Currently Investigating (14)
1) Metastasis and Materialism: toward a Deleuzian approach to information theory (full length monograph under contract)
We hope here to advance a step further toward settling the question of information’s ontological status without subordinating it to Being, but also without relegating it to the transcendent or mind-dependent status of the immaterial or abstract. In order to do so, we have elected to understand the specific problem through a Deleuzian lens so that therefore we can understand the specific character of Becoming as a replacement for the fixity of Being, and apply this to our exploration of information. We aim here to pose, and perhaps not necessarily settle, a cluster of questions that guide our inquiry:
*How might a Deleuzian metaphysics address the question of information in its multiple connotations and contexts without resorting to a hypostasis or essentialization of the term itself?
*How might a Deleuzian metaphysics function as a possible solution to the problems presented in library sciences with respect to categorial versus dynamical regimes of classification, and with careful attention to what is known as documentation studies?
* Would a merger of Deleuzian ontology and the “mechanisms” of metastasis provide for a new perspective with respect to information and reality?
*Precisely where are there points of agreement and disagreement between the Deleuzian metaphysical project and that of cybernetics in its successive incarnations?
*How will Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual and transcendental empiricism elucidate new directions for an understanding of information?
2) Measuring Negative Cues in Online Hostility and Aggression (full-length monograph; associated articles under consideration)
Asynchronous Rage Against the Machine: Social Interaction in Online Comment CultureFrequently touted as a democratizing feature of the Internet, the phenomenon of user-generated comments on a variety of fora have allowed for social niche-building, global information sharing that may transcend gender, ethnicity, or regional limitations, and open up an entirely new venue for opinion and self-expression. However, despite the optimistic virtues of such comment environments, these digital environments can also be a venue for aggression, trolling, cyberbullying, astroturfing, black propaganda, hate speech, and influence-peddling.
Has online commentary supplied by screen-shielded anonymity become more hostile? What differences may we note in terms of social interactivity across the three moderation schemes? How do we quantitatively measure online hostility and aggression by close attention to semantic triggers? Does online commentary actually enable such behaviours? I am currently performing data-gathering, interpretation and analysis across several news sites in a bracketed time period to learn the following:
a) What are the textual triggers of aggression and hostility?
b) How is online aggression managed and directed?
c) What discursive patterns do aggression events follow?
d) Is there a moderation method to encourage polite dialogical engagement and reduce combative and belligerent behaviour?
e) What role do major online news providers play in addressing or failing to address user-supplied aggression?
f) Are news comment pits necessary, informative, and a true democratization of issues that support critical and rational engagement, or are they ultimately frivolous zones exacerbating aggrandized entitlement to opinion?
3) Digital Discontent and Triumph of the Id (full length monograph in progress; associated articles and conference papers)
What is online narcissism and are there broader social forces shaping it? By an appeal to both psychoanalytic and sociological literature (Freud, Kernberg, Kohut, Meissner, Lasch, et al), as well as Debord’s concept of the spectacle, this project will attempt to connect a growing infantilization of the digital space, the naturalization of the neoliberal ideological discourse, and McLuhan’s concept of disembodiment to understand the online narcissistic character and if the digital environment is implicitly enabling id-based behaviour and aggravating poor object relations.
4) The Effects of Metaphor, Euphemism, and Rhetorical Strategies in Fostering Anti-Union Sentiment (articles under consideration or in progress)
A steady anti-union trend has been made manifest in media and public commentary sources both online and in print. Given labour relations strife with respect to recent events (Canada Post, EMD-Caterpillar, and Air Canada), how has the political shift in attitudes toward collective bargaining rights changed under the neoliberal discourse and its use of euphemism and metaphor to influence or engineer opinion? Has the current economic model taken on a role of a mystic absolute wherein “crisis” capitalism has constructed “competitiveness” in justifying wage and salary questions as being indexed on a “state of nature”? Does such rhetorical shaping actually empower governments to consider right-to-work legislation? Will the union movement need to mount a counter-offensive by rebranding itself? This study will examine the use of metaphor and rhetoric in general among official corporate and political communications, and match these against online and news media commentary, editorials, and public forums to measure the impact of these attitudes.
5) Mobile Capital and Geomorphic Agents (articles under consideration or in progress)
Mobilization strategies, be them of a geomorphic quality or with respect to labour, are imbued by a colonizing rhetoric supplied by a neoliberal discourse which relies on “state of nature” claims as the foundation upon which it can reconfigure the terms of economy. These, in turn, shape a new model of labour relations that may be tied to a new relationship to the earth itself as mobile commodity.
6) Astro-Turfing (article under consideration)
Although the construction of fake crowds and artificial publics for purposes of promotion and advocacy has a long history, the automated structure, audience reach, and rapid cycle mechanisms on the web allow for more widespread "persona management" and effective black propaganda with the use of "automated aggregators." Improvements in the software domain of persona management has increased the covert deceptive power of corporations, governments, and special interest groups that make use of these services to disseminate mass-message on online fora, review sites, blogs, and other forms of social media as a front operation for influence campaigns.
7) "Exegesis" of the Codex Seraphinianus
(side project; dedicated web space)
8) Phytosemiotics: Transduction, Morphogenesis and Behaviour
(article accepted)
I have taken an interest in plant semiotics, especially given some interesting work in plant behaviour that suggests that there are roughly comparable cognitive functions in plants that exhibit informational and decision-making signal processes in complex environments. Making use of Simondon's use of the term "transduction" to discuss environment-object sign relations, some early work on morphogenesis referencing Turing, issues of salience and time scales, I hope to prepare an article on the subject to revisit phytosemiotic inquiry. How this will integrate with a few other semi-related projects on teratology of the sign, information as pre-individual process, etc., remains to be explored.
9) Prompted under the Conditions of Persistence: The Role of Active Verbs in Digital Contexts as a Form of Subordination to Software Power Relations
10) Chaosmos: Noise as Organizational Element in Systems
11) A Felicitous Merger of Data Collection and Use Practices in Voter Tracking and Identification: What CIMS Draws From Bentham and Soviet Databasing
12) The Ecstasy of Twitter: Baudrillard and Microblogging as Obsessive Minutiae Manifested
The popular adoption of microblogging software such as Twitter may have provided a new venue for social relational exchange that honours the efficiency over accuracy of information paradigm. However, we may wish to apply more critical pressure as to how the tool is being used among particular geo-demographics, and if said tools are only enabling microburst gratification on the basis of the two online expressive extremes of voyeurism and exhibitionism. For the purposes of this article, Baudrillard’s critique of communication and the fetish for details disclosure will play an operational role in framing the problematic of the microblog, but also the insights of Debord on the issue of image-as-accumulation in the [digital] spectacle.
13) App as Non-Apparition: The Counter-Alethic Function (abstract accepted for conference, October 2013)
Apps already grid the subject and its conditions of possibility through a regime of signs, aligned in part by a technocratic restructuring of the myth of progress where the app is positioned as the essential filter through which problems can find their immediate or ready-to-hand solutions. However, despite the optimism of the technocratic solutions-as-tools, like the algorithm the app effectively regulates subjectivity by distributing uniform diversity rather than acknowledge the already-different. In Deleuze and Guattari's sense, it may qualify as simply another, albeit etherealized or computationally embedded, molarity that captures, regulates, and distributes the flows of difference by also shaping the Weltanschaaung through the precise pre-programmed aperture of the app itself. For example, the app of Google Maps alters the way we view and engage space, distance, and point-concentrated relevance. If there is no "app" for that particular "that," it may be implied as part of the computational logic that it is of no value or significance, thus appealing to valuation by omission. The emergence of affect generally must follow an intensive feature where the virtual is made immanent to the process of individuation. The app, however, might conceal the intensive affects and function to cancel out the real differences required for a truly expressive means of creating something other out of the tracing of the subject-user and the object-app, both of which enter into a dialectical relationship. The question upon which this turns would be in determining whether the app provides a mechanism for feedback or feedforward. By an appeal to the works of Heidegger, Simondon, and Deleuze, this talk will trace the logic of the app as possibly being less conducive in recognizing affect or the fold that exists between subjectivity and technology, still subordinating the affect of sense as a secondary quality.
14) Seed De/Re-Territorialization: Monsanto and Genetic Drift as Deleuzo-Guattarian Capital (abstract accepted for 6th International Deleuze Conference, July 8-10, 2013, Lisbon).
Recent legal disputes involving Monsanto's genetically modified organisms highlight issues of enviro-genetic territory with respect to the effects of gene drift from GM crops to non-GM crops. Although Monsanto prides itself on a Baroque-inspired philosophical outlook where human purpose is to "perfect" nature, and in thus controlling and correcting nature in ways reminiscent of cybernetics, gene drift reterritorializes environmental space in ways that cannot be properly contained, and may suggest a purposive plan on the part of Monsanto to recode the environment according to its own genetic capture and hyper-capitalist flows as united with bioinformatics. This paper will apply Deleuze's and Guattari's insights on the war machine and the apparatus of capture to better position Monsanto's relationship to environmental and genetic territory. This paper will argue that despite any superficial resemblance to rhizomatic spread, Monsanto is engaging in a covert arborescent strategy which attempts to overdetermine environmental and genetic space according to a despotic "corrective" regime under the guise of benevolent utility.
We hope here to advance a step further toward settling the question of information’s ontological status without subordinating it to Being, but also without relegating it to the transcendent or mind-dependent status of the immaterial or abstract. In order to do so, we have elected to understand the specific problem through a Deleuzian lens so that therefore we can understand the specific character of Becoming as a replacement for the fixity of Being, and apply this to our exploration of information. We aim here to pose, and perhaps not necessarily settle, a cluster of questions that guide our inquiry:
*How might a Deleuzian metaphysics address the question of information in its multiple connotations and contexts without resorting to a hypostasis or essentialization of the term itself?
*How might a Deleuzian metaphysics function as a possible solution to the problems presented in library sciences with respect to categorial versus dynamical regimes of classification, and with careful attention to what is known as documentation studies?
* Would a merger of Deleuzian ontology and the “mechanisms” of metastasis provide for a new perspective with respect to information and reality?
*Precisely where are there points of agreement and disagreement between the Deleuzian metaphysical project and that of cybernetics in its successive incarnations?
*How will Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual and transcendental empiricism elucidate new directions for an understanding of information?
2) Measuring Negative Cues in Online Hostility and Aggression (full-length monograph; associated articles under consideration)
Asynchronous Rage Against the Machine: Social Interaction in Online Comment CultureFrequently touted as a democratizing feature of the Internet, the phenomenon of user-generated comments on a variety of fora have allowed for social niche-building, global information sharing that may transcend gender, ethnicity, or regional limitations, and open up an entirely new venue for opinion and self-expression. However, despite the optimistic virtues of such comment environments, these digital environments can also be a venue for aggression, trolling, cyberbullying, astroturfing, black propaganda, hate speech, and influence-peddling.
Has online commentary supplied by screen-shielded anonymity become more hostile? What differences may we note in terms of social interactivity across the three moderation schemes? How do we quantitatively measure online hostility and aggression by close attention to semantic triggers? Does online commentary actually enable such behaviours? I am currently performing data-gathering, interpretation and analysis across several news sites in a bracketed time period to learn the following:
a) What are the textual triggers of aggression and hostility?
b) How is online aggression managed and directed?
c) What discursive patterns do aggression events follow?
d) Is there a moderation method to encourage polite dialogical engagement and reduce combative and belligerent behaviour?
e) What role do major online news providers play in addressing or failing to address user-supplied aggression?
f) Are news comment pits necessary, informative, and a true democratization of issues that support critical and rational engagement, or are they ultimately frivolous zones exacerbating aggrandized entitlement to opinion?
3) Digital Discontent and Triumph of the Id (full length monograph in progress; associated articles and conference papers)
What is online narcissism and are there broader social forces shaping it? By an appeal to both psychoanalytic and sociological literature (Freud, Kernberg, Kohut, Meissner, Lasch, et al), as well as Debord’s concept of the spectacle, this project will attempt to connect a growing infantilization of the digital space, the naturalization of the neoliberal ideological discourse, and McLuhan’s concept of disembodiment to understand the online narcissistic character and if the digital environment is implicitly enabling id-based behaviour and aggravating poor object relations.
4) The Effects of Metaphor, Euphemism, and Rhetorical Strategies in Fostering Anti-Union Sentiment (articles under consideration or in progress)
A steady anti-union trend has been made manifest in media and public commentary sources both online and in print. Given labour relations strife with respect to recent events (Canada Post, EMD-Caterpillar, and Air Canada), how has the political shift in attitudes toward collective bargaining rights changed under the neoliberal discourse and its use of euphemism and metaphor to influence or engineer opinion? Has the current economic model taken on a role of a mystic absolute wherein “crisis” capitalism has constructed “competitiveness” in justifying wage and salary questions as being indexed on a “state of nature”? Does such rhetorical shaping actually empower governments to consider right-to-work legislation? Will the union movement need to mount a counter-offensive by rebranding itself? This study will examine the use of metaphor and rhetoric in general among official corporate and political communications, and match these against online and news media commentary, editorials, and public forums to measure the impact of these attitudes.
5) Mobile Capital and Geomorphic Agents (articles under consideration or in progress)
Mobilization strategies, be them of a geomorphic quality or with respect to labour, are imbued by a colonizing rhetoric supplied by a neoliberal discourse which relies on “state of nature” claims as the foundation upon which it can reconfigure the terms of economy. These, in turn, shape a new model of labour relations that may be tied to a new relationship to the earth itself as mobile commodity.
6) Astro-Turfing (article under consideration)
Although the construction of fake crowds and artificial publics for purposes of promotion and advocacy has a long history, the automated structure, audience reach, and rapid cycle mechanisms on the web allow for more widespread "persona management" and effective black propaganda with the use of "automated aggregators." Improvements in the software domain of persona management has increased the covert deceptive power of corporations, governments, and special interest groups that make use of these services to disseminate mass-message on online fora, review sites, blogs, and other forms of social media as a front operation for influence campaigns.
7) "Exegesis" of the Codex Seraphinianus
(side project; dedicated web space)
8) Phytosemiotics: Transduction, Morphogenesis and Behaviour
(article accepted)
I have taken an interest in plant semiotics, especially given some interesting work in plant behaviour that suggests that there are roughly comparable cognitive functions in plants that exhibit informational and decision-making signal processes in complex environments. Making use of Simondon's use of the term "transduction" to discuss environment-object sign relations, some early work on morphogenesis referencing Turing, issues of salience and time scales, I hope to prepare an article on the subject to revisit phytosemiotic inquiry. How this will integrate with a few other semi-related projects on teratology of the sign, information as pre-individual process, etc., remains to be explored.
9) Prompted under the Conditions of Persistence: The Role of Active Verbs in Digital Contexts as a Form of Subordination to Software Power Relations
10) Chaosmos: Noise as Organizational Element in Systems
11) A Felicitous Merger of Data Collection and Use Practices in Voter Tracking and Identification: What CIMS Draws From Bentham and Soviet Databasing
12) The Ecstasy of Twitter: Baudrillard and Microblogging as Obsessive Minutiae Manifested
The popular adoption of microblogging software such as Twitter may have provided a new venue for social relational exchange that honours the efficiency over accuracy of information paradigm. However, we may wish to apply more critical pressure as to how the tool is being used among particular geo-demographics, and if said tools are only enabling microburst gratification on the basis of the two online expressive extremes of voyeurism and exhibitionism. For the purposes of this article, Baudrillard’s critique of communication and the fetish for details disclosure will play an operational role in framing the problematic of the microblog, but also the insights of Debord on the issue of image-as-accumulation in the [digital] spectacle.
13) App as Non-Apparition: The Counter-Alethic Function (abstract accepted for conference, October 2013)
Apps already grid the subject and its conditions of possibility through a regime of signs, aligned in part by a technocratic restructuring of the myth of progress where the app is positioned as the essential filter through which problems can find their immediate or ready-to-hand solutions. However, despite the optimism of the technocratic solutions-as-tools, like the algorithm the app effectively regulates subjectivity by distributing uniform diversity rather than acknowledge the already-different. In Deleuze and Guattari's sense, it may qualify as simply another, albeit etherealized or computationally embedded, molarity that captures, regulates, and distributes the flows of difference by also shaping the Weltanschaaung through the precise pre-programmed aperture of the app itself. For example, the app of Google Maps alters the way we view and engage space, distance, and point-concentrated relevance. If there is no "app" for that particular "that," it may be implied as part of the computational logic that it is of no value or significance, thus appealing to valuation by omission. The emergence of affect generally must follow an intensive feature where the virtual is made immanent to the process of individuation. The app, however, might conceal the intensive affects and function to cancel out the real differences required for a truly expressive means of creating something other out of the tracing of the subject-user and the object-app, both of which enter into a dialectical relationship. The question upon which this turns would be in determining whether the app provides a mechanism for feedback or feedforward. By an appeal to the works of Heidegger, Simondon, and Deleuze, this talk will trace the logic of the app as possibly being less conducive in recognizing affect or the fold that exists between subjectivity and technology, still subordinating the affect of sense as a secondary quality.
14) Seed De/Re-Territorialization: Monsanto and Genetic Drift as Deleuzo-Guattarian Capital (abstract accepted for 6th International Deleuze Conference, July 8-10, 2013, Lisbon).
Recent legal disputes involving Monsanto's genetically modified organisms highlight issues of enviro-genetic territory with respect to the effects of gene drift from GM crops to non-GM crops. Although Monsanto prides itself on a Baroque-inspired philosophical outlook where human purpose is to "perfect" nature, and in thus controlling and correcting nature in ways reminiscent of cybernetics, gene drift reterritorializes environmental space in ways that cannot be properly contained, and may suggest a purposive plan on the part of Monsanto to recode the environment according to its own genetic capture and hyper-capitalist flows as united with bioinformatics. This paper will apply Deleuze's and Guattari's insights on the war machine and the apparatus of capture to better position Monsanto's relationship to environmental and genetic territory. This paper will argue that despite any superficial resemblance to rhizomatic spread, Monsanto is engaging in a covert arborescent strategy which attempts to overdetermine environmental and genetic space according to a despotic "corrective" regime under the guise of benevolent utility.