Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.
I started reading this interview this morning, between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen. I still haven’t finished reading, despite being utterly fascinated, but even before I got to the guts of the interview, I was struck by a thought:
In the algorithmised world, the creator is the critic.
This thought is not necessarily happening in isolation; I’ve been thinking about ‘algorithmic culture’ for a couple of years, trying to order these thoughts into academic writing, or even creative writing. But this thought feels like a step in the right direction, even if I’ve no idea what the final output should or will be. Let’s scribble out some notes…
If there’s someone whose work we enjoy, they’ll probably have an online presence — a blog or social media feed we can follow — where they’ll share what they like.
It’s an organic kind of culture — but it’s one where the art and vocation of the critic continues to be minimised.
This — and associated phenomena — is the subject of a whole bunch of recent and upcoming books (including this one, which is at the top of my to-read pile for the next month): a kind of culture where the all-powerful algorithm becomes the sole arbiter of taste, but I also think there is pressure on creatives to be their own kind of critical and cultural hub.
On the inverse, what we may traditionally have called critics — so modern-day social media commentators, influencers, your Booktubers or Booktokkers, your video essayists and their ilk — now also feel pressure to create. This pressure will come from their followers and acolytes, but also from random people who encounter them online, who will say something like “if you know so much why don’t you just do it yourself” etc etc…
Some critics will leap at the opportunity and they absolutely should — we are hearing from diverse voices that wouldn’t otherwise have thought to try.
But some should leave the creation to others — not because they’re not worth hearing from, they absolutely are — but because their value, their creativity, their strength, lies in how they shape language, images, metaphor, around the work of others. They don’t realise — as I didn’t for a long time — that being a critic is a vocation, a life’s work, a real skill. Look at any longer-form piece in the London Review of Books or The New Inquiry and it becomes very clear how valuable this work is.
I’ve always loved the term critic, particularly cultural critic, or commentator, or essayist… they always seemed like wonderful archaic terms that don’t belong in the modern, fragmented, divided, confused world. But to call oneself a critic or essayist, to own that, and only that, is to defy the norms of culture; to refuse the ‘pillars’ of novel, film, press/journalism, and to stand to one side, giving much-needed perspective to how these archaic forms define, reflect, and challenge society.
It’s a real back to the future moment, this. Where I’ve headed off for a year or two on a journey of personal inspiration, seeking new knowledges, grand new themes, new looks, new designs, new vibes, only to come crawling back to the place where it all started. It’s all very Joseph Campbell.
My very first proper blog ran on a website called Blog-City, and for some insane reason I remember that my first post was on the 15th of July, 2003. This followed many years of experimenting with all sorts of web hosting and design services (all completely free) including GeoCities and Angelfire. I had websites for myself, for my made-up career, for imagined airlines and businesses and all sorts, not to mention links outwards to rudimentary social media services and websites like Neopets. The internet was simpler then; maybe it will be simple again some day, but probably not.
Once I started working properly on my career, I tried to separate out all the different parts of my life into different web presences. There was social media, of course, and since 2007 I’ve had Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (most of them are private or deactivated now, apart from Mastodon, which I’m enjoying playing around with). I had separate sites for my filmmaking, for my work and profile as an academic, for my photography stuff, as well as a blog archive just kind of floating around. When I registered danielbinns[dot]net back in 2014, I thought ‘right, time to link everything up’, but I never quite got there in a way I liked. Everything was still floating, still nebulous.
Part of this was the technology, maybe, but primarily it was due to my trying to force things to fit in a particular way. This is personal and psychological as much as it has anything to do with a particular host or platform.
Several things have happened in the last few years to make me reconsider all of the above. The pandemic was a player, for sure, but it also took me reading stuff and watching videos and learning about different ways of managing my time, my notes and knowledge, my skills and expertise, and just figuring out who on earth I was and accepting that person.
Long story short, we’re back here on WordPress, under a new domain, The Clockwork Penguin. TCP isn’t a business, necessarily; for now, I still like making stuff under the Deluded Penguin moniker. TCP is more of an ethos, a place to play and experiment, to reflect. To look back over some notes and some things I’ve been thinking about; to post fragments, or more developed work, works in progress, or just some cool links I found. I don’t know if it’s a cozy place or a mysterious place; if it’s a house sitting next to a river, or a garden where I can plant things and watch them grow. But I look forward to finding out.
I’m often asked by students for samples of writing that align with what’s required for assessment tasks. This semester is no different, so I actually spent some time digging through old courses and studios I’ve run, finding a few good examples that I can share with the students.
Very often my feedback on student reflections tends towards hoping they’ll integrate or synthesise research, ideas, and thoughts on their making. I usually find myself saying ‘take a position and argue it’, by which I mean that reflective writing — at least in an academic context — shouldn’t be about a summary of everything achieved, every decision made. Rather, choose a single point — be it a creative choice, or a quote from a journal article, or something watched — and then unpack that single point to make connections to other researchers and scholars, other makers, other reflections/insights the student generated in the class.
This is difficult to achieve, even for seasoned researchers. Add to this that the accepted conventions of academic writing — the vast majority of it in many fields — are so restrictive in terms of expression as to be incomprehensible. This means that students become terrified of approaching any academic writing. It’s seen as boring, or dense, or difficult. This greatly stifles their curiosity, or their interest in finding the connections I try to encourage.
If only, I hear them say or imply, academic writing was easier to engage with. Which reminds me that there are some truly wonderful, writerly, scholars out there. You just have to look. This is far from an exhaustive bibliography, but here are a handful of scholars that I read for the joy of experiencing good writing as much as for research.
Ingold, Tim. 2011. “The Textility of Making.” In Being Alive, 219–28. Milton Park: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203818336-28.
Jagoda, Patrick. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=4427890.
Miles, Adrian, Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier, and Franziska Weidle. 2018. “From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media.” In Critical Distance in Documentary Media, edited by Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, 301–19. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Murray, Janet Horowitz. 2017. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Updated edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226253978.001.0001.
Pomerance, Murray. 2008. The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–53. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109.
After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity. Errors and omissions my own. This instalment was published May 5, 2022(see all Shift Lock posts here).
Twitter was already a corporate entity, and had been struggling with how to market and position itself anyway. Not to mention, its free speech woes — irrevocably tied to those of its competitors — are not surprising. If anything, Mr. Musk was something of a golden ticket: someone to hand everything over to.
The influx/exodus cycle started before the news was official… Muskovites joined/returned to Twitter in droves, opponents found scrolls bearing ancient Mastodon tutorials and set up their own mini-networks (let’s leave that irony steaming in the corner for now).
None of this is new: businesses are bought and sold all the time, the right to free speech is never unconditional (and nor should it be), and the general populace move and shift and migrate betwixt different services, platforms, apps, and spaces all the time.
What seems new, or at least different, about these latter media trends, issues, events, is the sheer volume of coverage they receive. What tends to happen with news from media industries (be they creative, social, or otherwise) is wall-to-wall coverage for a given week or two, before things peter out and we move on to the next block. It seems that online culture operates at two speeds: an instantaneous, rolling, roiling stream of chaos; and a broader, slightly slower rise and fall, where you can actually see trends come and go across a given time period. Taking the Oscars slap as an example: maybe that rise and fall lasts a week. Sometimes it might last two to four, as in the case of Musk and Twitter.
How, then, do we consider or position these two speeds in broader ‘culture’?
Like all of the aforementioned, Trump was not a new phenomenon. Populism was a tried and tested political strategy in 2015-16; just, admittedly, a strategy that many of us hoped had faded into obsolescence. However, true to the 20-30 year cycle of such things, Trump emerged. And while his wings were — mostly — clipped by the checks and balances of the over-complex American political system, the real legacy of his reign is our current post-truth moment. And that legacy is exemplified by a classic communications strategy: jamming. Jam the airwaves for a week, so everyone is talking about only one thing. Distract everyone from deeper issues that need work.
This jamming doesn’t necessary come from politicians, from strategists, from agencies, as it may once have done. Rather, it comes from a conversational consensus emerging from platforms — and this consensus is most likely algorithmically-driven. That’s the real concern. And as much as Musk may want to open up the doors and release the code, it’s really not that straightforward.
The algorithms behind social media platforms are complex — more than that, they are nested, like a kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. People working on one section of the code are not aware nor comprehending of what other teams might be working on, beyond any do-not-disturb-type directives from on high. As scholar Nick Seaver says in a recent Washington Post piece, “The people inside Twitter want to understand how their algorithm works, too.” (Albergotti 2022)
Algorithms — at least those employed by companies like Twitter — are built to stoke the fires of engagement. And there ain’t no gasoline like reactions, like outrage, like whatever the ‘big thing’ is for that particular week. These wildfires also intersect with the broader culture in ways that it takes longer-form criticism (I would say academic scholarship, but we often miss the mark, or more accurately, due to glacial peer review turnarounds, the boat) to meaningfully engage and understand.
Thanks partly to COVID but also to general mental health stuff, I’ve been on a weird journey with social media (and news, to be fair) over the past 3-5 years. Occasional sabbaticals have certainly helped, but increasingly I’m just not checking it. This year I’ve found more and more writers and commentators whose long-form work I appreciate as a way of keeping across things, but also just for slightly more measured takes. Tepid takes. Not like a spa but more like a heated pool. This is partly why I started this newsletter-based journey, just to let myself think things through in a way that didn’t need to be posted immediately, but nor did I need to wait months/years for peer review. Somewhere beyond even the second trend-based speed I mentioned above.
What it really lets me do, though, is disengage from the constant flow of algorithmically-driven media, opinion, reaction, and so on, in a way where I can still do that thinking in a relevant and appropriate way. What I’m hoping is that this kind of distance lets me turn around and observe that flow in new and interesting ways.
Below the divider
At the end of each post I link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some are connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others are… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).
After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity. Errors and omissions my own.This instalment was published April 1, 2022(see all Shift Lock posts here).
To take a uniquely Web 2.0 perspective, one might say that ‘there is no longer such thing as a passive audience.’ It is undoubtedly true that new tools, technologies, and modes of communication have made it relatively straightforward to communicate one-to-one or among one’s networks. The result is a kind of town square both ad infinitum and nauseum, where memes and weekend warriors abound, a post-truth, “postpolitical cornucopia” where we all “fish, film, fuck, frolic, and fund from morning to midnight” (Miller 2009) In the social media age (Miller’s polite rage at user-generated content seems delightfully quaint now, in a ‘oooh, the teacher said fuck!’ kind of way), it can feel like we’re drowning in immediate reaction, and reactive opinion. In the immediate aftermath of the Will Smith slap incident at the 2022 Oscars, Ryan Broderick called it “viral pre-exhaustion”, the dread that the latest trending issue or moment will saturate feeds and streams and columns for days to come.
I used to even watch award shows or televised live events hoping for this kind of thing to happen. But now, the very thought of having the same “have you seen X meme or Y take” conversation, which now happens both online and off, feels completely draining. (Broderick 2022)
Saturation and a feeling of existential dread linked to said saturation is not a product of COVID, but the pandemi-moore certainly hasn’t helped. The distance between home and work, or study, or restaurants or, you know, outside, and the resultant necessary movement, meant that there was at least some forced breaks between the mindless absorption of hot takes. While stuck at home, that boundary, between brain and reactive opinion, between independent, critical thought and the feed, broke down as easily as that between work and life.
If global internet usage increased by a whopping 40% as a result of the pandemic (Sandvine Inc. 2020) some of that at least has to be users who specifically joined some kind of social network to rage about X or Y pandemic trending topic. Or perhaps they were already raging, and the panini simply allowed them more time and justification and reasons to do so.
It’s easy to look back and say times were simpler. Some have built careers out of it. And, sure, some of the diagrams we had when I first studied audiences were lovely.1
Karl Bühler’s Organon Model of human communication, 1934.
There has always, however, been a private and public sphere. It’s been a long time since I read my Habermas, but the notion of the latter sphere solidified around some kind of arena where debates could be had, grievances aired, authority ridiculed, speech could be free. The concept, at least according to Habermas, emerged after the Renaissance, with the opening up of global trade passages and an increased interest in ideas, creativity, and independent thought.6 What fascinated me most as a rookie media scholar was that I was seeing these 40+ year old ideas playing out live in — get ready for a flashback — the blogosphere. This was the pre-social media height of public and independent discourse, where anyone could publish whatever they wanted to their Livejournal, Blogger or WordPress, and the comments section was where the real conversation kicked off — believe it or not, they used to be rather civil.
Habermas was also partly responsible for my hybrid interests of media and film, in part because he suggested that it was in media that much of these deliberations, debates, grievances, could be encoded. While I read this, of course I was blogging about films, TV shows, and chatting about them in my uni classes: my own little filter sphere, of course, but a neat micro-example of Habermas’ thinking.
Over a decade later, and looking back over the evolution3 of internet technology and screen-based cultures, the public sphere seems at first glance to have evolved into a chaotic mess of bad takes and half-baked thinkpieces. The usual culprits cajole and dominate their target demographics, and the filter bubbles seem to close around everyone to an isolation-fuelled zenith. Social media is fragmenting into similar bubbles — e.g. monolithic Facebook/Twitter into Parler, Telegram, etc. — with little interest in public-facing discourse, and more in a kind of gated echo chamber where fringe ideas aren’t actively encouraged, but they certainly aren’t grounds for expulsion.
The mechanics of Web 2.0 still exist as we shift to web3, web2S 3D, or whatever comes next. It’s still very straightforward to set up some kind of public site for oneself and spout whatever nonsense you like (welcome to Shift Lock). But the unfortunate combination of the web of commerce/apps and the post-truth era means a siloing off: a splicing of the spheres.
So where, what, who is ‘the audience’? Is it still possible to think of a ‘public’ as a homogenous entity in the era of the platform? Ida Willig tracks this shift within media agencies, and the move from scatter-shot TV and print campaigns to tracked and targeted exposures based on behaviours. As they write:
When the media agency executive … speaks about ‘behaviour’, it is of course not our offline life he is referring to, nor is it any person in the sense of an identifiable human being, but the activity of a given IP address. This is a fundamental shift in how media agencies think about and work with consumers, and not least a fundamental shift in the knowledge that lies behind the construction of different target groups. (Willig 2022)
Despite the best efforts of corporations over the last century to assure us that ‘we’re not a number’, turns out we are after all. It makes things so much easier. In the past, salespeople would spin out an ad with no concrete idea of number of exposures or conversions to sale. Willig uses the example of a car:
With digital media, media agencies can sell ad space directed at people who are in the market for a car, or even a car of that specific brand, and track their exact online behaviour from interest to final buy. (Willig 2022)
For academics, particularly of the humanities stripe like myself, this is tricky. We’ve done our best to shun spectatorship, and the figure of the singular ‘audience’ is pretty much totally poo-pooed now in cinema studies (that took some work). But even if we shift the conversation in textual analysis to potential interpretations, we’re still treating the audience as a known unknown, or worse still, simply hiding ourselves and our own interpretations.
The subject of surveillance capitalism is treated as an individual with its own desires, needs, modes of engagement and routines. This sounds like progress until you remember that this system only cares about individuation so long as it makes you buy stuff.
For media-makers, this is a problem, too — the majority are interested in getting as many people to watch, read, listen to, play, or engage with their creation as possible. Individuated, niche segments, tiny custom campaigns direct a handful of IP addresses in predictable ways. In creating a perfect system for advertising, we have destroyed many concepts, spaces, that could be viewed as a public sphere in the Habermasian sense. Perhaps there never was a monolithic mass media audience in this way, but it was helpful to have that in mind when thinking through how media works.
So where does the public conversation play out? Instagram stories? TikTok? Whatever is trending on Twitter? Films and TV? Sure, in part. The public sphere is not just one thing, and that’s the point. It’s probably best to think of it in terms of the notion of media landscape discussed previously: a web or mesh of technologies, platforms, tools, companies and individuals, sending, receiving, storing. Add to that mesh several little silos or bubbles that have minimal connection to others, and some bubbles that encompass enormous sweeps of three-dimensional space. Conceivably, we can map The Conversation4 according to the number and frequency of connections between nodes in the mesh, drawing out themes and big issues accordingly.
This is what algorithms are built to do: they map the mesh and find the best routes to take. What they carry along those routes might be commerce-driven or content-driven, but the goal is still to get it in front of a node (person, feed, platform, screen) who’ll use it. Algorithms are the new media agencies; the more things change, etc etc.
Below the divider
At the end of each post I’ll try to link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some will be connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others will be… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).
‘Night Shifts’, by Michael W. Clune, at Harper’s Magazine.
Miller, Toby. “Media Studies 3.0.” Television & New Media, vol. 10, no. 1, SAGE Publications, 2009, 5–6, 6.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Great Brit: Polity Press, 1989, 17-18.
Sandvine Inc., Global Internet Phenomena Report: COVID-19 Spotlight, May 2020, Waterloo, Canada, 5.
Willig, Ida. “From Audiences to Data Points: The Role of Media Agencies in the Platformization of the News Media Industry.” Media, Culture & Society 44, no. 1 (January 2022): 56–71, 63-4.
Notes
1 illustration from Lanigan, Richard L. 2013 ‘Information theories’ in Paul Cobley and Peter J. Schulz (eds.),Theories and Models of Communication, Berlin: De Gruyter, Inc., pp. 59-83, p. 65.
2 I knew I was lost to media theory/academia when I actually found his Structural Transformation (see Habermas 1989) interesting as a second-year.
3 Yes, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I still believe the internet is an evolution, thanks in part to Hank Green.
4 As in The Conversation™ aka The Discourse, not to be confused with the academically-inflected publication of the same name.
