Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media

by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

New media -- we are told -- exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In "Updating to Remain the Same," Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all -- when they have moved from "new" to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives -- indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll.

Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing "society" with groupings of individuals and connectable "YOUS." (For isn't "new media" actually "NYOU media"?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as "personal" when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights -- the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?

Genres: Philosophy, Technology, Nonfiction, Theory, Anthropology, Politics, Academia

264 pages, Hardcover

Published May 27, 2016

About the author

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been a Visiting Professor at AI Now at NYU, the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), and a Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is an Associate.

Reviews

[David Dinaburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The continued rise of Mystery Science Theater 3000 nearly two decades after its cancellation is no surprise. It is a perfect metaphor for the disaffected—commentary as coping for those allowed only to view, not shape, their worlds—and remains the acme of what every group of dorky kids does together while watching movies (and cranky old aristocrats do at the theater) and what all of us do, now, constantly, on social media.

As an ex post portent for Twitter—the network that created an infinite, portable audience for wisecracks—MST3K showed that if you can’t change the channel, you might as well try to goof on it. Twitter ramps up the quips and simplifies the truth of the ultimate panopticon; the elision of fame and notoriety burns a clear path to the heart of the opt-in internet; publicity is existence. If your jokes aren’t the funniest, no one cares if you’re even in the theater.

The internet writ large has become the ultimate movie screen: to adapt Plato’s Cave metaphor, the shadows on the wall are now the only things worth caring about. Through the ubiquity of our networked digital present, we are our shadows, stretched thin across the internet— illusory and unreachable—but connected to the rest of the teeming massless masses in no other way. The distance shades our interactions with cruelty—“This isn’t real, it’s just online.” But because these projected selves have become our daily rituals—much the same as how we remain who we are when we go buy a cup of coffee from a stranger without giving them our name—our online presences are still reality.

The whole world is now MST3K; physical life is the bad movie underpinning the commentary, upon which we joyless puppets and hapless humans are overlaid. Jokes and quips and ironic observations are made to maintain any sense of control over a system which suffers no impact from the average captured participant:

This book has argued that what matters most is what and how things linger.

Because we are all entertainers now—forever dancing for the rest of the world or else silent ghosts haunting the web—what matters isn’t that we are flawless performers but admittedly fallible and eminently forgivable: :

Technoculture’s unendingly circulating information stream casts doubt on the value of this content. This is the creepy part of making oneself seen: once we offer ourselves up, once we are displayed on the screens of technoculture, we are as trivial as everything else.

What matters is context, kindness, understanding. What matters is to be viewed as a person to be heard, not as content to be consumed. Not shadow-selves, but selves: not “just online,” but as projections of who we are. A person, not content, or else you truly are illusory.

The internet is here and it binds us together; Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media posits this a need to avoid a return to the sheltered isolation of the private household—privacy built on control of bodies—but public digital spaces, a freedom to exist. An ability to err, to post mistakes and continue to live, to write dumb things and grow and change without being forever tethered to your error. “I am so happy facebook didn’t exist when I was in college.” I hear that from my contemporaries and from my own mouth. But that doesn’t mean we regret college, or even most of the things we did that are embarrassing—they were steps along the path to who we are now—it means there’s something fucked up about facebook:

Technoculture’s unendingly circulating information stream casts doubt on the value of this content. This is the creepy part of making oneself seen: once we offer ourselves up, once we are displayed on the screens of technoculture, we are as trivial as everything else.

The erasure of personhood as we become consumable content, of silence or infamy shame or invisibility, is not a required state. Personhood—respect for an online presence—doesn’t mean tethered digital footprints or even a harkening back to the halcyon days of an open Usenet. Rather than struggling against the benefits or submitting to the inadequacies of the present status, the habits surrounding the networked-now can be reshaped.

Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:

Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.

After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver; always be riffing, always be joking, say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?

What is required now is a holistic approach to digital media—a realignment of perception—where the characters we play for our screens can turn back into the people that we. A new series of habits, where commentary isn’t the only possible interaction, is required; for that, society needs to redesign who is allowed to control our access to digital spaces:

We must develop new habits of connecting that disrupt the reduction of our interactions into network diagrams that can be tracked and traced.

Public engagement, rather than corporate estrangement, is the only hope for a networked future that won’t leave everyone in the dark.

[Taylor Olmstead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critical theory that is truly critical of our current moment. Chun is almost aggressive in her use of infamous case studies to argue for a new way of understanding our relationships with each other and the networks that enable them.

[SY · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5 stars] Ok, I don’t know why it took me so long to get through this book, the premise is simple enough, and the language is straightforward, but, I think mentally I was having a hard time connecting to the project (“…to inhabit the inhabitable, to give in excess and in advance, so that we can re-member differently”) with the story she was telling. It wasn’t that the examples were imprecise, quite to the contrary, but more like, the moves themselves felt super counterintuitive. I kept thinking to myself, wah, professor, this is a whole lot of fancy footwork to improve a sort of already-impossible situation. Why not just, unplug oneself from the leaky network. Like, let the algorithm just run out of confession-as-data all on its own.

Anyway, I think she is spot on. This is a quietly controversial book if you read between the leaky lines. Love it. Super grateful.

[Dominik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not fully accessible to a lay reader. Prepare for tracts of dense critical theory.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blog post with thoughts etc will follow

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the DS Colloquium. Chun has an interesting technique of finding ways to express her claims as simple sentences, such as Update + Crisis = Habit, and then repeating them throughout the book in such a way that they are easily absorbed. Having interludes illustrating how the concepts she discusses play out in real life / online life was really valuable.

[Lette Hass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hay tecnología y hay operaciones realizadas habitualmente por la tecnología.
Tenemos tecnologías, Tenemos redes imaginarias ¿Cómo habitamos en ese tejido y como nos habituamos a su uso? Dispositivos personales, conectados a redes. Información efímera, memoria electrónica y almacenamiento.

El modo de abordar los "new media" no desde la marca de modernidad sobre la novedad, se detiene para dar paso a un análisis basado en "EL HÁBITO". Para mi, el mejor de sus tres libros.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great look at today's trends in the networked society

Chun presents a fast-paced and well thought out analysis of some of the leading trends in today's network society, backed both by current events and thinking in media theory.

I especially appreciated her formulation of Habit + Crisis = Update, a look at how in today's online media we have moved from the reporting of news and catastrophes to a state of constant crisis driving endless calls for action and updates. It captures my (not nearly so clear) experiences very well, and she articulates her case for the model very well.

If you're used to STEM-style writing, some of Chun's analogies and connections may be a bit of a stretch --- but I find the associations and conclusions she draws very thought-provoking when considering how I'm seeing people interact with media today.