Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.
—Heraclitus

Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves, and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation…. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.
—D. H. Lawrence

The adage attributed to Heraclitus above records his musings on one of the essential truths of the human condition. The ephemeral world has been a long-standing trope since at least the time of Heraclitus, whose adage translated above is found in fragments he wrote during what we would consider a slow-paced sixth century B.C.E., well before our digital age. In the twentieth century, the author David Herbert Lawrence similarly reflected on the ephemeral nature of existence—on the fact that our perceived state of being is in fact a process of becoming. Writers and artists, philosophers and industrialists, all have pondered and felt the challenge and exhilaration of a world defined by its constant change. While change is indelibly written on our existence, our desire for fixity and closure, evidenced in print culture especially, seems to be at odds with this idea of change. With the use of digital media as a means of communicating, however, this desire is increasingly called into question if not downright abandoned.

This conference requested “papers that ostensibly explore the reality of the constantly changing digital universe in which we live,” but what does the term “change” really mean? As Heraclitus noted, change ironically stands as the only constant in our lives. The very idea of change is also a relative notion rooted in temporality and subjectivity. The term can refer to the mere unfolding of time—the cause and effect that is the unfolding of life. It can refer to our perception of life’s unfolding. However, the change of Heraclitus and Lawrence is not necessarily the same sense of change upon which this conference focused.

The focus of this conference seems to be not so much on change-as-the-passage-of-time or its effects on the material world, but rather on issues surrounding the idea of change as technological innovation—particularly as it relates to digital media–experienced in the hypermediacy of our culture. While change visits us all, at all times in human history, the rapid rate of change seen in today’s modern, digital setting seems faster compared to earlier descriptions of the slow, plodding change witnessed in oral, scribal, and early print cultures. Time moves no faster than it did three thousand years ago, but the apparent rate of change in the world—and the value on and expectation of how fast life is to react to this change—seem to have accelerated. Of course, implicit within my pairing the diffusion of technological innovation to perception is how technological innovations spread through society and the influence of this technology—those pertaining to digital media in this case—on our perception of the world. And our perception has changed. If Paul Saffo’s “thirty year rule” holds true, however, it’s not that technological innovations are taking place at such a fast rate after all, but rather that there are more changes taking place at the same time—giving the appearance of a faster rate of change. The manufacturing-centric approach to technological innovation sought to satisfy the needs of large heterogeneous markets with homogenous selections that did not efficiently meet the needs of users and more particularly of “user-innovators,” who have the ability to modify existing products to meet their needs. The nature of the Web 2.0 culture allows for what Eric von Hippel calls democratized innovation and helps increase the rate-of-change-as-technological-innovation that we perceive. Circumventing the traditional, manufacturing-centric technological innovation process, consumers who take part in hacking, user-adaptation, crowdsourcing, and peer-created content, are now increasingly developing new technologies and new uses for new and existing technologies. When combined with on-demand-manufacturing, this trend decreases the time it takes to speed the diffusion of innovations and increases the number of innovations introduced to society, creating in turn the perception of increased rate of change in our society. User-innovation sites such as hackzine.com or the smart-mob meetings of barcamp.com10 represent how the Web 2.0 environment offers dramatic increases in the number of “products” created and increases how quickly these innovations diffuse through society.

Oddly enough, how we understand how change takes place has itself changed. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the process of how change took place was envisioned through the “great man” theory of history, which was validated by the late 18th and early 19th century’s valorization of the individual and genius and theories of history. The concept perceived the agent of change as a single lone genius who stood on the shoulders of giants to see farther than his peers. In regards to innovation, this theory is perhaps best illustrated by the figure Sir Isaac Newton. This idea of historical change described a world in which history was wrought by individual great men of great talents who, with knowledge of what other great men had done, could do great things.11 Think Edison. Yet, Edison had assistants helping him in his work. The changes wrought in a Web 2.0 environment in which users can easily innovate dispels the myth of the individual—contained and singular, working in isolation—bringing about change. A telling example of how the Web 2.0 mindset is undermining this notion of the agent of change is crowdsourcing. As Jeff Howe wrote of crowdsourcing:

Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains. The open source software movement proved that a network of passionate, geeky volunteers could write code just as well as the highly paid developers at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia showed that the model could be used to create a sprawling and surprisingly comprehensive online encyclopedia. And companies like eBay and MySpace have built profitable businesses that couldn’t exist without the contributions of users.12

Like an inverse pyramid, users are exposed to more innovations everyday, because more people are involved in the innovation process—particularly as corporations move away from the traditional manufacturing process and “enfranchise” the user-innovators and smart mobs. In democratizing the creation and diffusion of innovation, we are now able create more, we are exposed to more, our works are increasingly being linked together, and in turn our world seems to change that much more rapidly.

As Jeff Howe notes, today’s peer-created content sites such as Facebook.com, Myspace.Com, and Youtube.com derive their value not from the author/editor creating the content, but from the author/editor organizing and networking the content created by users in a manner that users find valuable. While these new practices draw attention to the assumptions inherent in our use of previous, non-digital media, celebrated instances of the digital age, such as peer-created content, find their precursors in the analog age.

The difference between today’s peer-created content and its 18th and 19th century analog is that control over the content that had been created by the populace and the final form of this content had been centralized, in this instance in the author/editor. For example, in 1857 the brother’s Grimm published Grimm’s Fairy Tales.13 Their work represents an earlier prototype of peer-created content as well as illustrates a number of our assumptions governed by our use of print media. In gathering the stories and songs of the German speaking countryside, the brothers Grimm transformed them in their act of recording them. Their stories changed from mutable objects that had found their existence in the breath of living beings, into inanimate, fixed print objects. As an insect collector collects insects and sets them with a pin to preserve them, the Grimm’s act fixed and preserved the stories.

What is it that causes us to desire this sense of fixity and closure? Why are these two fictions so resonant in western culture? Does this desire represent a deep-seated desire to escape the ephemeral confines of this world? In some ways, this closure can be seen as an understanding that the close of the “fairytale” delivers a sense of finality and completion unrealizable in life. It delivers a static end that is sustained—the happiness that is rooted in an illusory, static, rather than dynamic or ephemeral, world. We also read these fixed, static fables and come to understand not only that change has figured into our collective cultural consciousness for some time—fostering a desire for the fiction of closure and completion found in the saying “and they lived happily ever after”—but also that the well-defined, stable print document that the Brothers Grimm created wields considerable power in our culture. The fictitious fixity implied by the closing statement ironically comments on the Grimm’s own agenda of translating (or remediating)14 the fluid, oral tales of the German-speaking countryside into a fixed form that is defined by the impulses and associations of the Gutenberg printing press.

Traditional print media (associated with the post-Gutenberg era) lends us our perception of this illusion of fixity and closure, such as through the physical sense of closure seen in the last word of the last page of a work or the border of a painting, which perhaps reinforces a preexisting desire for fixity and closure in the world.15 Granted, traditional media affords change; publishing a work using a printing press allows for revising and substantially altering the edition upon the work’s second printing. Texts can be changed, yet there usually exists an agreed upon fixed form of the work, such as a scholarly edition. This final, fixed form reinforces in audiences a sense of the form’s “structural-closure,” a sense of closure dependent on understanding the form of the medium used to convey information (a narrative, art, etc) rather than understanding the content of the medium.16 The discrete quality of the work and its sense of wholeness, of completion, give rise to the expectation of closure and fixity of static objects, which is antithetical to the nature of existence—and to the qualities of digital media. The evolution of the digital world in which we all live has abandoned the expectation for fixity and closure for the acceptance of change.

But what causes this change of perception? While quoting McLuhan goes in and out of vogue, McLuhan and Walter Ong argue forcefully that media/technology influence our perceptions.17 Technological determinism, the theory that the media we use affects how we perceive the world, has its detractors,18 but many works illustrate and support the phenomenon. For instance, Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities theorizes that nationalism found its origins in the change of perception that resulted from the rise of the press. Anderson claims that the printing press acted as a powerful unifying force and allowed those diverse peoples who spoke the same language to conceive of themselves as somehow related to one another. Rather than solely seeing themselves as united through geography, with proximity creating a sense of community, the printing press allowed a people that spoke the same language to “imagine” a community that extended beyond their own small locale to encompass a nation that was defined by a common language. This “imagined community” represents how a society used the medium of the printing press to print news in the vernacular, which in turn influenced the thought and perception of its users.

We can better see media-inspired change in perception within the history of webpage design. Web page designers had first attempted to create pages that replicated the assumptions of print culture. When designers included the language “best viewed in 640×480” or “best viewed by browser model y, version x,” they were recreating the assumption of the static text of post-Gutenberg texts. This design philosophy maintains that users should not be able to change the “look” of the web page. As the field matured, the designers came to understand that digital media had changed the rules from those of post-Gutenberg texts. Fixed design and page content result from viewing web pages and digital media as though they were previous media, like a Gutenberg print text, rather than dynamic, database driven texts. As we come to understand the possibilities of this new media—and unlearn the lessons and assumptions of the old—fixity and completion have become even more obvious as fictions.

While far more malleable than many digital “texts,” wikipedia is never really in its final fixed, form (and poses all kinds of problems for citations). How can we cite an entry when the entry can change with every reader? The Modern Language Association (MLA) attempted to solve this problem by requiring authors citing web pages to include both a date published and the date accessed.19 The MLA’s strategy for citations doesn’t adequately address the problem of change in content or interactivity, but it does at least acknowledge the change taking place in media. From both a formatting and content standpoint, digital media is the embodiment of change. Web sites are constantly updated, links change or “go dead,” works require user interaction, and even the code and hardware used to access the information changes.

As a result, the idea of completion—of the finished work as a discrete, completed, and self-contained entity that will not change and is in its final, constant form and will deliver closure to an audience—no longer really holds. Many interactive works are not even discrete entities and depend on a connection to the internet, updates, patches, and/or the agency of the user to bring them into existence. The works present a potential; they are the instrument for creating a series of fleeting, ephemeral user experiences. While writing this introduction, I have created scores of works based on this process—simply by pressing save. All are admissions that rather than a final form or discrete, fixed, final object, instead objects exist as one of a string of instances of the work. With the internet and software published with the expectation that it will be updated—and networked computers allowing for this perpetual change—the digital age brings to the cultural landscape a degree of permanent impermanence seldom seen since before the invention of writing. In digital works such as hypertext, Second Life , and Massive Multi-Player Games, the ending and/or closure are forever deferred. Aside from often calling for patches and updates, interactive pieces—be they digital art, video games, or hypertext—are never really “finished” until the user interacts with them and causes a manifestation of them to shimmer momentarily into existence. These experiential works differ vastly from some works seen in the past—the painting or sculpture that could be stored in a safe place. Like Buddhist sand paintings, digital media (and its media-specific ideology) challenge previous assumptions about cultural objects and consequently require new forms of conservation and archiving.20 For instance, the United Kingdom National Archives has 580 terabytes of information stored in digital forms that are no longer commercially available.21 How do museums conserve or display those works that don’t have a tangible existence beyond a hard drive and rely on hardware, software, and the input of audiences to bring them into being?

The problems posed by digital media mean that we as a profession must come to understand the cultural assumptions we have that are based on print media—and effectively change our pedagogical, scholarly, and creative endeavors to more closely align with the possibilities afforded by this new media. Just as our current copyright and economic institutions rely upon on the assumptions of out-of-date-media, so too are academia’s processes and procedures (such as the irony of a print journal in a digital field). Institutions are conservative and slow to change. The tenure and promotion process moves slowly and reluctantly beyond the views of those technological forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22

Yet, like the fairy tales of the brother’s Grimm, for the sake of completion, fixity, and “authority” I edited and published these essays in this fixed form; I ran pins through the dynamic living instances of the ideas presented and discussed at the iDMAa conference in San Diego. The snippets of conversations contained herein are really neither complete nor definitive in themselves, but rather should serve as catalysts to spark further debate and discussion. That is after all one of the goals of academic discourse—to further the spread of ideas through the preservation of our discussions—either the asynchronous discussions possible through print media or through the synchronous discussions possible through digital media. T.S. Eliot once wrote in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that:

the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional…. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.23

For our works and discussions to have gravity, we must interact with what went before us and in some small way change our understanding of the past. However, with change such an integral part of digital media, how best can we preserve those digital works that have been created? In the end, that is what this organization—and journal—is about. The importance of the physical objects that we produce and preserve (objects such as articles, books, and works) lie not in themselves (or in their appeal to Tenure and Promotion committees) as much as in the dynamic interchange that takes place between these preserved instances of thought and the discussions engendered in the minds that populate the sweep of history.

Footnotes

1. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Classics; 2003), 51. The works of Heraclitus remain only in the form of fragments.
2. David Herbert Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence: Complete Poems, eds., Vivian De Sola Pinto and Warren F. Roberts (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 182.
3. Hypermediacy is “an intense awareness of and reveling in the medium” as opposed to striving to make the medium transparent, such as in those narrative works that show the story unfolding, rather than revealing the artifice of the work. Jay David Bolter, The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001), 25-26.
4. Modern technology such as microchips and digital media allow have allowed our culture to accelerate the rate at which we transact life. For an easy to read discussion of the acceleration of life, see James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999).
5. The “thirty year rule” states that new technologies take approximately 30 years to develop and become widely diffused in society. Roger Fidler, “Principles of Mediamorphosis,” in Living in the Information Age: A New Media Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Erik P. Bucy (Toronto: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 34-35.
6. Eric Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005).
7. Crowdsourcing is defined as when corporations outsource work to a large group of networked amateurs. Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired Magazine, 14. (June 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. (June 17, 2007)
8. Youtube.com, Myspace.com and Facebook.com are the three best examples that come to mind, but eBay also relies upon the choices and content of its users to add value to its web site’s offerings. See below for further discussion.
9. For an instance of on demand manufacturing for the print-industry, print on demand, see the site Lulu.com.
10. Hackzine.com http://hackszine.com. is as its name implies, a peer-created web-journal devoted to user-generated adaptations of existing technology or products. Barcamp http://barcamp.org is an “international network of unconferences—open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants—focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols.” iPhoneDevCamp San Francisco 2007 was recently held, generating over 40 new applications for the iPhone. See “iPhoneDevCamp San Francisco 2007: Making the web a better place for iPhone.” http://www.barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCampApps/ (July 17, 2007).
11. For an excellent example of this notion of the great man theory of history, see Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes. Vol. 5. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903).
12. Where corporations outsource work to a large group of amateurs. Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired Magazine, 14. (June 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. (June 17, 2007)
13. Brüder Grimm. Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Band 1. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 9.
14. Bolter and Gruisin define remediation in multiple ways; the two most appropriate definitions are “”the representation of one medium in anther” and “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another.” Jay David Bolter and Richard Gruisin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 45 and 59.
15. Landow and Delany describe the three crucial attributes of print texts as being that they were “linear, bounded, and fixed.” Of course we would see texts as fixed, as this attribute is associated with print. Landow, George P. and Paul Delany, “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: the State of the Art,” in G. P. Landow and P. Delany, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, 3.
16. I differentiate the idea of “structural-closure” from narrative closure, the feeling that the narrative answers all the questions/expectations of the audience. My idea of structural closure encompasses Janet Murray’s more narrowly defined “electronic closure,” which she defines as occurring when the audience understands the structure of the storyspace. Electronic closure occurs when a work’s structure, though not necessarily its plot, is understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story. The story itself has not resolved. It is not judged as consistent or satisfying. Instead, the map of the story inside the head of the reader has become clear. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. ( New York: Free Press, 1997), 174.
17. Marshal McLuhan and Lewis Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
18. For instance Bolter warns of the reductive nature of technological determinism. Jay David Bolter. The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001), 19.
19. Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (New York: MLA, 2003), 211.
20. For an interesting article on the conservation problems digital media poses to museums, see Terry Schwadron, “Conservation; Preserving Work That Falls Outside the Norm,” The New York Times, March 29, 2006, Section G, 12.
21. “Warning of data ticking time bomb,” BBC. (3 July 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm (July 6, 2007).
22. See for instance, “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages,” Modern Language Association. http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital. (June 23, 2007).
23. T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., vol. 2. gen ed. Stephen Greenblatt, (New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 2006), 2320.

Works Cited

Barcamp. http://barcamp.org/ (June 2007).

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Gruisin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Bolter, Jay David. The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001.

Brüder Grimm. Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Band 1. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987.

Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. In The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes. 5. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903.

Eliot, T.S.. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed, Vol. 2. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 2006, 2319-2325.

Fidler, Roger. “Principles of Mediamorphosis.” Living in the Information Age: A New Media Reader, second edition, Erik P. Bucy, ed. Toronto: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005, 33-42.

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003.

Gleick, James. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

“Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages.” Modern Language Association, http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital, (June 23, 2007).

Hackzine.com (http://hackszine.com/)

Heraclitus, Fragments. Brooks Haxton, trans. New York: Penguin Classics; 2003.

Howe, Jeff. “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired Magazine, 14. (June 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. (June 17, 2007).

“iPhoneDevCamp San Francisco 2007: Making the web a better place for iPhone.” http://www.barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCampApps/ (July 17, 2007).

Landow, George P. and Delany, Paul. “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: the State of the Art,” in G. P. Landow and P. Delany, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Lawrence, David Herbert D. H. Lawrence: Complete Poems. Vivian De Sola Pinto, Warren F. Roberts, eds.New York: Penguin Classics, 1993. 182.

Lulu.com. www.Lulu.com.

McLuhan, Marshal and Lapham, Lewis. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York, Free Press, 1997.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Schwadron, Terry. “Conservation; Preserving Work That Falls Outside the Norm.” The New York Times. March 29, 2006, WednesdaySection G, Page 12.

Eliot, T.S.. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., vol. 2. gen. ed., Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 2006, 2319-2325.

Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005.

“Warning of Data Ticking Time Bomb.” BBC. (3 July 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm (July 6, 2007).