Goodbye And Hello!
Re: A Tale Of Cherished Notions In Claiming
Departure And Arrival
(intro)
At the start of any social or formal, technical communication between man and man, man and (computational) machine or machine and machine, a moment of introduction occurs between participants — it is a moment of verification of who are actually getting together here: it’s the Exchange of the ‘Addressee X, or Y, I presume?’-moment. Different rituals in different places and cultures have brought forth myriad protocols of connectivity for this instant of understanding between meeting parties. Generally the hello-connecting and goodbye-disconnecting ritual is conditional to the intended communication. Machines connected in communication networks do it all the time. Even in the high speed flow of interconnectivity and data exchange, customs are designed to safeguard the transaction of valuable bits.
Goodbye! and Hello! on the other hand are brimming with (rich folklores of) the memories, expectations and opportunities of co-presence. Over the course of history individual and cultural practice built up an infinite catalogue of rendez-vous related greetings, for any interaction from first meetings to last separations. However, occasions which allow for a forever hello or forever goodbye are limited. The latter certainly only applies in case of decease of one of the parties involved. Some ‘forever hellos’ could be found with those happy partners who stay together after kindergarten courtship until death them parts — they’re getting rarer however at the increasing frequency of ‘flash divorce’. Machines on the other hand do not bother about any sustained validity of their hellos and goodbyes, they happily connect and disconnect all the time, without the partir c’est mourir un peu sentiment which affects us humans.
Pathetic ‘good-byes’ from the realm of media, technology or politics (...goodbye old media!, goodbye obsolete technology!, adieu ancien régime!), followed by excited ‘hel-los’ greeting more-of-the-same novelty (hello e-book!, hello biodiesel!, hello populist rule!) sufficiently illustrate the impossibility of any sustainable EXIT, of cultural and political systems or preferences. Different time periods lay down different rendez-vous outlines, according to technological, communicational, social-political and cultural developments which are neither value free, strictly quantitatively or qualitatively progressive, nor led by conspiratory industrial control, nor emerge from any ‘natural’ evolutionary principle, nor from any creative action operating ex nihilo — and are never entirely unfamiliar. Media amplified headline-HELLO’s and -GOODBYE’s in these realms primarily serve a commercial need for the expanded ‘spectacle’ on which lean our civilization’s (event) economies. To list but a few goodbyes with hidden hellos rolled in, one can (apart from lifestyle’s high gadgetry generations of commodity software and hardware) think of:
good-bye colonialism
hel-lo globalism
good-bye religion
hel-lo fundamentalism
good-bye international communism
hel-lo global terrorism
good-bye bureaucracy
hel-lo market place
good-bye teaching
hel-lo (‘lifelong’) learning
or to stay close at home, for the meme which chains the creative class to its drawing board:
good-bye experiment
hel-lo research
Goodbye A, hello B. B not seldom being a variable of or next generation (upgrade) A. Goodbye old school idée reçue, hello new school idée reçue. Or: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the more changes, the more things remain the same. At the end of the day old habits die hard, while what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘rearview mirror’ effect corrupts even the most heralded non-linearity, preventing cause and effect going ‘out of control’. Within a media enhanced system of attention, recommendation and validation, hello and goodbye become promiscuous to the max. All players with an ICT ambition are forced to beef up their communicational abilities in order to stay abreast in the Change Market — change notoriously being the ‘essence of information’.
Re: So You Want To Navigate Change Through Rearview Mirror Vision?
These remarks do not intend to deny cultural production its deep and dynamic change in media saturated network society. No doubt many an individual practice in art, design and theory has gone through remarkable review over the past decade or two. Our fields face the conception and reception of their production in new constellations, where historical institutional and societal partners also recast core interests. (A Nokia example? From rubber boots via paper and cable isolation to mobile telecommunications... a story of mobility in the vast Finnish woods in a nutshell. Another example? Daily newspapers going into organised dating, Internet-television — you name it). Cultural production can no longer rely on the sustained logic of an at least since the dawn of the avant-garde reliable experiment/prototyping-production-performance/promotion release agenda, nor be sure of its commercial or tax money support. (...do I hear a goodbye?...). To count on a traditional idealism of the sympathetic dependency for cultural production working at the benefit of a general well-being — in other words to make one’s state dependency ideological, a reputational statement — will prove self-destructive in a not so remote future. Catering to new headline-sized HELLO-needs of whoever fills the tip jar today is no option either. Cultural production will have to redesign its own economy — financially as much as it is doing so symbolically. Art, design and theory will need to welcome different partners, with different demands and different offers. For these three golden roads in contemporary cultural production no one single strategy will satisfy the needs. Even within the three ex-disciplines entirely different individual practices will meet their own challenges of getting organized, drawing in the peer crowds or special interest group audiences.
So hello and goodbye knot together a fabric of social interaction. The opening and closure of a communication channel needs momentum, a kick-off and a shut down, an intro and an outro. All the while another use of those two never wearing G and H words has to be examined, before going into conclusions as to what kind of dangerous liaisons might render a profitable return on Goodbye and Hello invested cultural production today and tomorrow (e.g.: open information exchange, p2p social and free content development, examples to be found in the software ‘industry’ or rather movement and online Internet initiatives, Wikimedia et al) (north-south exchange: trade-not-aid, e.g. Doors of Perception East) (publishing on demand with wild edit readership participation, e.g. Mute).
There’s an interesting meaning to be found in routinely repeated utterances of the ‘goodbye’ and ‘hello’ kind. Semiotics and linguistic anthropology took a notion from Malinowski’s anthropological study of Trobriand islanders to articulate communication which does not in the first place convey content or information, but is geared towards entertaining, maintaining a social relationship. Such is called phatic communion.
Re: Smile Phatically Sympathetically
‘Phatic’ [“denoting speech as a means of sharing feelings or establishing sociability rather than for the communication of information and ideas”] communion uses such non-sense-signs, to make sure or prove that a channel is still open. The smiley is a phatic sign, just as the smile or the nod can be in face-to-face contact. The electronic screens which announce traffic jams or advise you on your driving behaviour along the French highway show one simple asterisk * when there is no urgent communication: the channel is still open with just no information to be shared, the system is up and running. The asterisk is a tiny sign which in this context — of a networked urban screen-sized highway-side computational information system — reads that nothing’s to be shared for the moment, but the *. One can think of many messages of superior relevance for such a channel, one can imagine superior nonsense, one can even imagine to do without the boards entirely — when all one gets is a tiny “hello, I’m here to help you but can’t do anything for you right now”. This sign is only smart towards one party: the traffic control system which keeps open its channel to highway users. And yet it is comforting to the average user, who knows s/he’s being watched over and will be announced any bears on the road if they occur.
If a phatic sign is geared towards ‘sharing feelings or establishing sociability’, how much of cultural production would be of such superior insignificance in the flow of reputation establishing hellos and goodbyes? Wouldn’t a lot of goodbye-old-hello-new-anything qualify as a phatic fad? Has not ‘research’ itself turned into a notion with a high pitched phatic resonance, keeping open the institutional-cultural safeways to where some money can still be dug up, with disregard of the social and managerial innovation which (I should again stress) is conditional to contemporary design, art and theoretical production. Avoiding crashing in the arms of logo laden civic entrepreneurs promising forever hello happiness, cultural production with a knowledge challenge must innovate its own and its constituencies’ access to tools, material, knowledge and publicity... and do so in a socially committed, economically experimental way. ‘Hel-lo-o! is there anyone home in there?’ echoes in the sparsely lit and empty halls of after-hour institutional culture, after the Museum Night visitors have all returned home drunk.
As opposed to the French highway asterisk, smarter signs/systems/organizations aim to recognize their addressee, to cater her or him individual (yet often peer-shared) information. They do this on the basis of how well they know their constituency, aided by what and how much they gain from every hello and goodbye, from every new interaction with a user, who in turn feeds an information system in order for it to render valuable information. ‘Shoot!’ says the target, ‘shoot at the heart’. ‘Feed my curiosity, don’t feed me market place industrial consensus porn. Tell me something new that I do want to know. Listen to what and who interest me in particular... Don’t bore me with your bland promotions or debilitating spam. If I faithfully fill out my interest profile, get me something good, or else: good-bye!’
Re: So You Want To Be A Designer Fighting Design... Artist Fighting Art... Theorist Fighting Theory?
So You Want To Be An Organizer Fighting The Organization? Welcome Home!
So what if systems or organizations don’t get it, or lag behind? As we can see cultural institutions do, for which cannot be decided to aim their Goodbyes or Hellos, cannot be taken a stand with respect to obsolete or experimental organizational, technological and social habits. Such organizations do not acknowledge that cultural production today is no splendidly isolated disciplinary focused operation, but a media ecology. They will have to develop smarter selective and productive criteria in face of what still only inspires an embarras du choix or mere rearview mirrorism in them — leading to as abundant misinformation, as misunderstanding. In a variation on the RIRO principle of the limits of data processing: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out, cultural institutions have to realize their own RIDO ridicule: Rearview In, Dejavu Out.
According to some analysts we are only beginning to experience economies of abundance. Abundant content freely moves around through abundant venues, taking myriad forms pushing any discipline’s envelope. Even if current abundancy analyses might be found falling short at some point, nevertheless it is necessary to look at forms of and possible mechanisms in abundance and how to conceptualize organization and channelling of it. Conventional commodity markets prosper in dealing 2nd and 3rd rate quality goods and services. In an economy of abundance, not only 3rd rate ideas are abundant, also state of the art commitment is, and all this stuff is freely floating in the aggregate of contemporary Hi and Lo culture. Dangerous liaisons, which could make choices that do advance the visibility of cultural needs are to be found where interests meet, specifically the interest to engage in experimental material, symbolic and financial economies. As is quoted Alfred N. Whitehead on the last page of Marshall MacLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage: “It is the business of the future to be dangerous”.
Innovation and experiment cannot be downsized to specific, limited parts of a system of cultural production, but have to fully permeate its organization’s culture. The splendid isolation of research, in a protected at once but at the same time imprisoned state, in order to control its context and output, have limited value or effect. Experiments in isolation prove only valid in isolation, unless this isolational experiment is embedded in a chain of organizational and epistemological validations/measures, of evaluation, putting into effect, publication, etc. Then you touch upon an organization’s larger productional frame within which it provides access to ‘tools, material, knowledge and publicity’. Today systems want to be open, as much as and to fully support information that ‘wants to be free’.
To conclude and say so long. Networks allow for open interaction. An organization as a network in which every node is exactly that: a node where knowledge and content is taken in and out, can at the same time support an open hierarchy. Such a hierarchy, in which positions shift depending on just-in-time merits vis-à-vis the tasks at hand, operates on the basis of the communicational abilities of its individual nodes — which can be summarized in the ability to execute healthy Hello and Goodbye protocols. Opening up hierarchies is of prime importance in a social ability-poor cultural institutional world, while so much pep talk actually is only small talk that keeps open the channels of consumption.
So long!
(outro)
Re: Hello Or Goodbye: My House My Rules
