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Interactivity is a nice idea. However its actual incarnations are disappointingly consumer-oriented, so that much of what passes for interactivity in contemporary society is only limitedly so.
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Long before it was a fashionable term, we were familiar with the idea that audiences are also producers, and that meaning is a process of negotiation between audience and text (This understanding is indebted to the revival of the work of Volosinov as well as to the influence of Barthes' "Death of the Author"). Complex and sophisticated theories of agency and of signification have become condensed and simplified in the idea of the 'active' audience -- active, that is, in the production of meaning. There is recognition that it is not enough to study and analyse texts; texts must be viewed in their interaction with the audience. However, the production of meaning is an invisible activity. This dilemma leads to attempts to measure and make visible that activity, and to academics deploying techniques and strategies which resemble those of market research (though their motives may be entirely different). In market research and in some versions of cultural and media studies, focus groups, detailed questionnaires, and slimmed-down ethnographic techniques derived from anthropology, are used in the attempt to track down the minutiae of everyday life, our desires and our most intimate daily experiences.
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The idea that the 'public' is unknowable and unpredictable may be as anxiety-provoking for cultural producers and academics as it is for market researchers. While some researchers attempt to pin down the invisible practices of audience, others turn their attention to 'interactive media', where the audience's involvement is visible and traceable. In other words, the attraction of interactivity is not only the apparently democratic and liberatory promise it holds of making readers into authors. It also quells the anxiety provoked by the unresponsive, uncooperative mass.
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In the case of the internet, interactivity is associated with heterogeneity, and
the destruction of traditional hierarchies of information. It has been argued
to provide the potential of a new 'public sphere', because of the possibilities it holds for wide participation, publication and dissemination and active debate. For some intellectuals, whether it can realise this potential depends on whether it can be protected from becoming a regulated governmental tool or a marketing device. Of the wide range of non-market oriented, non-governmental uses which are made of the internet, the ones most frequently cited are the ones which are most obviously interactive (MUDS and chatrooms for example) or which fit Habermas-influenced models of political and cultural participation.
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For many people the World Wide Web is the internet, and their experience of it is not as the dynamic, and participatory medium of the enthusiasts, but as an extension of everyday activities. There are many uses of the internet which don't fit the cultural critics' image of it, some are too bizarre, many simply too banal. Memorials to the dead and 'virtual' cemeteries proliferate on the World Wide Web. I want to use their unlikely example to offer another vision of the liberatory possibilities of the internet.
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These sites are interactive insofar as they allow people, not only to set up their own memorials to their dead, but to send messages, a practice usually described as 'leaving flowers'. The analogy with the actual practice of leaving flowers at a graveside is a rather loose one, and this is made all the more apparent by the fact that visitors to Internet cemeteries (such as Michael Kibbee's WWW cemetery) are invited to exchange it for one more appropriate to their faith (so if the mourner is Jewish they may choose to leave 'stones'). These flowers or stones are e-mail messages sent to the website, and are usually, though not always, directly addressed to the person who has died. We may be tempted to read this first person address as an indicator that such messages are superstitious attempts to communicate with the dead. On this interpretation, sending 'flowers' is the hi-tech offspring of spiritualism, a reading made more attractive by the notion that sometimes sending e-mail feels like sending messages into the ether.
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In fact spiritualism always made use of the latest communication media. Victorian spiritualists were quick to make use of phonography and photography, for instance and many Victorian commentators on these new technologies were excited by their potential for preserving the traces of the dead (for extended discussions of this see Kittler and Engh). Indeed, life after death has always been a motivating factor for the production of texts, and communing with the dead a motivating factor for their interpretation. The invention of media which could record, store, playback and transmit, transformed the relationship between the living and the dead. Now we can record and preserve our voices, our physical appearances, our words, our movements, long after our death.
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There is another 'deathly ' association of emergent media which is the presence of 'ghosts in the machine'. Stories abound of people seeing or hearing ghosts in the snow of a detuned TV or the white noise of radio interference. (The idea of making use of this to contact the afterworld is beautifully explored in the film 'Static' in which a young man builds a machine which enables him to see heaven and his dead parents, but when he unveils it, and his friends and family, who share his desire, are allowed to look at the screen, they see only TV snow). Even so, it would be misleading to lump together these sightings and the spiritualist uses of media (as Jeffrey Sconce does). The popularity of Spiritualism and of telepathy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do with the desire for communication to be pure, unhindered, a meeting of souls. Their view of communication is similar to that which banishes the spectral interruptions of media. It is a similar desire for pure communication which presents us with new telephone technologies which have put paid to crossed lines and lengthy pauses, with new televisions which ensure an end to TV 'snow'. The old apparitions are replaced by a new illusion of instantaneous contact and uninterruptable signals.
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John Durham Peters argues very persuasively that the spiritualist ideal of pure communication has entered into modern culture in the form of a belief in the importance of 'shared understanding and instantaneous sympathy' (108). He suggests that not only is this ideal state unreachable, it is premised on a very limited understanding of human communication and of media. His theory of communication also offers a way to read the practice of writing to the dead (and posting it to a website) as not necessarily a spiritualist practice, or even a superstitious or religious one. As with other mourning practices, it would be a misrepresentation of its social role to view it entirely as a form of personal therapy or self-expression. To send 'flowers' to the dead is to produce a piece of communication which is unassuming, which does not expect or press for an answer. Peters holds up this one-way communication as exemplary:
Gifts to the dead are the purest kind of dissemination; they involve some of the most splendid acts we can know and do... Our communication with the dead may never reach them, but such elliptical sending is as important as circular reciprocity. It would be foolish to disparage communications that never leave our own circle as only failures(152).
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Peters discusses at some length Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1855 address at the
dedication of sleepy hollow cemetery. For Emerson, as for other Victorians, the cemetery is a place where the living commune with the dead. Emerson doesn’t expect the dead to answer. Instead, in Peters’ words:
he sees communication as a matter of giving and receiving without any co-ordination of the two. Whatever linkage occurs is a gift of grace. He
allows for the otherness of the world yet refuses to make it account for
itself to him.' (157)
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Sending virtual flowers is a practice which posits a challenge to current ideas of communication and to the critical promise which we tend to attach to interactivity. What we know as interactivity today is stunted and consumer-oriented. Far from being liberatory, it may simply extend the reach of the market and of a disciplinary regime into all aspects of the everyday. Against this we might propose another form of interactivity, one characterised by a generosity and an acceptance of otherness. Instead of the endless pressure to dialogue, respond, account for ourselves, we might posit interactivity as reciprocal and sometimes unrequited gift giving, as something which includes communing with the dead.
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12 | | Works Cited
Engh, Barbara. "After 'His Master's Voice'." New Formations (2000).
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks: 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000.
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13 | | Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Michelle Henning. "Interactivity and the Realm of the Dead" M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. [your date of access] <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mhenning.html>.
Chicago style:
Michelle Henning, "Interactivity and the Realm of the Dead," M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mhenning.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Michelle Henning. (2000) Interactivity and the Realm of the Dead. M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/mhenning.html> ([your date of access]). | |
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