New Media

Theories and Practices of Digitextuality

Anna Everett, John T. Caldwell, Anna Everett, John T. Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415939966
• eBook ISBN: 9781135372590
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

The mushroom-like growth of new media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. The proliferation of technologies like DVDs, MP3s and the Internet has freed the public from what we used to understand as mass media. In the face of such seismic shifts and ruptures, the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of film and TV studies are being shaken to their core. New Media demands a necessary rethinking of the field. Writing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, the scholars here outline new theses and conceptual frameworks capable of engaging the numerous facets of emergent digital technology.

part one
digitextual deconstructions

one
digitextuality and click theory

theses on convergence media in the digital age

anna everett

The advent of the digital revolution in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century media culture apparently confirms both Jean-Luc Godard’s belief in the “end of cinema” and other media critics’ claims that we have even entered a posttelevision age.¹ Driving this ontological shift in the infrastructures of many Western media forms and practices is the near ubiquity of difficult-to-regulate satellites, cable TV, analog, and digital video recorders, computer camcorders, and other mass-market technologies outside the proprietary panopticon of big media corporations. Moreover, the rapid fin-de-siècle diffusion of such consumer-grade digital technologies as the CD-ROM, the DVD, the Internet, virtual reality, and wireless communications systems portends even more radical challenges to traditional media industries and their increasingly vulnerable representational hegemonies, as the symptomatic and infamous case of the Napster music-file-sharing system and other open-source code technologies have denoted. In response, big media corporations have begun a frenzied bout of high-profile megamergers, and concomitant new-media colonization—or is it cannibalization? (We’ll return to this later.)

Still, the spectacular proliferation of these new technologies has multiplied exponentially that which W. Russell Neuman and other observers describe as “the fragmentation of the mass audience.”² After abiding the economic, production, exhibition, storytelling, taste, distribution, and scheduling dictates of traditional media powers, this fragmented mass audience has seized upon and been liberated, after a fashion, by a plethora of on-demand media services for consumers, (including what Hakim Bey and others call “data piracy”). These audience dispersal services and outlets include Replay; MSN TV Service (formerly WebTV); TiVo; both so-called mom-and-pop (independent) video rental stores and their super retail agent counterparts (Blockbuster Video, for example); private and professionally produced home-video archives, computer game arcades, the Internet, MP3 and Freenet peer-to-peer audio and video file swapping (downloading) systems; and direct broadcast satellites.

Figure 1.1. TiVo: One of several time-shifting digital videorecorder systems that upset traditional television industry practices and reconfigure television flow for consumer use. ©TiVo.

At the same time, film and television studies’ theoretical and pedagogical foundations are similarly being shaken. At stake for our expanding discipline is nothing less than a necessary rethinking of the field in the face of these seismic shifts and ruptures.³ A continued failure by cinema and television scholars to keep current with and, preferably, take the lead in redefining the discipline’s continuing relevance as these new media paradigms take shape and power will result in cinema studies’ repositioning from avant-garde to rear-guard formation in the unrelenting battle of late capitalism’s culture wars. Ours must be an aggressive and accessible participatory agenda in this emergent new-media landscape. Otherwise, the field’s relegation to the margins of the ascendant information economy is all but assured. Yet cinema and TV studies are still painfully negotiating mutually acceptable disciplinary boundary crossings, which the evolving digital media have already, to some extent, necessarily hastened despite our willingness and preparedness to engage with this inevitable brave new world. After all, we have only recently reached an attenuated consensus on the differing natures of cinematic and televisual texts as unique objects of study. With this battle barely in a state of field-expanding détente, the digital revolution has introduced new visual and aural media codes that draw extensively from the medium specificities of film, video, and radio while introducing new characteristics and imperatives that are properties of digital technologies alone. These are some of the primary issues that have inspired my thinking about digital matters and that lead to my formulation of the neologism digitextuality. Among other concerns, this concept focuses on the intersection of established media modes, codes, and payloads, and those emerging within the frameworks of new media. It also strives to examine and proffer useful ideas about the unique features and characteristics of the evolving new-media technologies that separate them from the old without forcing an untenable equivalence in either instance.

Although my formulation of digitextuality chronologically follows such important recent publications on new media dealing specifically with their indebtedness to film and TV studies and practices as John Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (1995), Margaret Morse’s Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyber-culture (1998), Peter Lunenfeld’s Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (2000) and Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001), digitextuality has been conceptually central to my work for some time now.⁴

digital matters: what is digitextuality?

Digitextuality, then, is a neologism that at its most basic combines two familiar word images: the overdetermined signifier digital, which denotes most of computer-driven media’s technological processes and products, and Julia Kristeva’s term intertextuality. (It also is indebted to John Caldwell’s far-reaching work on televisuality.) With the two terms conjoined in this way, digitextuality suggests a more precise or utilitarian trope capable at once of describing and constructing a sense-making function for digital technology’s newer interactive protocols, aesthetic features, transmedia interfaces and end-user subject positions, in the context of traditional media antecedents. Moreover, digitextuality is intended to address, with some degree of specificity, those marked continuities and ruptures existing between traditional (“old”) media and their digital (“new”) media progeny and, especially, how new media use gets constructed. Given this explanatory agenda, it is useful at this point to invoke Kristeva’s ideas about intertextuality to better clarify the term’s influence on my thinking and theoretical formulation of digitextuality.

When Kristeva first deployed the term intertextuality in her 1974 doctoral thesis Revolution in Poetic Language, it was at the height of psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, semiotics, and other high theories’ phenomenal influence in the humanities fields, in literary and creative circles, and especially in film studies. In her discussion of certain processes of linguistic structures and practices, Kristeva uses intertextuality effectively as a heuristic trope. She writes, “In this connection we examined the formation of a specific signifying system—the novel—as the result of a redistribution of different sign-systems: carnival, courtly poetry, scholastic discourse. The term intertextuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another . . . [and] demands a new articulation .... If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an intertextuality), one then understands that its ‘place’ of enunciation and its denoted ‘object’ are never single, complete and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated.”⁵ More concisely, Kristeva has remarked, that “‘Every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text is absorption and transformation of another text.’”⁶ For me, Kristeva’s point that the novel’s literary comprehensibility obtains in its intertextual redistribution of several preexisting cultural sign systems into a “field of transpositions” demanding a new articulation is extremely salient when we think about digital media’s imbrication in and rearticulation of analog and other traditional media significations.

For example, we comprehend the information-richness and graphic density of websites and other Internet data because we are habituated to the dense image, text, and graphic design schemes previously developed by newspapers and magazines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, we can recognize digital media’s increasing sophistication in flash animation and streaming media technologies as a field of transpositions because their sources of sound and animation are recodings or rearticulations of cinema, television, and radio’s unique signifying systems. As Kristeva notes, “The new signifying system may be produced with the same signifying material; in language, for example, the passage may be made from narrative to text. Or it may be borrowed from different signifying materials: the transposition from a carnival scene to the written text, for instance” (111).

Where digitextuality departs from Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality is that the former moves us beyond a “new signifying system” of quotations and transpositions, to a metasignifying system of discursive absorption whereby different signifying systems and materials are translated and often transformed into zeroes and ones for infinite recombinant signifiers. In other words, new digital media technologies make meaning not only by building a new text though absorption and transformation of other texts, but also by embedding the entirety of other texts (analog and digital) seamlessly within the new. What this means is that earlier practices of bricolage, collage, and other modernist and postmodernist hybrid representational strategies and literary gestures of intertextual referentiality have been expanded for the new demands and technological wizardry of the digital age.⁷ Nonetheless, our abilities to understand the new modes and codes of digital media texts today are still often predicated upon successfully decoding their semiotic densities and “semiotic polyvalence” in terms of earlier media structures, what Kristeva calls “an adherence to different sign-systems” (111).

Digitextuality, then, is not only concerned with digital media’s remediation (to borrow Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term) of our practices of intertextual reading and writing given our need to negotiate between radically different sign systems (historical and contemporary), but also explores digital media’s own emerging aesthetics, ethics, and rhetorics in light of the media convergence phenomenon in this time of ascendant globalization and corporate media monopolization. An important part of digital media culture is bound up with the idea of interactivity and expectations for its functionality. As media convergence strategies evolve, a contest is now afoot to determine and delimit how this crucial feature will look and perform. The question is, Will interactivity achieve a political economy in terms of a proconsumerist idea of use value, or a procorporate, profit-motive imperative of exchange value? I return to this issue through a discussion of the significance of bits, sound bites, and digital media’s computer determinism later on in the chapter.

I begin with a schematic outline of digitextuality as process, product, and discourse; I continue with what will be a polite rant of sorts against new media’s reified rhetoric of the posthuman in which I discuss digitextuality as a representational process and end-user practice—that is, what I am calling “click theory” and the lure of sensory plenitude. Subtending all this is my contention that we are witnessing the rise of a new cultural dominant, one marked by the digital convergence of film, television, music, sound, and print media. To start, let us consider, briefly, some familiar exemplars of digitextuality’s signifying systems, practices, and processes.

ontologies of digitextuality

In Televisuality, John Caldwell rightly rejects a distillation of film and television spectatorship into opposing ontological camps. Here, film studies’ gaze theory proposes a spectatorship consisting of sustained, dream-state hallucinations “focused on the pleasures of the image” (original emphasis) in contrast to television viewership imagined as a distracted or “ ‘more casual’ form of looking,” termed “glance theory,” due to television’s interruptible cluttered image and sound flows.⁸ For Caldwell, such “regime of vision” approaches miss important commonalities of reception existing between the two media systems.

I suggest that digitextuality is a concept capable of bridging this epistemological chasm because it strives to understand digital media’s technological proficiency at cannibalizing both media’s modes of production and consumption techniques, particularly those of television. Whereas glance theory denigrates “television based on the viewer’s ‘fundamental inattentiveness’” (26), user practices of digitextuality, especially as practiced by that generation who have grown up with computer games, MTV-style television aesthetics,⁹ and the Internet, suggest an alternative. Increasingly, today’s sophisticated media consumers use television, the computer (the Internet, computer games), print material, and the telephone all at once. Such a radically transformed media environment suggests that perhaps we are witnessing media users’ development of what might easily be described as a fundamental hyperattentiveness. Have apparatuses of convergence and new multimedia texts necessitated an activation of more than the proverbial ¹⁰ percent of new media consumers’ brainpower when interacting with new technologies? It seems that co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• list of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• part one Digitextual deconstructions
• part two Digitextual aesthetics
• part three Prefiguring digitextuality
• part four Digitextual practices
• notes on Contributors
• index