My contribution into this weeks reading, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, centers around the concepts of digital media, citizenship, technical expertise, and simulation. My concern is pseudo germane to the work itself, but more of an indictment of articulating better citizenship as the output of the work on computational literature. For example, Wardrip-Fruin argues, “Learning to understand the ideologies encoded in models and processes, especially when unacknowledged by system authors, is an important future pursuit for software studies… to be better citizens we need to understand software critically” (pp. 422-424). There are a few problems I would like to address here. First and foremost, citizenship itself is an ever fluid concept that hardly seems conceivable in lieu of recent debate and discussion. Second, the simulated citizen is always/already operative within simulation when addressing “politics”. Finally, every act of identification is an act of division (Burke) causing new (in)humanness to occur, and as Wardrip-Fruin argues, “our ability to identify with human characters is closely tied to their graphical representation” (414).
My first interjection is at the point of a Marxist critique of media and citizenship. Tying concerns of computational literary to machines that costs thousands of dollars (at the cutting edge), directly equates into a new form of academic elitism that may have negative effects. When I finished this book I could remember the aspects pertaining to ideology but couldn’t remember much in relationship to economy, I searched for the use of economic value in its relationship to ideology and found something surprising. Each time the book utilized the term, “ideology”, it was always/already devoid of material conditions and focused purely on the symbolic, social, and political ideologies that need not be divorced from economic analysis. If a central tenant of the works justification resides in the fact that it is a precursor for citizenship, then we need to careful reanalyze who gets to be a semi-citizen in the first place. The total of households in 2013 that owned a computer was 83% and in poor households the statistics of owning a computer were approximately 60 percent (Census.Gov).
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/acs-internet2013.pdf
Bringing me to my second point. Was there ever a notion of citizenship devoid of simulation? Politics itself seems to be the bridge where ideas are circulated, simulated, and voted upon to make into actuality. At the representational and naive level, our congresspeople directly simulate our responsitivity whenever they case a vote for/against a particular piece of legislation due to what is articulated. If I gave you the next passage from the book without explanation (and removing The Sims from it), you might be convinced that this quote directly supports politics in tune with its people, “Not only should we aim for engaging expression but also for expression that communicates the evolving state of the underlying system. We should strive for the closeness of surface and simulation achieved by the Sims, but while moving both forward and sideways toward elements of human life other than the most basic” (pp. 415-416). Which brings me to another thought, where does the line between simulation and real actually exist? There are many times where people think, “this isn’t the real me”, well what exactly does that proposition mean? In a world where we are rhetorically sound and repudiate higher truth’s, isn’t the “real you” just a serious of communicative exchanges in the creation of identity? If so, how does this differ from simulation itself? Just to make fun of myself for a terrible question:
Finally and most importantly, digital citizenship seems to be here to stay, what does that mean for our current geo-political situation? If most individuals lack the technical expertise to even understand that our climate is at risk from anthropomorphic activity, how is it possible to get individuals to think critically about simulation, which goal is self-erasure (a simulation is good when it denounces itself as simulation) and obfuscates the very processes at hand (seriously can’t I just play Grand Theft Auto, Sim City, etc., in peace)? Isn’t this going to get harder as, “Today’s authors are increasingly defining rules for system behavior” with greater technical capacity (p.3).
Ps. Just to show everyone that I’m very bad with fundamentals of a computer, here is an imagine of me trying to show a chart.
I rest my case:
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