One of the great fault lines in the vast space of our media culture today is summed up in the keywords: datafication, procedurality, and simulation.
On one side of the divide are those communities that are still committed to a view of the individual human as part of a historical process—communities that connect themselves to the past through coherent narratives. These communities will likely prefer media such as print fiction and traditional film that support the telling of those stories, even if they choose to read their fiction in the form of ebooks or watch their films on tablets. They will prefer political parties that align themselves with traditional strong narratives such as liberal democracy, socialism, extreme nationalism, and perhaps even fascism.
On the other side will be those communities that favor procedural interfaces for social interaction and procedural media for entertainment—video games instead of movies or movies that reflect and draw on the procedurality of video games. For these communities, as we have said, simulation replaces history, and in the extreme form they live in an infinitely repayable present.
On one side of the divide are those communities that are still committed to a view of the individual human as part of a historical process—communities that connect themselves to the past through coherent narratives. These communities will likely prefer media such as print fiction and traditional film that support the telling of those stories, even if they choose to read their fiction in the form of ebooks or watch their films on tablets. They will prefer political parties that align themselves with traditional strong narratives such as liberal democracy, socialism, extreme nationalism, and perhaps even fascism.
On the other side will be those communities that favor procedural interfaces for social interaction and procedural media for entertainment—video games instead of movies or movies that reflect and draw on the procedurality of video games. For these communities, as we have said, simulation replaces history, and in the extreme form they live in an infinitely repayable present.
Datafication
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The theme of the film Moneyball (2011) was the datafication of baseball.
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Trouble with the Curve (2012) was a response to Moneyball, posing the question whether the game really had changed.
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This analysis of endorsements by the Democratic presidential candidates by the FiveThirtyEight team illustrates their concept of data journalism in contrast to traditional political analysis. This is exactly the same dichotomy as the one depicted in MoneyBall and Trouble with the Curve. Not surprisingly the FiveThirtyEight site also covers sports as well as politics.
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Republican senator James Inhofe refutes climate change with a snowball he found.
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The Procedural and the Mechanical
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Chaplin, Modern Times (1936), a classic, comic critique of mechanization.
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In contrast to Chaplin, Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet was originally performed in 1922, seems to celebrate mechanization.
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Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927): the robot as the symbol of the threat to humanity in the age of mechanization
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Stanley Kubrik's 2001 (1968): The malevolent machine is now a computer, Hal, the personification of the procedural.
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History and Simulation
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A playthrough of Sid Meier's Civilization 4, which treats history as simulation.
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Gonzalo Frasca's political game September 12th, a good example of what Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric.
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Links to further sites and videos (images included for reasons of copyright)
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Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine have embraced the notion that recording and following data leads to a new degree of self-knowledge of "the quantified self" |
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The Pew Research Center is a great resource for attitudes about the Internet and technology in general.
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Many "cultural lists" can be found on the Rolling Stone site.
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The Modern Library's top 100 books lists is an example of what remains of the notion of a cultural elite.
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