process was an empowering one in that I was forced to rely on my own resources in the construction of the site. By choosing to not follow an established rhetoric, which was driven by the desire to experiment with the apparatus of electracy, I was able to write myself into the site on the basis of the decisions I made for what would and wouldn’t be included and for the directions I allowed the research to take. There were moments of true pleasure when I stumbled across unexpected links and directions. Whether the reader feels these moments in the text is beyond my control however, given that mystoriography is a learning process and that mystorys are not intended to be didactic, this is irrelevant to what I have learned from the execution of Halflives.

Mystory may prove to be difficult to institutionalise as a way of experimenting with electronic rhetoric and the impact this may have on the way we acquire and disseminate knowledge. The very few who have taken it up since Ulmer began to write about it in 1989 is perhaps evidence of this. [6] It is, in many respects, the antithesis of the packaged online learning systems, like Blackboard and WebCT, currently favored by many institutions of higher education in Australia. However, I believe it is a valuable approach that opens up new possibilities for thinking about how we learn and express our learning in an electronic environment.

Author’s Biography

Lisa Gye is a lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology. She recently completed postgraduate research at the AIM (Animation and Interactive Multimedia) Centre at RMIT. Halflives (http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/), is currently touring Australia as part of the Elastic exhibition produced by the CCP. Lisa’s scholarly interests include critical theory and new media, media arts, media production, alternative media practices and authoring for new media. She is currently co-editing (with Darren Tofts) an ebook titled Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix for Alt-X Press. She is also the webdesigner for the Fibreculture Journal.

Notes

[1] This paper serves as an adjunct to the web-based research performed in Halflives and readers would undoubtedly find it useful to read and engage with the site while reading this paper.

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[2] See Cole (2000) as one example.

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[3] See, for example, Peters (1998).

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[4] The earlier work on hypertext of scholars such as George Landow and Jay David Bolter were good examples of the kind of euphoric optimism to which I’m referring here. See, for example, Bolter (2001). Interestingly, both Bolter and Landow and many others like them have recently toned down their initial enthusiasm for the revolutionary powers of both postructuralist theory and hypertext.

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[5] George Landow also favours collage as a metaphor for thinking about techniques of hypertext production. See Landow (1999).

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[6] Ulmer himself is cognisant of the fact that experiments with regards to mystoriography are thin on the ground. His most recent publication, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, seeks to redress this by offering the reader a textbook that demonstrates how mystory is built in to the curriculum in the Networked Writing Environment at the University of Florida.

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References

Barthes, Roland. ‘To Write: an Intransitive Verb?’, in The Rustle of Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989).

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Boston: Lawrence Erlbaum, Assocs., 2001).

Cole, Robert (ed.). Issues in Web-based pedagogy: A Critical Primer (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000).

Corvino, William. The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1998).

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).

Haahr, Mads. ‘Information Jockey: The Dubious Role of the Twenty-first-century Academic’, Southern Review 35.2 (2002).

Landow, George. ‘Hypertext as Collage Writing’, in Peter Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

Lucy, Niall. Beyond Semiotics: Text, Culture and Technology (London: Continuum, 2001).

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1989).

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996; 1852).

Pelikan, Jaraslav. The Idea of the University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Peters, Michael (ed.). Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education (Westport, Conn.:Bergin & Garvey, 1998)

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary on Historical Principles, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Tofts, Darren. Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (Sydney: Gordon and Breach, 1999).

Ulmer, Greg. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

____. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989).

____. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

____. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (New York: Longman, 2003).

Education is very much trapped at the moment between present (technologically informed) potential and past institutional formations. Despite all the discussion about new pedagogies and the institutional love for technological “solutions” such as WebCT, there still seems a dire need for subtler theories of technology and education, more informed critiques of current major moves in this direction, and more supple, dynamic tools and concepts providing alternatives to these major moves. Here we provide Lisa Gye’s discussion of her own experiment in pedagogy, Halflives: A Mystory, which implements some of the valuable ideas of Gregory Ulmer in an Australian context. Tama Leaver gives a critique of WebCT as a seemingly closed system at odds with the very idea of the network. Karen Woo takes a look at learning objects, pointing out that this potential foundation for distributed forms of education is often misunderstood. She documents a number of interesting problems for developers. All these articles are telling us how much further we have to travel in order to really start mobilising the benefits of networked media in education.

On the other hand, in two reflections on new media in relation to the past, Philip Roe and Esther Milne are careful to sketch out the way that the past continues into the future. The past is giving us much to build upon. Roe describes the way in which, as was the case with “old new media” such as photography, there is always a virtuality to new media which potentialises the present with the fullness of the past, and drives it into new becomings. Milne traces the continuities between letter writing and email. For her, the complex creation of an incorporeality of presence ghosts the strategies of both.

Andrew Murphie – Editor, University of New South Wales, Sydney

web:http://www.andrewmurphie.org/