"WikiVerse: Information Narratives and the Flickering Signifier"
From Robo Culture Wiki
In the 1995 cyberpunk film Strange Days, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the narrative circles around fictional SQUID technology. SQUID is an acronym for Super-Conducting Quantum Interface Device. These devices allow the transmission of one person’s lived experience directly into the cerebral cortex of another, allowing the user to access experiences they have not lived themselves, such as robberies, sex romps or skydiving. The point-of-view of the user of SQUID technology thus becomes assimilated into the point-of-view of the SQUID recording. The notion of a transfer of lived experiences direct into the human brain functions as an extreme example of the ways that material information (in this case, lived experienced) becomes translated into coded computer data, and then re-consumed by the human subject. In the second chapter of N. Katherine Hayles book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” she explores the modernist idea of the sign/signified within the discursive context of the posthuman. In this presentation, like in Hayles’ chapter, I will explore these ideas both in relation to technology itself, in addition to cultivating an analysis of Wikipedia as an example of an information narrative.
Hayles makes the distinction between material modes of information technology, such as books and newspapers, and newer forms of electronic technology. In the case of reading a book, the relationship between signifier and signified is simple because the words materially exist on the page to be read. The book can be put away on a shelf and left there for decades, and those typewritten characters will still be there. In the case of digital technologies, the relationship between signifier/signified becomes significantly more complex. Information, which Hayles distinguishes as separate from meaning, is input into a computer with, for example, the tapping of keys with human fingers. As Hayles explains, this functions as “a model of signification in which no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between signifier/signified.” [1] Unlike with using a typewriter or a pen and paper, the striking of a single key can change massive amounts of data. An entire library of books, when input into a computer, can be completely obliterated with, for example, a simple DOS command like “format c.” The text of a book itself can be encoded in different ways when input into a computer. For example, in addition to text-based data, a book can also be scanned in JPEG image format, which in itself presents a completely different coded system than the physical pages of a book. To elaborate further, when a book is burned in fire, that text is gone. When data is corrupted or lost on a computer hard drive, it can sometimes be retrieved with the help of file recovery software. Hayles description of data as constantly in transit and subject to numerous changes which can affect it system-wide shows exactly the way that information is caught up in a broad, multifaceted process in which language interacts with the workings of machines.
The notion of the flickering signifier is based upon Jacques Lacan’s theory of the floating signifier. As Hayles explains, “In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example, an ink mark on a page. Rather, it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by relevant codes.”[2] The floating signifier presents an overarching means of understanding this computerized system wherein massive linguistic changes are capable of being made with relatively little work. As such, meanings in this system are not monolithically stable, but rather subject to an infinitely vast field of fluctuations. Hayles describes the modernist view as presence/absence, for example akin to the Freudian notion of castration, which defines an object by what it has or what it does not have. Or to continue with the book analogy, the presence of a book is the presence of information; when that book is destroyed, that information becomes absent. For posthumanism, information no longer exists in the binary opposites of presence/absence, but rather is defined by pattern and randomness. As Hayles explains, “Randomness is the contrasting term which allows pattern to be understood as such.”[3] The notion of pattern/randomness fits is articulated with Hayles examples of how computers encode, decode and even experience code corruption or mutation. The signifier becomes subjected to a myriad of transformations which have never before been possible.
Information narratives are texts which Hayles describes as expressing this tension between pattern and absence. Here, through an examination of examples of cyberpunk literature, she traces the way that human subjectivity and computer programs interact. She states, “The contrast between the body’s limitations and cyberspace’s power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence.”[4] It is this notion of the narrative that I wish to explore further, since these interactions between human subjectivity and digital machines, in terms of the notion of pattern and presences, seem to be exemplified exactly when looking at Wikipedia. Hayles explores how narrative functions in “I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense White Dot” by Mark Leyner echo the pattern/randomness inherent in posthumanism. She examines the disjointed narrative, stating “the narrative leaps from scene to scene, all of them linked by only the most tenuous and arbitrary threads. The incongruities make the narrative a kind of textual android created through patterns of assembly and disassembly.”[5] Like Leyner’s short story, Wikipedia functions as a textual android. While Wikipedia is not in itself a literary work of narrative, at least in classical terms of narrative, posthumanism inidcates the ways that such isolated categories are slowly being eroded by the ever-present forces of technology. I argue that Wikipedia functions as a perfect example of an information narrative. Wikipedia has numerous sections in dozens of different languages with entries dealing with a wide-range of topics from grilled cheese sandwiches to medieval history to The X-Files. What is Wikipedia if not a narrative of history, science and culture? A Wikipedia entry discussing Judy Garland might be stored on the same server as the entry on necrotizing fasciitis. These two seemingly random entries may appear random in proximity to each other, much in the way that Leyner’s short story meanders in a way that suggests how information exists in random and interconnected constellations rather than linear narratives. Wikipedia offers a way of turning randomness into pattern, as information is arranged and an infinite number of connections are made between its millions of entries.
Hayles points out, “The shift of emphasis from ownership to access is another manifestation of the underlying transition from presence/absence to pattern/randomness.” [6] With presence, information is physical and it is much easier to delineate the have-nots from the haves. If one has no money, then one cannot afford to buy books, journals or other forms of physical information available to them. The issue of access is much more significant in terms of the posthuman because it deemphasizes possession, a modernist notion that is tied to the rise of the novel. Because information available on a computer is immaterial and easily replicated without cost, anyone who has access to the internet, be it through their own home computer, laptop, school computer lab or public library, can access it. Wikipedia does not differentiate among those who utilize its databases. The wide range of subject positions which each person simultaneously inhabits are irrelevant when accessing Wikipedia, as aspects of identity such as gender or ethnicity become subsumed into a new existence as an internet IP number or Wikipedia username.
The texts which Hayles highlights as examples of the information narrative are significant because, unlike Wikipedia, they are still grounded in more the traditional conceptualization of the novel. While their structures echo this notion of the flickering signifier, they still can be printed into book form and read in a physically linear fashion. Once published, these texts cannot be changed, with the exception of by the original author in a future published edition. They thematically and stylistically reflect the notion of pattern/randomness, but they are in themselves cemented as texts in their final form. If Wikipedia is also an example of an information narrative, than what it presents is a further evolution into the notions that texts offer a wide-range of constantly shifting patterns. Unlike Hayles’ examples, Wikipedia possesses the unique capability of self-proliferation and evolution. Since the flickering signifier suggests the endless fluidity of meaning through the different systems of linguistic changes information encounters when it is exchanged, converted and uploaded to the internet, it strikes a particular resonance when looking at Wikipedia. Wikipedia, like the narrative of human history itself, is constantly edited, written and rewritten. As Hayles states, “Cyberspace is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen.”[7] Wikipedia does not offer a simple unidirectional top-down transmission of information, but its interactive user interface allows Wikipedia to transform, as Hayles describes, the internet into a landscape where it is possible for these narratives to be written by anyone. One does not necessarily have to have an account on Wikipedia to edit entries, although some entries are locked against editing by unregistered users. To reach back to the notion of access, any single person has the ability to write the narrative, removing this function from singular person or institution and putting it into the hands of millions of users from different countries all over the planet.
For Wikipedia, in comparison to literature where a novel has an author, the writer is subsumed by the system. Individuals are replaced by user names and IP numbers, and while Wikipedia does log who creates and edit entries, individual subjectivity is erased and replaced by arbitrary numbers or pseudonyms. For Wikipedia, the construction of the reader certainly brings forth some interesting issues in terms of the subject. Hayles states, “The construction of narrator as a manipulator of codes has important implications for the construction of reader. The reader is similarly constituted through a layered archeology that moves from listener to reader to decoder.”[8] In the case of Wikipedia, the distinction between reader and narrator can be dissolved, allowing the two positions to become assimilated. Of course, as I have mentioned, that shift in position for the reader is not always possible and there are limits to the possibilities for agency for users of Wikipedia.
By looking at a text such as Wikipedia, in particular when comparing it to the linearity and modernism of more conventional types of material text, the broad range of possibilities for information in the modern historical context comes into sharp focus. Wikipedia is the perfect example of an information narrative. It is precisely its form and interface that it highlights the nature of information in the digital age as a flexible, broad and densely connected arrangement of patterns held together by numerous digital and linguistic systems of code, and the possibilities for human interaction with such systems. It should be acknowledged here that it is problematic looking at Wikipedia as a wholly democratizing force, and that is not my central focus here. There are certainly arguments to be made, that as a system it possesses both checks and balances for its information, in addition to holding possibilities for abuse. What Wikipedia does provide is an arena where the process of the flickering signifier can be seen directly in action. It is an information narrative which experiences constant system-wide changes. The format of the information presented has every bit as much to do with the technology itself than it does with its users. As Hayles suggests, “If my assessment – that the emphasis on information technologies foregrounds pattern/randomness and pushes presence/absence into the background – is correct, the implications extend beyond narrative into many cultural arenas.”[9] Indeed, the implications for the broader cultural context are far-reaching and like Wikipedia itself, in constant motion and evolution. As technology itself advances, the paradigm will continue to shift, requiring us to further evaluate the consequences of the interactions between man and machine.
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