The Mode of Information : Mark Poster 03 ; Foucault and Databases _ Participatory surveilance
여기에서 저자는 Michel Foucault의 analysis of discourse를 따라서 information age의 database가 기존 매체와 어떻게 다른지 분석.
speech –> writing –> electronic media의 trajectory를 따라서 분석한다.
그 물질적인 차이점은 결국 space/ time의 차이를 불러오고, 이를 distance의 개념으로 해석한다.
The marriage of computers with existing communications-links will take us far closer to that goal than we have ever been.
Nothing significant is lost in the process of digital encoding, storage, retrieval, transmission and reproduction. qualitative한 손실이 없다.
p.70.
The digital encoding of printed records is indeed proceeding apace. p.70.
Confronted by such a massive intrusion on individual privacy.
dramatic changes in the reproduction, transmission, storage and retrieval of information profoundly affect the entire social system.
In short, the entire social infrastructure must be recalibrated and synchronized to the databases of the mode of information. p.72.
Digital encoding and electronic manipulation of language, images and sounds nullify the temporal and spatial limits of communication. Reproduction of information is exact, transmission if instantanuous, storage is permanent, and retrieval is effortless.
The Enlightenment dream of an educated society, wherein all knowledge is available to the least individual, is now technically feasible. p.72.
상대적으로 정보는 물량이 무제한적이기 때문에, 경제 논리에 의해서 이전시대 재화와는 달리 오히려 양을 컨트롤 함으로서 희소가치를 부가하려 한다.
Information is first a commodity and second that it is properly controlled by market forces.
By restricting the flow of information it produces the scarcity that economists tell us is a fact of nature.
The principle of private property is threatened in the domain of information. p.73.
이 전자매체의 물성에 대한 분석.
The most extreme cases of this reversal occur with digitized information. Once sounds and image are digitally encoded they may be reproduced perfectly and indefinitely.
When sounds, images and language are digitally encoded they are taken out of the register of material being. The transformation of information from analog into digital form makes possible its transformation from naturally organized matter into manipulable electrons. p.74.
Once this arrangement was broken by electronically mediated communication devices, capitalism lost its ability to control language. p.75.
The commodification of information creates its own system of expanded reproduction.
The Oral, the Written and the Electronic
Speech, followed by writing and print, followed by the electronic encoding first of sound, then of voice, then of image.
A change from speech to writing to electronics increases the space the linguistic act can cover and decreases the time. p.82.
The introduction of writing and then print is typically viewed as a condition for the development of cognitive skills. Written texts encourage critical thinking, this argument contends, because the reception of the message occurs without the persuasive physical presence of the author, because the linear arrangement of words on consecutive pages somehow corresponds reception of the message and thereby promotes cool contemplation not impulsive passion, because the written page is material and stable, allowing repeated receptions of the message, and thereby affords an opportunity for reflective reconsideration, because writing undermines the authority of tradition and the legitimacy of hierarchy. p.84.
speech에서 writing으로 변화하면서 어떻게 변하는지. 이것은 저자와 독자와의 거리를 보장, 유지함으로써 보다 냉정하고, 논리적리고 합리적인 critical reading을 가능하게 했고, 이게 곧 modern western society 를 만든 원동력이 되었다.
Writing makes possible forms of language-list, formulas, recipes-which occur rarely in speech and which are drastic simplifications and reductions.
Presence/ absence of transmitter and receive의 관계로 매체를 분석한다. –> DISTANCE
The new media extend considerably, the separation of transmitter and receiver introduced into history by writing.
While spatial and temporal distance between transmitter and receiver does increase in the change from speech to writing, the criterion of distance loses its organizing power with the onset of the mode of information. Electronic language situations subvert the framework that empowered the category of distance in the analysis of language; they undermine the verisimilitude and analytic force of the standpoint from which statements about presence and absence could enter scientific discourse. p.85.
물리적인 거리로부터 자유로워지면서 디지털 미디어는 기존 매체, 언어 시스템에서 distance가 갖던 힘을 무력화시킨다.
The mode of information initiates a rethinking of all previous forms of language.
The mode of information undermines the time/space coordinates that have been employed to fix language in various contexts. It thereby opens up an understanding of language and society hat has no reference in the grid of Renaissance perspective or the mimetic realism of Enlightenment reason.
Speech is framed by space/time coordinates of dramatic action. Writing is framed by space/time coordinates of books and sheets of paper. Both are available to logics or representation. Electronic language, on the contrary, does not lend itself to being to framed. It is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. It is truly material/immaterial. p.85.
Yiyun Kang: RESEARCH 