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The Semiotics of Osama bin Laden’s Death and The Internet Age

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It was incredible, and slightly surreal, to see not only just how fast news spread that Osama bin Laden had been killed in an attack by U.S forces, but also how fast people began analyzing what his death meant for the country as a whole, for the President’s term in office, and for the people who had lost family members during September 11th. The president’s address on the subject was streaming over the internet just minutes after the formal announcement; people had gathered not only in front of the White House, but also in communities elsewhere in the country to celebrate before the President had even delivered his speech; others had begun criticizing the revelers’ actions as uncouth, no matter how bad the man who had been killed, as soon as the news and response had popped up. By the time most people woke up the next day, they had heard what happened, either through their own investigations or because someone had called or texted them.

As fast as news was traveling to them, people were analyzing it for meaning, and in doing so, putting theories out on the internet about every conceivable topic related to Osama bin Laden’s death. His death came to stand for so many different things in so many different topics, and the technology that produced that also produced a very specific response, one that could only be imagined in the age of the internet.

One of the first things that people began discussing was the impact this would have on the 2012 Presidential election. At the time of this writing, there are almost 57,000 articles devoted to commenting, predicting, or satirizing the effect that Osama’s death might have on Obama’s chances in the next election, as reported on Google, all within the last 36 hours. Things like this are already old news on the internet:

In the wake of the never-ending financial crisis and the wars inherited from President Bush that had, for the previous part of Obama’s presidency, hung like an albatross around his neck, it was immediately recognized just what an accomplishment this was, finding Bin Laden. The task was pretty much a punchline to most of us. So, when the news came in, a wave of praise rose up for Obama, cartoons like that one, and the one here: http://www.collegehumor.com/picture/6498012/csi-obama The humor—and for those of us who have sided with Obama despite falling poll numbers, a slight sense of unflatteringly smug satisfaction (although that might just be me)—comes from the fact that this momentous thing happened during a time where birthers and now people who doubt Obama’s academic credentials are trying to discredit him left and right, all the while doing one of the things that people doubted would ever happen, under him or anyone else.

However, some people who may or may not have had a problem with Obama before criticized the ecstatic attribution of Osama’s discovery and death to Obama.
I’d say the real people to thank are the guys at the CIA who managed to figure out where Bin Laden was hiding. If all that was needed was some tough Navy Seals to jump in and kill him, he’d have been dead before September of 2001 was over. Finding him is the important part, and the CIA managed to pull that off. And really, organizing such a major investigation as that requires some careful management, so as the chief executive Obama did have a fairly important role to play besides “hey yeah you guys should go find him’. (AV Club, “Weekend Box Office: Osama is Dead! (And Some People Bought Tickets to See Furious Five)”)
Already reactions and counter-reactions have sprung up, and not just the pundits or the news anchors was weighing in to disseminate and comment upon the information, but everyone with an internet connection. Facebook newsfeeds were filled with status updates and notes about Osama’s death. The sentiments may not be all that different than what has been expressed about presidents in the past, but the method of expression is unique to the internet age.

To bring this back to a point of the reading we’ve done in the past semester, Tim Wu discusses in Chapter 21 just how the internet, being a fractured and democratic form of information technology, allows everyone not only to have an equal say, but to have a pretty equal chance of getting it out so that anyone else with an internet connection can hear them. “It cannot be denied that the Internet has ushered in a time of unprecedented diversity an ease of communication and commerce, a broadly available way of reaching millions of people. And each of those millions of networked parties can in turn claim the role of what was once called, with appropriate distinction, a ‘broadcaster’” (317). The internet provides whole new realms for discussion, where the inappropriate is de rigueur, and where someone’s immediate reaction can become a sensation that lives on, for future readers to discover and comment upon, in ways that cannot be achieved in a television, or book, or speech-dominated society. Everyone’s internet presence is available for everyone to see almost immediately, and things of note from people who were otherwise unnoticeable happen every minute. At the same time, reactions, reactions to reactions, and numerous different analyses crop up and take off for a myriad of different discussions and interpretations of what something means that also disseminate into the common knowledge. Events mean more things to more people, sometimes many things to the same people, as they do here, rather than the monolithic interpretation that would have come along with a single outlet.

Moreover, as I alluded to before, the myriad of outlets and “broadcasters” means that there are a myriad of interpretations of the situations at hand, all of which—if not quite considered equal in validity—are at least considered and discussed. Shortly before the broadcast of President Obama’s speech, Brian Williams was interviewing a member of President Bush’s cabinet, and for his opening question, he asked one of the questions that I had seen many other people, ordinary citizens, pose on the internet: what do you think this means for President Bush (and, in an underlying statement, the people who sided with him both during his presidency when their judgment was criticized and afterwards as a criticism of Obama)? On this train of thought, people began predicting the Democrats’ chances for a victory over the Republicans in the 2012 Presidential Election, talking about what Donald Trump’s direct criticism of Obama now meant in terms of his public image, and reviving attacks against the Birthers, each of which had a bunch of different counter-responses. At the same time, people were discussing what the revelers in front of the White House (and elsewhere) meant about the American lust for revenge, and still others were discussing what this meant for our relations with Pakistan, or the sense of closure this actually did or didn’t bring to the families of victims claimed by 9/11.

The Piercian model that Chandler discusses seems to fit so seamlessly here: the influx of opinions and the multifaceted nature of the interpretation to which they give rise fits the tripartite model which opens up the interpretation of any symbol to diachrony. Osama bin Laden’s death is a symbol, not yet an icon and probably never an index, where it stands for any and all of these things and more simultaneously, and with the expectation that those associations will change as sentiments do, or as new details come to light over time. Pierce’s commitment to diachrony allows us to think about bin Laden’s death in all of the multifaceted aspects that it represents for us as broadcasters in the internet age. As I said before: in a place where anybody has as much say and as much ability to be heard as the next person, any symbol is pretty much guaranteed to have a huge number of “official” interpretations, and the diachronic model allows us to think most accurately about the semiotics of bin Laden’s death in the internet age and beyond.

Connectivity and the YouTube Community

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By Jessie Kastenbaum (jekastenbaum@vassar.edu)

As technology progresses, the world becomes more connected and communication improves dramatically.  Wu’s The Master Switch follows the progression of communication technology starting with the telephone, going to the radio, then to film, and so on.  With each new device, people become more connected to each other and are able to communicate in different ways.  The telephone allows two people to hear each other across distances.  The radio allows people to hear multiple types of media, from talk shows to music to presidential speeches from remote locations.  With film, viewers can see and hear stories come to life.  Wu mentions “the power of an open technology like radio broadcasting to inspire hope for mankind by creating a virtual community” (39).  The first thing that springs to my mind when I think of a “virtual community” is the Internet, and YouTube in particular.

Through the Internet, we can share information and ideas with anyone else in the world who also has access to the Internet.  This map, which shows the global connections via Facebook, illustrates just how connected the world is via the Internet:

This connectivity is extremely apparent on YouTube where an enormous community of video bloggers, or vloggers, has sprung up.  Many people think of YouTube as just a site for video clips of adorable kittens and of people running into stop signs.  However, there is so much user-generated content that goes unnoticed by the greater public.  Audiences interact with vloggers through comments and making video responses.  In addition to interaction between vloggers and their audiences, there is a great deal of interaction among vloggers.  Most of the vloggers I watch are members of the same YouTube community, called Nerdfighteria.  Nerdfighteria began when two brothers, John and Hank Green (the “vlogbrothers” on YouTube), began a vlogging project in which they would communicate without text for an entire year.  They built up an audience around their vlogs and call themselves and their audience “nerdfighters” (because we fight for nerds and fight to decrease world suck, which is exactly what it sounds like).  Here is one of John’s vlogs (which actually talks about community a bit):

Many of the vloggers of Nerdfighteria are friends through YouTube and through this community.  The community has brought people together from around the globe, showing the connective power of the Internet and YouTube.  One of the best examples of the YouTube community is the “collab channel.”  A collab channel is a YouTube channel run by multiple people; typically, each person posts a video one day a week.  For example, on the channel FiveAwesomeGirls each of five girls posts one video on a specific day of the week.  Kristina posts on Mondays, Lauren on Tuesdays, Kayley on Wednesdays, and so on.  The five girls do not live near each other and did not know each other personally before they began their collab channel, but have become close friends through the YouTube community.

Something I have noticed about video bloggers is that they tend to use similar techniques.  For example, they usually use a lot of jump cuts, something that is frowned upon in movies.  Why do vloggers use jump cuts?  It could be because they simply can’t remember everything they have to say to do the vlog in one take, or it could be that it makes the video more visually interesting.  After all, most vloggers are just talking to a camera, so they need to do something to hold their viewers’ attention.  Furthermore, most popular vloggers use a lot of hand gestures.  Again, this could be to make their videos more interesting or it could be to help get their points across.  Here is a video from one of my favorite vloggers, Charlie McDonnell (“charlieissocoollike” on YouTube):

What do you notice about John and Charlie’s videos?  Why are they interesting (or why aren’t they interesting)?

Wu mentions the “mix of both entrepreneurial and humanitarian motives” that “drives the opening up of a media” (36).  YouTube is primarily humanitarian—vlogging is generally not an economically sound job (although you can earn money from running ads on your videos).  Most vloggers make videos because they genuinely love doing so and have a message they want to share with the world.

There are so many different communities on the Internet—the YouTube community is just the one with which I am most familiar.  Furthermore, the Internet is just the next step in connectivity.  According to Wu, “what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology’s development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people” (19).  Connectivity and communication will thus continue to increase as technology improves.  There is an exceptional amount of global connectivity due to the Internet, but can we improve on it?  What will be the next step?  Can the world become even more connected than it currently is?  Can we continue to build our global community?

Dinner Time: Formality in Rituals

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by Katrina Newman (kanewman@vassar.edu)

“Mental hygiene” films were shown to kids in schools all across America in the ’40s and ’50s with the intention of instructing them in sanctioned behavior and the proper roles of the nuclear family. I’ve always found these kinds of videos to be quite entertaining and kind of funny, and was reminded of the one about eating with your family when I read about feasting in Signs of Recognition.

Among the Anakalangese nobility  generosity (boraku) as well as wealth is required of them, and feasting is one of the ways that males use to display their rank, power and wealth (5-7, 58).  A failure to live up to traditional standards is something causes Anakalangese to lament about the good old days (58). In ’50s America, formality of eating was reintroduced to thousands, maybe millions of people, modeled by a “typical” nuclear white middle class family, by this video:

Formality, defined as the representation of roles and/or hierarchy, is embodied in speech events and rites/rituals (8) and social exchanges are facilitated by working within this “ritual frame” (Keane 5).

“You can be yourself. Just be sure it’s your best self.” And what constitutes their best selves? Pleasantness and relaxation are the key qualities emphasized in this propaganda video. Ritualized, traditional order is also facilitated through ritual speech, and what the family can talk about is restricted to “pleasant, unemotional conversation.” One is not to monopolize the conversation or discuss unpleasant topics! No arguing, don’t insult your brothers and remember to compliment mom on the cooking. The people don’t have personal names but are addressed as mother, father, sister, brother and junior, emphasising the “stereotypical performance roles” in the formality. By engaging in formality, participants are able to interactively define themselves and each other (7) thus creating self-awareness of their roles and their family hierarchy. The  seating arrangements, who serves and the order of serving and saying grace are all embodied parts of the representation. Whether they are really happy or not is irrelevant; all that matters is acting as though they are happy by performing pleasantness. “Even the simple norms of everyday propriety, among the least dramatic elements of any cultural account, may serve” the interests of domination, (6) and in ’50’s America that certainly included dinner time.

I couldn’t find any equivalent modern videos; any videos on family eating were on how to eat healthy and make meals more quickly. I would conjecture that it means the importance of enforcing family hierarchies through eating rituals has largely disappeared in popular culture. To bring authority, sources of power and legitimate agency together requires persistent effort (9) and most people seem to have difficulty “finding the time” to eat together as a family. Do you think that more people would manage to find time for formalized family dinners if they thought their family dynamic and personal happiness were dependent on it? Why do you think the importance of performativity of roles has decreased since the post-War era? Even though it is less visible now in media, what kinds of formalities in the video do you think are still performed in American households?

Alphabet Species

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by Luke Leavitt (luleavitt@vassar.edu)

Hey Guys!

Alphabet Species is a conceptual art project borne from my father’s collaborations with other artists, including myself. Here is the homepage for Alphabet Species (one of many other projects you should feel to scope out at dagostinostudio.com)

http://www.dagostinostudio.com/daviddagostino/alphabet/alphabet.html

read the statement, then click on 4 Intermedia Diagrams, read that statement, then click on Oz-Oz-Opiads — this is the best example of the project (in fact it is the only fully complete diagram).

When reading Hank’s Chapter on Text and Textuality from his book Intertext I was struck by the overlap between Hank’s interrogations and my father’s, although the two come from different perspectives (linguistic-anthropology and conceptual Fluxus art, respectively). Specifically, both projects raise the question of text, broadly defined as some sort of communication. What is text? How do we know where it begins and ends? Like a lot of art, I think it is fair to say that Alphabet Species seeks to raise questions in a creative way, rather than provide some sort of answer to these sorts of questions. So what does it make you think, in relation to what Hanks has to say in his chapter?

Here are some ponderings of mine. Hanks says that “text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users” (165). So first off, is Oz-Oz-Opiads a text by this definition? What role does interpretation play in making Oz-Oz-Opiads a text or not?

Hanks also says that at first glance, textuality is the “quality of coherence or connectivity that characterizes text” (166). Do you recognize any sort of coherency in Oz-Oz-Opiads that might give it textuality? Or is it simply a “text without textuality” (168)? — perhaps a text-work in a genre that inherently lacks cohesion?

Part of the ambiguity in defining text is that interpretation may vary considerably, but is an important factor in “concretizing” a text (ala Ingarden) in a social context. How does Oz-Oz-Opiads bring to the surface (or not) the role of social setting and interpretation in its creation? Interesting to note is that Oz-Oz-Opiads internalizes “reception into the production process itself… dialogizing authorship” (180).

Finally, Hanks says that “even though any strip of text can be multiply interpreted (through alternative centerings) [which might be one interpreted goal of Oz-Oz-Opiads], the range of possibilities is never open-ended in the real social world. Rather, it is partly inscribed in textual form, and partly contested by actors (which may be more or less than individuals).” How might Oz-Oz-Opiads confirm or challenge this? Could the diagram potentially go on forever or not? And what is its central “text” anyways? Is it the original visual poem? What exactly am I interpreting when I create both the Visual Poem Sound Composition and the Composition Manuscript? I am simply interpreting an interpretant (ala Peirce), or am I somehow interpreting some sort of semi-distinct, semi-unitary “text” or “piece of art” that exists nebulously under the title, Oz-Oz-Opiads?

Pingu and Fictional Languages

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by Alden Rose

With words being a sort of white noise to the images that surround us, studying a television show with no explicit verbal context was interesting. Television shows have become soaked in visual imagery that gives the viewer layers of information to sort through, often hard to separate from basic elements like character relationship or narrative. Pingu is a Swiss claymation television show that first aired in 1986 and came out with some new episodes in 2004 (but definitely not as good). The show is about a community of penguins that’s pretty much it, but they do not speak a recognizable language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGPhXrc78Jg&feature=related

They lack words in their communication, but what is retained? Levinson talks about deixis as “the ways in which language encodes or grammaticalizes features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.” In other words, there are many different elements that contribute to the meaning of speech acts, context being one of the most important. He talks about the context specificity of pronouns, demonstratives and tense, but for Pingu where there aren’t any words, so we have to work with a partial deixis.

In this clip, Pingu and his friend start playing hopscotch. You actually see them playing the game, a cooperative event. Even without words their speech acts provide tone, inflection, and temper. You can see that they are successfully engaging in a conversation, even though the content remains unknown.

Next, an adult penguin rides in and interrupts their game, using a more aggressive and authoritative voice. As he cleans their game up, Pingu’s speech becomes rapid and agitated, implying annoyance and even defiance.

Many productions draw on preexisting social contexts to define a character’s roles, with a great deal based in a culture and language. The relationships between these anthropomorphized penguins emerge as we pick up visual and auditory clues, such as the adult yelling at Pingu. Like the hidden indexical components (Hanks 159) in Hanks’ Don Chabo exchange, all speech acts are extremely relational. Some viewers may find it offensive that Pingu has in a sense talked-back to the man (though we only know this because of his tone and gestural usage), while others may find it acceptable and even humorous.

The adult’s next few actions come off as odd, as he draws a red box ontop of their game, and puts up a sign with a “P” on it (parking maybe) and a sign with a penguin and a ball with an X on it. He has just designated this as his parking spot, but the viewer only comes to this conclusion after his actions are completed. Without words, other aspects of linguistic communication are amplified

It is interesting that someone has put captions in Swedish for the show.  The Swedish captions, though not understood by us, give more verbal encoding than is originally implied by the show’s ambiguous language. Youtube had been a goldmine of redefining the meaning of speech acts in another language by using captions. Such as .

This type of open-language is also used in many role-playing computer games, such as The Sims.

These types of undefined languages can draw from all aspects of language; specific accents or a certain cultural vocal pattern can be used. But without words, these languages really do become universal, allowing you to interpret deixis personally. As Pearson (the woman interviewed in the previous clip) finds, “I can make up whatever I want about it.”

Pingu and The Sims draw an international audience, aided by their peculiar languages, but appeal to the creativity provided by this open indexicality. The viewer is given much less information, so the majority of the context is left for them to decide. “It is the minute details of linguistic structure that coordinate this awareness and make it known with a delicacy unparalleled by any other mode of expression.” (Hanks 165) You can pick up on the relational meaning of these indexicals because of structure of language and how much our interpretation relies on the referential content provided outside of word meaning and usage.

The Language of Robots

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By Genevieve Lenoir (gelenoir@vassar.edu)

Well, after expending a great deal of energy trying to figure out how I was going to live up to the absurdly high standards set by Andrea in her post last week, I finally decided to just write about something I enjoyed and let the rest flow from there. One of the topics I’ve been interested in from a theoretical standpoint, and one which I’ve previously explored in a linguistics class, is the nature of artificial intelligence. Out of curiosity, I Googled “robot language” and immediately got this interesting result:

ROILA website screencap

“ROILA is a spoken language for robots. It is constructed to make it easy for humans to learn, but also easy for the robots to understand. ROILA is optimized for the robots’ automatic speech recognition and understanding.”

According to the website, ROILA is an artificial language developed by a team in the Netherlands to make it easier for humans to communicate with robots. Robots have difficulty understanding natural speech — speech recognition technology is not yet developed enough to be effective, so misunderstandings between robots and people are common. Some people believe it is impossible for speech recognition technology to ever reach the level of human speech. To bypass these technical limitations, ROILA was compiled using simple grammar and phonemes that occur in a broad range of natural languages and have no irregularities, with a dictionary of words which are phonetically distinct from each other in order to divert the chances of mishearing a word. It is supposed to be easy for humans to learn, and the ROILA team offers free courses to teach humans the ROILA language (hosted on Moodle, funnily enough).

ROILA words are generated by a scalable genetic algorithm that produces words which are deemed to have the least amount of confusion between them. Definitions are taken from Basic English, a form of English developed by Charles Ogden in 1930 which contains only 800 words. The grammar is basic and contains no exceptions in grammar or syntax. It follows subject-verb-object form. I did notice that the language contains four pronouns: I, you, he, and she, and I thought it was very silly of them to use gendered pronouns in a language designed for communication between animate and inanimate objects. Just something I found interesting.

Here, NPR’s Morning Edition takes a quick look at ROILA:
Morning Edition

Robots have been undergoing intense coerced evolution since the time of the first simple mechanical device. As humans invest more and more time and energy into elevating mechanical/electrical inputs to the eventual goal of total human-like sentience, it evokes a great number of questions. Deacon states quite clearly that “Even under these loosened criteria, there are no simple languages used among other species, though there are many other equally or more complicated modes of communication…For the vast majority of species in the vast majority of contexts, even simple language just doesn’t compute” (41). Language is an intrinsically human creation, limited to Homo sapiens by our biology and our development. With that said, do we believe that robots — as a creation of human intelligence — are able to make use of our forms of communication? Robots are not like animals; it’s not that they have simple brains, it’s that they don’t have brains at all! If I’ve learned nothing else in this class, it’s that language and the way language functions in human cognition is vastly more complex than “words = names for things” and grammar and even the pragmatics of social situations. But robots are built by us, and to function they must work within the parameters of human understanding, which of course is heavily language-based. A robot which can use language, either recognizing it or replicating it, is doing something fundamentally different than a dog is when it interprets your commands. And, then, at the end a robot is just made of a bunch of circuits and signals. Some robots can “learn”, adding new functions as they interact depending on their programming. Some robots have been taught to react to facial expressions or tone of voice. Do we say that these robots have language skills on par with human beings?

Possibly my favorite part of the Deacon reading was when he addressed the problem of understanding. “Isn’t any family dog able to learn to respond to many spoken commands? Doesn’t my dog understand the word ‘come’ if he obeys this command?…Not exactly. We think we have a pretty good idea of what it means for a dog to ‘understand’ a command like ‘Stay!’ but are a dog’s understanding and a person’s understanding the same? Or is there some fundamental difference between the way my dog and I understand the same spoken sounds? Common sense psychology has provided terms for this difference. We say the dog has learned the command ‘by rote’, whereas we ‘understand’ it.” I would like to turn his sequence of questions to my own purposes:
Does a robot “understand” the language of its operators? Can a series of ones and zeroes accurately map a system like the inside of the human brain? What does it mean for a robot to use language?

Like with Deacon’s discussion of animals in myth and fiction, robots have often been romanticized in popular culture. We would all love to believe that computers will someday reach the point where they can act and behave just like us, smarter or stronger or more polite, but essentially human in every way that matters. Perhaps we believe that if robots can become human-like, if they can show some glimmer of a human soul, then humans, ourselves little more than a collection of biological functions and neurological pathways, will no longer need to doubt the nature of our own.

Wall-E