If the network is everting, turning mundane and imminent, there may be no better sign of the trend than the QR code. Mundane as can be, they currently serve mainly as “quick-response” gateways or portals between physical objects or places and the web. Mostly their use seems to be limited to advertising, taking people to the URL of a product or company. They became widespread shortly after smartphones gave large numbers of people a way to scan them wherever they were encountered. You see them in shop windows and on real-estate signs, on flyers for campus events or on badges at conferences. Often they’re just used as a kind of magical talisman of connectedness, or of the desire for connectedness. They say “This thing or place is networked,” or “data is here,” but often in the predictable, simplified form of opening an URL on your phone. Often their appearance and display betrays a general uncertainty surrounding their use, the vague suspicion that they’re nothing but a gimmick. Sometimes they’re given a graphical shadow so the cryptic square itself looks like an object, a large black and white stamp layered on the poster or print ad of which it’s a part. Sometimes you see them printed on an 8.5 X 11 inch sheet of paper with instructions added in large black type, just in case users are still unfamiliar with them: “Scan This With a Mobile Phone App.” Just printing the URL would be easier and save toner. Presumably at this stage the relative novelty of QR codes entices some people to try scanning them in situations where they’d never stop to type in or write down an URL. But if you think about it, the significance of all those QR codes seems worth thinking about. Even magic talismans–maybe especially when their practical uses are not quite clear–can have cultural significance. For example, just in terms of design, there’s something intriguing about the fact that QR codes go the bar code one dimension better with their matrix layout–and that they “encode” in more than one sense the idea that the network and its data are connected to the physical world and that those connections can be revealed by way of readily available, cheap and ubiquitous acts of dimensional translation.
Month: March 2012
Codename Revolution podcast (and a new project)
The MIT Press’s monthly podcast series featured our book Codename Revolution for February. Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane Productions interviewed my co-author, George Thiruvathukal, and me over the phone. Chris was in an Oregon Public Broadcasting studio, I was in my English department office, and George was in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities across campus, so there was something of a conference call feeling to the experience. (Once I was interviewed by Scott Simon for NPR; he was in D.C. and I was in a Chicago Public Radio studio, but there was at least a technician in the room with me.) Despite that, the interview was fun, and Chris did a really good job of producing it to reflect the conversation we had in real time.
When I saw the link on the MIT Press podcast page I noticed we were preceded in January by B. Coleman. I took it as a sign, since I’m reading and enjoying her book, Hello Avatar, now as I research my own next book in progress: The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. Coleman’s concept of an “‘X-reality’ that traverses the virtual and the real” (3) is consonant with Katherine Hayles’s idea that mixed reality is the current, fourth stage in the history of cybernetics, and with William Gibson’s exploration in his most recent trilogy of the idea that cyberspace is everting, turning inside out and colonizing the physical world. I can’t help but notice that the recent rise of the digital humanities–at least its emergence into public consciousness and a new presence in the academy–has roughly coincided with this eversion of cyberspace, a shift in our collective understanding of the network: from a world apart to a part of the world, from a transcendent virtual reality to a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through every day. It’s not really a coincidence, I think. Digital humanities, in its newly prominent forms, is both a response to and a contributing cause of the wider eversion, and that’s the connection my book will explore.
Steven E. Jones 