Midterm

Guru Meditation and Estrangement

In his blog post, "What is an app?," Ian Bogost gives a critical analysis of this new apple-generated phenomenon. Saying that the complete software-suite experience is being replaced by the divided experience of individual apps, he says: "the days of the software system are giving way to a new era of individual units, each purpose-built for a specific function... Or just as often, for no function at all." what does this mean, that there is no function to the app? Certainly the "Pages" app fulfills (however unsatisfyingly) the word-processor function, and Keynote makes Powerpoints look older than they ever looked. Yet Bogost may be onto something here. The perfect app to examine in light of this quotation is the Guru Meditation (GM).

Ostensibly a meditation app, GM leaves many of its users confused, dazed, or indifferent. It consists in holding the iPhone (or any iThing) in a specific way, sitting still so that a small pixelated guru may float in the air for as long a time as possible. The graphics in the app as austere at best, recalling the earliest days of the atari system, further increasing one's non-excitement for the app. That is, we are used to apps with good graphics(especially game apps), but this app goes the opposite way, purposefully. The creator of the app writes: "An earnest meditation game would have to reject graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity." So now we see: the game looks to challenge our expectations that we may further enter in a meditative state, by providing the graphical palate that is analogous in the game world to the austere background of a silent, undecorated room. But is that all it does?

The GM forces you to be still, and if possible, silent. And suddenly you realize: here you are, looking at an iPad for an indefinite period of time. To an outsider, you look dumb, if not worse. This is similar to how I felt when I "played" with the app during the seven minutes in class. I looked around me and saw fifteen stupid students doing a stupid thing. That's what it at first seemed like. Then I realized that most of the developed world is in this kind of state for long periods of their days: staring lazily at a computer while they perform a function that, as the GM aims, gets to be invisible with repeated use (think about how one gets used to the words on the keyboard).

This reminded me of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the film actor in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." he says that the film actor, when performing, is estranged from his public, yet, in a metaphorical sense, "with" them: "while he stands before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting the public." This strange feeling is akin to one seeing oneself in the mirror, Benjamin explains. Communicating to an audience of potentially millions of people, the actor feels desperately alone.

And I think this is the inadvertent effect of the Guru Meditation app, because it reminds us of the fact that, at a most basic level, we spend most of our days staring at a screen, alone, communicating with the world, precisely by snatching the world away from us and leaving us with a meaningless pixelated guru.

And thus this app paradoxically points at perhaps not the uselessness of apps that Bogost referred to earlier, but certainly at the consequences of the estrangement from the world that occurs when the human can access it from a device in his hands.

Am I saying that this is negative? Not necessarily; but we must consider that in Japan, there is a special term for people who literally do not leave their homes because they are totally plugged in to the cyber-world--people who are horrified of actually confronting other people, much like the fat people in Pixar's Wall-E. The term is hikikomori, which means "withdrawal."

Thus, in its uselessness, the uselessness that Bogost pointed at, the GM points us to the loneliness at Benjamin described in his essay some fifty years ago. What should be our reaction?
I'm not exactly sure, but we should be cautious.

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Barthes and the Gateway App

Some apps perform the function of being gateways to other sources. The NPR app gives you access to radio bits given throughout the day. The WWOZ app gives you straight access to the WWOZ radio waves, and the NY Times Editor's Choice app gives you a selection of the "best" or most important articles in a given day. It is at this very literal level that these apps resist definition, or, as Roland Barthes said, "cannot be thought of as defined objects." He further explains this by saying that the text must be thought of as "an activity, a production." Rather than a concrete thing that "occupies book-space," the text is a "methodological field." This gives way to an interpretation of text as event and not as substance. And indeed, these Gateway apps, like the NY times app, share this quality at a very literal level. Depending on when you click on the NY Times app, the words that you see on the IPad's screen (or field) change--the product of "the Editor's" decision to show you one thing rather than another. The Gateway app, like the text, is always changing. Not only in the sense expained above, but also in the fact that it is constantly being updated (a quality that all apps share). It is thus that this kind of app is always "without closure"---again, in a very literal way.

Let us return to Barthes's notion of the "methodological field." This is a very tricky, elusive concept, by its very definition--that is, Barthes picked this term because he was precisely trying to point at the text's elusiveness in contrast with the work's concrete quality. I propose that the iPad's screen can serve as an analogy to the elusiveness of the text. Moreover, it can serve as an analogy to the mobility, the constant movement, of the human mind. The mind is fragile and ephemeral, and precisely one of the functions of writing is to preserve memory, that the mind may not completely erase an experience. But the iPad is quick to forget. The NY Times app field lives strictly in the now of the news, only reporting what is current. And the NY Times app does not have an archive where you can access last week's or even yesterday's article; it lives strictly in the now that the "editor" gives you. And this makes the iPad, when performing the NY Times app, an analogy for the mind.