Indexality

Description

Axel Bruns on the media research of Tom Boellstorff,:

"Dubbing inscribes new cultural meanings into existing texts; it takes those texts and transforms them. Similarly, online and offline do not blur: they dub, and this is actually more interesting than a mere blurring. Tom goes back to an example from doing ethnographic work in Second Life to illustrate this further: here, too, aspects such as knowledge of the space, in-game gender, discussion threads, switching between codes of communication, precedents and parallels, and the presence of the ethnographer interweave.

This is also about indexicality. The gap between online and offline is culturally constitutive: it has cultural consequences not because it blurs, but because it gaps. In linguistics, an indexical (‘I’, ‘this’, …) is an element which points to context: ‘this’ may be the same word in different situations, but points to (is an index of) some very different things depending on who uses them when and about what. Some languages don’t have relative spatial indexicals, for example (‘left’, ‘right’), but only absolute ones (‘north’, ‘south’) – and this changes how different language users perceive the world.

In a world of online as well as offline mobility, indexicality becomes even more important, because both online and offline contexts must now be considered; the concept of the digital is fundamentally linked to the concept of the index (even simply through the fact that the index finger is a digit). How can we use this to think about online and offline in new ways, then – when from the very early online environments, indexicality played a crucial role. The base 2 system of digital technology is the new base 10 of monetary circulation, which also provided currency as an index to actual wealth. The gap between the virtual and the real is constantly crossed.

We now ought to move from nodes and networks to atmospheres: in this moment of mobility, we assume co-constitutive motion through offline landscapes; we’re immersed, and mobility is no longer a way of getting to context, but the context itself.

We also rely on aggregate expertise, where context becomes expertise through the aggregation of multiple voices, through aggregate knowledge production; Google Translate is another example – it draws on the context of massive textual corpora to find what look like appropriate translations of texts. This isn’t about the system understanding the texts, but simply about them identifying similar contexts that may point to a workable translation.

Tom also suggests the idea of feline devices. Dogs are culturised, subservient, autonomous devices, almost robot-like in a sense; feline devices, on the other hand, would stand outside of this – they would continue to account for themselves, and their interests and actions would merely converge with human interests at various points in time." (http://snurb.info/node/1591)