Research in Professional Writing, Games, and Design

Mark Poster (b. 1941)

Mark Poster is an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Irvine. You can find his faculty page here, although he is not listed in his department’s current faculty listing.

Wikipedia has the only extensive bibliography of his I could find. His last major publication appears to be his book, What’s Wrong With the Internet (2001).

His faculty homepage trumpets an award from Lycos (seriously…).

Interestingly, his output seems to have tailed off right about the time the internet started to turn much more participatory in nature.

“Postmodern Virtualities”

Poster constructs an analysis of the then-still-emerging internet in the mid 1990s as a vehicle for exploring the dynamic nature of subjective identities and relationships that inhere to postmodern culture. He quickly narrates the development of mass media as a (mostly) one-to-many system of information distribution falling under the hegemonic control of those with the financial resources to manufacture the necessary equipment and distribution infrastructure. The “bidirectional communication systems” constituted by the internet asked for a reassessment of media consumption and production as relatively cheap means of production/distribution could be more widely disseminated to the average consumer.

From this, the notion of the “virtual” leads to a realization that “culture is increasingly simulational” so that “‘reality’ becomes multiple” (p. 538). Poster correctly predicts a few key shifts that will later happen in the late 1990s, including the impact of these information distribution systems on media products like music. We all know the infamous Napster debacle. A key and interesting point to take from that is how cheap and massive distribution systems altered the political landscape. For instance, Metallica wasn’t always so hostile to fans who gave away recordings of their music:

The use of Lars Ulrich’s image in this video was purely unintentional, and I did not want to violate said intellectual property…I swear…

But just in case he’s pissed off at me (WARNING: NOT EVEN REMOTELY SAFE FOR WORK):

Back to the point… Poster acknowledges the formulation of identities in these networks as contingent upon the interrelationships of subjects within “virtual” communities that seem simultaneously “real” (phenomenologically) and fictional (p. 543). Since the realities within these networks are “fanciful imaginings” that “evoke play and discovery…a simulational practice is set in place which forever alters the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed” (p. 539) — something Metallica apparently knows rather unwittingly…

The materiality of these communication systems highlights the nature of identity as a practice, therefore more explicitly rendering identity as “unstable, multiple and diffuse” (p. 540) as participants become more aware of the alternatives afforded to them for identity exploration. Immediately after this statement, Poster turns this recognition toward the collapse of communication and economic binaries into each other — perhaps one of the earliest formations of the “produser” or “prosumer.”

Thoughts

Though dated at this point, we can see within Poster’s analysis the kernels for a media studies analysis of the participatory web and the cultures that have grown alongside it. Though the idealized virtual reality systems he discusses have never really come to fruition, we’ve still managed to invoke a wide array of communities, and even “worlds,” online that command our attention and focus it in unanticipated ways.