This paper kicked off our foray into digital studies and, for me, inspired skepticism and a (un)healthy amount of scorn. The following post details my issues with this piece, specifically its use of language.
Babble or Babel?: Response to Galloway’s (2000) “What is Digital Studies?” (originally posted to class wiki on September 2, 2010)
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the hour. Maybe it’s my low-level but persistent desire for a SnakPak of pudding.
WHATEVER the reason, I have very little patience for this treatise. I really want to call it “acado-cyber-artsy-wanking,” but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use the word “wanking” in polite circles…
That’s the “Babble” interpretation, that Galloway is talking polysyllabic circles around subjects of very little import. One might suggest that Alex channel his yearning for wordplay in a more productive manner, perhaps by writing a poem. That would take care of such (albeit beautiful but) superfluous sentences as, “The ping frisks the homogeneity of computer networks to find the specificity of an object, the machine” (paragraph 3).
Riiiiiight.
What I’m getting from this is an articulation of the nature of digital components.
Html is not a metaphor. (Okay, but who cares about html anymore? Isn’t it all about Flash and Java and PHP and C++ and the next big thing that I’m too Luddite-ish to know about?)
Online content is ephemeral. (Okay, but won’t cached data live forever? And since people all over the world might have seen and/or printed and/or stored any data that appeared once, isn’t the longevity of online content QUITE considerable? (And might that inspire me to re-think the scoffing-ness of my tone?))
Protocol requires a singular way, and that makes it hegemonic. (Okay, I guess you could call it that (and do so with this sentence that would set scholar-haters’ teeth on edge and hurt most laymen’s heads: “…digital networks are structured on a negotiated dominance of certain textual forms over other forms. Protocol is this hegemony” (paragraph 8).) But then, isn’t a standardized anything, by that definition, hegemonic? And yet isn’t it very, very practical? What if everyone had a different idea of what was an inch/gallon/pound AND we lacked a translating tool? Because that’s what protocol is, in Galloway’s assessment, a means of interfacing dissimilar objects. How would we ever achieve understanding WITHOUT that bridge? We had to standardize railroad ties, Alex. We had to settle on alternating current. I guess decisions are hegemonic because they make dissenters go along with the popular opinion. I guess grammar is hegemonic, imposing rules on wily verbs and telling speakers they’ve gotta do such-and-such to make sense. But you know what? That’s the kind of hegemony we need in order to make connections. Otherwise it’s the Tower of Babel — which I’ll get to in a minute. But first:
Here’s Galloway’s exploration of interactivity:
“Interactivity is potentially an interesting category” (paragraph 19).
Period. And THAT’s the ballgame! Whaaaaaat??? That’s it? Alex Galloway, who _are_ you?
All right. Let’s calm down and think for a minute. Let’s give Galloway (and Dr. Kuhn!) a little credit here, and assume for a second that I don’t know everything (heresy! but a sporting exercise) and perhaps this is a “Babel” problem, not a “Babble” problem. Maybe I simply don’t speak Galloway’s language. And language is what this boils down to his opinion, that, “…like cinema before it, the whole of digital media is essentially a *language*…” (paragraph 4).
It’s an interesting idea. I think the visual is a language, so for digital media to represent its own language… Okay, maybe. Maybe it’s an offshoot of visual and textual, maybe it’d look like this in a family tree:
| MOMMY VISUAL | + | DADDY TEXTUAL |
| Baby Digital Studies! | ||
But that isn’t what Galloway is arguing. He says that digital studies isn’t linguistic and that text isn’t its primary metaphor. This is a head-scratcher since the online world is rife with text (I’m typing the junk right now!) and it was all coded with text (which we call scripts, which stem from languages, which, if nothing else, represents the text-based frame that the creators conceptualized and (hegemonically!) passed on with their suggestive labels). So… what am I not getting here? What language am I not speaking? Cinema studies? Art theory? Computer science?
I welcome the opportunity to learn those languages and better appreciate this “non-linguistic semiotics” (paragraph 4)…