Interactivity and choice

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 8 – Can Coherence Be Saved?: Selective Interactivity and Narrativity
& Chapter 9 – Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama
& Chapter 10 – Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media
(& Conclusion)

I have argued elsewhere that the aim in designing an alternative Internet is to provide Real Choice to people who would otherwise have to twist themselves and their values in order to participate in society. Here, again, we see that the evolution of art/literature is helpful in making the case for me; that both have deluded people that what they offer is this Real Choice. Ryan quotes Julian Barnes:

When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision – or a decision makes us – and we go one way; had we made a different decision… we would have been elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn’t reproduce this reality: it merely takes us down two diverging paths. It’s a form of cubism, I suppose. And that’s all right; but let’s not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved. / After all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a series of sealed enveloped in various colors. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending… and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings (242).

I suggest that what we would offer in envelopes in terms of Real Choice for the Internet would be different value sets: Materialistic/Consumerist; Capitalistic/Efficient; Compassionate/Selfless, etc..

Most eloquently in the following passage Ryan makes the point that what we think of as choice is an illusion, saying, “Even in a conceptualization that presents hypertext as a matrix of worlds and of stories, what readers do is control the strings of the fictional worlds through either reasoned or arbitrary choices, but they are themselves the puppets of the author” (283). This is exactly what I’ve been trying to argue for Internet use: that people think they are completely free in this space, but that they are being manipulated completely by the rules of the space, and furthermore the space actively participates in deluding them that they are free.

Ryan makes an interesting point about design as narrative, that it is up to the designer to envision the plot of the product’s use: “The system designer must be able to foresee the possible actions of the user and to streamline them toward the desired effect. The user should progress under the impression that his actions determine the course of the plot, when in fact his choices are set up by the system as a function of the effect to be reached. The need to steer the user toward a certain goal without revealing this purpose (for fear of spoiling its effect) explains why dramatic structure, the fullest form of narrativity, is also the most problematic of interactive design” (246). I think we tend to forget that in creating a product for use, we provide the setting of the story, setting the parameters around which a possible narrative scenario can conceivably take place; and this setting is in fact the value sets that the product embodies. It is no wonder that products prescribe certain use that is in line with these values.

Ryan quotes an interesting passage from Randall Walser with regards to the function of cyberspace media: “Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies…. Whereas the playwright and the filmmaker both try to communicate the idea of an experience, the spacemaker tries to communicate the experience itself. A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and not just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly…. Thus the spacemaker can never hope to communicate a particular reality, but only to set up opportunities for certain kinds of realities to emerge. The filmmaker says, ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ The spacemaker says, ‘Here, I’ll help you discover’” (306). This fits well with the above notion of the system designer as the creator of setting. And interestingly, it shows that while many people associate the Internet with a lack of embodiment, cyberspace embodies in the Foucauldian sense, in that it subjectifies. It also implies that the medium itself helps the ‘user’ discover; but that said, it helps the ‘user’ discover only the particular realities it allows to be discovered. In other words, it prescribes a way of seeing and discovering that precludes alternative vision. I think this is what I’m so interested in changing, or creating alternatives for. As it is now, cyberspace is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing worldview that allows users to discover again and again the merit of the kind of thinking that created the Internet in the first place. I guess what I’m asking is if people are going to embody the reality promoted by the medium of the Internet, should we not put some consideration into the version of reality we wish to promote? How can people discover themselves and their world as being more than this materialistic vision promoted by cyberspace now?

I picked up on a useful term, namely “emergent.” Ryan writes, “Emergent is the favorite term of contemporary literary theory for a type of meaning that comes out of the text, rather than goes into it, and that is produced dynamically in the interaction between the text and the reader” (258). I think this is a fundamental truth about the construction of the Internet, that it is emergent. It will become whatever it will become through its use by people. I guess I wonder if an especially radical revisioning of the Internet might come in challenging the assumed value of this emergent quality.

Ryan also implies that engagement with media can have a psychological effect on people. This is something that Juliet B. Schor (Born to Buy, 2004) argued in relation to consumerist engagement:

High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them…. [L]ess involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids, and more involvement leads kids’ psychological well-being to deteriorate (167).

Similarly, Ryan quotes Michael Heim, who writes, “’Hypertext thinking may indeed reveal something about us that is agitated, panicky, or even pathological. As the mind jumps, the psyche gets jumpy or hyper’ (Metaphysics, 40)” (261). It’s not difficult to extend this argument to the Internet in general. How much is its jumpiness negatively affecting our mental well-being?

From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 6 – From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game

Consider this short passage

“There’s glory for you! [said Humpty Dumpty.]
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” – Lewis Carroll

Ryan writes about the game of text. I like this quote in particular: “The idea of linguistic relativism is a seductive plaything for a thought that conceives itself as play. In the paradigm that currently dominates literary studies, if literature is a game, it is because language itself is one; and if language is a game, it is because its rules form a self-enclosed system that determines, rather than reflects, our experience of reality” (187).

I think that this is an important lesson for anyone in academia. Compare this to my previous rant about the Game of Academia…

Another takeaway from this chapter is the way in which the notion of authorship has evolved. Foucault writes in “What Is an Author?”: “Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits (120)” (190). Once writing became a game, it needed new creative ways of playing; e.g. Cubism. “According to Roland Barthes, reading is a ‘cubist’ exercise in which ‘the meanings are cubes, piled up, altered, juxtaposed, yet feeding on each other’” (191). And ultimately, the game has evolved to encourage participation: “The writerly, by contrast, is seen as promoting an active and playful participation of the reader in the act of writing: ‘Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ [Barthes]” (195-6). We can clearly see a path from here to hypertext…

So what is the point of this seeming tangent. I suppose I see it as yet another example of the ways in which our aesthetic and cultural values have led to and been incorporated in the Internet as it is now: a participatory space in which everyone is a creator.

Immersion

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Interlude (I) – Virtual Realities of the Mind: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Coover
& Chapter 3 – The Text as World: Theories of Immersion
& Interlude (II) – The Discipline of Immersion: Ignatius of Loyola
& Chapter 4 – Presence of the Textual World: Spatial Immersion
& Chapter 5 – Immersive Paradoxes: Temporal and Emotional Immersion

Ryan writes about an interesting character called Ignatius of Loyola, who encouraged people to vividly visualize scenes from the Bible as a means of achieving a more immersive and spiritual experience: “The originality of the method resides in the idea that the involvement of the sense of the body – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can be used as stepping stones toward the involvement of the two sense of the soul: the will and the intellect” (116). While this example may be seen as a case of religious rather than spiritual experience, the point is that immersion has the potential to be linked with spiritual engagement. As Ryan explains, “In the Spiritual Exercises the founder of the Jesuits produced a meticulous description of the mental operations that lead to immersion in a textual world” (115).

The point that Ryan makes so eloquently is that there is nothing wrong with immersion. Many people have criticized the vision of VR by arguing that immersion is dangerous to our frail psyches, as if we will lose all sense of reality. This is the tired old argument that people have used to protest against role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which frankly I see no problem with. Furthermore, it seems to be a conflation of immersion and escapism, which are rather different. And I think that our use of the word "user" to describe people who engage with things like MUIs even further serves to pathologize the immersive experience, as if it is analogous to a "drug user."

Anyway, on the contrary, immersion is - and always has been in painting, literature, television, etc. - a transcendent opportunity, one which may approach what, indeed, we mean by spiritual engagement. For example, "Baudelaire regards the artificial not as a copy that should make up for a lost original but as a way to overcome the terrifying chaos of organic life” (75). The more one becomes immersed in the experience, the greater this ability to overcome.

Ryan identifies 3 different kinds of immersion: “spatial immersion, the response to setting; temporal immersion, the response to plot; and emotional immersion, the response to character” (121). She quotes Marcel Proust who describes the experience of the latter:

[I found myself] giving more attention and tenderness to characters in books than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much I loved them… those people, for whom I had panted and sobbed, and whom, at the close of the book, I would never see again, and no longer know anything about…. I would have wanted so much for these books to continue, and if that were impossible, to have other information on all those characters, to learn now something about their lives, to devote mine to things that might not be entirely foreign to the love they had inspired in me and whose object I was suddenly missing… beings who tomorrow would be but names on a forgotten page, in a book having no connection with life. – Marcel Proust (140).

(Immediately, I am reminded of the experience described by Turkle in her Life on the Screen.)

And for yet another example, the immersive potential of tragedy has long been recognized: “Ever since Aristotle defined the effect of tragedy as catharsis, or purification through terror and pity, it has been taken for granted that literary fictions can elicit the same spectrum of emotional reactions in the reader as real-life situations: empathy, sadness, relief, laughter, admiration, spite, fear, and even sexual arousal” (148).

And now the Internet creates greater opportunity for the kind of voyeurism that has always drawn us into narrative: “Whether or not we like to admit it, voyeurism has a lot to do with the pleasures we take in narrative fiction: where else but in a novel can we penetrate into the most guarded and the most fascinating of realms, the inner workings of a foreign consciousness” (149)? I do wonder though, if we would do well to get rid of some of the voyeuristic quality of Internet engagement and trade it for more profound opportunities for connection with people. In other words, I see Ryan's point, but to the degree that we can avoid it, I'm not sure it's worth emulating voyeurism in cyberspace as a means of designing immersive experiences; though I can kind of understand how we got to this point where voyeurism has become such a fundamental part of cyberspace.

Ryan explains other ways to create an immersive experience: “The depth of immersion – what Walton calls the richness of the game of make-believe – depends on the style of the representation as well as on the disposition of the reader” (110). (This dispositional factor is why a small few people may lose touch with reality when playing Dungeons and Dragons or playing MUIs.) But more specifically, “For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world” (90)…. ‘A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole’ [Michael Heim]” (91).

The question here is - assuming that immersion offers spiritual potential and is something to design for - whether there is any coherence in the current design of the Internet. There may be pockets of coherence. But I think that the democratic ideals of the Internet supersede any ambition of coherence, so that individual expression and creativity win the day. Is the result something incomprehensible to the point that it interferes with immersive - and spiritual - potential? I realize this is beginning to sound like I'm advocating totalitarian control over creative space... but I'm just musing over these questions.

Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 2 – Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology

Aldous Huxley wrote of the potential perils of multisensory art in his Brave New World, where characters experience The Feely, “that offered visual, auditive, olfactory, and tactile stimuli. The spectators could feel every hair of the rug on which the protagonists were making love, every jolt in the crash of a helicopter, and they were so fully absorbed in these sensations that they paid no attention to the silliness of the plot” (55). We can relate to this – it does seem like the logical extension of the VR dream, resulting in the death of the mind. But Ryan says, “Despite Huxley’s warning that multisensory art would extinguish critical sense and render the imagination obsolete, the idea has retained a powerful hold on the modern mind” (55).

So it is not the multisensory nature of VR that we should be wary of. To some degree, a good novel evokes sensations of touch, smell, etc.. But there is something we may want to consider in more depth: Ryan writes a lot in this chapter about the goal of virtual reality is to erase the medium while multiplying it – i.e. making the medium invisible (56): “The ‘virtual reality effect’ is the denial of the role of hardware and software (bits, pixels, and binary code) in the production of what the user experiences as unmediated presence” (57). In a sense, this is not unique to VR; for example, it is clearly the goal of interface design. As Ryan says, “‘Virtual reality’ is not just the ultimate medium, it is the ultimate interface metaphor” (58).

The question for me is, Are we duping ourselves out of a spiritual experience? This seems illusory and manipulative; and in erasing the medium, we make it more readily acceptable, thus the technology can increasingly creep into where it might otherwise have been objectionable. In a nutshell, this insidiousness is what irks me about Ubiquitous Computing (Mark Weiser’s vision of it, anyway). Before we know it, we may find that our hitherto spiritual spaces are being corrupted by the intrusion of technology cloaked in the invisibility of the perfect erasure of its medium-ness.

I was intrigued to learn that there have been people in the past who have considered the possibility for more spiritual representation within our communication. For example, “The mystics of ages past – such as Swedenborg, the esoteric philosopher of the eighteenth century – had a term for this radically antisemiotic mode of communication. They called it the ‘language of the angels’” (59); and, “Pierre Lévy… believes that the expressive potential of the computer will be better served by a graphic language that he calls ‘dynamic ideography’ than by alphanumeric symbols” (60). I agree in principle with this approach; i.e. I think that if one wants to design a spiritual object, technology, or experience, one needs to evaluate the ways in which the foundation of that object/technology/experience represent the essential spiritual principles one wishes to be present in the final product. But I think in terms of the Internet, we are far past the point of (what Lanier would call) “lock in,” and there is no way to change the symbols that we use to communicate in that space. The remaining options for us have to do with structural changes, meaning how that communication occurs, rather than its encryption.

Bearing this in mind, I found this quote particularly fascinating and poignant: “This VR relation to space is totally different from what we experience in the ‘cyberspace’ of the Internet. Cyberspace projects not a continuous territory but a relatively loose net made of links and nodes, of routes and destinations, with nothing in between. The destinations, or sites, may be centers of interest, but the connecting routes are not. Travel from site to site is not a voyage through a developing landscape but an instantaneous jump that negates the body, since material bodies can move through space only by traversing it one point at a time. The standard metaphor for cyberspace travel, surfing, gives a false impression of continuity” (73)…. In the nonspace of cyberspace, travel time is wasted time, since there is nothing to see between the nodes” (74).

This design embodies and in turn promotes a value set whereby speed, efficiency, and by extension profit, are at the top of the hierarchy. I think – though perhaps I’m not qualified to say so – that engagement with technology that emanates these values slowly and subconsciously affects our ability to appreciate alternative values. In other words, the more we engage with technology where the journey is a distraction and a hindrance, is it getting harder for us to enjoy the journey in other areas of our lives? My point is, there must be a more spiritual design alternative that could promote a difference set of values. How can we make it look like this – Ryan’s – vision?: “It would not matter where we ended; the pleasure would be the ride itself, the experience of being carried away by a smooth but mighty force” (74).