Virtualpolitik: Governments as Digital Media-Makers
Elizabeth Losh, University of California, Irvine
MIT Press, 2009
Proposed Table of Contents
1. digital monsters : show and tell on capitol hill
During a period of twenty-four hours in Congress, two hearings investigated the Internet activities of two prototypical kinds of "monsters": terrorists and child molesters. Yet the rhetoric of these actual hearings shows much more about the anxieties of policy makers about everyday social interactions in unregulatable cyberspace by average citizens. In the case of the hearing about "Terrorist Use of the Internet," the cultural slipperiness of new digital genres was at issue: videogames, websites, blogs, and even PowerPoint presentations and e-mail. The subtext of the child pornography hearing, a desire to regulate file-sharing, was made explicit in the formulation of new legislation, "Masha's Law," which equated child pornography with illegally downloading commercially produced music by making the penalties equivalent for possessing and transferring these unlawful digital files.
2. hacking Aristotle: what is digital rhetoric?
Digital rhetoric provides an interpretive framework that encompasses much more than the study of hardware or software. Yet many who purportedly study the rhetoric of digital discourse focus excessively on the technological apparatus, so that a conventional view of the study of hypertext and networked communication directs attention to the user's experience with a given computer interface rather than the theories behind its development. In the standard model of digital rhetoric, literary theory is almost always applied to technological applications without considering how technological theories could conversely elucidate literary texts.
“Hacking Aristotle” looks at four possible meanings for the term "digital rhetoric": 1) the rhetorical conventions of new digital genres in everyday discourse, 2) public rhetoric via electronic distributed networks or hypertext, 3) the rhetorical analysis of new media in scholarly communities, and 4) the rhetoric of information theory (as opposed to rhetoric grounded in traditional epistemologies and institutions of knowledge). I argue that this new linguistic ideology, which is articulated in mathematical theories of communication published after World War II, also feeds back to influence the norms and generic conventions of everyday digital discourse.
In assessing the rhetoric around digital politics under the current presidential administration, this chapter also looks at how trends toward public diplomacy, social marketing, risk communication, and institutional branding indicate that what Michel Foucault has called "governmentality" in regulating potential subversive social media practices is now borrowing rhetorical techniques from the advertising industry.
3. the desert of the unreal: democracy and military-funded videogames and simulations
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. defense planners have hired a number of software developers to aid in the construction of 3D computer-generated digital models that represent the landscape, built environment, and citizenry of Iraq. Less obviously, these games and simulations for soldiers also spatialize particular political ideologies about national identity, public trust, and personal privacy. It may seem strange to think about government-funded videogames as being like civic murals, commemorative columns, or triumphal arches, but games like Tactical Iraqi and simulations like Virtual Iraq can similarly serve the function of the res publica and the process of what Bruno Latour calls "making things public" when it comes to the Iraq War. There are significant differences in interface and user experience, of course. Tactical Iraqi, a "third person shooter"-style videogame developed with funding from the Department of Defense, is designed to accelerate a learner’s acquisition of spoken Arabic to assist in the rapid deployment of soldiers into volatile tactical situations, while Virtual Iraq is a virtual reality simulation with a head-mounted display intended to lessen the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among combat veterans who have returned home. However, both initiatives have received extensive national media coverage and seem to serve rhetorical as well as pedagogical ends by making individual, private digital experiences aimed to effect the personal education or rehabilitation of military personnel accessible to a wider public. Because such games and simulations also make manifest certain politically uncomfortable aspects of the war in Iraq, there has been a lively debate in the serious game development community about working on behalf of government-funded projects that support current military efforts. This debate may also tell us something about competing attitudes among programmers themselves about how their work with new technologies impacts human behavior, as "instrumentalists" debate "functionalists" in online forums.
4. the war from the web: an atlas of conflict, government, and citizenship
Official rhetoric about September 11th on the Internet and its reception history shows how the public face of “e-government” can be more protean than its boosters would like to believe. There are many different instantiations of state authority from the vantage point of any individual user’s screen. Jane Fountain’s concept of the Weberian "virtual state," which initially existed primarily to maintain files, is now represented by dynamic government sites and taxpayer-funded online interactive exhibits. A partial survey of websites from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Central Command in the weeks and months that followed September 11th suggests that official idealism about the promise of a user-friendly, authoritative, and direct digital democracy can not account for mixed messages from different sectors of the federal government about race, class, gender, and nationality in the virtual aftermath of the attacks of September 11th. This chapter takes issue with the assumption that institutional websites are mere extensions of a single, public relations apparatus and shows how they can present controversial speeches, damaging reports, public apologies, declassified documents, and even certain compliance statistics mandated by law.
5. power points : the virtual state and its discontents
The genre of the proprietary electronic slideshow PowerPoint has inserted itself into many other forms of digital communication, from the military recruitment videogame America’s Army to a popular online parody video about Star Wars, where it often serves as a manifestation of state rhetoric and institutional hierarchy. Once Hollywood movies only showed human-computer interaction with stealthy hackers covertly manipulating code; now the exposition of back-story by official policy makers can be staged with a recognizably more public form of digital rhetoric. On its own terms, PowerPoint has been castigated by information design experts like Edward Tufte who complain about its Orwellian constraints on language, mocked by artists like David Byrne who exploit its vacuous epistemologies, and co-opted by activists, such as the Yes Men, who use it to skewer the partnership of government insiders and global capitalism that they seek to undermine. This canned corporate presentation style has insinuated itself in political discourse in everything from Congressional hearings to Presidential reports and policy statements. A famed PowerPoint presentation before the United Nations justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the name of the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and PowerPoint has continued to be an important medium for attempting to persuade both the public and policy makers in government reports that escalation of the conflict will bring the desired result of quelling the insurgency.
6. whistle-blowers: choosing between traditional discourses and electronic communication
On the face of it, e-mail would seem particularly well-suited to the aims of a would-be whistleblower intent on exposing government corruption or averting disaster as quickly as possible. As a medium for instantaneous and intimate global communication, e-mail initially appears to be far superior to traditional epistolary discourse, because letters are vulnerable to delays and acts of confiscation by hostile parties. Although the genre of e-mail is often perceived as closer to speech than to written communication, its status as a virtual artifact actually undermines its juridical authority. Ideally e-mail would serve as electronic testimony but often it functions as mere evidence, if not hearsay.
When TIME magazine named three women as its “Persons of the Year” of 2002, as icons of public rhetoric, it is worth noting that none of the featured whistleblowers used e-mail as the primary vehicle for their well-publicized performatives. In fact, FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley devotes a significant section of her thirteen-page letter to Chief Robert Mueller to meta-discourse about e-mail. Rowley asserts that the e-mails of others “speak for themselves,” while her own e-mails require more explication, because they were constrained by compositional pressures of time and written space.
In contrast, online video-sharing sites like YouTube have been very successfully used for whistle-blowing purposes in a range of cases by individuals from a variety of professional classes: a lawyer for a man detained as an “enemy combatant,” an engineer revealing inefficiencies in government contracting, and an academic researcher exposing flaws in electronic voting machines.
7. submit and render: digital satires about authentication and surveillance
As the government becomes a digital media-maker, officials have become anxious about interfaces and applications that allow critics to generate authentic looking documents, reports, and online forms. In October of 2006, these issues became particularly prominent when a graduate student in computer science, who was critical of airline security procedures instituted by the Transportation Safety Administration, created a web generator that could print what appeared to be boarding passes from Northwest Airlines. These online generators, which are used for everything from creating doctored photographs of church signs to online aliases with superhero names, have become particularly popular in the current Internet reputation economy, as PHP programs are circulated amongst those who use basic programming skills to create Internet ephemera capable of creating Internet ephemera without knowledge of computer design tools like Photoshop or Flash.
Nonetheless, if images can be used as arguments, with distinct logical components, the commercial software program Photoshop is often used as a tool of debate or dialogue. On web logs and other websites that attract diverse members to heterogeneous online communities, Photoshop sometimes even ignites controversy, particularly when alterations of race, gender, and sexuality in the original image are at issue. As the virtual state becomes increasingly associated with particular topoi in visual rhetoric, such as authorized “brands” or stock genres like the “photo essay,” netizens are appropriating that same iconography into subversive digital artworks, such as “Photoshopped” images, photo mosaics, or remixed video or audio files. These digital ephemera circulate in what is often an unregulated gift economy, although it is potentially subject to rules governing intellectual property despite obvious aspects of constitutionally protected political speech.
Yet these forms of gift-exchange can also promote the development of Internet theaters of cruelty, particularly when disenfranchised political subjects take revenge on the virtual bodies of the leaders of the body politic. However, this convention of offering digital mutilation for the entertainment of the online masses has been complicated by computer artists who use the actual interface of composition for studio programs like Flash and Photoshop as a stage that exposes the processes and practices associated with the manipulation of data and the nexus of social actor, mouse, and screen on the virtual canvas.
8. reading room: building a national archive in digital spaces and physical places
The basic thesis for “Reading Room(s)” is that just as the physical building of a national library can serve as a tangible expression of political and cultural philosophy, a given digital archive manifests ideological features of the national legacy it preserves and disseminates electronically. For example, millennial discourses have influenced national library building projects in both physical and digital archives. However, a simple analogy between conventional and electronic spaces is inadequate, because national policies on digitizing documents and regulating access engender contradictory impulses in archivists and policy makers. Although critics like Lessig, Stallman, Warner, and Samuelson focus on the centrality of the “right to read,” the physical space of a document archive is actually constituted by prohibitions on reading.
In the case of the bibliothèque nationale, the French government makes its digital collection widely and anonymously available, but closely surveils readers in its physical space. The Library of Congress celebrates democratic access to its reading rooms and its “open source” approach to the collective labor of cataloguing, but corporate business models for web development undermine the authenticity of these rhetorical appeals to the public interest. The British Library offers an interface that emulated turning pages of rare tomes but comes late to prioritizing searchable text encoding.
Now Google Print and the competing efforts of Microsoft are appropriating the cultural work of the state archive and consigning it to the sphere of corporate privatization, which scholars such as Siva Vaidhyanathan have warned against doing. To understand the pre-history of obstacles to public investment, Peter Lyman has pointed out that the project of the "digital library" has often been frustrated by other competing metaphors for institutions of information society in political rhetoric, such as the "information superhighway" or the "virtual community" in which government investment and the role of corporate capital are imagined very differently. I suggest that the invisibility of the metadata industry, in which the labor of live indexers is obscured by the corporations who employ them, could be one factor explaining why the public is unwilling to invest in these long-term projects for an information infrastructure.
9. waiting room: when the attack from without comes from within
Narratives in commercial videogames and online environments often engage the player in interactive behavior by giving him or her responsibility for managing a rapidly evolving crisis, one that potentially threatens the social order and even the rule of law maintained by the state. Situations of crisis in videogames frequently involve the risk of terrorist attacks or outbreaks of lethal diseases, often in heavily populated urban environments. Games of crisis also exist to train emergency first responders, however, urban crisis narratives that use videogame technology have a different function for those who limit property damage, injury, and mortality in the physical environment of the bricks-and-mortar “real” world. For them, these disaster simulations are part of the realm of work, often a required element of both initial career preparation and ongoing on-the-job training. As the institutions and professional organizations of medicine, nursing, and emergency response are transformed by interactive technologies, new "virtual clinics" are being born, in which digital environments define a topography of professional initiation and exclusion of the general public. Software titles include The Virtual Terrorism Response Academy, Hazmat: Hotzone, Regimental Surgeon, and a series of "Virtual Clinic" titles from the Interactive Media Lab at Dartmouth. This chapter examines the intersections of political rhetoric, pedagogical rhetoric, and the rhetoric of science in several federally-funded digital media projects and how these programs create new epistemological spaces while also reinforcing disciplinary norms of knowledge-acquisition defined by space and gaze.
10. the past as prologue: the rhetoric of the founding of information science
In his 1959 essay The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow famously described the “intellectual life of the whole of western society” as divided between “two polar groups”: those of the sciences and those of the humanities. In fact, our central institutions may be divided between two even more fundamentally incompatible communities of association: the culture of knowledge and the culture of information. This dichotomy has a long history, since at least the 4th century B.C.E. when, as Dilip Goankar observes, “Aristotle replaces Plato’s binary opposition between reality and appearance with his own binary opposition between the necessary and the contingent.” This chapter looks at the schism in government institutions and the academy that carries to the present day.
World War II and the massive investment of government resources in computer science created a specific discipline in which "information" was the chief object of study. In light of this analysis of political reaction , three major texts merit new rhetorical scrutiny: Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945), Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), and Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949). These texts are significant for critical information theorists because they presciently seem to consider the effect of the marketplace on communication once information can be quantified and thus commodified. By using the image of the "girl" at the stenotype machine or telegraph desk, these texts also express a certain level of discomfort in the new science's inappropriately gendered association with a then largely pink-collar communications industry and implicitly establish a power hierarchy that replicates ideologies of traditional physical or natural science. Finally, these texts redraw the boundaries of the human subject and the national citizen and direct attention to how political messages contain redundancy and noise.