Front matter
The Anthology
Digital Culture
Forms and Affordances
Table of Contents
Preface 11 Introduction 13 1. History 19 11. Etymological and Cultural Roots 19 1.2. In Literature 23 1.3. In Radio 31 1.4. In Television 38 1.5. In Digital Culture 48 1.6. Other Short Forms 58 2. Design 69 2.1. Narratives 69 2.2. Formats 74 2.3. Formulas 80 2.4. Forms and Affordances 85 2.5. Taxonomy 94 2.6. Concepts 100 3. Infrastructures 113 3.1. Ecosystemic Perspectives 113 3.2. The Classificatory Mind 118 3.3. From Humans to Machines 123 3.4. The Streaming Machine 126 3.5. Geographies of Streaming 131 3.6. Infrastructures of Time 136 4. Platforms 147 4.1. Platform Ecology 147 4.2. The Platformization of Culture 152 4.3. Industrial Context 154 4.4. Streaming Practices 159 4.5. Algorithmic Culture 164 4.6. Recommendation Systems 169
Appendix: On Methods 195 Bibliography 205
Index 227
Preface
Academic writing is about the world as we collectively know it and understand it, but it is also, inevitably, about ourselves and our own systems of knowledge. As such, it is never complete. It always needs to be revised, redefined, rewritten. A palimpsest model would be perfect to erase the original words that we no longer recognize, those sentences that do not match with our present thoughts, with our new discoveries, and with our developing perception of reality. It would be a manuscript, which means it might contain errors. But, then, so does our memory. As needed, the text could be scraped or washed off, resurfaced and the material reused anew. Some traces of earlier versions might be still visible. There might be remains of ancient marks, drafts, and records, like an old magnetic drawing board that no longer functions properly. But the entire primitive text would be lost or corrupted forever. It could be incomplete or unintelligible. The palimpsest model is multilayered, and yet each version lives in some sort of isolation from previous ones. Each narrative exists on the premises of another narrative’s erasure. The reasons for overwriting can be tied to the mere diachronic privilege granted by temporality: the most recent text will be the easiest to read. Or, perhaps, it is a way to correct inaccuracies. Or else, in more extreme cases, survival might depend on acts of dominance, authority, recognition, disapproval, even violence. Such record-keeping system would require little or no classification.
There would be no complex archival system to keep track of multiple versions of the same text, no errata corrige detailing corrections to a published paper, but just a series of writings perpetually striving for permanence. In the lexicon of Italian television, the term palinsesto came to be commonly used to define the programming schedule. In a way, linear media do superimpose, day by day, a new broadcasting flow to the former one in a relation of posteriority. In the case of broadcasting, some form of organization or ordering is imposed, via the hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, season-long schedule that articulates mediated time. Yet, this is not quite the model we have chosen for our archives of the future. The digital has shifted oral, ephemeral, transient practices into an incessant process of documentation. The cultural repository continuously grows to satisfy the human impulse to collect and store artifacts as permanent records. In digital culture, the palimpsest model ultimately left space for the anthology model, for the synchronous accumulation and sorting of objects. With it, we have achieved access to the possibility of a deeper understanding: not only can we see the things in between relations, but also the relations between things. This system of kinships came with a higher cognitive load. Forms of knowledge became dynamic entities in an expanding network of associations, categories, and classification schemes. They acquired functions, uses, and affordances. Relations between things can help us understand ourselves, but they can also create barriers to interpreting otherness if not discerned in their appropriate contexts.
We now find ourselves questioning not how we may think, but how we already think. The human kind struggles to make sense of the amount of information currently available. Since many contemporary societies have embraced the anthology model, the load of stories, collections, and data has been hard to divide and compute. We require machines, infrastructures, and algorithms to organize the mass of content. In algorithmic culture, texts are not handwritten, but it is difficult to find the errors. Versions are saved into unlimited storage, but we cannot remember. Some artifacts are overly exposed and prominent, others get lost — but we cannot tell which ones — somewhere in the universe of millions of computationally curated categories. I wrote this book to regain our awareness, responsibility, agency, and control over the deep structure (Chomsky 1969) of concepts, thoughts, ideas, as well as our capacity to discern the surface structure of forms that emerge from the internet. In architecture and design, it was said that “form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling” (Sullivan 1896). But in the information forest of the mind, where plants are narratives and the soil is a mix of communication infrastructures (Bowker and Star 1999), form follows function insofar as function follows form (Weiss et al. 2014). For it is always a form-in-a-medium (Luhmann 2000). In this forest, “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified” (Bush 1945). Much of the work for this book has required me to return to the roots of this forest of interconnected branches, trails, systems, and morphologies, into a genealogy of my own education and upbringing. So I will start from the roots. This book is dedicated to my “forms of knowledge’, those I was born into and those I was able to create. To my origins, my family — the close ones and the extended ones, the past ones and the future ones — and to the forms of true and honest kinship I shared. Writing this would not have been possible without you.
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