PREFACE
2. The terms “data” and “information” do not differ quantitatively, as is suggested when referring to a bit of data as a “piece of information,” but qualitatively. Data (as givens or facts; datum in Latin) embody the lowest level in the chain of perception, preceding both information (as processed data; informare in Latin) and knowledge (as interconnected information or a “serial event of cooperation and collaboration,” in the formulation of Manfred Faßler, Der infogene Mensch. Entwurf einer Anthropologie [Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2008], 281, stressing the processual character of knowledge). From the perspective of perception theory, however, it is questionable that data (as givens before interpretation and the construction of meaning) exist for the observer. As an alternative to “data,” the suggestion has been made to use “capta” (from the English “to capture”) in order to keep in one’s mind the inevitable “taking” of the given. See Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/5/1/000091/000091.html. This term, though, subverts the difference between data and information (as processed data). Since the purpose of this book is not a terminological discussion, it may suffice to keep in mind the indicated difference among data, information, and knowledge.
1. INTELLIGENCE AGENCY LOGIC
2. DOUBLE INDIFFERENCE
1. See the lecture by the political scientist Christoph Bieber, “Politik und Staat im Netz. Social Media nach dem NSA-Abhörskandal und der Wahl in Deutschland” (Politics and state on the net: Social media after the NSA phone tapping scandal and elections in Germany), one in the series Digital Media Studies in der Praxis. Wie die Geisteswissenschaften auf die neuen Medien reagieren (Practical digital media studies: How the humanities react to the new media), which I organized at Basel University on September 24, 2013. Gerhart Baum compares it to Fukushima in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (September 24, 2013), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/gastbeitrag-von-gerhart-baum-ich-will-dass-wir-beissen-koennen-12589869.html.
3. SELF-TRACKING AND SMART THINGS
4. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 71. Bauman is referring to John Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941).
8. Gary Wolf, one of their protagonists, underlines exactly this altruistic aspect of self-tracking: “Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby’s sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others’. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research. Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life.” Wolf, “Know Thyself.”
9. Helga Nowotny, “Wissenschaft neu denken. Vom verlässlichen Wissen zum gesellschaftlich robusten Wissen,” in Die Verfasstheit der Wissensgesellschaft, ed. Karsten Gerlog and Anne Ulrich (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2006), 27, 33.
10. See Morozov, “Information Consumerism.”
4. ECOLOGICAL DATA DISASTER
3. This example is reported, with reference to the German company Metro Group, by Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon, in his talk “The Social Data Revolution: More Efficient Than the KGB?” at the World Innovation Forum, New York (May 8, 2010), http://fora.tv/2010/06/08/Andreas_Wigend_Marketing_and_Web_20/The_Social_Data_Revolution_More_Efficient_than_the_KGB. Four years later, Apple’s iBeacons sensor promised such “location-based marketing,” possibly starting a trend, as it did with the iPhone.
4. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26. Originally published in German in 1979.
5. Morozov expands on this complexity in “The Real Privacy Problem,” MIT Technology Review (October 22, 2013); and in his book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
8. The consensus between the views of the digital native Morozov (born 1994) and those of the digital immigrant Schirrmacher (born 1959) regarding the negative evaluation of today’s developments in technology shows that cultural criticism or even pessimism cannot be attributed unproblematically to the older generation. Also Michel Serres (born 1930) shows with his book Petite Poucette (2012) that the older generation does not necessarily behave in a way that is motivated by cultural pessimism.
9. On this, see the paragraphs concerning Charles Fourier’s social utopias, the glass architecture of the early twentieth century, surrealism, and Trotsky, in Manfred Schneider. Transparenzraum (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013).
10. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 330; Peter Handke, Am Felsfenster morgens (Salzburg, 1998), 336.
5. COLD CIVIL WAR
2. On the demand for transparency, see Tal Zarsky, “Mining the Networked Self,” Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 6, no. 1 (2012): 120–136; Tal Zarsky, “Transparent Predictions,” University of Illinois Law Review 4 (2013): 1503–1569.
4. Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1979), 107.
7. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26.
8. Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (New York, 2012), 98, 91. Anna North presents these quotes in her article “When Technology Makes Work Worse,” New York Times (August 19, 2014). North also refers to Rhodri Marsden’s text “Is Your Boss Spying on You?” Independent (March 19, 2014). Marsden concludes that the results of such analyses “could eventually produce data sets that cover the entire career of an individual, following us from job to job and depriving us of the opportunity to creatively airbrush our past within the context of a one-page CV.” http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/is-your-boss-spying-on-you-9203169.html. From a management perspective the transparent employee is desirable exactly for the reason that it prevents such airbrushing. The morals—this is the paradoxical and absurd aspect of such analyses—are on the side of those who want to reveal, not to conceal, the truth. For Evolv’s self-description, see www.linkedin.com/company/evolv-on-demand.
9. The first quote is by David Lyon in Finley, “The Quantified Man”; the second quote is by Zygmunt Baumann in Baumann and Lyon, Liquid Surveillance, 168, 130.
6. DATA-MINING BUSINESS
2. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4. On the job sharing of data mining, see Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), chap. 7.
7. SOCIAL ENGINEERS WITHOUT A CAUSE
3. It is in exactly this framework of customization that Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier are surprised that Amazon does not sell its data on the reading habits of its Kindle users to authors and publishers: “For authors a feedback would be also useful; they would be able to track when the reader stops reading the book and they could then improve their texts.” Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 167.
4. For a recent appeal to save the book as means of reflection and imagination against the practice of “developing written material to suit sales strategies,” see Ursula K. Le Guin’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards on November 20, 2014.
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1. A good example of how little tinkerers allowed their enterprises to be “sicklied” by thought is given by Todd Humphrey, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory, in his TED talk “How to Fool a GPS” in February 2012, while promoting equipping all objects with GPS-“dots”: “I couldn’t find my shoes one recent morning. And as usual I had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn’t have to bother my wife with this kind of triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are.” http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps. The joke received the laughter hoped for in the TED talk and leaves little room for this troublesome objection: how much better it is to have to ask one’s wife than to risk that others, whom the wife would never answer, could ask the house as well.
6. In his book The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), David Golumbia criticizes “computationalism as the belief in the power of computation, as commitment to the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes” (8). Evgeny Morozov varies this criticism in his book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), with the key terms “internet-centrism” and “cyber-utopianism” representing the conviction that all social problems can be and should be solved through the Internet (xv). Later, in his book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), Morozov reinforces his critique under the key word “solutionism.” The “softwarization of society” is, among others, discussed by David M. Berry in his Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), where Berry notes a “transition from a rational juridical epistemology to an authoritarian-computational epistemology” and points out the presence of software engineers within their products: “their rationalities, expressed through particular logics, embedded in the interface and the code, become internalized within the user as a particular habitus, or way of doing, appropriate to certain social activities” (12, 38).
8. SILENT REVOLUTION
1. Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, eds., The Human Face of Big Data (New York: Sterling, 2013), 19.
2. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage, 2014), 4ff.
5. Morozov offers this term in his book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), with respect to the media euphoria of the Arab spring in 2009, which generated such headlines as “Facebook Revolution” and “In Egypt, Twitter Trumps Torture.”
6. Schmidt and Cohen, The New Digital Age, 66.
7. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67, 63.
8. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Nicholas Carr, The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
9. Gary T. Marx, “An Ethics for the New Surveillance,” Information Society 14, no. 3 (1998): 171–185; Alex Pentland, “Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data,” in The Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009, ed. Soumitra Dutta and Irene Mia, http://hd.media.mit.edu/wef_globalit.pdf. Of course, the privacy debate demands clearing up who owns the data both technologically (is it the individual who produces its geodata, or is it the provider?) and socially (living in an apartment building, how much privacy can the individual demand from Google Maps?).
9. ALGORITHMS
1. On the problems of terminology, see, for example, Peter Wegener, “Why Interaction Is More Powerful Than Algorithms,” Communications of the ACM 40, no. 5 (1997): 80–91; Moshe Y. Vardi, “What Is an Algorithm?” Communications of the ACM 55, no. 3 (2012): 5. Moreover, computer sciences differentiate functionally between many different algorithms: searching, sorting, classification, and optimizing algorithms as dynamic, evolutionary, or probabilistic algorithms, as cryptographic, epidemic, or ant-colony optimization algorithms. For an extended discussion of the algorithm, see Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, and Ronald L. Rivest, Introduction to Algorithms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009); Mikhail J. Atallah and Marina Blanton, eds., Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook (Boca Raton, Fla.: Chapman & Hall, 2009). See also the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures, http://xlinux.nist.gov/dads; and Robert Kowalski’s essay “Algorithm = Logic + Control,” Communications of the ACM 22, no. 7 (July 1979): 424–436. My thanks go to Marcus Burkhardt for his references to the discussions in the field (Digitale Datenbanken: Eine Medientheorie im Zeitalter von Big Data [Bielefeld: transcript, 2015]).
2. Andrew Goffrey, “Algorithm,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 19.
3. Eli Pariser, Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2011), 15.
4. Berthold Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 20.
5. Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery (New York, 2005), 36–43. See also Cass Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On the term “Daily Me,” see Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
6. See Andrew Shapiro, Control Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999); Gordon Graham, The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry (1999); Sunstein, Republic.com. The psychological explanation for the human interest in the filter bubble was already given in Leon Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), and the necessity of encountering otherness and contradictoriness is discussed by Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996).
7. David Lazer, Alex Pentland, et al., “Computational Social Science,” Social Science 323 (February 6, 2009): 721–723.
8. This is how the enthusiasm for this form of electronic shackles in service of the organizational sciences sounds in the original: “Face-to-face group interactions could be assessed over time with ‘sociometers.’ Such electronic devices could be worn to capture physical proximity, location, movement, and other facets of individual behavior and collective interactions. The data could raise interesting questions about, for example, patterns of proximity and communication within an organization, and flow patterns associated with high individual and group performance.” Ibid., 722.
9. See Cass R. Sunstein, “It’s for Your Own Good!” New York Review of Books (March 7, 2013), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good. Sunstein is referring to Sarah Conly’s book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism (2013) that, given the weight problems, the debts, and the lack of social security of aging American citizens, pleads for the intervention of the state into its citizens’ freedom to make decisions on their own.
10. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). On the algorithm as a victory of Leibniz’s logical syllogisms over Voltaire’s critical rationalism, see David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 189–196. On the criticism of the formalist model of rationality, see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
11. In the chapter “The Perils of Algorithmic Gatekeeping” in Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), he further illustrates the absurdity and danger of human freedom of opinion when algorithms pass judgment on certain key terms within the contents of journalist articles, with the consequence of excommunicating these articles from the Google cosmos.
10. ABSENCE OF THEORY
2. Hans Jörg Rheinberger, “Wie werden aus Spuren Daten, und wie verhalten sich Daten zu Fakten?” in Nach Feierabend 2007: Daten; Züricher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte, ed. David Gugerli et al. (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), 3:123–124: “Currently data only make sense and only acquire meaning if they are accessible in a structured way. In this context there has been talk about a true epistemological revolution taking place at this moment. The argument is that a transition from research based on hypotheses to one based on data has taken place. I.e., traces are no longer generated through phenomena but pooled as data in order to bring yet unknown, new facts to light.”
3. See Timothy Lenoir, one of the prominent representatives in digital humanities in 2008 in an e-mail to N. Katherine Hayles. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 33. See also Patricia Cohen, “Humanities 2.0. Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” New York Times (November 16, 2010).
4. David M. Berry, “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities,” Culture Machine 12 (2011): 4.
5. Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 87–88. On the paradigm change in the sciences, see Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder, and Gregor Schiemann, eds., Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
7. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26, special issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 8.
8. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 196–211; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskia Iris Jain (New York: Routledge, 2008); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). For an extensive discussion of these aesthetics on the background of the postmodern condition and digital media see Roberto Simanowski, Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1–26.
9. Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 88.
10. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 19, 146.
11. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 105, 104.
12. Norbert Bolz, “Theorie der Müdigkeit—Theoriemüdigkeit,” telepolis 3 (September 1997): 43.
13. Jean-François Lyotard, “Apostil on Narratives,” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 18, 19.
11. COMPULSIVE MEASURING
3. With this expectation the Swiss Next Generation Finance Invest AG justifies its engagement with StockPulse, a startup of two IT business engineers from Cologne that follows communications on financial markets in the realm of social media and analyzes up to one hundred thousand content items daily in order to predict volatility and price movements with trading signals for stocks, currency, and raw material. Half-Annual Report (August 21, 2012), http://blog.nextgfi.com/page/3. Page no longer accessible.
4. Richard Münch, Akademischer Kapitalismus. Über die politische Ökonomie der Hochschulreform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 13. See Theodor M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
12. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE NUMERABLE
4. Byung-Chul Han, Digitale Rationalität und das Ende des kommunikativen Handelns (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013), 33, 20ff. On the discussion of the jury theorem in Nicolas de Condorcet’s Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785) and his relationship to democracy, see Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps. 1–2.
5. The same removal of protection by the experts occurs in academia, where unprofitable but important programs can no longer be backed up by the faculty of a department if each program reports directly and independently to the financial office.
6. Jürgen Mittelstrass, “Bildung und ethische Masse,” in Die Zukunft der Bildung, ed. Nelson Kilius, Jürgen Kluge, and Linda Reisch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 257.
7. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 157, 167.
10. Michel Callon and John Law, “On Qualculation, Agency, and Otherness,” Environment and Planning 23 (2005): 717–733.
11. William H. Starbuck, “How Much Better Are the Most Prestigious Journals? The Statistics of Academic Publication,” Organization Science 16 (2005): 180–200; Alfred Kieser, “JOURQUAL—der Gebrauch, nicht der Missbrauch, ist das Problem. Oder: Warum Wirtschaftsinformatik die beste deutschsprachige betriebswirtschaftliche Zeitschrift ist,” Die Betriebswirtschaft 72 (2012): 93–110.
13. DIGITAL HUMANITIES
2. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 57.
3. See the panel “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” at the MLA Convention in January 2013 and the lecture by Alan Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” at the MLA Convention in January 2011.
4. http://nanopub.org/wordpress/?page_id=65; see Paul Groth, Andrew Gibson, and Johannes Velterop, “The Anatomy of a Nanopublication,” Information Services and Use 30, no. 1 (2010): 51–56. http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/c/c0/HCLSIG$$SWANSIOC$$Actions$$RhetoricalStructure$$meetings$$20100215$cwa-anatomy-nanopub-v3.pdf. The authors differentiate between concept (“smallest, unambiguous unit of thought”), triple (“a tuple of three concepts (subject, predicate, object)”), statement (“triple that is uniquely identifiable”), and annotation (“triple such that the subject of the triple is a statement”) and define the nanopublication as: “A set of annotations that refer to the same statement and contains a minimum set of (community) agreed upon annotations.”
5. Tripel means 3-tupel; tupel is a term for the synopsis of an ordered list of mathematical objects sensitive to sequence.
6. “The Semantic Web is, bluntly said, nothing else but technocratic neo-scholasticism based on a naive if not dangerous belief that the world can be described according to a single and universally valid viewpoint; in other words, a blatant example of cybernetic control ideology and engineering blindness to ambiguity and cultural issues.” Florian Cramer, “Animals That Belong to the Emperor: Failing Universal Classification Schemes from Aristotle to the Semantic Web,” Nettime 29 (September 2007), http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0712/msg00043.html. “Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview.” Clay Shirky, “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview” (November 7, 2003), http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_syllogism.html. I would like to thank Marcus Burkhardt for drawing my attention to this discussion in his dissertation Medium/Computer/Datenbank. Ansätze einer medientheoretischen Grundlegung, University of Giessen (Spring 2014). On the discussion of this example and the epistemological problems of the semantic web, see Burkhardt, Medium, 276–290.
7. Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen, A Semantic Web Primer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 246–247: “The motto of the Semantic Web is not the enforcement of a single ontology but rather ‘let a thousand ontologies blossom.’ ”
8. Antoniou and van Harmelen themselves point out this aspect of invisibility without relating it to the promise of the polyphony of ontologies: “Navigation or personalization engines can be powered by underlying ontologies, expressed in RDF Schema or OWL, without users ever being confronted with the ontologies, let alone their representation languages” (ibid., 247).
9. Niels-Oliver Walkowski, “Text, Denken und E-Science. Eine internationale Annäherung an eine Konstellation,” Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 9: Digital Humanities (Diaphanes, 2013), 45–46. See also Richard Sennett’s distinction, with respect to the logic of collaboration software such as GoogleWave, between information sharing as “an exercise in definition and precision” and communication which “is as much about what is left unsaid as said” and “mines the realm of suggestions and connotation.” Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New York: Penguin, 2012), 28.
10. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:9.
12. Ibid., 1:13, 1:16–17.
13. Stephen Ramsay, “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books,” lecture at Brown University (2010). See Ramsay’s article “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18, no. 2 (2003): 167–174, which conceives of algorithmic analysis not as verification of interpretations but as inspiration for hermeneutic attempts quite in the style of art reception.
14. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 82.
15. Terence Harpold, “Conclusions,” in Hyper/Text/Theorie, ed. George P. Landow (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 189–222; David Kolb, “Socrates in the Labyrinth,” in Hyper/Text/Theorie, ed. George P. Landow (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 323–344.
16. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2012), 10.
1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 225.
2. David M. Berry, “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities,” Culture Machine 12 (2011): 7, with a quote from Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66: “That is the point of the pedagogy of Bildung, which teaches knowledge acquisition as a process rather than the acquisition of knowledge as a product.”
4. Sabine Maasen, Wissenssoziologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 86.
5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, A Rejoinder, in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98.
7. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 27ff.
10. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 377. Claus Leggewie sees Rorty’s reference to Lessing’s endlessly deferring conception of truth as an expression of postmodern acceptance of difference and connects this philosophical position with the pragmatic problem of multiculturalism in his book Multi kulti. Spielregeln für die Vielvölkerrepublik (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990), 134.
11. David Weinberger, “Die Digitale Glaskugel,” in Big Data. Das neue Versprechen des Allwissenheit, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger and Tobias Moorstedt (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 236–237.
12. With a view to the terminological differentiation made at the outset, it becomes questionable whether, in strict terms, we can still use the category “knowledge” (or “understanding”) here as “program of a deliberated insight or conception of recognition and delineation” or whether we should rather talk of information. Manfred Faßler, Der infogene Mensch. Entwurf einer Anthropologie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), 277. Reconstructing the cognitive process that a book or an article makes possible as a structured processing of information will, at any rate, get lost in the course of shortening into selected excerpts or to the result of that process.
13. Weinberger, “Die Digitale Glaskugel,” 236.
14. Ziauddin Sardar, “Alt.Civilizations. FAQ. Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 742.
15. Elena Esposito, Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 318.
16. In my book Facebook-Gesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz, 2016), I take up this discussion from the perspective of narrative and memory theory.
15. GOD’S EYE
1. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 73, 59.
2. Didier Bigo, “Globalized (in)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon,” in Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, ed. Naoki Sakai and John Solomos, Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory 4 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 109–156; Thomas Mathiesen, “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s Panopticon Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (May 1997): 215–234.
3. Oscar Gandy, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993).
4. Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “Google and the Search for the Future,” Wall Street Journal (August 14, 2010). The “anticipatory software” Google Now, launched in 2012, fulfills the goal specified for it at least to the extent that it indicates flight delays on its own because it knows the travel plans of its users from their Gmail-hosted e-mails.
6. The inspiration—and the payback—for this commercial is of course the Super Bowl commercial by Pepsi-Cola from 1996 in which a surveillance camera shows how a Coca-Cola distributor in a supermarket steals a Pepsi can from the fridge. Here it is not the function of the surveillance camera that is given new meaning; it is the judgment of the convicted culprit, who in the logic of advertisement actually does “the right thing.” The twinkle in the eye is even implemented on the audio level. However, against the voluble enthusiasms of Coca-Cola, which are free of irony, it is to be feared that Pepsi’s gesture hardly has a chance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cJzTgFPj64.
16. DATA HACKS
1. The concept of media literacy oriented by cultural studies and going beyond the bounds of merely functional knowledge is illustrated in the collection of essays coedited by the author: “Grundlagen der Medienbildung. Szenarien und Potentiale” (Basics of media education: scenarios and potentials), dichtung-digital. A journal of art and culture in digital media 43 (2014): http://www.dichtung-digital.de/en/journal/archiv/?issue=43. I take up the discussion of media literacy in my book Medienbildung (forthcoming with Matthes & Seitz in 2017).
3. Ulises Ali Mejias, in his book Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), calls this communication outside of the realms of control or capitalization by global social networks (the nodes of the Internet) “paranodal.” Already Gilles Deleuze had invoked “hijack speech” in his interview with Antonio Negri entitled “Control and Becoming.” http://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/6._deleuze-control_and_becoming.pdf. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175: “The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” See Gilles Deleuze, “Post-Scriptum on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 6. Referring to this passage in its manifesto The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001), the French authors’ collective Tiqqun calls for the creation of “opacity zones,” the opening of “cavities, empty intervals, ‘black blocs’ within the cybernetic matrix of power.” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis.
5. Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
6. The term “optical unconscious” is used by Walter Benjamin to indicate the fact that the technical image captures details that may otherwise—for example, if a scene is in process—be invisible to or overlooked by the human eye.
7. Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 180.
9. Ralph Haupter, “Unternehmerische Verantwortung im Zeitalter von Cloud Computing,” in Der digitale Dämon: Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien zwischen Alltag und Ängsten, ed. Ralph Haupter (München: Redline 2013).
17. ON THE RIGHT LIFE IN THE WRONG ONE
1. Norbert Bolz, Die Konformisten des Andersseins. Ende der Kritik (München: Fink 1999), 127 (German: “[der] schöne Traum von einer schlechten Welt”).
2. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 104–105.
3. Norbert Bolz, Das konsumistische Manifest (München: Fink, 2002), 14, 16.
5. TED interview, Charlie Rose and Larry Page (March 2014), “Where’s Google Going Next?” http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_page_where_s_google_going_next. The critical questions that are not asked by Rose are all the more clearly revealed in a reading of Julian Assange, who sees the privacy problem in particular in Google’s attempt to gain total control over information. “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ ” New York Times (June 1, 2013).
6. A site exemplifying the contradictions of this engagement was the Berlin conference on digital culture re:publica 2014, where even after fierce claims for more data privacy, advocates for the Internet of things were nonetheless given hardly any critical questions concerning the accumulation of private data. The problem is that people fail to see the link between Snowden and the smart shower (which collects data about your habits while mapping your water usage). See Yvonne Hofstetter’s gloomy lecture “Big Data? Intelligente Maschinen!” (Big data? intelligent machines!), https://re-publica.de/file/republica-2014-yvonne-hofstetter-big-data-intelligente-maschinen, on the one hand, and, on the other, Martin Vesper’s good-humored product announcement “Wenn der Kühlschrank twittert: Das Zusammenspiel von Haushaltsgeräten in unserer vernetzten Welt” (When the refrigerator twitters: The interaction with domestic appliances in our networked world), https://re-publica.de/file/republica-2014-martin-vesper-wenn-kuehlschrank-t.
7. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 218.
EPILOGUE
1. Martin Schulz, “Technologischer Totalitarismus: Warum wir jetzt kämpfen müssen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (February 16, 2014), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/technologischer-totalitarismus-warum-wir-jetzt-kaempfen-muessen-12786805.html; Gerhardt Baum, “Auf dem Weg zum Weltüberwachungsmarkt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (February 20, 2014), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/politik-in-der-digitalen-welt/gerhart-baum-antwortet-auf-martin-schulz-auf-dem-weg-zum-weltueberwachungsmarkt-12810430.html; Christian Lindner, “Warum Europa digitale Autonomie braucht,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 6, 2014), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/politik-in-der-digitalen-welt/it-kapitalimus-fdp-chef-lindner-fuer-digitale-autonomie-europas-12833286.html; Sigmar Gabriel, “Unsere politischen Konsequenzen aus der Google-Debatte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 16, 2014), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/sigmar-gabriel-konsequenzen-der-google-debatte-12941865.html.
POSTFACE
2. The Federal Government: Digital Agenda 2014–2017 (Munich, August 2014), 2, 5. The next quote ibid., 5.
3. Ibid., 27, 31. The next quote ibid., 32.
6. Digital Agenda 2014–2017, 12, 5–6. The next quote ibid., 6.
10. Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).