Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
gate its pose of objectivity. We invite the audience to join us in questioning the
dominant, ideologically coded mode of producing history.
Interrogating “individual choice”
There is a great deal of industry hype surrounding interactive media and com-
puting. Typically such experiences are promoted through a rhetoric of utopian
navigation. According to such rhetoric, the computer provides unlimited access
to information and experience, a pure source of empowerment that imposes
no interpretation on the data that is processed. Other familiar tropes in this
rhetoric include: real-time, immersion and virtuality - promising the thrill of
reality or hyper-reality, without the effort, right from one's own PC. Microsoft's
ads softly beguile us with the question “Where do you want to go today? ®”
Interaction leaves a trace. The flip-side of utopian navigation is demo-
graphic data collection. Especially as more computer-mediated interaction
moves into networked environments (e.g. the Web), the very acts of user in-
tentionality, those manifestations of the power of free choice lauded by infor-
mation technology enthusiasts, have become the raw material for corporate
data collection. By collecting, sorting, and categorizing acts of user interaction,
corporations hope to sell users ever more precisely targeted products. “Where
do you want to go today?” becomes “What do you want to buy today?”
Te rmi na l Time
is an exploration of both these dynamics, utopian navi-
gation and demographic data collection. However,
Te rmi na l Time
is not in-
tended as a pure debunking exercise showing that all things interactive are
bad. It is certainly the case that information technology has provided easier
access to larger amounts of information. In fact, the producers of
Te rmi na l
Time
took advantage of the web in doing historical research for the project.
Rather than debunking,
Te rmi na l Time
is intended as an exploration of some
of the unexamined assumptions and unintended side effects of information
technology.
Utopian navigation
In the worldview of utopian navigation, the computer is seen as a value-free
conduit, an executor of user agency. Even the use of the word “navigation”
is telling - it moves the focus onto the user's movement in some data space
and away from the system's active manipulation of that data. The computer
is seen as pure communication device, pure medium. Of course in this post-
