All posts by colin angell

General Media Theory, Other

That’s Valid…?

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My grade twelve homeform teacher was one of the people who encouraged me the most to go to UBC. He went to Simon Fraser for BEd and once joked I reminded him of a younger version of himself — it was all the sweeter when he said I was “full of s—” when I asked what he’d meant in calling me facetious. We were his last class in his last year teaching, and he liked drawn out chats as much as he liked to talk over the entirety of a film’s run time, spare the long pauses with open faced palms and a big smiley “ah-ah-ahhh,” glancing at us in a darkened classroom to see if ‘we got it’ (imagine the sound of a seal eager to be fed).

He didn’t talk over Gattaca though. The 1996 sci-fi flick stars Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thrurman and is set in the near-future where eugenics is widespread, dividing society in perfected ‘valids’ and impure, naturally-conceived ‘invalids.’ Hawke plays an invalid, Vincient, who masquerades as the paralyzed — but valid — Olympic swimmer Jerome in a bid to go to space that would otherwise be impossible given the unconfirmed presence of heart defect. Every single morning, Vincient undergoes an extensive routine of meticulously hiding himself behind contacts and fingers printed in the shape of Jerome while scrubbing clean any bioindictors that would identify his true self.  That’s mad, man.

Anyway: this one’s for you, Joel.

The eugenics of Gattaca are multifaceted. Fertilization takes place in laboratory petri dishes as zygotes are screened and selected both for particular attributes like gender, complexion and intelligence and the absence of defects or inheritable diseases. The resulting effect is the proliferation of a caste system, powered by an invalid underclass resigned to menial, subservient social and economic positions. Genoism — discrimination of those due to their genetic profile — is technically prohibited but a principle practice in the hyper-corporate-capitalist future. Instantaneous and frequent DNA testing is everywhere and powered by a collective genetic registry, squashing any attempt for an invalid to circumnavigate their social roles.

Though (thankfully) our own society doesn’t practice eugenics, the concept of capitalist biometric surveillance is not foreign to us — no, not at all. Lindsay Anne Balfour authored an article which raises rightful suspicions toward Femtech: her term for platformized feminine health technology like menstruation and ovulation trackers on one’s smartphone (2024). Data from users is stored by these apps and have — and continue to be — sold to social media and advertising firms, becoming an implicit identifying category digitally for users. These data bases, though not collectivized or publicly accessible, constitute an analogous structural transposition of a genetic registry. Advertising-driven models of revenue for digital platforms commodifies user-sourced data, incentivizing and contextualizing the channels of information infrastructure toward a de facto confederated pool of identifying data. 

As media scholars, we should have no illusion that our advanced (and still rapidly growing) digital social spaces lack a reactive, considered legal framework that accurately represents their whole relationship to both the self and society. Though Balfour uses the example of the app Flo being charged in the US for misleading customers regarding data sales, personal data stored on these apps have few legal protections. FemTech rarely tracks data that warrants platforms being listed as a covered-entity under America’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. As such, these platforms have fewer restrictions on storing and selling data. She provides the example of a South Carolina bill designed to make abortion punishable by death — it’s not an unfounded question to the moral character of lawmakers so offended by access to healthcare in asking what end they’d go to in ‘bringing people to justice.’ What about tracked geospatial data of a user visiting a medical clinic? Beyond subpoenas, what if police proceed into the (disgustingly) unregulated territory of simply purchasing data from advertisers in search of a conviction?

In the face of such technology, users end up having their personal ‘self’ increasingly imprinted and fragmented across digital spheres. A person has the ready ability to use these information deposit-boxes as extensions of their mind, assisting in monitoring what they’d otherwise do themselves. Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this notion that people’s identities reflect separate but enmeshed characterizations of themself. (Weiss 2019). When biometrics identifiers are among those being tracked, this enmeshment becomes paradoxically intimate; user’s physical bodies are increasingly traced through apps as their data is liable to be shipped and shared with less-than-privy eyes. 

Okay, wait, let’s return to Gattaca. Again, we do not share the film’s fantasy of living in a genetically engineering civilization — the conversation regarding eugenics and biopolitics is its own can of worms. However, we can’t ignore its commentary on what advanced media technology has the potential to enable regarding how we interact with human identity. The genetic registry is of particular interest in this regard. It can be accessed and shared among any corporate entity to corroborate a DNA test against one another, returning a binary marker of the person before them as either ‘valid’ or ‘invalid’ — good or bad. In this action, they are robbed not only of any semblance of mobility, agency, or equality before their peers but of all of these virtues and rights we take for granted regarding the very act of self-conception. Vincent possesses every cognitive faculty which would let him go to space but is prohibited by an omnipresent registry that reduces his human potential to the delimitation of a collectivized knowledge base.

It’s best to proceed with my point in comparing the technology of Gattaca and Balfour’s concerns regarding FemTech. FemTech does not create or define a person as a living, breathing human. It does, however, draw increasingly sensitive categories around one’s digital self  — the way that our digital sphere conceives and represents the human. More important, however, is that this data becomes increasingly foreign to oneself and is, as evidenced through legal proceedings regarding such data, flowing further away from our explicit control. To think that current laws come close to matching the potential exploitative — or discriminative — features of digital technology made increasingly intricate year by year is both naive and explicitly wrong. Sci-Fi is one manner in which we speculate future outcomes of our current actions. In walking away from Gattaca, we must affirm a commitment to upholding the human behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves. 

References:

Balfour, Lindsay Ann. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 48, 2024, pp. 58-75.

Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.

Critical Comparison

Conversations of Ethical Evaluation in a Materialist Media Ontology

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By Colin Angell

Grant Bollmer offers to conversations of media theory — and specifically the ontology governing the metaphysical relationship between humans and media — a process-focussed system theory driven by the distinction of the two as independent actors co-constitutively in broader societal progression. “Our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters;” (176) the last sentences of his book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction summarizes both the essence and the forward-facing direction of his namesake materialist theory. Through his work, he refuses to view media’s relational position as subservient to humans and instead proposes that we ought to see them plainly for what they are before our eyes: physical manifestations of matter occupying the same spaces as our own biological forms. He fronts a view that holds them accountable to their material presence — as culpable agents with the capacity to originate consequential actions felt by other actors. It is with full intention that Bollmer introduces his theory with the impact-aware declarative: “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (1). 

Although Bollmer defines and sharpens such a non-static system through commentary on how both actors drive broader system change, it is through an understanding of Dennis M. Weiss’s essay Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots that this materialist framework becomes visible as lacking a distinct moral or ethical framework with which to conceptualize relational connotations of media agency. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” (231) Weiss similarly questions a representational ontology of humans and media while offering to supplement the materialist theory with a mandate for human-centred authenticity. While Bollmer teases ethical concerns, the purpose of this essay is to highlight how Weiss’s argument of the necessity for a human-based, empathic evaluation of human-technology interactions lend materialist media theory with the ethical foundations it presently lacks.

Notes on Bollmer

Bollmer’s materialist media theory is one that observes the physical forms of media as constituent objects in reality and their embedded meanings as aspects of their unique, fundamental traits. In introducing his book, he defines it as orienting academic discourse to how human reality has been altered by technology “beyond conscious knowledge of most individuals” in a manner that “representation alone cannot acknowledge. (Bollmer 3)” In challenging representation, Bollmer is referring to a perspective that sees media objects as primarily snared in idealism — as objects whose value exists only through an internal interpretive lens of their content — and instead suggests such items are “material, performative” actors in their own right with corresponding “material effects in organizing bodies, objects, and relations in the real world” (25). Referencing how video game portrayals of gender come to drive not simply individual conceptions of gender stereotypes but wider models of performed identity, he asserts that “to be represented in a democracy is directly articulated to media representation of identities, behaviors, and norms” as it through one’s identity being public that one is “acknowledged as a political actor” (32-33). Although a person exists independent of their portrayal, individual roles become attributed and applied to them through actors with entirely different life-cycles than that of themselves. 

It is here that the fundamental ontology of this materialist theory can be drawn. There is the presence of a clear distinction between a human and media that may act separately from one another but remain conjoined in co-producing each other’s meaning. Described further in his appeal to phenomenological affect theory, the materiality of a medium is understood as subject undergoing a “process of mattering” into a physical medium, leaving “subjects and objects are linked in relation, but in which these relations are inequivalent, even oppositional” (145). Transposing Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects, he argues that it is through an object “independently “support[ing] something independent” (147) that relational value can be observed as necessary for definition of one another while existing as separate entities entirely. For Bollmer, the ontology dictating human and media relations is one which reconciles both of their co-shaping capacities with the material confines with which they both exist in and perpetuate.

Weiss’s Ethical Suggestion

Weiss uses his article to present his belief that we require a human-centred framework from which we could ideally address the tensions of human-media relationships, progressed through a comparison of varying analyses of varying attitudes. Centreing his text around a pseudo-dialectic between the technologically-cynical Sherry Turkle and relatively optimistic views of Peter Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh, Weiss applies both views’ gazes on the emotive relationship between humans and technology. Introducing Turkle’s notion of relational artifacts — those that “have states of mind” and call forth the human desire for communication, connection, and nurturance (219) — Weiss cites her clinically observed opinion that these increasingly advanced “machines that exploit human vulnerabilities” (221) leave us “prone to anthropomorphize relational artifacts” and incubate inauthentic, hollowed connections with smudged boundaries “between genuine and simulated emotional responses” (222). However, he argues that Verbec proposes such a pessimistic view is “held captive by a modernist metaphysics that insists on the separation of subjects from objects, humans from artifacts” (223) when, in reality, “human beings are fundamentally interwoven with technology” that “structures and organizes the world” and “shape[s] our existence” relationally (224). 

One end result from this cross analysis is that of the conclusion offered by Weiss; that we must recognize a “view of the human condition, one in which technology takes a central place” (225-236). The potential stored in external media to progress social change while shackling our evaluations to a human-first approach. However, to further progress such a theory is stifled by paradigm shift regarding what we mean by the moniker external. External to what? Within our broader societal systems, it becomes necessary to distinctly conceptualize that humans and media are ontologically independent — where they exist external to one another — while exerting intimate influence over one another. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” Weiss pointing out that “contained within human culture is technology” places the previously described relationship as evidence of fundamentally distinct actors who are intimately woven into the identities of either or (231). 

Analyzing Ontological Agency

Bleeding through Bollmer’s book sporadically are statements suggestive of some scale of moral concern on the author’s end when proposing his theory. Returning again to his introductory proclamation that “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference,” (1) he waffles between wax and ernest laments that “materiality means we all exist together.” The latter quote, drawn from his tenth summative thesis, bottlenecks his opinion that “our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters” (176). Bollmer flirts with ethical concern, qualifying his critiques of representational theory by reaffirming “we must think critically about how female bodies are represented” (23) and decrying questions to the relevancy of such interpretations as a “reactionary position” basking in “discrimination, prejudice, and hatred” (24). However, it is only from a theory-orientational concern that he suggests this concern, continuing later that it’s a “task of media critique” to interpret representations as malleable “processes into which we have been indoctrinated through cultural and institutional forms.” (27)

It is here that we can underline Bollmer’s aversion to naming what ethical standards ought to guide our evaluation of human-media relationships — something that Weiss is less apprehensive toward. Similarly analyzing gendered technological objects, Weiss argues that there’s a “profound significance of human beings caring for vulnerable others” (230) that is “seldom given attention in philosophy of technology (228) which makes Turkle’s arguments so relevant. Placing “the cultural and institutional factors that shape the need for relational artifacts” (227) as a crucial vertex of analytical attention, Weiss underlines that our analyses must serve humans and not other actors. While Bollmer pulls his theory away from conflict in suggesting that “images and representations” ought to be analyzed in terms of their “performative materiality” (25), Weiss almost directly rebuts the former’s ethical apathy, articulating that “our focus ought not to be on the object world and the status of relational artifacts so much as on the role of caring for others in sustaining a human world” (231). 

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From here, we are presented with two places from which we might move forward. First, it is the reaffirmation of the need to constantly critique new theoretical perspectives with contemporary critiques not from an antagonistic angle but one that seeks to corroborate new creative directions. Second, it is the potential call for the author of baseline theories which present themselves as neutral to rise to the challenge and offer a more pronounced opinion regarding ethics. Commentaries on society cannot be neutral, especially when our argued ontology posits that we “we all exist together” (176). Rather than place appendaged cliches in conclusions out of convenience — even if meant well — it is the responsibility of media scholars to seize our capacity to challenge a priori conceptions as the independent agents are.

Works Cited

Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/.

Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.