(*SPOILERS ALERT*: If you plan on playing the game Heavy Rain in the future, please avoid looking at the diagrams included in this boot camp. You can still follow my discussion spoiler-free in the first part, but avoid the second part of this boot camp.)

Part I

First to explain the basic concept that lead me to Heavy Rain as an object for actor-network theory, here is a trailer of the game:

I apologize for the highly dramatized sequences and the sentimental soundtrack, but I wanted to present the game from a gamer’s perspective, rather than from its creators’. The basic concept of Heavy Rain is that you are in control of four different characters, who start out as strangers but who become (if you are able to keep them alive) intricately connected. In each scene you are allowed to control only one of those four characters, which are: Ethan, a father who is trying to save his kidnapped son; Scott Shelby, a private investigator independently working on the case of the Origami killer; Norman Jayden, a FBI agent working on the case; and Madison, a journalist who gets entangled in this mess by stitching up Ethan, who sleeps in the motel room next to hers.

If you picture this cast as part of a murder-mystery video game, then you get a feel of how important each those character’s survival become. While there is the possibility to ‘retry’ achieving the desired outcome in each scene you play, the experience of the game is more intense if you strictly follow through the narrative you have set out for yourself (by making certain choices, and/or failing at certain tasks).

In order to ‘draw’ a network from the characters in this game independently to my own experience, I found a very detailed “FAQ/Walkthrough” written by Thundaka.

Thundaka wrote a full narrative with all the scenes available to play, which explains how to access such scenes (by having, for example, a certain character survive an event) and reveals how such modifications in the plot will alter the ending you will be granted at the very end of the game.

Thundaka is obviously very much taken by this game to have taken such care into compiling all the narratives possible, and here’s part of the answer as to why:

The traditional seperation (sic) between story and gameplay is almost completely absent, as nearly every moment of the game is under the player’s control.  Even your characters’ survival is up to the player, since the game will continue without them if they die.  All these choices lead to a great many possible endings: some determine whether the killer is stopped and his victim saved, while others influence the ending in subtler ways. (Thundaka)

The illusion of agency is a powerful tool to enhance the experience of a game, as it heightens the intensity of the ‘immersion’ within the world or narrative presented in the game.

The impression that choices are not only available, but also leads to drastic diverging directions gives to the player the illusion that the game was not ‘scripted’ but is in fact very close to being ‘real’ or ‘personal’ even. This may be why games such as “The Stanley Parable,” a narrated game in which “the story doesn’t matter,” but rather is “an exploration of story, games, and choice,” which “might not even be a game, and if you ever actually do have a choice”.

Here’s a trailer of “The Stanley Parable” if you are curious to know more about it:

Part II

Now let’s return to Heavy Rain, and look into the consequences of the choices, and interconnections between its characters. Here is my first attempt at trying to draw a network from the plot-driven possibilities in the game:

Heavy Rain (1st attempt)

I apologize for the shameless branding that aggressively competes with my diagram of the different elements interacting in Heavy Rain. I’ve added color (red signifying death, and blue being the main cast of characters) in order to lessen the confusion, but as you can see, this network is a beautiful, orderly-looking, big mess. And yet when compared to the dense ‘narrative’ version offered by Thundaka, certain patterns are made visible, even if their compete and/or counter others. You could say that what is present and what is absent are competing for dominance in this first network, in which we ‘see’ how the characters die and how they may solve the case of the Origami killer. Originally in playing the game you can only ‘see’ one of the two outcomes, and compiling all those different outcomes in a narrative becomes a sizable project.  So I would like to add video games to Moretti’s question, “But if you work on novels or plays, style is only part of the picture. What about plot – how can that be quantified” (Moretti 2). In order to try Moretti’s answer,  here’s a second network I’ve crafted from the first:

Heavy Rain (Figure B)

The network is simplified since I’ve focused on the interactions between the characters that truly advanced the case, rather than drawing all the choices given to the player. Here you can see patterns emerge more clearly, but what kinds of patterns, and what do they tell us that wasn’t mentioned in Thundaka’s narrative?

One of the first choice I’ve made to draw this network was to remove the character Scott Shelby (the private investigator) from the network for a very obvious reason. I’ve also discovered that the character Paco, who appears to be highly irrelevant during the game, is the only one who can make Madison and Jayden solve the case. Furthermore, if Madison never makes it to Paco (she died), then Ethan’s chances of surviving at the end of the game drastically drop, since Madison is the only one who can not only solve the case, but also communicate its solution to another character (be it Jayden or Ethan). By tracking Madison throughout then, you can see that while she is part of the main characters, she is also an edge—a connector—between Jayden, Ethan, and even Scott in the first diagram. Madison thus, creates ‘clustering’: she is the dot that connects two lines in a ‘V’ shape. This network is still a bit too messy to see where this ‘V’ shape or “triangle closes” (Moretti 6), but Madison reveals to be in this diagram more essential than the cops solving this case, and is much more than just a plausible ‘love-interest’ for Ethan.

Hence, my networks of Heavy Rain allowed me to “see” Madison’s role in Heavy Rain, which was invisible in the narrative of the game, and in Thundaka’s rendition of it. Ironically, I, too, needed  networks to see how  “visualization: the possibility of extracting characters and interactions from a dramatic structure, and turning them into a set of signs that I could see at a glance, in a two-dimensional space” (Moretti 11) benefits research by granted access to what is made invisible in narratives and storytelling.

Works Cited:

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 2. May 1, 2011. [Orig. pub. New Left Review 68, March-April 2011]. http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf

Thundaka. “Heavy Rain A FAQ/Walkthrough.” November 8, 2013. http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/933123-heavy-rain/faqs/59975

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Hi fellow Distant Readers—and Others,

Here are some clips that I will discuss during my presentation, so you can have a peek at them if you wish. I will show them during class, so you don’t need to watch them right away. Now just to make my presentation sound mysterious and be sightly more engaging, I won’t provide any information as to how they relate to my probe just yet. You’ll have to wait and see.

Also, I’ll discuss these quotes:

Digital media (like any media) is anything but a neutral vessel. Instead of passively and objectively carrying and migrating content, digital technology contributes its own sets of connotations and inferences for the user. Consequently, to decide to convey an idea using a computer is also to decide (implicitly) to cast this idea within another set of meanings associated with computing. In short–if it is not too evident to say so–digital media becomes part of the message. (Parry 226)

And:

…because it is the arena in which this community has come to a certain kind of consciousness. This consciousness may be limited, it may not have successfully helped them to remake their history. But they have been ‘languaged’ by the discourse of popular religion. They have, for the first time, used religion to construct some narrative, however impoverished and impure, to connect the past and the present: where they came from with where they are and where they are going to, and why they are here. (Grossberg 54)

I might even discuss this short clip too, if time allows it:

Now let’s see how you, avid thinkers, assemblage those articulations, and make your own constellations. I’ll see you in class shortly.

Works Cited

Parry, Ross. “Introduction to Chapter Four”. Museums in a Digital Age. By Ross Parry. London: Routledge, 2010. 226-242. Print

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(1986): 45-60. Print

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Perhaps one of the best ways to visualize the concepts of articulation and assemblage from for this week’s seminar, ‘Drawing Things Together,’ is the process of learning: by making associations and parallels between complex elements and familiar and/or simpler concepts, we are crafting and superimposing patterns that enable us to understand what appears to be foreign, new, and/or complex elements, thus ultimately gaining knowledge. As students, we spend many hours reading, writing, and discussing an array of different topics and theories, thus drawing links that are “not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Grossberg 53) in our works, thus creating a “web of articulations” (Slack, Daryl, and Wise, Daryl, and Wise 112) in our head. Then the process of articulation and assemblage—or actor-network theory—becomes particularly relevant in terms of conducting research, considering that the works of a scholar is set in a contingent place within shifting webs of institutionalized, marginalized, and/or soon-to-be institutionalized theories.

When one goes looking for constellations, one can get lost among the stars; the multiplicity and scale of assemblages can be overwhelming. I was lucky enough, however, to stumble on a software that not only assembles my virtual social network for me, but also allows me to visualize it. This software is called ‘Museum of Me’, and this link will lead you right to it. For the purpose of my argumentation, I would encourage you to jump right in, and experience it yourself (by entering your own Facebook login), instead of viewing this generic rendition of the ‘Museum of Me’:

The impact of this ‘museum exhibit’ is of course stronger if you experience seeing your own friends and family, plus reading your own words and likes in this virtual gallery. The reason for choosing this software becomes obvious towards the end of the exhibit: robots are shown selecting and ordering the profile pictures of your friends and family into a canvas that ultimately depicts your own profile picture, which then reveals how you are linked to a web of people via your social network.

What better image to depict the concepts of articulation and assemblage as it relates to technology? (Either this is a rhetorical question or I’m challenging you to submit other examples in the comments). The ‘Museum of Me’ gathers from your Facebook account a multitude of information, but ultimately exhibit a very particular kind of elements about you (not just mere facts such as your age, profession, education); the gallery aims to show how your social interactions (on Facebook) define your (online) social identity. This ‘Museum of Me’ does not show much about yourself, but instead draws the contours of your social networks in order to reveal—much like with the canvas of your friends’ profile pictures—how your social identity is shaped by the people you interact with online. Thus this software “could be said to territorialize the articulations of…angles of relationships, space, atmospheric conditions, trajectories of movement, and a way of seeing,” thus becoming “in a sense, a contingent invention, both artificial and natural” (Slack, Daryl, and Wise, Daryl, and Wise 129, their emphasis). Every time you update certain elements in your Facebook account (a new friend, like, comment), you are eradicating the virtual exhibit that you have seen in the past—thus proving the contingency of the exhibit. By visualizing how you fit in a pattern of social networks, you see the territory that you occupy virtually and socially, thus envisioning a space that is ‘both artificial and natural’. Thus, just as a constellation “is made up of imaginative, contingent, articulations among myriad heterogeneous elements” (Slack, Daryl, and Wise 129) so is your own exhibit. The ‘Museum of Me’ reflects how “particular collection of (moving) bodies is articulated to a particular image” (Slack, Daryl, and Wise 129) by turning the profile pictures of your friends into your own, an image that is in fact a composite of social interactions and relationships that are in constant mutation.

So the ‘Museum of Me,’ what is it good for? (Don’t sing out, ‘absolutely nothing’ just yet). What is it about a museum exhibit that appears to be appropriate for representing a social network that is experienced virtually, which is both ‘artificial and natural’? Before jumping into discussing Intel’s agenda for producing such software (Justin McGuirk   in his article in the Guardian does mention “brand awareness” as one of the reasons), let’s probe at the choice of a museum exhibit to represent one’s social interactions online. The interactions and elements selected by the ‘Museum of Me’ as mentioned earlier are not matters of fact, but are instead linked to a cultural dimension. The authors Slack, Daryl, and Wise define culture as being “understood to consist of corresponding, noncorresponding, and even contradictory practices, representations, experiences, and affects…not refer to effects, as in the outcome of a causal process, but to affects as a state: as disposition, tendency, emotion, and intensity” (Slack, Daryl, and Wise127). Considering the role of affects in the definition of culture, it becomes obvious that our social interactions online (even more directly with the ‘like’ button on Facebook) have a cultural component.

In the case presentation of the ‘Museum of Me,’ its creators mention that “we created a new form of storytelling” (around 20 seconds in). Here we seem to be touching something. If our social interactions online have a cultural dimension, and that culture is defined by affects rather than effects, then creating a ‘storytelling’ of that which is without causality becomes interesting. Picture the ‘Museum of Me’ thus as a narrative without a beginning nor an end, without plotlines or characters’ arches, but pure exploration of networks of affects, emotions, tendency, and intensity.

To create a narrative without causality and/or plotlines necessarily implies ruptures, breaks, and inconsistencies from the lack of a linear structure. This is particularly relevant for scholars who must situate their works in a history of theories and events that is not linear; how should we structure and order what is intertwined with culture—with affects and tendency, with emotions? How should we situate and present our work, which is always influenced to some degree by the culture we have internalized? While I have no answers, these questions could be informed by exploring the ‘form of storytelling’ that takes place in a museum—or in this case the virtual one.

Let’s consider how museums ‘communicate’ to its audience certain kind of information. According to Peter Walsh, museums have “traditionally ignored an important aspect of communication: that communication is not a monologue, but a dialogue,” (Walsh 234) and as such “Museums are almost unique among educational institutions in that they still are using a one-sided method of communication” (Walsh 234). This lack of reciprocity produces a certain kind of power, enabling the institution to impose a vision/structure into a firm one-sided discussion with its viewers—and students/scholars. Maria Roussou argues for this conversation to include its viewers by allowing them to directly communicate with the museum through the use of technology. This presents a perfect case of “technological culture” (Grossberg 128, his emphasis) that allow us to understand better the foundations of the ‘Museum of Me,’ as it directly uses technology and bypasses the institution itself. Roussou argues for the need of interactivity in museums, which she defines as the “reciprocal action…to act on each other, to act together or toward others or with others. Reciprocity can takes place between people, people and machines, people and software, or even machines and machines” (Roussou 249). This interaction is not only “seen as an intrinsic feature of educational practice” but also as “an inherent property of any interactive multimedia or virtual reality environment that promises physical and sensory, in addition to mental, activity and response,” which characterizes “learning as a process of making meaning through personally constructed or socially co-constructed knowledge (Jonassen 2000)” (Roussou 249). The use of technology hence branches out onto our ability as humans to interact with our environment—in this case archeological objects and/or works of art—in order to understand and learn from it. In the ‘Museum of Me,’ there is no direct interaction possible between the viewer and the exhibit itself, and this is essential to understand the purpose behind creating this institution as a format.

Why is it a museum of me? As an institution, museums thus refer to a historically “particular formation, anchored very directly in relation to a number of different forces,” (Grossberg 54) hence the museum’s “meaning—political and ideological—comes precisely from its position within a formation” (Grossberg 54). As discussed, museums are in a relation of power with its audience in the way they communicate the cultural objects that they have ordered. The discourse of a museum exhbit seum exhbit ibit hence might allow for a better control over the kind of ideology that is articulated by the use of this formation/structure. The ‘Museum of Me’ could hence re-conceptualize the non-interactive, one-sided, ideological, and authoritative elements of the museum discourse into a site of advertisement.

McGuirk in the Guardian depicts the ‘Museum of Me’ as “Entering this generically deconstructivist, what you get is a fly-through animation of a series of galleries, with pictures of you and your friends on the walls,” which ends with “a final sequence that implies, erroneously, that you are merely a composite of your social network. A soaring soundtrack turns the sentimentality dial to max” (McGuirk). Whether the implied message—or ideology—of the ‘Museum of Me’ is valid or not, what is relevant is that McGuirk pointed out that this experience started in a ‘deconstructivist’ building. If one considers the creators’ aim to craft a ‘new form of storytelling’ via the ‘Museum of Me,’ then this deconstructivist element becomes important. I believe the roots of the answer for, ‘why is it a museum exhibit’ are located there. Deconstructivism is a particular type of architecture that was inspired by the postmodern theory of ‘deconstruction’ as a semiotic analysis; it is characterized by its manipulation of surfaces in shapes that distorts typical rectangular structures and/or celebrate fragmentation. The very building that we enter in the ‘Museum of Me’ thus reflects a postmodernist vision, which articulates ‘fragments’ of ‘me’ into assemblages of social interactions on Facebook. Just like in Hall’s example of the postmodernist experience, the ‘Museum of Me’ “contains emergent ‘postmodernist’ elements, as it were, is that there is no story in the old sense,” ‘me’ does not “come from anywhere; there is no whole story about him to tell” (Grossberg 47).

By looking at the very space used for a museum exhibit—its externality—one can understand how the inevitable ruptures and breaks (inherent in the postmodern view of way) within a narrative of cultural elements (of affects) are negotiated. The ruptures are always present in a museum exhibit, but have been institutionalised; the walls represent specific artists with similar affects, and the different rooms represent different ‘ages,’ movements, or centuries. When one moves from room to room, and from wall to wall, one is navigating the both the instituted linearity (the museum’s ordering structure, such as the walls and rooms) and its ruptures (the empty space between paintings, the middle of room, the staircase between two rooms of the same exhibit) at once. What the ‘Museum of Me’ does is exactly that; by using institutionalised structures (representing virtually the rooms and walls of a museum exhibit), this software allows for a narrative displaying assemblages (your friends in one room, your likes in another) while making you unaware of the gaps and inconsistencies in its ordering. Perhaps Latour’s third criteria as the ‘Power to Arrange in Bank Order’ which specifically relates to the ‘notion of value’ can add another layer of interactions as to what the ‘Museum of Me’ does. As such, we shall briefly—unfortunately too briefly—mention “the compatibility of new propositions with those which are already instituted” (Latour 109) such as Intel’s re-conceptualization of museums befitting the ‘new’ way to communicate, and advertise ideology.

This was one small instance of an institution such as museums beings re-conceptualised to sell us an ideology—and of course the product behind it. To link this discussion to our work and research, how can we use these theories of assemblages to form the networks necessary for our work to be circulated, instead of being marginalized by what is institutionalized, contingently relevant, and/or what the majority engages with? This discussion had for goal to make us indirectly reflect on the selling and spreading of an ideology, which as consumers and scholars, we participate to. Are we not indeed attempting to selling an ideology whenever we look for funding or publication?

Works Cited

Latour, Bruno. “A New Separation of Powers.” Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 91-127. Print

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(1986): 45-60. Print

McGuirk, Justin. “Robot Cleaners and the Museum of Me: Intel’s Vision of the Future.” The Guardian. Tues 24 Jan. 2012. Web.

Roussou, Maria. “Learning by Doing and Learning through Play: an Exploration of Interactivity in Virtual Environments for Children.” Museums in a Digital Age. By Ross Parry. London: Routledge, 2010. 247-265. Print

Slack, Daryl, and Wise, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Causality,” “Agency,” “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture +Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 101-33. Print

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Mess is inevitable: it is in our thought-process, our social interactions, our work, our mistakes and accomplishments, but most importantly it is also there in the creative process. When looking for supercuts on the internet, this website leads you to an archive of supercuts, which provides a definition for them:

Supercut: noun \ˈsü-pər-kət\ — A fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliché from film and TV. Supercut.org collects every known example of the video remix meme.

This ‘obsession’ creates a framework, a sort of viewer’s critique that highlights how this single element is repeated (and thus circulates) throughout a variety of different circumstances, events, or sources. For example, by isolating a sentence from the Wizard of Oz movie the following supercut shows how a single element can spread and circulate in a series of different contexts (networks) to ultimately become a popular culture reference:

Supercut of a Line from the Wizard of Oz

Simon Owens who writes about the impact of supercuts in the shape of nostalgia gives numbers to the general amount of editing in one single supercut, mentioning that in “2011, Baio analyzed a database of over 146 supercut videos and found that ‘the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25 percent of the videos’” (Owens). The extensive editorial effort provided by the creators of supercuts points to the difficulty of finding ways to order what must first appears to be a messy pile of data.

As an aspiring scholar myself, I found their creative—and yet—rigorous method intriguing enough to dig a little deeper. Could supercuts make visible the network patterns that John Law describes as running “wide and deep – that they are much more generally performed than others” (Law 385), thus illustrating how “network patterns that are widely performed are often those that can be punctualized…because they are network packages – routines – that can, if precariously, be more or less taken for granted in the process of heterogeneous engineering” (Law 385, his emphasis). Considering how supercuts create “a kind of ‘Aha!’ moment when a Hollywood cliché that you perhaps never fully internalized is laid out for you” (Owens), I would argue that they are disrupting force—perhaps even (when shared and spread) a resistance—to the sort of formulaic engineering of inserting certain overused tropes (or references) within the content of a film or series. Why would the phrase from the Wizard of Oz be used so many times? The actor-network theory might explain it in part. By alluding to the Wizard of Oz, the writers are making a reference to something that is familiar to a vast number of people, and thus this phrase becomes an actor in a grander scope of networks (viewers). This phrase has the power to connect the writers’ content to a complex spectrum of effects spreading from nostalgia to comedy.

Since supercuts isolate elements that could have been lost in a sea of content (massive amounts of unseen and/or unrelated movies and/ or television shows), could supercuts also be, in way, a punctualization? While the digitalisation of television and cinematographic content aids the phenomenon of supercuts, “these forms can be traced back to pre-digital technologies of the 1970s (in the case of Penley’s Star Trek fan videos) or the pre-YouTube and Web 2.0 participatory sharing (in the case of Cover’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan videos, distributed through newslists, email and private website)” (Cover). By now being able to ‘binge-watch’ a whole series (which can sometimes amount to eight or nine seasons of twenty plus episodes) due to the digitalisation of content, viewers of such content appear to have new ready tools to engage with, share, and modify massive amounts of data.

Rob Cover argues that despite this blossoming of digital methods and tools, “there has emerged a methodological gap requiring new frameworks for researching and analysing the remix text as a text, and within the context of its interactivity, intertextuality, layering and the ways in which these together reconfigure existing narratives and produce new narrative” (Cover). The way supercuts organize and order their content could be an example of how massive amounts of content could be framed in order to highlight the interactivity and intertextuality of their content.

The ‘methodological gap’ to research and analyze the remixes (and/or supercuts) that Cover points out is not unlike the one that fostered Law’s interest “in rehabilitating parts of the mess” (Law 4). Hence by trying to find frameworks in order to include (and assign meaning) viewers’ and/or fan-based’ works, we are simultaneously trying to imagine new ways to include messy bits into our methodology. The inclusion of those types of media in research is particularly relevant to Lawrence Lessig, who argues that text “is today’s Latin,” since it is “through text that we elites communicate…For the masses, however, most information is gathered through other forms of media: TV, film, music, and music video. These forms of ‘writing’ are the vernacular of today,” and ultimately adds that for “anyone who has lived in our era, a mix of images and sounds makes its point far more powerfully than any eight- hundred- word essay in the New York Times could” (Lessig 68-69). To illustrate the potential repercussions of combining arguments with media, follow through this experiment: would this clip demonstrating how a character manipulates individuals with pop culture references to create a ‘community’ reinforce Law’s argument that “our communication with one another is mediated by a network of objects – the computer, the paper, the printing press….that these various networks participate in the social. They shape it” (Law 382)?

Short Clip from Pilot Episode of the TV Show Community

Also, could this type media thus be used not only to shape our social networks and interactions, but also to “overcome your reluctance to read [Law’s] text” by reinforcing “the social relationship between author and reader” (Law 382)? Could then supercuts be considered as the product of a distant reading, and if they are, could they represent a different media (other than writing) to reveal patterns and networks between non-obvious elements? Most importantly for my case, would considering this media as a potential way to enlarge or enrich our methodology enable us to tackle down more complex and messier concepts?

Consider the complexities that arise in an episode from the TV show Community entitled “Remedial Chaos Theory” in which the interactions between the characters diverge and/or converge when a person must leave the room to go get pizza.

They roll a die to determine who gets to leave the room, and this sequence is repeated to show each of the seven plausible (and very different) storylines contained in this episode. A supercut would make a montage of the repetitive sequences, namely the rolling of the die, and discard the variants. However, take a look at another type of fan-based/viewers clips that was created, and reminisce Law’s leading question, “‘would something less messy make a mess of describing [mess]’” (Law 4):

Juxtaposition of Content rather than a Supercut

This clip—and other similar ones–cannot be called supercuts since they did not in fact isolate repetition. They created instead a patchwork that allows the viewers to notice all the repetitions while viewing all its parallel differences. These clips could also represent the compilation of data before the massive editing (such as in supercuts or essays): before discarding the bits that do not fit to seek a pure pattern, a seemingly complete repetition. These clips are messy, noisy, heterogeneous, and relevant, “because that is the way the largest part of the world is” (Law 4). The reluctance to order something that is already complex, the surviving mess in those clips points to Law’s argument that “Clarity doesn’t help. Disciplined lack of clarity, that may be what we need” (Law 4). By not adhering to a massive edits (but instead minor ones, to juxtapose the storylines), these clips thus show a much more complex and richer patchwork of parallels, repetitions and variants.

These clips “broaden method” (Law 4), by not ‘obsessing’ with “clarity, with specificity, and with the definite” (Law 4). These clips can be used as a parallel for the moment when someone conducting research is facing a multiplicity of data converging and diverging in places, noisy and messy at times but also repetitive and similar at others. Should we then attempt to ‘Other’ “Everything that doesn’t fit the standard package of common-sense realism…Everything that is not independent, prior, definite and singular” (Law 8)? Or should we attempt to use this mess as the creators of those clips did, to better understand its source? How can we understand the complexities of mess if we can only use methods that ultimately order—and thus alter—it?

Works Cited

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Web.

Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 1999. Revised 2003. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Notes-on-ANT.pdf

–. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-Mess-with-Method.pdf

Owens, Simon. “How the Supercut Changed the Shape of Nostalgia.” DailyDot. 23 August 2013. 12 September 2013.Web.
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/supercut-nostalgia-history-slacktory/

Cover, Rob. “Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix.” M/C Journal 16.4 (Aug. 2013). 12 Sepember 2013. Web.
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/686

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