Cinematic Perspectives on Digital Culture

The ‘Tamagotchi effect’ refers to an emotional attachment to machines, robots or even software. It betrays a tendency to anthropomorphise things that mimic human behaviour or which use automated knowledge processing.¹ Decades before the Tamagotchi effect was recognised, however, robotics professor Masahiro Mori observed that, despite initially prompting positive responses, increasing similarity to humans in machines provoked not emotional attachment but sudden revulsion.² Although this quickly abated, at the lowest point of a graph that represented these reactions in a ‘valley’ curve, the associations with corpselike similarities acquired ‘zombie’ connotations if the robot moved. Linked to a notion of the uncanny explored first by Ernst Jentsch (1906) and developed by Sigmund Freud (1919), Mori’s observation became known as the ‘uncanny valley’ hypothesis.³

The correlation of film with digital culture is not a new enterprise. D.N. Rodowick sees cinema as providing ‘the most productive conceptual horizons against which we can assess what is new’. Relieved that digital culture is not emerging in a theoretical vacuum, Rodowick nevertheless regrets that ‘a whole new industry and art emerged in the early twentieth century without a philosophical or sociological context that allowed its social impact and consequences to be imagined’. Could a sociologist in 1907 have predicted, he asks, what cinema would become in 50 years?¹ Lev Manovich locates Dziga Vertov’s visual essay, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), at a juncture of emerging cinematic theory and proposes the application of its text as a dataset ‘to map out the logic driving the technical and stylistic development of new media’.² Other theorists agree that a productive conceptual horizon is to be found in film, although few explore the principles involved the way Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin do in remediation.³

However we choose to define digital culture, it is clearly conditional and, as Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil remind us, it should be located in a continuum that consists of political, social and psychological uses of antecedent technologies.¹ While this suggests the need to look beyond a single device, an emblematic tool can nevertheless serve to illustrate typical routines in processes that blend into the background of convention and tend to become ‘invisible’. Mobile phone use has an especially affecting impact on key markers of change and raises questions about the purposes and functions of technology. What becomes usual or routine can sometimes render innovation invisible, but the spread of computers and an accompanying convergence of media at the close of the twentieth century briefly made issues that had previously been only theoretical a concrete reality. Widespread awareness of mobile communications was ensured by adverts for cheaper calls, a flurry of company take-overs, wireless connectivity in public spaces and the viability of hand-held computing.

Having explored some historic examples and conceptual frames for understanding a collaboration of biology and technology, we now focus on theories that underpin disparate issues impinging on behaviour in a network of affection. Part II will explore particular cinematic perspectives, but this chapter is concerned with clarifying the intersection of approaches that aid analysis of consensual assemblages and affective networks. These approaches comprise actor network theory, the idea of hybrid agency, genealogies of new media and Deleuze’s notion of abstract desire.

It is as though stars, in their everyday lives … are condemned to ape their cinema life.

Edgar Morin¹

It seems doubtful that there was ever a time when users of analogue technology were passive. In any case, such an approach to audiences is made obsolete by new technology, users of which are now encouraged to be contributors in an inclusive discourse: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube demand participation. Their conceptual embrace of digital affordance is intensified by the portability of increasingly pervasive media devices that inscribe themselves into human and non-human networks by wire-lessly networking with hubs and information systems. Furthermore, the transition from analogue to digital culture has been accompanied by a normative shift from determinism to constructivism, as textual structures have articulated: in the twilight of analogue culture, narratives of unstoppable machines (i.e. The Terminator, 1984) gave way to reassuring myths of mechanical saviours, programmed to privilege human agency (i.e. Terminator 2, 1991). Such texts point to a perennial feature of technological change, in which producer–consumer relations become embedded in the assemblage.

And teach your friend some manners. Tell him without me he wouldn’t have a job, because without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studios.

Early in Sunset Boulevard recognition (‘You’re Norma Desmond!’) gives way to affect (‘You used to be big.’). This subjective expression of affect in terms of size is then overturned in a denial of technological determinacy that attempts to restore human agency (‘I am big; it’s the pictures that got small!’). Articulating personal erosion in the production frame of mature technology, Sunset Boulevard enunciates the masochism of cultural prostheticism by telling the story of what can happen after submission to an assemblage – in this case of stardom. In actor network theory, such submission amounts to delegation, inscription or translation of human agency. The human ingredient, as Latour explains, ‘is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms’.¹ The foundation that reconfigured the moving image as cinema and allowed a new industry to flourish was the exchange of forms that calibrated subjectivity, as Norma tells the gatekeeper at Paramount Studios (above).

In the early 1990s, the term ‘online’ became a buzzword in advertising for supermarkets, banks and public information. Used to denote telephone-enabled services, it was symptomatic of a potential ‘cybernetic’ future that seemed to anticipate a sublime integration. Critics, though, questioned the novelty of this and drew comparisons with earlier booms that promised utopian progress; railways in the 1840s, mechanised weaponry in the 1880s, automobiles at the turn of the twentieth century, radio communications in the 1920s and transistor electronics in the 1950s.¹ These historic precedents suggest a cultural amnesia preventing the realisation of how digital technology may repeat patterns of earlier hybrid paradigms. Nevertheless, as domestic computers became more affordable in the 1990s, related notions of ‘virtual reality’ and ‘cyberspace’ began appearing in cultural texts: increasing representation in films (The Lawnmower Man, 1992; The Matrix, 2001) and television texts might suggest that a ‘distinguishing birth’ was taking place. Gaudreault and Marion’s model of a ‘double birth’ for cinema (Figure 6.1) details how a new technology, emerging to complement existing practice, departs from a subordinate role and assumes the role of an increasingly autonomous proto-medium. Gaudreault and Marion’s model is based on a single practice, however, rather than on a generalised paradigm spanning a variety of contexts and functioning across digital practices.

Behaviour associated with Tamagotchi and mobile phone use is evidence that unanticipated, anthropomorphic desires do not need human subjects in front of a photographic lens to create an impression of life in the ‘magical’ moment of viewing. Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler, for example, observe that animation brings to light ‘a humanity which can no longer be known in itself: it is a humanity without any essence’.¹ In animating the still image, an essence conjured in animation goes beyond the frozen representation of still photography. In its first birth, the moving image was no more than a dynamic but literal trompe l’œil, tricking the brain into seeing movement and therefore life. Its second birth is connected with an exogenous cult of celebrity that recent studies suggest has a much longer history than has been assumed. The concept of celebrity as a modern phenomenon is now challenged by historians, who point to examples of vibrant celebrity cultures in eighteenth-century London and nineteenth-century France.² Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is a seminal text of celebrity, an obsession with youth and ageing for a culture now capable of digital manipulation: ‘Celebrity Dorian Grays’ (as one blogger has christened them) like ‘Sean Connery and Keanu Reeves no longer grow old, while others (Madonna?) become younger’.³