Digitizing Desire: A History of the Codification of Pleasure

In the summer of 1938, Theodore Adorno set out for America to head the music department of the Princeton Radio Project. Upon his arrival, Adorno was proudly shown the centerpiece of the radio project’s empirical analyses: the Stanton-Lazarsfeld Analyzer. Designed by social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld and CBS executive Frank Stanton, the Analyzer included a green “like” and a red “dislike” button. As music was piped into the different rooms of the project, volunteers of different age, race and class were instructed to press the red or green button every few seconds depending on whether they liked what they were hearing at that moment or not. Codifying the analog rhythm of music into binary pulses of like and dislike, the Analyzer was digitizing desire.

Be it the measurement of happiness according to Twitter tweets, Facebook likes (but not dislikes) or the ubiquitous internet star rating of everything from blockbuster films to vacuum cleaners, our wants and pleasures are constantly being translated into a stream of digitized ones and zeroes. Tracing the origins of today’s digitization of desire,  the paper I will be presenting in October uses the Princeton Radio Project to explore how groundbreaking intellectual and cultural developments such as behavioral psychology, neoclassical economics and consumer capitalism played a crucial role in creating the rating-obsessed world we live in today.  

I’d be happy to receive any comments (or a star rating 1 thru 5) and look forward to meeting you all soon!

Eli

Graduate student in Harvard University's American Studies program

All I Need to Know About Birtherism I Learned from the “Feejee Mermaid”: Audience Reception and Interrogating Truth Claims in Communications Revolutions

NB: My week to post to the blog was the same week that I 1) had my comprehensive exams and 2) got married, and in the confusion, I forgot to post. For this reason, I am postdating and putting this up now in hopes of getting feedback before the conference.

United States History has in many ways been singularly defined by a long series of communications revolutions. From the First Amendment and the Postal Road System to the telegraph to the birth of the Railway Mail Service to the rise of the mass media to the Internet, the United States has been a nation that has been constantly being reshaped by revolutionary shifts in communications. The way that people communicate has been shifting rapidly and radically for most of our nation's history. This paper looks at the way that these communications revolutions have encouraged audiences to constantly retrain themselves to discern between counterfeit and authentic, to critically interrogate new information and attempt to detect deception-- and how this sort of interrogation has become a recurring form of entertainment and ludic pleasure.

PT Barnum is perhaps best known for his apocryphal dictum that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” but investigating Barnum’s audience suggests that they were far savvier and less trusting than is popularly assumed. James Cook, in his The Arts of Deception, demonstrates quite well that Barnum based much of his career on a winking playfulness with his audience, one based on constantly dancing on the line between the authentic and deception. This playfulness with truth claims, far from going unnoticed by his audience, was one of the primary things that appealed to Barnum’s audience. Witnessing exhibitions of the “Feejee Mermaid,” George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid Joice Heth, or the nondescript “What Is It?”, audiences went to witness uncertain “objects,” to interrogate the truth claims of exhibitors and the surrounding media, and to attempt to determine for themselves if they were being deceived or not. The playful negotiation of truth and fiction was a large part of the audience’s enjoyment, in a time of intense technological and media shifts, from the age of Jackson to the twentieth century.

Likewise, while many popular and academic accounts of Internet users assume that they are a deeply uncritical audience, I argue that much the same process of playful interrogation of authentic versus counterfeit still goes on on-line, and that it is indeed a very popular type of discourse on the web. Looking at examples including the 4chan “Perfection Girl” meme, “Slender Man,” and Youtube trick-photography videos, I argue that Internet users are playing with one another, making a game of critical analysis. Of course, in an age of deep epistemological uncertainty, “truth” is a far more problematic category today than it was in the nineteenth century. For this reason, I extend my analysis to the Korean <Tablo Online> movement, as well as the 9-11 Truther and Birther movements in the United States. While these online movements deal with far more serious issues-- and while the conclusions they come to are deeply problematic-- the mode of discourse within them and the methods by which they interrogate evidence is fundamentally very similar to the game-like mechanics with which Internet users play at questions of veracity. I argue that this is fundamental to the popularity and longevity of these conspiracy-theory based movements, and can provide insight into the way authenticity and deception are understood in the twenty-first century.

African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations: Transforming Charleston’s Public History Landscape through a Digital Exhibition Project

Looking back now at the title of our presentation, I’m realizing that our claim that a digital exhibition can change Charleston’s public history landscape seems pretty bold. In many ways though, I think we are at least onto something-- I do believe the relationship between inclusive public history work and digital humanities research and resources could be greatly expanded, and even transformative, for Charleston and the Lowcountry region. To provide some context, for over a century, since tourism first became a lucrative industry in the Charleston area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historic sites, tour guides, and museums have overwhelmingly focused on antebellum and colonial white elite experiences and material culture. Their interpretation choices served to marginalize or romanticize historic social struggles over race, labor, and citizenship that formed during and after slavery in this region, and continued into twentieth century civil rights activism. Today, “Historic Charleston” is a multi-billion dollar tourism destination that receives over four million visitors annually. But with some notable exceptions, most historic tourism producers still do not frame African American history during and after slavery as central to understanding Lowcountry history. Instead, guides give these subjects passing acknowledgement, or historic sites present them as separate, optional additions to their standard white elite tour narratives.

Acknowledging and effectively interpreting Charleston’s full history to the public is long overdue, but cultural institutions, historic sites, and tour guides face major challenges for accomplishing this task. For example, the physical presence of historic mansions of elite whites often dominate current Lowcountry historic landscapes and guide narratives, while complex social histories of African American labor and struggle within these spaces or on surrounding former rice fields can be more difficult for visitors to conceptualize. In addition, efforts to build new physical exhibitions and museum structures to address these underrepresented histories often become constrained by limited budgets in the current economy. In this context, mobile applications and online exhibitions can engage multimedia archival materials and scholarly research to help users effectively visualize and connect with more diverse social histories, within a fuller range of the Lowcountry’s historic structures and landscapes. They can also accomplish this at minimal costs and impacts on the current physical environments and communities living within these spaces. Through African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations, the Lowcountry Digital Library will specifically introduce a cohesive online narrative platform for presenting digital projects connected to the history of colonial and antebellum slavery in this region (such as online tours of specific spaces where enslaved people lived and work in the Lowcountry, or images of artifacts they used). Our goal is for this online exhibition to promote greater understanding and appreciation for this region’s complex, multicultural histories to a range of user audiences, including visitors, locals, scholars and educators, as well as tour guides. 

Mary Battle, PhD Candidate
Emory University
Assistant Digital Curator
Lowcountry Digital Library
College of Charleston

Excavating Before 1970

One of the challenges or research in the digital age is locating and accessing texts written prior to 1970 that are not commonly used. Archives are increasingly adding to online digital documents in an effort to preserve the most valuable primary source materials. In the process, manuscripts are privileged over less     snazzy (and more lengthy) old books. For my own research on theatre and dance histories these old books contain a plethora of information about play productions and period perspectives. Generally speaking, books between 1890 and 1970 get lost in the catalogue since many collections began to digitize new acquisitions around 1970. Accessing these materials is still a challenge of the digital age, and when I am able to find a volume (such as Robert Albion's History of the New York Port), it can be easier to purchase online than to acquire through library or archival sources.

My own project "Tracing Ira Aldridge, " lies at the other end of the spectrum. Through a digital tool  called MixD I am attempting to construct through mapping and photo references the performance journeys of 19th century actors. Even as I invest in data collection and sorting for realizing the visual display of graphics and information, I wonder what the accessibility of this material will be for those who want to access this tool outside of the digital world.

Posted by
Anita Gonzalez, Professor
State University of New York at New Paltz
gonzalea@newpaltz.edu

Conference registration, program now online

The main NEASA page has just been updated with a link to the program. To register, click here.

The misread professor

One story: when I was teaching a 4-4 composition load, I had a conversation with a father's friend, who asked me how many courses I taught. 4, I said. How many hours a week does each class meet? 3, I said. "So you work 12 hours a week!" he said. At that point, teaching courses that required multiple drafts, I was working closer to 12 hours a day (almost every day of the week). Recently, David C. Levy wrote in the Washington Post, how underworked and overpaid professors were. As others noted, not only did this article underestimate how much work teaching is, it ignored all the service work we do, for one, and eschewed all ranks of professor below full, including adjuncts.

Our panel is less formal and purely academic than most of the ones here (perhaps all of them). It involves the weird lives as professors we lead, semi-public, sometimes unconventional, and often (or even almost always) misinterpreted.

There are far bigger issues facing the professoriate--finding a good job, decreasing tenure rates, racial and gender discrimination, and changing workload expectations. But our perceived place in American culture have an impact on almost all of those issues and so by extension, being misread is important.

Part of the reason for this consistent misreading is the partially public lives we have as professors--we spend 6 to 12 hours a week performing teaching and another 3 to 6 in office hours. But the rest of the work we do is often private or straddles the line between public and private, and often done, in fact, in odd hours and wherever we want. That means male professors can sometimes help with child care, and many of us can do our errands at odd hours, though not without questions.

No one likes a pity party about how hard a professor's life is, and we do have more autonomy and better working conditions than many professions. But without a better understanding of what professors do, those outside the profession will continue to misread us.

--Jonathan Silverman

Crosspost: Scholarly Research and Writing in the Digital Age

Hi everyone-- Check out this post on scholarly research and writing on Steven Lubar's blog (he's our keynote speaker): http://stevenlubar.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/scholarly-research-and-writing-in-the-digital-age/

--Jonathan Silverman