Page 207 - Cyberculture and New Media

198 The Différance Engine
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message (to borrow de Certeau’s language: there is still an organised
supermarket from which we must shop, even if we get to play a little within
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its space ).
Let us timeshift. The tectonic plates of the media were noticeably
shifting around the early 1990’s. A crossing of the divisive stage-boundary
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began (hypercards for example ) with the birth of ‘the wreader’, a sort of
Barthesian writerly but this time adding signifier, paradigm and pathway
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choices (what Aarseth would later call ‘variable expression’ ) to the
aforementioned semantic latitude of those signifieds. The recent birth of
these interactors began to make such ageing theories, even of
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semantic/subcultural play , seem untenable. The tectonics of the object itself
began to drift from under these theorists’ weary feet.
This move then from texts with relatively determining meta-
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narrators to texts that stepped outside of such trajectorial-boundaries
demanded a somewhat different outlook if a media theorist’s reflections were
to keep pace with media practsumption (consumption-practice) and to offer
something fit for a changing media infrastructure. As example of this reality-
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pull, in the UK a lively email debate amongst scholars ensued within which
a number of new-broom media educators pointed out the changing shape of
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their student’s more ludic media experiences (algorithmically: how can we
carry on teaching film and media theory 1.0 when students have moved on to
the internet, mobile phones and games and whose media experiences are thus
far from continuous and playless?). In place of the ideologically determined
subject exemplified by Althusser et al, these scholars suggested Media
Studies 2.0 where a reflexive subject, prepared for variously by Caillois,
Butler and Giddens, might provide a more fitting analytic. Before however
looking at 2.0’s more proper and up-to-date approach let us look in a little
more detail at this 1.0 model’s attempted expansion into new media territory.

2. Theory 1.0: Third-Personed Spectatorial-Constatives
As an exemplar for the problematic extension of so-called media
theory 1.0 into the alien realm of games let us present a brief case study.
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Rehak re-issues (into games) interpellation or the ‘hey you!’ function of the
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text, from its original setting within film theory and puts it to work in its
new surroundings by finding equivalents or replacements within the
videogame. This occurs in much the same way as when for film theory
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MacCabe famously replaced literature’s omniscient written third-person
commentary (operating everywhere that is outside character quotations) with
the film camera and edit’s positioning of what he termed dominant
specularity. Rehak’s replacement (or supplementation) of the film camera
function in the game actually makes the immersion or ‘loss’ to the space
more powerful than ever: