Intro version 01 - Unfinished DRAFT

8/14/2019 Intro version 01 - Unfinished DRAFT

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UNFINISHED DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT!!!

Starting - The Location of This Author

Launching a project about the author , it is very hard to dismiss the fact that theauthor I know best is myself. From a Freudian point of view this statement might besomewhat harsh, but in an another viewpoint it seems like a mechanistic notion thatyou can know something better by studying it than by experiencing it, but this isgenerally the way enlightenment science works. Human Research animals areviewed as sensory beings, storing information in our rational minds bouncing thisinformation back to the world as a set of structured facts. The human researchanimal is realized as a world mediator working pretty much like a virtual Javamachine which takes instructions from the application and translates it to a formunderstandable for the operative system. In this way you can run the same Javaenabled application independent from the operative system. I does not matter if you

are using Windows, Linux, Mac OS X or another Java mediated OS. The point is thatthe application can only perform instructions native to the Java translator. But thereis one more factor, the Java mediator is located in time, or version. An applicationbuilt for version 3 of Java might not work on version 2. The Java translator hasdeveloped, and the old translator does not understand instructions build for this newone. This is a very linear and mechanistic world, and when the digital mechanics fail,there is some sort of breakdown. Within a person, there are constant breakdowns inour rational understanding of the world. We have learned to live with differentversions of our world translator. We do not have any other choice. That is the humansituation in a nutshell.

Being an author is about having a location, so I am going to leave the concept'author' in the closet for a while and talk about my location as an author, whichprobably say something about what an author is from a conceptual viewpoint.



What is in front of the maleish figure in Caspar David Freidrish painting, what isbehind of it and what is above? A teenager today could easily think this picture ispicked from some of those fantasy works crowding the library shelves under thecategory "Science Fiction & Fantasy". In that case it would have been either animage copy from a frame in an animated movie, or an stand alone imagerepresentation of a movie or a book. If it had been a representation from a book, itcould be called a trance-media representation from the text narrative. The textwould have the location based on the author and the context the author worked andlived in. This text would have been given to the illustrator who made a visual

representation, or simulation. It is likely that the illustrator picked the scene toportrait as a result of reading and reacting to the text. The illustrator merged withthe text, almost like when you merge two complex objects in Adobe Illustrator,though this illustrator would not have used a vector based tool like Adobe Illustrator,but rather a pixel based tool like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter. A vector basedimage has the location in mathematical algorithms while pixel based images areatomistic in the sense that each area is reducible to a atomic element, the smallestelement in the picture. That element is called a pixel. As we know from real life,mathematics is not that great to pick up all the beautiful and scary shadingsconstantly entangled in our lives. A pixel based digital brush is more realistic as it iseasier to create tonally complex works as in the Wanderer above. By now I hope youunderstand that this author regard Technoscience research as pixel based ratherthan vectorized. It is extended in time and space and cannot be parceled like avector image or a zip-file. It is my intention to produce raster based research withoutunnecessary posterization effects in the final work.

Let us say we continue our cyborgian journey between fact and fiction and pick upwhere the author created a text based on her life world, an illustrator got the task to



illustrate the text and then we have the teenager surfing the Internet and stumbleacross this image thinking it has to be an illustration from some cool fantasy book.She download it to her hard disk and upload it to her Facebook profile, using it as anavatar, a representation of her digital self. This process could be separated intothree conceptual dimensions, like three Photoshop-layers on top of each other, semi-

transparent, semi-accessible. Let us say the bottom layer is the background layercreated by an anonymous Greek artist during the Golden Age1. The middle layer, onthe other hand, is created in the beginning of the 19th century, in the peak of themindset we generally call romanticism. So now we a text created in the Golden Age,recreated in a different communication medium in another mindset. Theoristsconstantly argue how much transparence we can obtain in layers like our middlelayer. Most theorists agree there are some kind of semi-transparency, even if thetransparence has been reduced increasingly by an agency sometimes tagged asculture relativism. The most of this transparency reduction have been done after theromantic period. This layer was created after Kant, which means a conception of thetheory that we do not have a direct to the world. We only have a direct relation tothe representations in our mind - I cannot help myself picturing this representationalsphere as a bowl of goldfishes. But the middle layer is before the postmodern viewof epochs as more or less opaque layers with their own ontology, epistemology andethics. So the location of this illustrator would lend her to see some transparency inthe layer but not complete visibility, because this would not have been obtainableeven if the illustrator had studied her own picture in the mirror. The situation wouldprobably have been similar to using the Wacom board pen on a Photoshop-layer with20% transparence and trace the emerging shapes with a soft pen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age






Back to an estimated reality. is a digital image representing a painting by theGerman artist Caspar David Friedrich 1818. It seems reasonable to deduct thatFriedrich know about Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, which is generallyencoded as an important text in the development of the modern view of history. Itwas published 11 years before Friedrich painting, 1807. This book is the location of

the famous or infamous doctrine of dialectical evolution, reconstructed and used byKierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx and others. Dialectics as a methodology has been usedextensively at least since Plato in the Socratic Dialogues to Francis Fukuyama's TheEnd of History. The methodology of dialectics is told in many different forms and withseveral set of symbols, but one of the most widespread is the form Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. I often use this form in many different situations since it is both effectiveand fairly commonsensical, and easy to understand. I often use this methodartistically to created images. I take a walk with a digital camera, shooting a set of pictures in various character when it comes to color, tone and structure. I alwaysuse a raw file format so I can press color and tone without "breaking" the image intoposterization effects. A raw image file is functions similar to a negative in analoguephotography. You have to "develop" it in a raw converter software. Doing the samething in Photoshop with common image formats as jpg or tiff generally results in amore or less visible degree in image quality. In a raw converter it is generally noproblem to maximize properties as saturation or contrast. So I start with one pictureas a basic thesis, and then I do the same with another image, i.e. setting theproperties light and color depending on the situation. This other image is myantithesis. Each picture gets its own layer in Photoshop. The top layer is thetransparency, or synthesizing agent. The transparency agent has different blendingmodes. The mode normal just increases the transparency of the top layer.

Figure 1 Some of Photoshop's blending modes



One of my favorite blending modes is called Overlay "Multiplies or screens thecolors. depending on the base color Patterns or colors. overlay the existing pixelswhile preserving the highlights and shadows of the base color. The base color is notreplaced but is mixed with the blend color to reflect the lightness or darkness of theoriginal color"1. The point of this dialectical methodology is to search for the perfect

blending. If no blending mode produces an exciting result, I just pick one based onintuition, and add one more picture layer. No the synthesis is used as a thesis andthe new layer as an antithesis, and this process is a start of an evolution in tone andcolor blending and transforming shapes. This methodology is easily transformed intosomething very different than the two seeds used in the beginning of thetransparency evolution.

If the graphical dialectics described about is used in as a artistic methodology of expression, HDR could be described as the dialectics of perfect tone, perfect then ina more rational sense. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is used inphotography to obtain a supernatural tone quality, nature in this sense mean the

nature of digital camera technology in the first half of 2009. In this technology youstart with one underexposed photo and its opposite, an overexposed image, and theHDR software merge the two images to an image with a very high tone range. Theresulting image have so high dynamic range it cannot be viewed on a computerscreen. A tonal translation is necessary. The HDR software picks an even map of tones and creates a normal image file such as a tiff or a jpg. The resulting file is notcompletely unlike a textbook: a very complex world is translated into a very complexsemiotic structure by a theorist, which is then "tone mapped" to an easily digestibleform. If you search photography forums and communities, it does not take longbefore you realize that many photographers view this kind of photography as

unnatural. The evenly mapped out tone scale is not photographic. Our perception isaccustomed to a photographic tone scale very inferior to our perception of reality.Many HDR images look more like they were done in some 3D modeling software likeMaya. The identity of a photography is lost in the tonal translation.

1Photoshop CS3 help file.



Figure 2 Pseudo-HDR by myself from the French alps

Figure 2 above functions both as an example of this kind of picture and a signalsaying that we will soon get back to the romantic painting. Taking the basic photo forthis image I was standing in almost the same position as the wanderer in thepainting. I remember leaving my wife a few steps behind to come closer to the motif.My wife must have been located much the same as the person behind the wanderer,and my own perspective more similar to the wanderer. I have always felt aconnection to the art of Caspar David Friedrich and many of my images frommountain areas has an identity similar to the painting of the wanderer. We musthave some location in common.

Back to the digital representation of the wonderful painting by Caspar DavidFriedrich. If it had been an illustration of a more than 2000 year old book fromGreece, the painting could have been described as a result of a dialectical evolutionfrom the starting thesis in the backdrop of the Greece culture, meeting an author'sexperiences, becoming an synthesis in the form of the book witch the illustratorreads and use as a thesis in her dialectical process. Posterity would have called thisblending mode romantic. The romantic blending mode might be the location I andthe German painter share. It is 189 years separating us in time. I have called him aGerman painter, but that is not completely true. He was actually born in Greifswald ,at that time belonging to Sweden. All his life he was a Swedish citizen.

[[Let us imagine that every person in the world is a separate, semi-transparentPhotoshop layer. These layers are grouped into nations, so every nation groupcontains a large set of semi-transparent layers, extremely complex, filled withdifference and sameness. For every location in the pack of layers we only se alimited distance in each direction.]]

'Learning' is a realistic, modest word for many things called other things. Make acore word.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=109821012390866121078.0004657dbc682255fb2bf&ll=54.09806,13.392334&spn=5.174421,14.282227&z=7&iwloc=0004657dc0174cdb3ac55






--- Conversation theory as the ackumulation of ideas as a realistic and qualitativealternative to the accumulation of knowledge in the sciences. A researcherscontribution is to launch a idea or statement in this conversation cloud, rather thanthe task of posing the right one, the one that renders the previous ideas obsolete...

I am using the Web as a signifier for everything emanating from servers connectedto the Internet, so it does not mean world wide web specifically. For the moment,www is almost synonymous with the Web, but a few years from now, the situationmight be quite different. Emerging technologies as ubiquity and 3D might scream forother protocols. The border object between now and then is probably the Internet.Internet is the machinery of www and will probably continue to be it for the Web inthe foreseeable future too. I am a little bit reluctant to draw the obvious parallels,because they easily falls into the platonic tradition of dualism between body andrationality. But I am not cut out to avoid things. One of my methodologies isreconstruction, and for reconstruction I need material. The Internet servers is aparallel to the machine park building up the Matrix, the body generating the mind,

the computers interplay with hardware/software generating the processes viewableon the screen. The most dangerous of these parallels is of course the body-minddualism. For me, this is an almost aesthetic question. It is easy to picture the mindas a different entity from the body, something hovering around the brain. If you area Christian theist you might think it is the soul emanating from God, and if you are amaterialist as myself, you might view it as a computer withhardware/software/processes. This computer allegory is generally my own view, but Isee it as cybernetic signal processes in the body, not something external, producedby the body. But when it comes to the Internet/the Web relation, I think it is easier topicture it as a complex, cloudish, smokish or crystalish entity hovering above the

machine, the generator.Gravatar etc.

Let us now imagine that the Wanderer has ended up as an avatar on the Web. Afourteen year old girl has chosen this image as a digital representation of herself onFacebook. Her choice was not really rational, more like a feeling of somethingreminding of something in some fantasy novel. She could very well have beenmyself in that age. When I was fourteen, one of the first neo-classic fantasy novelswas published followed by followed by very very many. The classic is of course thebooks by Tolkien. The book published when I was fourteen was Lord Foul's Bane byStephen R. Donaldson. the sublim, romantic feeling... ovs.

Poststructuralist UtopismNow you have to prepare yourself for a stylistic, rhetorical break. Now we are goingto talk about location seriously. Location is about the future. It is about other thingstoo, but future is one of the most important locations. Sifting throw a larger body of the Web it is easy to get the realization of how a human works. In communitieswhere it is practice to be anonymous, ideological conversations often result in some

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web






kind of disarmed wars fought with animal rhetoric. Real ideological conversationsseems impossible. In communities with a practice to have a transparent relationbetween the avatar and the identity in the physical world, discussions generally donot reach the level of being interesting and/or important. This is probably due to thefact that the REAL NAME avatar is a border object between in vulnerability and

vulnerability. Ideological discussions in the physical world is quite easily controllableregarding context. We generally group ourselves on the property of likeness, and inthat case there is no real risk of talking freely. Many men would not hesitate to saywoman should stay at home attending the children and cooking for their workinghusband. But if the same person were localized in a group of people including a grimlooking woman with muscles or an obvious rhetorical intelligence, then this manwould probably keep his mouth shut. His investment in the situation had becomemore risky and he would not risk a loss by going into combat. On the Web, thissituation is not possible since it is more or less impossible to control the situation.On the Web a specific utterance is not possible to control regarding context. Aspoken utterance is transient. People might remember and pass it through to otherpersons, but memories generally fade quite easily. An utterance on the web islocalized in a temporary context which mostly is apt for change as other persons jointhe conversation. Even if the conversation seems quite stable for the moment, thecontext might change and your utterance might prove to be an object of mockery,social exclusion or even resulting in some maniac throwing a firebomb into your mailbox. Conversations on the Web is more instable than traditional forms of conversation. I is not far to the conclusion that this is inevitable since we arehumans and this is how humans work. I do not think this conclusion is completelywithout sense, but you this does not mean the animal we now call human does notchange. What we are, we define as humans, but what we become might not have

the same properties. I do not think the Internet, the Web is built for humans. I thinkit is built for something we are in the process of changing to. Some is calling thiscreature a posthuman. This concept might sound somewhat odd, but it denotes ourtransgression from the renaissance view of a human to something other, but sincethis Other is still mostly in the future, all properties discussed are tentative. I viewthe posthuman as a preliminary, beta version of the future Web citizen. If you are areader of science fiction stories, you might have heard the word terraforming. Since

Terra is another word for earth, terraforming means forming another planet toinhabit creatures with human properties. In science fiction this concept is used insettings when earth is overcrowded or destroyed and the remaining humans have to

move to other planets. I think the posthuman is a mirror concept to terraforming. Wehave to transform some of our properties to fit the new brave world of digital life. Wecannot just move to the Web, we have to become Web citizens in a morefundamental way. I think it is possible to speculate about some fundamentals of theposthuman.

• Posthuman Rights - A reconstruction of the Human Rights doctrine

• Fallibilism - to BE in YOURSELF and still SEE the OTHER

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming






theistic discourses. So ideas, knowledge is metaphysical with a materialist location. The location in this case is called actual and the idea is called virtual. Both is real. Anidea is not less real than its actuality. This is a Deluzian rhetoric. In one way digitalvirtuality corresponds to the idea, but it has the property of being tangible. Virtualreality is simultaneously actualized by the Internet server farm and the human

factory of language and ideas. I would say it is a synthesis of the dialectics betweenan idea and machine power.

Methodology is probably one of the more important keysto the future. The way wedo things today determines the kind of result we get tomorrow.

• Using Methodologies

• Developing Methodologies

Using methodologies is an authoritarian way of creating knowledge. To createmethodologies breaks with that and becomes more or less anti-authoritarian.Integrative

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DO NOT READ AFTER THIS - THIS IS OLD OR BECOMING OR SOMETHING ELSE

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(Science) is sublime, something you can hear over and over again without gettingtired. (longinus) -- Neoclassicism is looks back to the classics, trying to mimic theirexcellence (horace)

In academic gatherings it is a common practice to introduce yourself with your

academic identity. This identity usually includes geographical location, hierarchicallocation and your name. Neither of these locations can work alone as a namespace,an original place not alike another place. When I am writing this I am located atBlekinge Institute of Technology, a small university in the South of Sweden.Hierarchically I am a Licentiate of Engineering and when you are reading this I amhopefully a Doctor of Engineering. My name is Peter Giger. Connecting these threeproperties gives something very close to a real namespace. It is fairly unlikely thatyou are going to run into another person with these three properties. But it is notfoolproof, take a very common name, a very big University and somewhere in themiddle of the hierarchy, you might find two persons with the exact same properties.I am a member of a relatively small community of transdiciplinary research, but in

most academic gatherings you can still rely on a forth property, the discipline,generally used as a preconception. However, the interdisciplinary family, includingmultidisciplinary and transdisciplinary science and research is growing in this lifeweb of enormous complexity.

In the analog world it is fairly difficult to use real namespaces, in Sweden we havethe person identification number, and most nations in the western culture havesomething similar. In the digital world it is the other way around, most things have a



namespace and it is from this world I have picked the sign namespace. In the digitalworld, everything is quite simple on the surface and this is an effect of everythinghaving it self-evident location, viewed in the light of technology. My main location inthe digital world is for example http://petergiger.com. This phrase is called anUniform Resource Locator 2, an URL in the shorter and more familiar form. Writing

petergiger.com in the browser address bar is enough to access my digitalnamespace instantly. But the namespace in itself is not so exiting,you have to visitmy space to get any kind of understanding of who I am what place I have in thecontext of Internet relations. In the case of the academic gathering, the next stepwould be to some kind of introduction. It can be fairly extensive or very quick andshallow depending on the situation. The introduction is a narrative the personalproperties or preferences most suitable for the context. The substantialpresentation comes after the presentation, in action. The action is more or lessstrictly divided into serious talk, and informal talk. The serious talk generally have aplanned agenda. The informal talk is located in spaced between the serious talk.

This is two dimensions in science and research. Some say it is both desirable andpossible to separate the two. Some say this separation is only ostensible, they theformal and informal talk is entangled in each other and all attempts to separatethem is more or less in vain, viewed from an epistemological point of view. Thedigital world have inherited this separateness in something called scientific journalsand databases. On scheduled time, an academic usually access the digital spheresimilar to the serious talk in academic gatherings, and on the unscheduled time weturn to facebook, blogs and twitter. Mechanistic science usually view the formal-informal as binary spaces where 1 is the body of science and 0 is what has to bekept out of the game of science.

My field of research is Technoscience and this word is meant to resolve the binaryopposition. Technology is not zero, it is included in the one. Science and technologyis practically inseparable (ref latour) and technology is inseparable from normalhuman experience. My view on and experience of digital technology is embedded ineverything I do, everything I say. When I write this, it is mars 2009. I am entangledin an apparatus of thesis writing technology (jfr hawkin och stone). I am writing onthree different computers, depending on situation, one is a stationary computer Ihave planned and built myself a digital monster designed to handle complexrendering of image files of several hundred megabytes in size. On this computer Iam using Windows Vista with a rather traditional setting to avoid problems as muchas possible. I have also to laptops, one Intel based PC, and one Intel based Mac. On

the PC have a dual boot, using booth a beta version of Windows 7 and Linux Ubuntu.On my Macbook Pro I dual boot OS X Leopard and Windows 7. When I started writingthe thesis I tried out the "feeling" of several different writing technologies, someonly available on Mac, Linux or Windows but finally I ended up with the standardwriting solution at this time, Word 2007. This means I have excluded Linux from mywriting apparatus for the moment, since it does not work with Microsoft Word. I havenoticed that this exclusion have made me change perspective somewhat from and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator






ideological view of computer technologies to an aesthetic. I do not have the sameconviction of the superior excellence for Open Source technologies compared to oneyear ago. The technologies most important for me now seems to be related to cloudrelations and different forms of asynchronous conversation. All my computers areentangled in a cloud of storing and information exchange. I can go up early in the

morning an start to write on my stationary computer, save the file and later accessit on my iPhone, and later on my laptop and the file I am working on is always storedin the cloud rather than separately on each computer. Digital cloud formations is oneof the emerging technologies at this moment. It is not really possible to separate allthis technology from my writing. If I had been writing this text on a typewriter thirtyyears ago, or on my IBM 286 PS1 computer 20 years ago, the text had definitelybeen different. Technology is enfolded in all texts and all scientific results.

Technology is the skeleton in the nature-culture binary.

Technosicence seeks to dissolve the platonic binaries inherited from a 2500 yearlong tradition. Besides the nature-culture binary, some of the most central include

oral-speech, white-black and male-female2.

But in this point in time, in the last year of the first decade in the 20th century,everything points in the direction an increasing digital sphere. And this is reallyparadoxical since the foundation, the building blocks of digital life is binary.

I am a web author. I am the thing I write about. Everyone writing about authorship isinextiricably interwoven with its subject. This is an iPropostition: you cannot writeabout being an author and leave yourself out of the picture. What is it like to be anauthor - (tomas nagel..)

technosicen byggs mycket på dekonstruction av binära enheter, och digitala världen

på en byggnad med binär grund...

ip-numbers, and url:s. det räcker inte med att nämna sitt ip-nummer, eller url.

IcT

Everything starts in a location. You can call it ontology or just view it as a partialorigin for every story told by material-semiotic story telling processes making up ourspace time continuum. In a theistic frame of reference there is always a masterlocation to use as a point of reference, God. But God does not really regard JürgenHabermas' book Theory of Communicative Action () as his bible. God talks, or writes,in parables rather than use his omnipotence to make us understand his will. I use amale God construction because I cannot see God as a woman. A woman/motherwould not do the things God do to his children. The western annexation of Iraq andthe tragedy of 9/11 both had male locations. Atomic bombs and other war machineshave male locations. That is almost as far as I am willing to go when it comes togendered technology locations. But with a few hesitant steps I dare to take the

2I have used Caroline Merchant's selection of important binaries ()



analogy somewhat further and say that IT, Information Technology, has a malelocation, while the location for ICT, Information & Communication, is female. I amnot creating this proposition lightly. It is an iProposition. I call it an iProposition tocancel the seriousness in the language inherited from the tradition of reason andrationality. An iProposition is a something coming from within rather than from a set

of deductions and/or inductions. An iProposition is something floating up from thebottom of a person to the surface of understanding. But since we are aligning it tothe tradition of reason by giving it the label 'proposition', it is not just something wesay, something unexamined. A process of examination is inherited in an iProposition.We cannot treat it as an exclamation.

But it is also something not easily rationalized. "To inform" is an authoritarian agentcreated through thousands of years of hierarchical thinking in the Masculinear,hierarchical tradition. Adding the C between I & T is to locate conversation in thecenter - if we dare to reconstruct the C in communication as conversation. When Iam saying that ICT has a female location, I am referring to Information &

Conversation Technology , rather than lexical denotation Information &Communication Technology . To go even further in symbolic juggling, I am proposingIcT as a symbol for Information & conversation Technology . The lowercase is not anagent for psychological crouching. It connotes a modest attitude. A deepunderstanding that knowledge often is created in informal settings and that thearrow in teleological intention often wobble and thereby leads to other knowledgethan the intended. We start conversations in one direction, but before it is over, itgenerally has visited many lands and created a sea of knowledge seldom withinreach in formal communication. But before I take the iProposition further I have tosay something about the ontology of male vs female location.

It is more difficult to discuss male locations than female. Male locations are the normin the history of ideas. Female location is simply the location of feminist theory as acritical agency in the masculinear tradition. The masculinear tradition is a symbol forthe opponent in feminist theory. To mention some of the kindred to the masculineartradition, I would pick Platonism and humanism, more or less encapsulated in thelabel modernism. The figure masculinear put an emphasis on the teleologicalproperties of modernism as a liberal journey towards a capitalistic paradise. Feministtheory does not buy that commodity and seek rivalry with criticism as the doctrineof posthumanism and figures as the Cyborg.

Two of my academic locations are near oxymoronic: 1)I am a male feminist 2) I

regard myself as a poststructuralist utopist. Both locations are easily weaved in tothe posthumanist tapestry. The male feminist is a definitive break with thethousands years of gender essentialism. I want to rescue a large degree of thefemale properties abducted by males and forced on woman throughout history.Iwant these properties for myself. I want to enchant myself with wonderfulproperties as 'irrational'.



Male and female locations are not about gender or sex. Regarding 'gender', I neverreally understood where this concept comes from, thinking about location, otherthan some misguided holism. I respect woman who talks about "woman'sexperience", but since I never had felt "a male experience", I doubt these categorieshas an biological origin. Male and female location are more about agency. For

thousands of years we have, on loose grounds, pointed to woman and men anddressed them with various properties. These properties now lives as forcefulagencies in the world. They are probably not children of the evolution, but this factdoes not deenergize them. It only makes them stronger and more vicious since theyare invisible.

The male feminist location could be said to be divided in two parts 1) the platonicdoctrine of fe(male) equality 2) Criticism based on fe(male) agency. I am using thesign fe(male) to signal the female set of agencies as an utopist hope to counteractthe masculinear journey to destruction, a hope that this mindset will a parenthesis inthe overall history of planet earth and its human and nonhuman agencies. The

iProposition that the masculinear journey is a road to destruction is anunderstanding which is gathering followers in western societies. It is starting to bemore and more difficult to maintain the hope of the rational, liberal, capitalistparadise. Many of us is starting to doubt that earth has the recourses to harbor thisprogression towards paradise for much longer.

Lost in Translation The German Sociologist Max Weber critiqued rationality and the modernenlightenment process for its disenchantment processes(). But in one sensemodernity has a counter process of mystification and this process has to do withdelocalization. Before the enlightenment, most persons in the western part of the

world know why it was wrong to steel. It was wrong because God said it was. Thelocation of wrongness was crystal clear. In one of Friedrich Nietzsche's well knownaphorisms there is a crazy man rushing in to the market place shouting "God isDead! God remains dead! And we have killed him"3. The death of God means thathumans have lost the location of meaning. This is a warning. First we investeverything that we are on a transcendent location for meaning. Then, when we aredependent of the flow of meaning from the God location, we kill the flow. Norelocation, no reconstruction. Before it was meaning. Then it was not. The lost of meaning is the beginning of nihilism. Nihilism is not a dirty word, something to sayto a person who does not seem to have a socio-political identity, it is an agency

constantly working to cut us off from our personal well of meaning. As some of youprobably have figured out, the heading Lost in Translation is from the film from 2004by Sofia Coppola3. It is about Bob and Charlotte, two Americans in Tokyo and howthey simultaneously struggle with the unfamiliar culture and the confusion of tryingto relate to a very different personality. This situation has not much in common with

3Aphorism 125 in The Gay Science ()

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/






the workings of nihilism agency, but that is mostly due to the fact that they have achoice and that their situation is temporary. They can easily reconnect with theirwell of meaning and they know it. Nihilism is the agencies that cut you off with yourpersonal well of meaning. In this sense you cannot really use nihilism as an adjectiveabout a thinker with controversial ideas, even if their claim seems to poison your

particular well of meaning. The nihilism agency is important in my work, since I regard it as an opposite to theauthor agency. The nihilism and author agencies are entangled in each other, not ina balanced harmony as in the Yin Yang symbol, but more like the deadly mess youfind in a pit of irritated snakes where some are poisons and some are not. Thismetaphor suggest that nihilism is not really the historically big thing in Nietzsche'saphorism, but something moving, something shifting and mostly in most people thebalance in the entanglement is at least tolerable. But sometimes one of theagencies are gathering forces and become predominant resulting in an eruption of meaning or implosion killing every effort to move forward in an early stage.

Nihilism agency often unfold itself as a relationship, or a sense of a lost relationship.

Nietzsche's story is in a way an opposite to Plato's metaphor “The Cave”44. In Plato'scave, people are chained in front of a stone wall. The wall is like a projector screenshowing the movie of life. But the audience cannot turn around and look at theprojector operator. They are trapped in an "audience position", looking directly atthe screen, knowing nothing else, learning noting else. But someday someonereleases them from their chains. They follow a passage leading up from the cave,against the light. The freedom when they reach the opening is more intellectual thancorporeal. The opening to the light is the border between the situated, located and

the universal place beyond all locations. The light is the place where the humanbecomes a half-god, a philosopher, a rational being with an objective view of reality.It has to be a coincidence that the movement upwards from the cave to the lightresembles a lot of metaphors in Christianity, and perhaps especially as in Dante's

The Divine Comedy5.

A blog is a location and most blogs does not pretend to be anything else. Most blogposts are just a reflection of their time and (social) space. The best of them let thereflection pass through the I behind the text, before it bounces into the vastness of cyberspace. A blog's name space, friend space, layout and literary style is itsvisual/rational location. Somewhere in this techno-social construction there is also a

person. All blogs are a balance between a person and a conformity game.

4 The Cave is one of the most famous of Plato's stories or metaphors. It is located in the booklength dialogue The Republic, available freely on the web

5Dante's The Divine Comedy is one of the best books to help you understand what kind of location the modern society is a reaction against, i.e. the Christian knowledge hierarchy withGod at the top. The book is freely avalible on the web



influence our view of the persons spinning the net of web 2.0. Are bloggers, forexample, 'authors' or are they something new, something still to be named andunderstood.

Web 2.0 as s Poststructuralist UtopiaWhere am I in virtual reality? What am I? If virtual reality is a materialimmaterialization, so am I. I am weaved into the fabric of the alternative realitycreated by the worldwide network of Internet servers. We are still in the real, but thispart of the reality fabric is real in another way then the tangible parts of reality. If pure reality is open to our senses, virtual reality is a sub category only reachablewith some of them. Virtual reality is a world generated by the socio-technicalapparatus called the Internet. It is with us, in us, and still outside us. It is weaved into the same fabric but with a material previously unknown to mankind. Thevirtuality material is something as new as new can be, and yet is it is as old as oldcan be. It is a construction created in the ballroom of history. It is the end of the

world without the virtual sphere and the start of possibilities never experiencedbefore.

Figure 3 Internet Map

Why is it that most visualizations of the virtual sphere share the aesthetics of ourmaterial universe as seen through our most precious technoscientific prosthesis?Can it be that both are technological projections on the same canvas where dreams



and other stories are created? Space has been a canvas for science fiction stories aslong as the history of materialized symbols. The scientific stories of astronomy andcosmology are build with mathematics, logics and technoscientific visualizations.When virtual reality became a concept many science fiction stories changed canvasand virtuality became something opposite to outer space, namely inner space,

something turned inwards, into ourselves as biotechnical constructions. Virtualitycan be compared to Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic model where 'parole'corresponds to the actual symbolic expressions located by name spaces and'langue' corresponds to virtuality as a system of cultural codes. As Carol Sanderssays, for Saussure "langue is the work of collective intelligence; it is an intellectualorganism" (). To use a common concept, langue is a parallel to the 'mindset' of virtual reality. Thus, Virtuality is about an increasingly extensive set of namespacesand a mindset, about extreme location and extreme dislocation. Dislocation does notmean no location, it means complexly fragmented locations, a poststructuraldestabilization of location as an exact point of origin, something in constant change,"Everything flows, nothing stands still"8.

Figure 3 is a visualization of the Internet. It is a "Partial map of the Internet based onthe January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes,representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delaybetween those two nodes"9. Looking quickly, this Internet map could pass for asomewhat strange outline of some part of the universe. The degree of resemblanceis very high, but there is a big difference: an astronomic picture is supposed to be aprosthetic, an apparatus of eye enhancement. The Internet map is a metaphor.

about last episode of battlestar...

Rorty on the Webxxx

The Social GlowSpoiler alert! This essay discusses human future from the eyes of the creators of thetelevision series Battlestar Galactica aired from 2004 to 2009, and particularly thevery last episode. The spoiler alert also applies to Robert J. Sawyer's novel WWW:Wake (2009 ref).

In this essay I am trying to create a way of expressing complex thoughts in a simpleway, both in a general way, as a theory, and specifically by applying it on aftermathof Web 2.0 discourse. The word 'theory' aims at a way of looking at things, aperspective, a mind model, rather than a truth framework; as something local and

8Wikiquote: Heraclitus: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus, viewed 2009-04-08

9Internet Map, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024.jpg, viewed 2009-04-08

http://opte.org/

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024.jpg







http://opte.org/

http://opte.org/

http://opte.org/



situated rather than universal. The background is a few years with intensediscussions about the mindset 'web 2.0' as a location for participation, democracy,openness, sharing and other rather empty, worn out words. They are empty becausethey have been subjected to nuclear reactions resulting in something so scatteredthat the conceptual location hardly means more than nothing. That is not to say

that web 2.0 as a practice is or was something without meaning. On the contrary, Ido not doubt it is a very important piece of expression, hinting what is coming in thenear semi-digital future.

The semi-digital, near, future is a basic constant in all my texts. Semi-digital meansthat digital technology will be a very big part of practically everything in the human,and human related, sphere in a very long period of time starting from now.

A worn out word is a word that has been recontextualized so many times it has losta common localization. It has lost its power as an energizing, argumentative forcebecause its meaning has been too complex. It has been disabeled as a positive forceand methamophorized to live the rest of its life as the negative power of critizisism.When some young energized person uses the word, there is always plenty of wisdomto critizise the particular usage. There are only a faint chance of agreement,because a wider examination can always find a crack where deconstruction ispossible.

BibliographyHabermas, J. (1985). The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1 : Reason and

the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press.

Weber, M. (1991). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge.



1Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age, viewed: 2009-03-19

2Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator , viewed: 2009-03-16

3 IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/ , viewed: 2009-03-17

4Education Testing Center, http://www.etestingcenter.com/library/BooksM-P/The%20Republic.pdf ,viewed: 2008-11-14




http://www.etestingcenter.com/library/BooksM-P/The%20Republic.pdf













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