a” poderia estourar em grandes movimentos sociais, reivindicando a reforma agrár

A partir de ese marco, la epidemiología convencional cayó en una distorsión múltiple de la metodología, posible de sintetizar en los siguientes cinco elementos: Una explicación fenoménica, reduccionista y fragmentaria de la realidad y la determinación de la salud Primacía absoluta de la asociación causa-efecto como gran organizadora y lógica del universo epidemiológico Reificación de la relación causa-efecto como artefacto formal aplicado para identificar factores de riesgo La reducción de la noción de exposición/vulnerabilidad a un problema esencialmente individual de naturaleza probabilística A la hora de organizar la práctica epidemiológica, la reducción de ésta en acciones funcionales sobre factores de riesgo.

and since the digital converges all media into a single state (that is to say digital data)

must first be digitised to data, then modulated between storage and display in an endless protocol-based negotiation that both severs any link to the data’s semantic source and creates an ever-growing excess of data weirdly related to, but ontologically distinct from, its originating data source.

What broadly characterises this trend is its commitment to a return to a full-blown metaphysics of ‘being,’ outside of any subjective or human ‘correlation.’

Ontology, when it enters at all, can only do so as an historically-circumscribed concern.

Fixed social structures produce an impoverished form of agency because agency always belongs to the same components or groups.

Assemblage theory does not treat agency as something that belongs to or stems solely from humans or from technology alone but from the interaction of a number of heterogeneous tendencies that together produce emergent properties that enable new capacities. In addition, every assemblage contains actants, like Go, that can modify other entities giving them new functions and abilities. Without new associations or without continually forming new connections this process cannot take place and agency cannot occur.

The examples of Foxtel Go and the LetsPlay channels demonstrate how new television can be thought of as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements that has moments of stability and moments of transformation depending on the kinds of connections that are formed. They also demonstrate how the social is refigured through the new productions and viewing practices they engender.

For them, the transmission of television via a simultaneous schedule is an entirely foreign concept, even though this has been one of the defining elements of television as a medium for decades

Latour argues that it is through the process of reshuffling agency that associations between objects are revealed as social. He argues that the social ‘is an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together’ (Latour, 2005: 65).

Reciprocal determination is a non-linear form of determination that emerges from a process of interaction.

Finally, the concept of assemblages shows promise in theorising multiplatform television as an arrangement that challenges a linear determination based on a cause and effect logic, in favour of a multi-determinate trajectory.

Keilbach and Stauff have a similar issue with the framing of television as a stable medium. They argue that recent discussions about the dramatic changes in television that ‘distinguish the medium’s current heterogeneity from television as it used to be’; [imply] that television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question

In the US context, Amanda Lotz argues that the shift to the digital multiplatform has altered television’s industrial logic and therefore requires ‘a fundamental reassessment’ of how television ‘operates as a cultural institution’

engage with a show’s interactive material or create and distribute user generated content.

Reciprocal determination is a non-linear form of determination that emerges from a process of interaction. To appreciate the importance of this concept to the functioning of assemblages, it is necessary to understand how it relates to both the virtual and the actual. Assemblages function on two planes: the plane of consistency or virtuality, which is made up of becomings or pure differentiation; and, a plane of organisation that actualises these virualities by segmenting and stratifying them

Processes of deterritorialisation, on the other hand, undo fixed orderings, disrupt hierarchical power structures, and by privileging contingent relations between heterogeneous parts, open the assemblage to new possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3–25)

Actants are entities that contribute something new to the assemblage and can be human or non-human.

Complicating matters is the fact that different theorists use different terminology to describe what might appear to be similar phenomena.

The implication of this is that social theory misses transformations in culture and the social itself.

in favour of a multi-determinate trajectory

deterritorialised and reterritorialised,

‘takes seriously the particular objects, technologies, and forms through which culture is brought together’

television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question

theorists suggest that there is a need to develop new theoretical frameworks that encompass more than the analogue broadcast model.

emerged

the way television culture can be deterritorialised and reterritorialised through new connections and in doing so introduce new qualities such as interactivity and reciprocal determination.

Within assemblage theory, agency is dependent on the kinds of relationships that are formed between different elements.

In a multiplatform environment participation and agency can happen in more subtle ubiquitous ways; it happens through practices like using the Foxtel Go that transforms computers, tablets and phones into television sets.

it is also becoming increasingly multiplatform by spreading its content across different devices and platforms that encourage viewer participation.

For example, a viewer who personalises their news to receive only business news or entertainment news misses out on hard news and is not exposed to a mixed diet of news sub-genres

Furthermore, Bennett and Strange point out that customisation and personalisation technologies that enable viewers to select programmes according to personal taste

As a stable structure, broadcast television may not offer the personalisation and customisation features that digital television does, however it possesses some very important functions. By addressing a mass audience, it facilitates a sense of nationhood and enables the spread of important information

viewers to become schedulers

With their simple content and amateur production standards, LetsPlay channels have very rudimentary aesthetics that challenge the broadcast/network model.

Even the name given to these channels ‘LetsPlay’

Their hybrid nature puts into question television’s ontological status and the idea that it is a stable medium. While I agree with Uricchio who argues that historically television demonstrates a propensity for change and that different models of television have always existed, I would also suggest that examples like LetsPlay channels signal that digital technology has considerably increased the number of different forms of television and the rate of change.

Go behaves as an agent that enables new viewing practices by forming connections between different parts of the assemblage including viewers, industry, texts and related technology.

effect logic toward a multiple determination.

This signals a shift in how television is viewed; live television can now be viewed without the need for a television set.

It enables computers, tablets and phones to do what just a few years ago only the television set could do

One of the most interesting aspects of Go is that it incorporates a number of functions that were previously distributed amongst different technological devices such as the television set, the remote control, the set top box, and the Personal Digital

television has always been a hybrid medium

If we understand multiplatform television as an assemblage that is constantly forming new connections between viewers, texts, technologies, polices and practices, we can imagine a virtual realm full of possible outcomes. However, it is difficult to predict which will be actualised and which will remain in the realm of the virtual. This sense of contingency and chance means that social and cultural television formations are open to the new and unthought rather than limited to fixed relations.

exploring emergent properties.

binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

Tamsin Loraine uses the example of a tree that might be comprised of tendencies toward bending and falling

These processes also affect how agency operates within an assemblage. Firstly, agency cannot be attributed to any one component or actant, human or non-human but emerges from the association of different parts. It is intrinsically tied to the kinds of connections that make

Processes of territorialisation can over-code an assemblage by giving its parts fixed roles and meanings and by producing a closed unified structure with a central point of power and signification

Unlike fixed structures that always act in the same way and produce the same outcomes, assemblages introduce new possibilities.

with binary relations

As old connections disappear and new ones form, it changes quantitatively, in terms of the number of connections it has:

Although this mode of theorizing provides a basis for prediction and thus for intervention and rational governance, it falls short in accounting for change

It also allows us to consider how agency is reshuffled, as new connections are formed between new kinds of devices, texts, practices and applications.

As Goggin notes assemblage theory ‘questions the constitution, production, and reproduction of the social, pointing to how particular objects suggest different conceptions, ordering and politics

Keilbach and Stauff have a similar issue with the framing of television as a stable medium.

For Joke Hermes television and television viewing is so vastly different than it once was that ‘we are in need of evaluating what television is about and, perhaps also, of updating our theoretical frame-work to understand the medium’

The emergence of digital, multiplatform television also puts into question many of the central concepts and theories for understanding television and television culture, such as: appointment viewing, mass audiences, liveness and broadcast-flow

In the midst of this change at least three new and distinct functions stand out: pay per view, search and retrieve, and upload and share.

at a time of their choosing.

Empowerment and the agency of audiences has been a contested aspect of digital media.

For example, José van Dijck challenges the idea that online platforms like YouTube signal any shift in media power because they mine the metadata of users in order to target advertising to individuals

can limit their exposure to different kinds of programmes and different perspectives

It enables us to not only to consider current television formations, but to contemplate how these connect and relate to past formations, and possible future formations.

The years of stability that Uricchio refers to could be understood as precisely a set of links that reinforce particular arrangements and by doing so block other possibilities. However, digital technology has enabled new links to form that open up the television assemblage to new forms of production and new forms of engagement.

beckons viewers to become engaged and to become players rather than passive viewers.

This means taking into account that children are not tied to temporal modes of viewing based on schedules and other expectations to do with broadcast television such as high production standards and established genres.

what is lost in this new formation?

If we think about these components as simply the actualisation of a number of possible virtulalities, then it becomes apparent that their actualisation is contingent on a variety of tendencies coming together and not the result of a linear logic.

the actual is always informed and influenced by the virtual and that, while the virtual may have an infinite number of possibilities, only some are actualised

Firstly, agency cannot be attributed to any one component or actant, human or non-human but emerges from the association of different parts.

as the nature of the system changes, its capacities or what it enables, also change. DeLanda discusses this process in terms of emergent properties.

First, because assemblages form new connections with the outside, the social itself becomes open to change.

the concept of assemblages provides a means of accounting for the formation of new kinds of connections between discrete devices, texts and applications, at times across different mediums. It enables us to think about how previous and current devices, texts and medium are reconfigured and adopt new functionalities or are modified, so as to display new qualities.

change and transformation are not simply ‘characteristics of the medium’s current phase but more generally [are] one of television’s integral features’

Internet TV

Fixed social structures produce an impoverished form of agency because agency always belongs to the same components or groups.

This unique function addresses a society as a whole and reinforces a sense of nationhood and citizenship.

This means taking into account that children are not tied to temporal modes of viewing based on schedules and other expectations to do with broadcast television such as high production standards and established genres.

This is no small matter when we consider the scenario described at the start of this essay, where as little as ten years ago not only did viewers have very little control over where and when they watch television, but they also had to deal with incredibly cumbersome technology.

Go’s search and retrieve logic also challenges a fixed idea of a television schedule that is organised by the scheduling department of a television channel with the aim of enticing viewers to immerse themselves in its flow. Go, on the other hand, is defined by a multiplicity of possibilities that may or may not actualise as schedules. Viewing is no longer reliant on schedules as viewing on Go means choosing programmes from a number of lists and menus that can be swiped through, personalised into favourites or arranged into a number of different playlists. This form of interaction removes programming and scheduling as something that is solely the domain of the industry and reconfigures it into a shared arrangement.

By doing so, it literally brings new elements into an assemblage that deterritorialises a number of connections fundamental to broadcast television.

I’m on the bus. I take out my iPad and open Foxtel’s application the Go. I can watch programmes on 60 live channels, or I can choose from hundreds of shows and movies from the ‘on demand’ menu.

a virtualised form of participation.

gender groups at particular times

The concept of reciprocal determination is important for challenging the centrality of broadcast television and the idea of television and television culture as something with a fixed and stable structure based on fixed roles, binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

These are properties that arise from the interactions of heterogeneous parts so that the assemblage as a whole acquires new attributes. At the same time, the parts of an assemblage retain their unique properties, and do not lose their distinctiveness.

so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage’

More specifically, in this paper I argue that the concept of assemblages provides a means of accounting for the formation of new kinds of connections between discrete devices, texts and applications, at times across different mediums. It enables us to think about how previous and current devices, texts and medium are reconfigured and adopt new functionalities or are modified, so as to display new qualities.

‘[p]art of the ‘power of television’ lies in its constant transformation process, enforced by a continuous reflection on the ‘appropriate’ use and an ongoing redefinition of television’

The emergence of digital, multiplatform television also puts into question many of the central concepts and theories for understanding television and television culture, such as: appointment viewing, mass audiences, liveness and broadcast-flow

Upload and share practices enable viewers to engage with a show’s interactive material or create and distribute user generated content. These changes have transformed television from a single platform medium into an interactive multiplatform medium that encourages viewer (if this term is still appropriate) participation.

hinking about these problems in terms of assemblage theory, we could say that in these instances YouTube is captured and over-coded by molar ordering that reinstitutes a hierarchical structure and a central agent of power.

customisation and personalisation technologies that enable viewers to select programmes according to personal taste can limit their exposure to different kinds of programmes and different perspectives

By addressing a mass audience, it facilitates a sense of nationhood and enables the spread of important information.

LetsPlay channels can be see as one manifestation of these new links,

In fact, children’s viewing practices should form an important base for how we rethink what television is and what it does, because today’s children have had little or no exposure to television prior to a digital age.

They incorporate a mix of television and gaming elements and cultural practices.

‘we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant’

At the same time, we could also ask what is lost in this new formation? One possibility is that members of a household act in isolation from each other in relation to planning and scheduling communal viewing.

the Foxtel iQ disrupts appointment viewing or a temporal mode of viewing by enabling viewers, to not only record programmes easily (that is without needing to know the start and end time or date) but also ‘create a personal playlist from the pool of programs they have recorded, which can then be watched at the viewer’s convenience’

mobility becomes an emergent property

At the same time, I am not assuming that prior to multiplatform television viewers were passive, as acts of reading and making meaning are also forms of activity.

While this event may be read through a linear cause and effect logic after it has occurred, it is first a series of heterogeneous tendencies that come together to form an expression.

processes of deterritorialisation

processes of territorialisation

Unlike fixed structures that always act in the same way and produce the same outcomes, assemblages introduce new possibilities.

rhizome, clearly meant a series of transformations, translations, transductions, which could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory’ (Latour, 1999:15).

As Latour argues, social theory privileges stability and tends to structure the social around fixed terms and binaries such as ‘actor and system, or agency and structure’ (Latour, 1999: 16)

The concept of assemblages takes into consideration the way television culture can be deterritorialised and reterritorialised, so that new functionalities and qualities are introduced.

LetsPlay channels put into question the idea of television as a stable medium, and invite us to rethink what television is and what it can be.

LetsPlay

Viewers are therefore no longer bound to the television set to watch live television.

However, unlike mobile phones and tablets which promote mobility, I would argue that these home based technologies attempt to maintain the television set as the privileged site for viewing and the home as a central location.

Go and apps like it offer new lines of connections that potentially reformulate television culture by deterritorialising appointment, mass and home viewing.

Foxtel Go is one of a number of television applications (or ‘apps’) that enable viewers to watch television on different devices.

broadcast television offers viewers very few opportunities to actively participate in the media texts that they are directed to consume

broadcast television is a highly organised structure that revolves around a centre of significance, tends toward homogeneity and produces images and representations for viewers to consume.

reciprocal determination

deterritorialisation

rhizomatic assemblage

social as a constantly stable structure

television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question

1950 and 1980

[p]art of the ‘power of television

viewers can access their favourite shows in a number of different ways

assemblages

By taking over the combined functions of the television set, the remote control, the set top box, and the PDR, Go produces new lines of connections that cause a shift in how we understand what television is and what it does. In this sense, the set of associations and connections that shape broadcast/network television culture are disassembled and reconfigured as some of its vital actants and their connections disappear and new ones emerge.

As Latour argues, social theory privileges stability and tends to structure the social around fixed terms and binaries such as ‘actor and system, or agency and structure’ (Latour, 1999: 16). Social theory also finds it difficult to account for changes in the social that come about as new connections are formed, and how these potentially reformulate or transform the way the social is ordered or assembled.

ex falso quodlibet

symbolic placeholders for binary switches: on/off, +/-, yes/no, is/is-not

The age of media is over, for there is now only one medium

aphorism

hypomnesis

amamnesis

Digital ontology is the event of the end of media

full-blown metaphysics of ‘being

web 2.0 practices

displacing ‘the human’ from the centre of action

ever-growing excess of data

his tension leads to certain opacities or blind-spots regarding the status of media for each trajectory, which the others can supply only at the cost of their own blindness.

When modulating some digital data into a display state and experiencing it as an image (say, in order to show a picture of your child to a friend on your phone),

It is noteworthy that these three major trajectories (the naturalist, the socio-historical and the object-oriented-ontological) in contemporary media studies are incommensurable, if in perhaps unexpected ways.

What broadly characterises this trend is its commitment to a return to a full-blown metaphysics of ‘being,’ outside of any subjective or human ‘correlation.’

‘object oriented ontology’ (OOO), expressly named as such by Harman on the model of ‘object oriented programming’—but just as expressly without any further relation to computing than that

hen modulated between storage and display in an endless network of protocol-based negotiation that both severs any link to the data's semantic source and creates an ever-growing excess of data weirdly related to, but ontologically distinct from, its originating data source.

Later, we will see how this could help us also understand immanently digital entities and their relationship to the world.

there are no longer any media, saying, “with numbers, everything goes […] a digital base will erase the very concept of medium”

technics

Or, to put this differently, we have argued that: logic is the medium of being, insofar as it inscribes the necessity of pure minimal differences before contradiction; mathematics the medium that concretises minimal differences into consistency-without-phenomenal-identity as the possibility of any actualisation; technics the actualising medium of modulating these consistencies in turn. This tripartite distinction—difference, consistency, modulation—entails that all phenomenal presentations are at once infinitely variable as they are entirely constrained in specific ways.

otiose

Yet our point here is that, at base, the digital is a model of logic, not a specific technology (Chun, 2011: 140). Second, and just as importantly, because the physical reality of the computer is an electronic and magnetic enactment of this logic, it is impossible to ever identify any specific being of digital data, since the ‘movement’ of data back and forth between disks, RAM (Random Access Memory), caches and registers on the CPU (Central Processing Unit), is in fact a constant process of modulation between states of magnetic polarity or electric charge in these physical objects. Because of this, it is impossible to say that any given bit of digital data is even the same as itself, or point to its localisation or appearance in the world as a criterion or determinant of its identity, laying bare the fundamental spuriousness of the concept of a ‘copy.’ Data’s ‘identity’ is a pure, non-phenomenal, distributed-cohering-across-materials. And, ‘underneath’ that, there are simply absolutely minimal differences or pure binaries—which are thus differences-without-identity, not subject to the laws of non-contradiction.

ferromagnetic

digital ontology as founded on pure differences established by the primacy of excluded middle, data should be considered a hyperdifferentiated consistency without identity. We thereby reiterate and extend our fundamental point about digital data, which is that it scrambles inherited metaphysical polarities. The principle of excluded middle rules the foundations of the digital universe, not the principle of non-contradiction. Digital ontology is paraconsistent, not classical or intuitionist.

incommensurable

Yet recent developments in logic—those broadly denominated ‘paraconsistent’—have attempted to construct logical systems in which contradictions are not necessarily ‘explosive.’ In traditional propositional logic, everything follows from a contradiction, but variants of para-consistent logic propose otherwise. As Greg Restall explains: Paraconsistent logics are distinctive in that they do not mandate explosion. […] Instead, for paraconsistent logics the entailment fails […] in the semantics for these logics there are interpretations in which A and -A may both be taken to be true, but in which not everything is true (Restall, 2006: 76). - 36 - It is essential here to understand that paraconsistency separates out contradiction from consistency, such that certain contradictions might be true, without all of them being so. Whereas consistency and the foreclosure-of-contradiction are identical in classical and intuitionist logics, this is not the case for paraconsistent ones. Moreover, this situation establishes the actuality that there may well be many different modes of constructing logical systems, even a kind of logical pluralism. This reopens the old question regarding the foundations of logic in a radical new fashion. - 37 - What we want to underline is that the instantiation of Boolean logic in post-war computing led very quickly to the appearance of a vacillation in the data computers were handling, such that paraconsistent logics initially came to be developed “to prevent computers, such as expert medical systems, from deducing anything whatsoever from contradictory data… because of the principle of ex falso quodlibet” (Meillasoux, 2009: 76). [12] Unlike regimes governed by classical logic, then, such a digital ontology would render pure difference (not identity) fundamental; unlike intuitionist logic, digital ontology could also affirm actual infinities. One corollary is the possibility, even actuality, perhaps even necessity, of true contradictions; another is the patency of contingency in any modulation.

But we, four, disagree that ontology must be classical, as well as, five, that logic can only describe (and therefore does not prescribe) existents. So it is time for us to bring together all the points we have made above into a clear and distinct summary of digital ontology.

they are ideological in this new sense, that they are produced on the basis of absolute binary operations whose operations vanish in the presentation of numbers, thereby also remodulating the data they present. The very organisation of data through various forms of modulation puts all sorts of pressures on the numbers that numbers themselves cannot say (Mackenzie, 2012: 335–350). We are thus committed here to understanding the digital as prior to number. Above all, we use this fact as a hint in our construction of a digital ontology. We maintain that it is vital to understand that to construct a digital ontology is to have recourse to a logical and not a mathematical ontology. But what does this mean?

The move to pure quantities is far easier to understand when we accept the numerical as simply another parameter in the modulation process between data and its display, and may help us move closer to an understanding of the relationship between the contemporary technical interdependence of virtual/material and the Deleuzian interdependence of virtual/actual (Nash, 2012).

it is that the unprecedented powers of thought and action that derive from the electrification of Boolean algebra first established by Shannon, and now incarnated globally in the form of contemporary computing, must have some fundamental anchoring in ‘being’ for it to function at all (Shannon, 1937). Second, this means that to speak of ‘digital media’ is not simply to speak of a set of hardware and software components developed by a particular species on a particular planet at a particular time using particular materials: it is rather to be given a new access to being itself, and one which must thereafter guide our thinking of natural processes more generally. Third, if there remains something unthought in the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis, it is simply that there is something preprogrammed, indeed too representational, about the direct projection of a contemporaneously-dominant media paradigm onto being itself. Moreover, if the social conditions of such a projection are occluded, then we should expect such an occlusion to create certain symptoms too; not least the immediate carrying-across of a number of features of contemporary computing to nature itself in an unjustified manner. What we wish to do here, then, is radicalise the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis along logical lines. Above all, we agree that when we speak about the ‘digital,’ this must have an extension far greater than simply referring to the actualities of new media, at the same time that these new media must simultaneously function as our primary mode of access to this recognition. But we disagree that the universe is a computer. We believe, rather, that being is digital, if in a very particular sense.

at all other times it exists as unmodulated digital data with no clear ontological state. This is true of all digital data. These may perhaps be termed ‘immanently digital entities,’ and could be said to be true of any and all of the excess of data created by the use of digital data and networks. ‘Likes’ and ‘friends’ and ‘photos’ and ‘text’ and ‘links’ and ‘Tweets’ and ‘followers’ and all other ostensibly differentiable digital phenomena–some of these may have identifiable provenance in the non-digital world, and some may be uniquely generated by and in the digital sphere, but all can be said to be ‘immanently digital entities.’ It is this problem, unique to the non-medium of the digital, that leads thinkers such as those mentioned above to concepts of ‘inorganic life’ and technogenesis, as well as scientists like Stephen Wolfram and Edward Fredkin to posit—in a move emblematic of Kittler’s assertion that “media determine our situation”—an hypothesis of the universe as a digital computer (Kittler, 1999: xxxix; Chaitin, 1999: 108).

chimeric

the ‘experience’ of the digital becomes one of process, a performance (Groys, 2008: 84). As we have already implied, being qua data proceeds from its operations. When modulating some digital data into a display state and experiencing it as an image (say, in order to show a picture of your child to a friend on your phone), you can no more say that it is the same, or even a copy of the image you showed a different friend yesterday than you could say the D flat played by Martha Goldstein in her 1970 performance of Chopin’s “Etude Op.25 No. 8” was the same D flat that Hermann Scholtz played in his 1879 performance of the same work, let alone the same D flat that Abel Tesfaye sang in The Weeknd’s 2011 performance of their song “The Knowing”.

phenomenological

“ [T]hese very terms,” Manovich writes, “content, cultural object, cultural production, and cultural consumption—are redefined by web 2.0 practices” (2009, 326)

the grand assertion

ontology

They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from the centre of action, multiplying the sites and forces and functions that are to be analysed, at the same time that these factors are simultaneously treated as part of a sole and single natural world.

proprioception

corporeal

Hayles does not go quite as far as Bernard Stiegler, who repurposes the Epimetheus myth in order to show that humans have no essence separable from the technologies they require for life (Stiegler, 1998). Stiegler complicates temporality even further by asserting that technics, “far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time” (1998: 27). The logical conclusion of this train of thought is that ‘the human’ emerges as a post-facto image from particular technological situations (and not from all of them!), a conclusion that Hayles’s version of Simondon’s and others’ approaches does acknowledge without fully accepting, by insisting on the adaptive approach of epigenetic evolution (Hayles, 2012: 90). Francisco Varela’s work with organic living systems, abstracted to apply to the assemblages formed between technical systems and organic beings, also strongly informs this mode of thought. Varela talks of “embodied cognitive structures” and models of understanding based on “microworlds and microidentities,” as well as of knowledge that is “built from small domains” (Varela, 1992: 334). He defines embodied cognition as the experience of a body with sensorimotor capacities that are “themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological and cultural context” (Varela, 1992: 329). Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s concept of a body is available to apply this theory to digital environments, and many contemporary theorists of new media and affect have done just that, including Anna Munster, Claire Colebrook and especially Luicana Parisi in her book Abstract Sex. Parisi uses such readings to move beyond the dichotomy of embodiment and disembodiment. She also calls on Donna Haraway’s famous explication of the cyborg, reminding us of the need to revisit Haraway’s thesis in the light of the contemporary era of cyborgian digital networks (Parisi, 2004: 135).

ather he understands mediation purely as the process of interactive communication between the two structures, a process which always amplifies (Simondon, 1992: 304).

“modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 562 n92).

it is rather to be given a new access to being itself, and one which must thereafter guide our thinking of natural processes more generally.

Unlike broadcast television, multiplatform television can be understood as a rhizomatic assemblage as it contains no centre of significance and cannot be unified into a whole. Multiplatform television consists of a number of different media sites, services and devices where viewers can access the programmes of their choice at any time.

The concept of reciprocal determination is important for challenging the centrality of broadcast television and the idea of television and television culture as something with a fixed and stable structure based on fixed roles, binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

This approach means that the actual is always informed and influenced by the virtual and that, while the virtual may have an infinite number of possibilities, only some are actualised. It also implies that ‘the determination of every actual being by the virtual past in its entirety remains contingent for Deleuze:

constantly being reconfigured according to the introduction of new elements and components. This essay turns to assemblage theory because it specifically focuses on open and dynamic systems.

challenges a linear determination based on a cause and effect logic,

‘[T]hey have helped to mask some of the medium’s fundamental transformations, and they have continued to shape key assumptions about television’s interactions with its audiences,

These changes have transformed television from a single platform medium into an interactive multiplatform medium that encourages viewer (if this term is still appropriate) participation

In this mediating sense, we can understand modulation as becoming, although for Simondon mediation never refers to a third entity acting between two structures,

In this mode, the word takes on a definite sense of shaping, even of sculpting, since the shape of the carrier wave is modified by the signal for transmission,

It has come to denote a similar performative action in speech.

Because digitisation places the emphasis on a plurality of modulations of the same material, just as Spinoza conceives of a single substance expressed in an infinity of modes, these modulations are no longer media in any traditional sense.

“with numbers, everything goes […] a digital base will erase the very concept of medium”

such an option repeats rather than resolves the difficulties.

What is certainly notable about all these ontologies is their radicalisation of what Martin Heidegger (1996) phrased ‘the ontico-ontological difference’

software studies “has to investigate the role of software in contemporary culture, and the cultural and social forces that are shaping the development of software itself” (Manovich, 2013: 10)

consequences

They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from the centre of action, multiplying the sites and forces and functions that are to be analysed, at the same time that these factors are simultaneously treated as part of a sole and single natural world.

What is the ‘sender,’ ‘producer,’ ‘receiver,’ ‘message’ of a simple Facebook post? The digitisation process creates an excess of digital data through its own operations, an actual excess greater than the sum of just simple meta-media and the retroactive virtuality of the media being digitised as virtual content.

[T]hese very terms,” Manovich writes, “content, cultural object, cultural production, and cultural consumption—are redefined by web 2.0 practices” (2009, 326). Or, as he puts it in another text, software studies “has to investigate the role of software in contemporary culture, and the cultural and social forces that are shaping the development of software itself” (Manovich, 2013: 10)