The Modern Mind

For the student, especially for the graduate student, realization and spontaneous clarity are a wanted, but seldom experience event. Then, when we do experience it, we are shocked to find that, most times, we are horribly wrong. What follows is an exploration of such an event. This event occurred yesterday during the middle of a discussion I was providing tech support for. I read the following passage from Persuasive Games:

Situations like this help explain why we often despise the role of computers in our lives. They are inflexible systems that cannot empathize, that attempt to treat everyone the same. This is partly true, but it is not a sufficient explanation of a computational procedural expression. When the human clerks and supervisors in the retail store agree to forgo their written policy, they are not really "breaking procedure." Instead, they are mustering new processes - for example, a process for promoting repeat business, or for preventing a commotion - and seemlessly blending them with the procedure for product returns.This distinction underscores an important point about processes in general and computational process in particular: often, we think of procedures as tests that maintain the edges of situations...there is no reason one could not model the more complex, human-centered product return interaction computationally. (emphasis mine) (Bogost 2007: 6-7).

This sentiment is important as, in most social theory in the world I inhabit, the underlying discussion that created this sentiment is usually ignored. This sentiment has been around since the early 1900s but only since the mid-90s has it really begun to make its way into more discussions. The earliest example I can find is a quote from Georg Simmel:

I will now contrast this discussion of the general concept of culture with a specific relationship within contemporary culture. If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say – subject to many individual exceptions - that the things that determine and surround our lives such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined. This does not need to be shown in detail. (Simmel 1997 On Culture: 38).

This sentiment is that there is a line between human interaction and non-human interaction. This sentiment is perhaps best captured in the Bruno Latour book We Have Never Been Modern:

From Blogger Pictures

This chart is tricky. First, we have on the left (1) Non-humans, nature. (2) is Human Culture and (3) is a hybrid of the 2. Let's go through this in order.

(1) is Nature. Humans make things to conquer nature, to control it. In many ways, this act is a pure thing. It is what we, as moderns, want to do. We want to be in control of nature. (2) is Human Culture. This is a pure form as well as human culture is in its own little bubble outside of nature. The most interesting thing that has happened to human culture in thousands of years is what Mumford would call the Re-awakening of the Human Mega-Machine. A gigantic procedure to human existence. That is as simple as I can think to make these distinctions. Here is where (3) comes in. Through the process of industrialization, we have essentially seperated ourselves from nature by creating routines, procedures, to govern our interactions. A work of translation is anything that does something human culture needs that nature usually does. For example, an oven provides fire with which to cook our food in a highly routinized and predictible way.

The thing here, getting back to Bogost, is that all of these things are created by us to meld culture and nature, yet are done so in such a way that it exists outside of both.

This is where my critique of video games comes from.

Video games are a hybrid of the cultural play-character with that of technology. Play-form, as I have posted about previously, is essentially the essence of culture. The issue with video games, is that video games are a portion of the essence of culture yet are still separate from us in the same way that an oven, a refrigerator, an ATM, or a return procedure is.

Bogost's work is the first I really read that has actually tried to do something about it. The simple quote: "there is no reason one could not model the more complex, human-centered product return interaction computationally." is indicative of what I wish more video game programmers would at least try to approach. However, the procedure for creating video games (indie games aside), is as such that seeing outside the procedure might be more difficult than actually doing it.

So, this is where I am at. I'm excited that this logical leap ahead has occurred. Still and all, it will take some searching through the annals of reading and theory that are in my mind to really and fully understand where everything about modernity and modernization fits.