The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Mark Winokur
Ubiquity and ideology
In is seminal definition of ideology, Karl Mannheim referred to Francis Bacon’s “theory of the idola,” which “may be regarded to a certain extent as a forerunner of the modern conception of ideology. The ‘idols’ were ‘phantoms’ or ‘preconceptions,’” in other words both visual and ideational from the first modern use of the term. Except for “scopic regime” studies, we have tended to forget this visual component of ideology, especially when thinking about ideology as total. But total immersion – a principally visual phenomenon as we have been using the term in New Media Studies -- is very like the way, for example, Louis Althusser thinks of ideology: as a total phenomenon always seeking but never quite succeeding in being invisible. Ubiquitous computing, which I take to refer to two distinct phenomena – the utopic synesthesia of the perfect videogame and the containment of the subject within a total computing environment – has as its nearest cousin in the Humanities (after perhaps “convergence,” which has not gained much traction of late) immersion. I believe that Humanities critics and scholars (like Slavoj Zizek) are deeply mistrustful of notions like immersion and ubiquitous computing because of their unacknowledged kinship to the notion of [I]deology.
I would like to argue in contrast that convergence, digital multi-media, ubiquitous computing and all the other modes of thinking about new media immersion are not necessarily reducible to ideology conducted by technological means, first because we have always been immersed, and second, because such ubiquity can be put to good use. The example I would like to use is a new online journal – epistemologies.org -- that conflates the idea of the academic essay and the art piece, and offers the possibility of immediate audience feedback on the artwork. Though the site is immersive, it is not yet ubiquitous. This paper will be in part a thought experiment about how one might think about an online arts journal as the site of visceral ubiquity as well.