Having finished reading the second chapter of Raley’s book, I felt there was a pretty distinct tilt on the debate over illegal immigration. The argument surrounding the pros and cons of “migrants” goes well beyond the scope of what can be considered in a 400-word blog post. But what can be considered, and I think what must be examined, is just in what ways tactical media works to dissolve social binaries—and whether or not they should be.

Echoing popular anticolonial works like The Wretched of the Earth, Raley replicates Fanon’s warnings against errant nationalism. Argued as a re-enforcement of colonial dichotomies, Fanon believed that nationalism bounded citizens in the eternal binary of colonizer versus colonized, internal versus external. For any collective to identify itself as fully decolonized, it must thus reject the internalization of nationalism. For Raley, this argument is appropriated to a more contemporary setting: specifically the “border war” between the United States and Mexico.

Raley scaffolds her argument with Huntington’s assertion that to define the United States and Mexico as oppositional is flawed; the division of “Anglo” versus “Latino” is both “putatively archaic and primal” as it fails to recognize the globalizing trend of migration (37). And so long as these social binaries continue to be exerted, “migrants” will be eliminated from social consciousness. With the additional help of Judith Butler, Raley concludes that, as “de-realized” individuals, any acts of violence against these dehumanized migrants are invisible to the American public—as the famous adage says—out of sight, out of mind (39).

But to argue that tactical media cares about awakening social consciousness is a difficult pill to swallow. DDoS attacks on servers fly in the face of “hacktivism” and its genuine protest on internet censorship. By “violating the principle of free flow,” groups like SWARM prove to be shockingly contradictory to Raley’s argument (41). By shutting down sites, they do not improve American social consciousness so much as obscure it. Many of these activist movements, such as Tuesday Afternoon’s demand to terminate American borders, shows the efforts of tactical media are more symbolic than actual (47). Perhaps it is as Dominguez says:  as “permanent cultural resistance” that constantly changes with the times, tactical media doesn’t yet know entirely what it wants—except only to keep questioning (46).

If we can reduce the definition of a countergame as merely defying expectation, what is ultimately the point of it? Similar to something like a “YouTube Poop,” where a user splices various segments of a television show or movie, often with other shows/movies, and molding them into something else entirely, countergaming sounds like nothing but an exercise of contradiction camouflaged with a “Dude … So meta!” self-reflexive existence.

That sounds harsh, though I don’t mean to be (entirely).

Aesthetically, Galloway’s framing of the countergame is digestible.  Commercial gaming often seeks to sell a believable experience. Often named “AAA” titles, they work best on high-end computers and console platforms, and are often lauded for their closeness to realism. In a way, commercial gaming is all about creating that sense of “transparency” – a suspension of disbelief modeled closely to reality that it then masks the scaffolding layers of code. You do not feel like you’re playing a “game” as explosions sound off and you struggle to the next objective. That is, until your character clips through a gap between the sandy beach textures and a large rock you were trying to hide behind – where your character falls infinitely into white, grey, or black space until you return to the previous checkpoint.

It is this unmasking of code—foregrounding—and the celebration of such glitches—visual artifacts—that frames the existence of a countergame. In a regular, commercially-produced title, things are supposed to move as we expect them to. When I pull left on the stick, my character should look or strafe left. Both the control scheme and the physics of a game should feel “natural,” even if not modeled by reality.

To the countergame, attention to realism is not the goal. Unlike commercial games, where narrative and form are interlocked in a working manner, a countergame has no interest in cohesion. Similar to the YouTube Poop, aesthetic becomes central. Game physics are invented and molded to the artist’s desire,  and interactivity is all but entirely eliminated.

But if interactivity, if the very elements of a “game” are removed from the countergame, how exactly is it still a “game?”  Galloway unfortunately doesn’t answer this, and leaves the door open to interpretation.  I think he’s on the right track by dropping machinima (like the very web-famous Red Versus Blue) and other methods of intersecting gaming as some type of mixed-media pursuit, but perhaps the problem is that countergaming-while-gaming just is not possible.

Having read arguably non-traversable texts (at least upon first reading) such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I can relate pretty heavily to Stephen Mamber’s promotion of narrative mapping. Conceptually, this can be (and likely has been already) done in ways like mapping out Leopold Bloom’s walk through Dublin in Joyce’s seminal text Ulysses. Like Mamber says, some texts, like Wallace’s and Joyce’s, are just “ambiguous in some fundamental fashion,” (146). They might have “multiple explanations” with “elaborate temporal constructions,” (147). And what is more appealing than being able to draw back that curtain and visually map what has been intentionally left hidden from us, by the author?

But I think for a moment, and I really have to admit that when such things are done for me, it just does not have the same permanence. Perhaps it is because the Death of the Author is fresh in my mind from last week’s discussion and recent blog posts, but the importance of authorial intent drones on in my mind. I think of Mamber’s assertion of “going global,” using narrative mapping in an analytic fashion that re-creates the way we examine a work as readers, but it truly begs the question: am I, as the reader, OK with that?

I think it was Meredith who mentioned last week that a “betrayal” to the reader within a written narrative is more striking than when done in visually representative media, like video games. In print, we allow our imagination to run rampant, to think what we want to think, visualize it on our own, in the most horrifying ways, rather than watching it unfurl for us as they do in television, film, and games. And I similarly think back to Mamber’s suggestion of re-creating what the author has used to scaffold their narrative, yet have chosen to leave out.

But then I must ask: did they leave that narrative mapping out on purpose? And even if I watched Leopold Bloom’s day unfold similarly in format to this week’s reading of 21 Steps, would it have the same level of permanence with me, watching the story progress on my laptop, than if I tried to traverse the text, visualize it in my mind, and understand it, page by page? If mapped narratives become a new, superlative interface to the work itself – at least for my own understanding – is the actual experience of interacting with the text just as emotive?

To be honest, I am not sure it is. A narrative mapping assists my reading of a text and helps me remember who is related to who in The Count of Monte Cristo, but part of the fun of celebrating such literature is partially because it is difficult to read. I like the challenge of a tough book. And to have it decoded for me, to watch it instead unfold visually, is perhaps similar to buying a jigsaw puzzle already pieced together. In new, digital media, such elements of narrative mapping may be unique, helpful, if not completely novel. But I think something great, the experience of traversing a deep text, is destroyed in the creation of some kind of a graphic overlay.

When I read, while it may be convenient to use a narrative mapping to, as Mamber says, “[deal] with complexity, ambiguity, density, and information overload” (157), I feel something is similarly lost in the removal of that experience. And while it is true my hair may go gray quicker, and I may lose my patience with the method Joyce crafts his novels, I prefer to read certain novels as they are intended to be read: difficult, and sometimes with alcohol. I do not want to “deal with” complex books. I want to read my complicated books. I want to conquer them.

I have caught myself several times already, over the course of this semester, both in blog posts and in our in-class discussions, using the word “text” in reference to digital media. This is partially due to my own ignorance, not with the digital medium(s) in particular, but with the scholarly, investigatory “lens” being applied to them. I absentmindedly use the word “text” because it is a word I am comfortable with. It is a part of a discourse of literature I have claimed to be in conversation with for several years, to shift and mold to my liking; it is a term I believe I have mastered. “Text,” in a way, is my own literal understanding of how “literature” is defined, but in many ways is a tiny word that so emphatically portrays my own limitations of perspective.

And through this week’s readings, I have come to understand that referring to digital media as “text” is not a fair assessment. As Cayles asserts, there are exclusions to this rule. But generally speaking, electronic media, and its investigation as a work, like Wardrip-Fruin’s exercise in understanding Strachey’s “Love Letter Generator,” must include the system as a means of interpretation.

The strategies of combinatorial literature, the domination of fixed terms in finite spaces, of cut-up literature: to look at them simply as an end result is prosaic, and I mean that in both the ways the term is used. Prosaic: because looking at a Love Letter Generator as a computer gargling out words in and of itself is nothing to look at. The beauty of it all is in its process. That Strachey and Turing compiled a computer program that took words from a Roget’s Thesaurus shows how vapid the cultural mindset of mid-20th Century England was. They laughed at the computer’s failures of evoking a “human-like” letter, but this failure, argued similarly by Wardrip-Fruin, is what distinctly marks the Love Letter Generator as an evocative process and not simply something to be examined as its end result.

So while I latch onto the term “text” as a mental guidepost through these readings, I, like the toddler on training wheels, must come to accept that such conveniences are temporary – that it is impossible to truly grapple with and understand the digital media as digital so long as I continue to define it by print terms. And though I have previously argued that these two mediums both openly imitate and influence one another, it is paramount to remember that the stages of representation at work are never going to be the same.

I am not sure whether or not I am allowed to foreword my blog post in any way, but I like to subvert my assignments whenever possible.

In many ways, I struggled with this text. I grappled with it. I read it, re-read it, and found it so utterly fascinating, but I felt Raymond Williams’ writing could be distancing at times. As a simple yet distinct overview of his perspective, by unpacking it, I am hoping to better understand his own writing; and I hope by my doing so, you will glean something of use as well.

According to Williams, there are two mindsets within the field of cultural studies that investigate the relationship of technology and society. On one hand, there is the “determinist” outlook, which argues that the discovery of tech literally affects human development (i.e., because of the internet’s instant gratification, our attention spans are now shorter). On the other hand, there is another perspective, the “symptomatic,” which establishes that technological advancement is merely a “symptom” of social change. If the television was not directly invented, something else would have merely taken its place. (293)

Williams battles with these two views, however, because they readily imply that technological advancement develops organically, and is “assumed as self-generating.” It places such developments at the margins of social change, where Williams would instead prefer to place tech advancement as an active, central guide, representative to cultural needs and social cause.  (293)

In a way, Williams challenges both outlooks by developing this middle-ground approach. With the way technology advanced from the 19th Century onward, it was inevitable that the television would be invented; as society grew more and more centralized, it only made sense that science and research groups would invest in methods of communication that would prove more conducive to reaching the largest of audiences. These social conditions and needs develop the desire for technological advancement, but Williams shirks the belief that this automatically happens. (295)

And I feel like, in many ways, this approach allows ourselves the inclination to see the television as, for the lack of a better word, a platform or medium. It is necessary to see that the development of the television did not come solely out of thin air, nor that it was some arbitrary military research effort discovered on accident. And by examining this development of social media and platforms, as investigators ourselves, we allow ourselves the room to accept social media as being situated within history, interpreting new media as cultural artifacts of our own contemporary time period.