Part one:
While playing the guru meditation app, I was very quickly frustrated. First I was stuck on a dark screen with the weird, blobby guru telling me I was too loud every time I sniffled. Then when I finally got to some scenery, I guess I wasn't still enough for the picky little guru because he sent me back to square one 3 times. It was only at the very end of the seven minutes that I even got the clock to start. The entire time I felt this bizarre anger towards the little guru. I was trying to interact with him, trying to follow the rules of his game; but he was essentially ignoring me. Instead I was left beating on his door begging him to start floating so I would at least have something to look at.
It was, admittedly, a pretty annoying 7 minutes. I wasn't relaxed at all. I definitely feel more 'meditated' reading a book than trying to please the guru with my balance skills. At the same time, I kept thinking about Marc Prensky's article on digital natives and digital immigrants. Which one of them would enjoy this game? Is it one that involves deep attention or hyper attention? Does it even involve attention? In his article, Prensky discusses the differences between legacy content and future content in the educational system. Which one does guru fit into? Should i even be trying to label it as either of these?
I just can't figure out where to situate this app. Is it an app made modern but calling back to the deep attention of the past? Or is it a modern game just trying to be original? Is it even a modern game? I guess by the standards that it involves a touch screen and sound sensitivity it is modern, but the idea for this app was born with some of the very first video games. The fact that it's a meditation app is only an homage to the very old meditation board.
Perhaps Bathes has an explanation for my lack of definitiveness. In 'The Death of the Author,' he talks about how the "explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it" and says that "once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." I know that, in literature, we have not seen the death of the author. But maybe Barthes was right. Maybe the death of the author has come to us in the form of the app. We don't know who is behind these things. I don't even know who made the app I'm using now and it's never really troubled me. I can interact with this app or my weather.com app without worry or concern about who is behind it. But the more that I think About, the more I begin to feel like my iPad is full of anonymous people.
All of these apps can be read as texts. But these these texts are different from books, magazines or movies. We have experienced, through the iPad and other things like it, the "birth of the reader," as Barthes calls it. There is literally no interaction with any sort of authorship in the app world. There is no call for it. So what about guru makes me feel unsettled? Why doesn't feel like guru needs an author?
Perhaps it is because guru really does call back to an older time. But what would the author for an app be like anyway? Has there ever been an instance where there was an 'author' for an app? Maybe I'm even more of a digital immigrant than I thought.
Part two:
The app I find most fascinating (I'm serious) is the app store. I go there every day. I like to see what apps are in, what apps are out, what apps are free, what new, unnecessary thing I can do next on my iPad. It feels like a really bizarre version of going to Forever 21. There's so much for so little and it's so overwhelming how many options I have. So looking at Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Science Fiction," what order of the simulacra is this app? Is it natural? Well, no. I really don't think the app store is naturally occurring. I believe that the app store is simulacra of the second order. It is "productive, productivist, founded on energy.". There is nothing new, original, or beyond ordinary about the app store. While it "corresponds science fiction," in that it is truly a manifestation of the immense bounds technology has taken, it is not among the complete other and beyond that the third order identifies with. Perhaps the apps themselves are members of the third order, but the app store is simply the iPad version of any normal store. It's format is not original.
Perhaps if the app store featured some really awesome way for me to enter in all of my interests and it would tell me apps that I like. As it is, I search for "PDF reader" in the search bar and that's about as good as it gets. It doesn't even do suggested apps, which amazon or barnes and noble will do for books, movies, etc. The app store is merely a "mechanical robot machine," as Baudrillard characterizes the second order. It does not have any sort of momentum or original power. It is simply the iPad version of Forever 21, complete with a sales rack.
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We appreciate very much how your first essay unspools into open questions concerning Guru Meditation. However, we would want to press you on a few points:
ReplyDelete1. You say "The entire time I felt this bizarre anger towards the little guru. I was trying to interact with him, trying to follow the rules of his game; but he was essentially ignoring me." Might this "bizarre anger" be the same or related to the feeling of trying to use *any* app (or the whole iPad, for that matter) for the first time? In other words, isn't it the case that with *any* app, you have to follow the rules while being, essentially, 'ignored'? This could have profound implications—by your personifying description, we might be moved to consider apps 'people' in a curious, 'post-human' way.
2. Your essay would have benefited from an actual quotation from Marc Prensky to work with. As it is, you somewhat conflate Hayles on deep/hyper attention and Prenksy on digital natives/immigrants.
3. You claim: "I know that, in literature, we have not seen the death of the author." But wait: Barthes's point is precisely that in literature we HAVE seen the death of the author. This is not because authors don't exist any longer (of course they do, in a "scriptor" sense). Rather, it is because we understand the roles of language, culture, etc., to be BIGGER than any single author can delimit or contain. This is a really critical point that Barthes is making: the author *is* dead when it comes to literature. Very dead.
4. The death of the author is evinced in how you so nicely put it about your iPad: "I begin to feel like my iPad is full of anonymous people." This is very well put. BUT, this is, essentially, how you should feel about ANY piece of literature, too! Every book, in a strange way, is "full of anonymous people"—the people who comprised the language games and contexts of meaning before you ever arrived on the scene. Does that make sense? Not only are you perhaps more of a "digital immigrant" than you thought—maybe we are all always analog immigrants, too...
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In your second essay, we like very much your comparison of the App store to Forever 21. This is clever and spurs a colorful image. However, wouldn't this categorization of the App store as a 'version' of a 'real' store place it in the third order of the simulacra? (Because it serves as or is based on a *model*?)
You say that "It is 'productive, productivist, founded on energy.'"—Linger on this, work with Baudrillard's language a bit. We would like to see you unpack this, and to explain what the foundational "energy" of the app store is, exactly.
Finally: what does it *mean* for the App store to be part of the second order of simulacra? What are the stakes? Should this make us think twice (or three times) about the cultural status of this app? We would like to see you zoom out, as it were, and ask the "So what?" question in your second essay.