personal-impersonal+Forces+(Jenkins)

impersonal and personal forces, Adrian Mackenzie

Wikipedia Definitions of words I did not completely know:

Problematization: make into or regard as a problem requiring a solution Signification: the representation or conveying of meaning. Alterity: the state of being other or different; otherness. normative/normativity: has specialized contextual meanings in several academic disciplines. Generically, it means //relating to an ideal standard or model.// [|[1]] In practice, it has strong connotations of relating to a //typical// standard or model (see also [|normality] ).

Technological Action is the act of interfacing with technology or technology based objects. The big examples that Mackenzie references are information and biotechnology (197), but he also points out that we interface with technology on a a whole range of different levels in our everyday life. The way we use / interact with our cell phones, computers, our thermostats, our remote controls. He notes that Technological action both "abstracts from and concretizes existing social relations. It generates singular intersections of historically and materially specific impersonal and personal forces." (198)

TV B-Gone and 209 Codes: 'meaning and action'

"Making something technological is a deeply social process that translates, borrows or re-routes social relations through different material arrangements. Changing these arrangements materially affects social life." (198) The TV B-Gone was a tool that shut off any TV within a certain distance from the user. There was also another device developed that did the same thing for cell phone signals that was the size of a cigarette box. []

The development of these technological devices inherently intervenes into the user/technology system that we are used to, placing the power of the operation of the technology in the hands of a pedestrian or third party user. The technology is a good example of how tech can carry heavy meaning, as well as be an active influence in the social world. It also shows how the technology is itself a response to an existing technology that carries its out gigantic social weight, television.

Personal And Impersonal: Google Desktop was a complete failure, but it still follows along the same lines as other very successful technologies that we used today (ie: spotlight finder searches, google documents). Google desktop aimed to bridge the gap between the personal and impersonal spaces of a computer, primarily the internet and the desktop of the user. It aimed to capitalize on the success of google as a search engine to be used as a means of searching your own personal space on your computer. It achieves this primarily in the sense that the program itself was open source and open toe xternal community development. In essence, a copy of the program was on "my machine" but the program itself existed as something else much more muddled and vague, as it was constantly in development and open to all types of externally hackery. What was mine, in a way, could also include things that were yours (in the sense that you developed them) and although it remained linked to me as an individual, it bridges the gap between us and allows the technology to exist in a grey area personal/impersonal state of existence.

It also highlights the personal/impersonal in the very direct sense that we all obtain so much data now that we become unfamiliar and no longer linked to it, needing to use a third party application to search and find the information that we need. This "personal" information has become very impersonal in some ways due to the fact that we no longer can remember what the hell we named the file as, where we saved it, what format it was, or when we did it. It is still in every sense "ours" on our computer, but we can't really be personally connected to it anymore because of the sheer amount of data we ingest in today's world.

"To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation. It is to produce the names and numbers, the locations and trajectories of those things. It is to produce kinds of relations, and relations of relations, in which things may enter." (Wark 2004: 083) (202)
 * Abstract:**

BiTTorent, Action and Normativity:

"Technological action, therefore, is collective yet not social or cultural in any conventional sense of those terms. It overflows subjective experience or individual control even though individual figures accompany events in the process of individuation. Hackers, for instance, are often represented as isolated criminal figures. The mundane reality of hacking, however, centres on interaction, copying, communicating and working with others in exploring and bringing into relation specific material-technical traits within a technological ensemble." (207)

Bittorent and hacker culture are good examples of the collective nature of technology, and the personal/impersonal relation. For instance, Bittorent is a technology that ranks the popularity of ts torrents based on the sheer number of people who download it. This isn't something like itunes where downloads are counted, but the actual act of downloading makes the file more readily downloadable to the rest of the user base at a higher speed. The torrent itself becomes more "alive" or active as a file. The file is not stored centrally on one server or in one location, but treads the line between being 'personally' on your own hard drive and 'impersonally' floating around the internet being dispersed in small bits and chunks to other users.

reference: Mackenzie, A. (2006) //The meshing of impersonal and personal forces in technological action.// Culture, Theory and Critique, 47 (2). pp. 197-212. []