Presider: Benjamen Walker (@benjamenwalker)
Hashtag Moderator: Aakash Sastry (@aakashsastry)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Consensual Hallucination: Fantasy in Public Life
Stories are one of the fundamental building blocks of society. How we tell those stories and assure their continuation has always been a mixture of tradition, practice, and technology. The presentations in this panel demonstrate just how deeply and profoundly the means of telling stories can effect their content. Of course, what is being told and the intended use of a technology can come into conflict, as we see in both Laren Burr and Molly Sauter presentations, both of which deal with varying levels of deception propagated by technologies that are usually treated as conduits of true and useful information. Fiction, whether it is purposefully masquerading as an accurate account of facts or designed to offer an alternative reality, can be immensely useful to those of us that think critically about the maintenance of the status quo. Iskandar Zulkarnain’s work on “playable nationalism” and Amy Papaelias and Aaron Knochel’s work on anti-racist ARGs show how the speculative can become the prescriptive or even the aspirational. All of the presenters demonstrate the power and promise of fiction to bring about productive reflection and opportunities for change.
Lauren Burr (@burrlauren) Doing It Wrong On Purpose: The Creative Misuse of Social Media
During a TEDxToronto event on October 26, 2012, Twitter handle @BrendleWhat sent out an inquiry: “Why is the City of Toronto taking bikes from @TedXToronto and throwing them into a furnace? #TedXToronto #BikeFurnace.” This single tweet sparked a flood of other similar reports that effectively hijacked the conference’s Twitter stream until the organizers reassured everyone that the police were not, in fact, burning bicycles. The #BikeFurnace prank made local news headlines as an unusually sophisticated case of event trolling. It was also a serendipitous example of an emerging genre of electronic literature that Rob Wittig and Mark Marino have termed netprov, or “networked improv literature.”
According to Wittig, netprov is a digital art form “that creates written stories that are networked, collaborative and improvised in real time.” It encompasses spontaneous and planned acts of fictional role-playing on social media, including a particular subset of creative Twitter bots and the occasional Internet hoax. Often compared to alternate reality games (ARGs), netprov uses the same strategies of participatory transmedia storytelling but differs through its notable ambivalence to game elements. It also distinguishes itself from earlier forms of electronic literature by its choice of social media as a platform.
As an experimental creative writing genre, netprov emerged as a social critique of both its own topical content and the digital networks on which it unfolds, fitting itself comfortably into sites of real-world dialogue. Unsuspecting bystanders can thus find themselves straddling several simultaneous realities, legitimately unsure as to whether the described events are fact or fiction, or where the boundaries lie between them. Netprov is a new phenomenon, having been developed only within the past three years, and it continues to wrestle with the critical and ethical implications of bringing fiction into the realm of social media. In this talk, I draw on theories of hybrid and x-reality as conceptualized by Adriana De Souza e Silva and Beth Coleman, as well as the ethical principles of transmedia design articulated by Andrea Phillips and Markus Montola, to examine several recent examples of Twitter-centric netprov that both coincided with real-world events and were believed to varying degrees and consequences by their audiences. Stemming from my doctoral work on the politics of pervasive media genres that span both physical and virtual spaces, this talk illustrates what happens when fiction and reality collide in the space of social media.
Iskandar Zulkarnain (@zhoel13) “Playable” Nationalism: Nusantara Online and the Gamic Reconstruction of National History
In this paper, I look at the development and distribution of Nusantara Online, an Indonesian-made massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) that imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Indonesian archipelago. The game, developed collaboratively by Sangkuriang Internasional and Telegraph Studio—two emerging start-up companies—uses the history of three major kingdoms in the history of Indonesian archipelago prior to the creation of the nation state—Majapahit, Pajajaran, and Sriwijaya—as material for its background stories. As an “allegorithm”—historical allegory and algorithmic model—for the Indonesian nation, the game suggests a distinct type of digital nationalism that I dub as “playable” nationalism. This concept captures the formulation of “Nusantara,” an earlier term for the Indonesian archipelago, as the idealized yet playful version of Indonesia, a version emphasizing the principles of digital collaboration. By engaging discourses developed in game studies, Southeast Asian studies, and post-colonial studies, I treat the game as an attempt to create an immersive setting in which player’s nationalistic experience is both “open-ended” and “programmed.” I also demonstrate how the game’s “playable” nationalism is rooted in a complex process of national identity formation in the post-Suharto public debates in Indonesia. Exemplifying the characteristic of Indonesian “digital generation,” the developers of Nusantara Online generally embrace new media technologies. Yet, they worry that the Indonesian people’s excessive consumption of foreign ICT products will lead to the crystallization of consumer mentality, thus uprooting Indonesian nationalistic values. At the same time, these developers also seek to present a polyvalent meaning of Indonesian history in the form of video games. At first sight, the game’s model of “playable” nationalism gives the impression of an alternative expression of everyday nationalism, emerging from outside official state discourses. Yet, closer consideration of the game, exposes the limitations of the game’s model of nationalism, which constrains players’ experience with its software mechanism, represents a conventional version of national history, and offers perplexing images of racial classification. In the end, my analysis of Nusantara Online’s “playable” nationalism can shed light on the ways in which national identity formations and technological visions are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive, even in such a popular entertainment form as video games.
Molly Sauter (@oddletters) An Exploration of Civic Fiction: A Gay Girl in Damascus and the Cosmopolitan Romance of the Digital Bridge Figure
In this paper, I explore the concept of “civic fiction,” and its implications for digital cosmopolitanism in news coverage, through the example of the Gay Girl in Damascus/Amina blog hoax perpetuated by Tom MacMaster in 2011. This paper serves to further define and situate civic fiction within existing theories of communication, performance, witnessing, fiction, and testimonio. I am defining the phenomenon of civic fiction as the purposeful construction of counter-factual narratives that, by virtue of the counter-factual itself, allow an individual or an event to take part in a civic dialogue or space that would otherwise be inaccessible, or that they perceive would be inaccessible. Through the creation of the Amina persona, MacMaster altered the persona through which the online world interacted with him, in order to change how his contributions to conversations on Middle East politics were received.
This paper uses this example of civic fiction to critique the cosmopolitan bridge figure described by Kwame Anthony Appiah and later Ethan Zuckerman, specifically its role in modern international news coverage. Amina was originally received by Western news sources as bridge figure, someone who could “straddle the borders between cultures,” acting as “an interpreter between cultures…an individual both groups could trust and identify with…” (Zuckerman, Rewire, p 171). Zuckerman specifics aligns “bridge blogger” figures with modern international news coverage, assigning them the role of translating, contextualizing, and making accessible events in faraway places. Zuckerman had originally envisioned these figures directly attracting a global audience of readers, and the appeal of the “bridge blogger” figure to the news industry is clear. Especially in a journalistic age wherein foreign bureaus are being swiftly dismantled, the attraction of readily available, engaging local content that can be quickly adapted for a Western audience at the point of interest cannot be denied.
This paper argues that in being received into the role of the bridge figure/blogger, the Amina persona, who purported to be a Syrian lesbian while actually being performed by an American man, created a permissive space for a progressive Western audience to engage with the complex politics of a far-away conflict on familiar terms while operating under the idea that they were engaging in cosmopolitan solidarity across international lines. The Gay Girl blog presented a testimonio-like opportunity for solidarity-building and the extension of sympathy, performing an encounter with the subaltern while never venturing beyond the progressive Western confines of its own conception. The Amina persona effectively performed a bridge-figure because she was, in fact, a mirror.
Ultimately, the civic fiction concept allows for an interrogation of anxieties regarding the success of cosmopolitanism as practiced in the digital space. These anxieties reflect a perceived crisis of sympathy, and a lack of faith in the ability of Western audiences to meaningfully extend sympathy across cultural lines. The goal of this paper is to unpack those anxieties and, through the civic media concept, explore their implications for the digital cosmopolitanism project and modern international journalism.
Amy Papaelias & Aaron Knochel (@fontnerd & @artisteducator) Let’s Talk About…: An ARG in Spatial Dialogue about Race on Campus
Racial tensions play out in dynamic ways on the campuses of American universities. From parties themed by ugly racial stereotypes to blatant acts of hate crimes(1), the university campus provides a diorama of the complexity of race relations and identity politics that are more easily hidden outside the realm of vital young adult sociality. Over the past two school years on the campus of SUNY New Paltz(2), these tensions and complexities have erupted in two heinous acts of anonymous racist tagging within campus buildings that provoked the campus community to respond with a one-day symposium entitled “Let’s Talk About … ” Through a series of speakers and breakout sessions, the event brought together over 300 students, faculty and staff to discuss issues of race, gender and identity.
In order to continue to engage the campus community in dialogue about race relations, we have initiated a design process that spatializes the dialogue on race and campus life to augment the campus geography as a social space. Through geo-tagging technologies, spatial mapping, theories of psychogeographic discovery and interventionist tactics of street theater and art performance, our design process looks to expand the ongoing dialogue of the symposium “Let’s Talk About…” by bringing the dialogue into context: an augmented reality game (ARG) that facilitates place-based knowledge, layers past and present in a historiography of space, and creates dynamic but fleeting social provocations. Our appropriation of the ARG genre, a.k.a. alternate reality gaming, moves this practice from its locus within fantasy in transmedia storytelling to creating spaces of social interaction that augment events, history and people that are a part of our campus community. Augmentation in this sense is the realization of radical intersubjectivity that is provoking reflections on representation and the subject within varied fields of both space and time. In addition to creating a dialogic space along the lines of the “Let’s Talk About…” symposium, our design process is an inquiry to the deployment of web connectivity and mobile computing as enacting spatial dialogue immanent to the campus geographies that mold our social topography.
During the Spring 2014 semester, undergraduate art education and graphic design students will develop a working prototype of the “Let’s Talk About…” ARG. Students will collect stories of historical and current events surrounding race on campus and develop an interactive environment in which the campus can actively participate. As art and design faculty, we believe it is crucial to engage future makers and educators with practices that situate the mobile web as a site for embracing and investigating complex social issues.
Our presentation will document the design process, from conception to final working prototype, and how it is informed by theories in critical race theory, game design, mobile computing and spatial dialogue for bringing about a discussion of race on campus that is grounded in the history and peoples that make any campus vital, equitable, and empowering for all of its students.