Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert - New Media and the Fourfold

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McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 1996.

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Pinker, David. "Folksonomy." New York Times Magazine. II Dec. 2005. http :/ /www.nytimes.com/20051l2/ lllmagazinelllideasl-21 .html

Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Place and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.

Seiber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern . Illinois UP, 2004.

Selfe, Cynthia. "Technology and Literacy: A Story About the Perils of Not Paying Attention. " Views From the Center: The CCCC Chairs ' Addresses 1977-2005. Ed. Duane Roen. Boston: Bedford, 2006.

Shirky, Clay. "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." 10 Mar. 2006. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html.

Sterling, Bruce. "Order out of Chaos." Wired. 13.04. April 2005 . http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 13 .04/view.htm1?pg=4.

Svenonius, Elaine. The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.

Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

Weinberger, David. "The New Is." IS Nov. 2005 . http://www.hyperorg.com/ misc/thenewis.html.

New Media and the Fourfold

Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert

New media and its technologies have generated unprecedented forms of

communication, community, and interaction. They extend themselves into the everyday lifeworld as more thanjust a set of new, technologically enabled practices; indeed they are coming to constitute new ways

of being. Such deep-rooted transformations are also challenging, and a

great deal of work in new media, and technology in general, treats its unsettling effects. The literature is replete with issues of alienation, access, privacy, civic potential, environmental damage, power differentials, dehumanization, and more. Of course, such critiques are hardly

unique, since they were often only (re)formulated with the advent of the

Internet and actually go back to decades-old debates aboutthe unrootedness

and quickening of modern life itself. We can see this in looking at the work of Martin Heidegger, one of

the more insightful critics of technology and modernism. And yet

Heidegger also layered his charges with as yet largely untapped theoretical resources for not only rethinking our relation to technology but

cultivating a more responsive, attuned modus vivendi around it. Heidegger urges a rapprochement to the world and the things in it. A thing, as

opposed to an object, is an entity that is more than a resource or means;

rather, it is gathered across a full range of conditioned relations with other

things, including human beings, and in this way contributes to the making of a home. As Mark Wrathall comments, "For Heidegger, a worthwhile

life in the technological age demands that we rediscover existentially

im portant 0 b j ects and a sense of place" (76) . This way of relating to th i ngs

and environs Heidegger calls dwelling, and the fulsome lived expression of this relating he calls the fourfold-earth, sky, divinities, and mortals.

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Seeing the world as a deep and interconnected stitchwork of things that lays claims on us, Heidegger argues, stands to recompose our way of being in the world, and thus to transform our relation to technologies.

Our essay explores what the fourfold might mean when thought in terms of new media, our two primary examples being the social networking web utility Facebook and Apple's iLife application suite. Heidegger reserved the status of"thing"-which brings the fourfold ~s opposed to the "object," which does not-for privileged phenomena, such as bridges, jugs, and farmhouses, and denied such status for, say, a hydro-electric dam (see "Question" 16). We cannot resolve the question oftechnologies like the dam here, but certainly the richness of rhetorical interaction across new media suggests we cannot remain satisfied with the idea that living with new media is somehow always a tainted prospect, with an ethically superior kind of non-technological dwelling awaiting us (Kolb 125). Is it possible to see emergent examples of rich ways of being with technology in new media platforms such as Facebook? With such inquiry we hope to chart fresh territory outside -the orbits of technological romanticism, which sees every advance as a human good bringing great progress, and technological critique, which emphasizes the problems and crises it produces. We agree with Heidegger that such positions are already thoroughly permeated and enframed by technological thinking, which is problematic to the extent that it shuts out for inquiry other modes of understanding, interacting, ~nd being with technology. At the same time, simply offering a theoretical account of making a home with Heidegger's notions of the fourfold and dwelling as a counter is also insufficient. What we need is a more affirmative approach that suggests that the fourfold richness oflife Heidegger describes is irrepressible, and that it is a matter of finding how it manifests itself in the wild, as it were, and enrichening it, especially in our everyday rhetorical practices with

new media.

Thing Power

The power and enchantment of things is an important theme in the later Heidegger. One way to approach his ideas, and also to dispel charges of

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obscurantism or mysticism, is to consider the role of things in our understanding of materiality. In her illuminating essay "The Force of Things," Jane Bennett confronts the state of materiality in contemporary theory, asking how Marxist-inspired materialism has "come to stand in for a 'materialist perspective' per se" (348). Bennett acknowledges the tremendous growth of non-Marxist studies ofthe body, but this advance has not extended far beyond a central and controlling notion of the human in its cultural-biological materialism. Things-the objects that surround us-do show up materially as opposed to just culturally, but only as structured by an undergirding Marxist discourse that relates them to discussions of capitalism in general, including economics, exchange structures, means of production, the flow of capital, commodification, ideology, and so on. In short, things come forward as functions of human interests, particularly capitalist and/or economic interests. To suggest otherwise, to suggest that things are not so mundane, is to subvert or mystify the power of human agency, and accordingly, this power must be protected.

This is often the case in studies of new media and its technologies, where, perhaps surprisingly, the object remains mundane. Certainly, scholars grant new media and technological objects great importance, even assigning them fundamental roles, but such work retains a centralizing and sheltering notion of the human, albeit implicated in larger social, cultural, and technological forces. Nevertheless, the humancentricity of such studies is assumed. As Friedrich Kittler argues, "Given that tools are always defined from the point of view of their user, there is no need to question the old approach that defines machines from the point of view of humans; and subsequently there is no need to consider the possibility that, conversely, humans are defined by machines" (40). Indeed, it may seem perfectly natural to subsume tools and objects underneath human concerns, but in subtle and not-so-subtle ways this hierarchy structures our relation to new media and the world it brings.

This point is clear going back to our earliest understandings of what we have come to call postmodernism. For instance, in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logie o/Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson describes his experience and frustration with the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles

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(38-45).' The Bonaventure is built in stark contrast to modernist principles ofform following function, preferring new architectural principals that amount to "a mutation in built space itself' (38). Jameson has received his share of criticism, of course, but what is important here is that the Bonaventure's organization o.fspace functions as a condensation of larger cultural and economic phenomena, most especially late capitalism, that is itself advanced in large part by new technologies and new media. These new spaces are reflective of a profound cultural disorientation. Jameson writes, "This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself . ... It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment . . . can itself stand [as] . . . the incapacity of our minds . .. to map the great global multinational and decentered communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects" (44). Indeed, this spurs Jameson's call for cognitive mapping as a way of achieving a total izing perspective in a fragmented, disjoinep world (see "Cognitive"). Even if technology and media are fundamental to the postmodern world, Jameson resists any serious inquiry into them as fulsome and replete. Instead, they are mundane objects, of great interest naturally, but only insofar as they provide hermeneutic means for diagnosing contemporary human experience. The Bonaventure is interesting because, contra the modernist machines for living, it is a machine for disoriented living, reflective of larger transformations in capitalism that in turn impact our

built environment. Cynthia Selfe's Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Cen

tury takes a similar track to Jameson (despite the large differences between their projects in the move from Marxist-inspired cultural critique to multicultural politics) in her examination of the computer in literacy practices. The computer is an interesting object because of the debates it spurs about what literacy is, what policies education should implement regarding computers, and how initiatives can foster genuine and equal access to computers. When she lists the agents responsible for the contemporary predicament of unequal access, the list includes government, educators, businesses, and parents (xxi). Technology itselfis not an agent. Selfe is to be lauded for upbraiding the nostalgic humanist


literati lamenting the ascendancy of the computer and the challenges it brings to a print-based literary ideology, and also on target in seeing computers as important technological objects in their own right. But computers still only show up across humanist, if not modernist, concerns.2 Computers appear as material objects embedded in material systems, concrete practices, and complex social and cultural webs (Selfe 11). Even granting the controlling function of the term "literacy," computers are relegated to a role in the changing nature of human relations precisely insofar as they are an extension of human powers. Indeed, while Selfe complains that in the writings and practices of many the computer is fading into the background and in danger of becoming invisible, we suggest that Selfe also occludes the computer (22). In the act of paying attention, we can see only what the computer offers as a function of our critical demands

This humanist background can appear even in work that attempts to jettison it, such as Mark Hansen's Philosophy for New Media. Building on the work of Gilles Deleuze to Henri Bergson, Hansen theorizes new media in terms of the "theframingfunction of the human body," since any concretely deployed new media form "reflects the demands of embodied perception" (8). Hansen does partially recognize the agentive force of technology, pushing for an understanding of the image as a hybrid composite of analog surface and digital infrastructure (9), but the human body still retains a primary and privileged role. Images such as those of the media artist Robert Lazzarini that are digitally manipulated so that they cannot be resolved across human perceptual ratios point out how digital media's newness itself stems from this privileged human frame.3

The similarity to Jameson is striking: the inability to cognitively map one ' s environment, whether a digitally distorted hammer or postmodern hotel, marks the advent of the new while also having recourse to a grounding and preserving humanist dimension. Postmodernism requires human cognitive mapping; digital media require the orienting capacities of the human sensorimotor body.

Our essay runs counter to these humanist orientations. We argue that learning to dwell with new media and its technologies entails a harkening to their ontological weight and rhetorical agency. Elizabeth Grosz, like Bennett and a growing number of theorists interested in the power of

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things, argues that we need to accommodate things more than they need to accommodate us, and that "life is the growing accommodation of matter, the adaption of the needs oflife to the exigencies of matter" (132).4 However, the possibility for a new relation to things as a way of life was first explored in Heidegger's later work, primarily through the concepts of dwelling (wohnen) and the fourfold (das Geviert) as being integral for making a home. This gives an importance and relevance to Heidegger's thought that dovetails with and helps reframe contemporary theories of materialism and things. We want to emphasize that this is not an arcane linkage. The examples of Jameson, Selfe, and Hansen are all gripped by concerns about how to find a livable place in a technological environment that challenges our previous ways of making a home. Each of them also reaches for a conserving notion of the human-a tactic that frequently shows up as critique-as a safeguard againsttechnology'schallenges and the insecurities it brings. While Heidegger is commonly understood as offering a sustained critique of technology, it is less understood that he also offers concrete, affirmative proposals for dealing productively with the challenges technology sets forth. If he complains that "[n]ature becomes a gigantic gasoline station," he also asserts that technology cannot be condemned, for "we depend on technological devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances" (Discourse 50, 53). The concept of dwelling, knotted through his little-understood notion of the fourfold, is central to understanding technology and new media and fostering inventive, robust relations. Key for Heidegger is a reversal of the customary relation to technology and media, seen in Jameson and Selfe, and to a lesser degree Hansen, of placing them solely within a well-defined relation of human ontological priority, such that humans are the means for gathering things and generating a world of concern and meaning. What if, as Heidegger suggests, it is not humans so much as things that "gather the fourfold" ("Building"

153)? Such possibility remains dark for those who remain enmeshed in a

conserving notion of the human and thereby seek to master technology. Heidegger's point is clear: this way of proceeding is alreadytechnological, since "[m]odem technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing" ("Question" 19). (Would be) masters of technology

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are by technology mastered. The danger is that this narrowed disclosive horizon takes over all other modes of the world's revealing. But,just as the process of technological enframing is not solely human doing, so too the work of surmounting (verwunden) technology'S sway is not solely human doing ("Turning" 39). Heidegger would have us see that the calls and directives stemming from things in the world, including technology and new media, offer other ways of living with and through them. Bennett remarks that "humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside a sticky web of connections or an ecology" (365). The great advance of Heidegger is to grant ontological status to these things, to see them as complexly embedded in the world, and to describe how something akin to an ethic beckons forth from them.

In what follows, we attempt to build an ontology for new media objects, one that acknowledges the (rhetorical) agency of those objects and attempts to ascertain what ways of being- in-the-world they open up for us beyond the dangers of excessive technological rationality. The granting of rhetorical agency to objects shifts the ground on which most of our new media theories are established. Importantly, this opens up possibilities not only for a richer understanding of new media and its associated technologies, but a richer way of dwelling with them. Our argument in a nutshell is that while new media gathers the fourfold, we will remain caught in technology's sway until such time as we can attune ourselves to how new media, and not solely human being, afford other ways of being-in-the-world. An intractable humanism is ultimately a refusal of the gathering call of things in the world. It is a deafness to what Heidegger calls their "directives," a deafness that is at the same time an aggrandizement of human beings' powers of technological mastery (see "Building" 158). New media scholarship that remains inattentive to those aspects of worldly encounter that Heidegger describes in terms of the fourfold, smart, insightful, and rigorous as it may be, primarily attends to what shows itself as resource for efficiency or optimization-which is to say, as technology considered only technologically. This interpretive horizon is limited, reducing in scope not only human being but the things, new media and otherwise, of the world, which in turn diminishes our potential for dwelling with them.

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The Problem of Technology

The later Heidegger proposes the idea of dwelling as a way of relating to and inhabiting the world. Dwelling makes a home; it is a way of "staying with things" ("Building" 151). T~us, Heidegger tells us, we are in the fourfold when we dwell ("Building" 1 SO). So, in order to understand what it means to dwell we have to understand the fourfold, a mutually implicated composite of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals (Young, "F ourfo Id" 3 73). S In claiming that dwell ing gathers the fourfo Id, Heidegger points to what distinguishes a livable place-a place one makes a home, even if one is never entirely at home.6 Insofar as the Greek word oikos conveys a sense of home-making qua dwelling, and oikos is the root ofthe word ecology, we can see the fourfold as an ecological approach to being, albeit one that goes beyond what a movement like environmentalism has done. Certainly, new media constitute a profound portion of our technological environment. The question for us is, do new media gather the fourfold? To what extent do new media also co~tribute to dwelling, to the making of a home? If new media do so, have we !llso initiated a shift in our understanding of the relations among human beings, things, and the

world they show up in? But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Heidegger, after all,

is better known as a critic than a proponent of technology. "Everywhere," he claims "we remain unfree and chained to technology" ("Question" 4). This com:Uon understanding ofH~idegger's critique oftechnology-that it is instrumental and calculative, that it enframes (Gestell) human being within the world, that it sets upon the world and turns it into a "standing reserve" (Bestand)-is accurate but incomplete ("Question" 17). Heidegger understands as well as anyone that there is no getting beyond technology (Discourse 53). Instead, his argument is about finding a better relation to technology, a relation that technology itself impedes (DiScourse 5 1-52). As he states, "The instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology" ("Question" 5). Human beings think they can master technology, and they marshal calculative and technological means to do so. As technology grows in stature and power, the greater grows the will to mastery of technology ("Question" 5). The will to mastery, however,


forecloses on the kind of dwelling that makes a home. And that is precisely Heidegger' s point: when our relation to technology is itself technological, we impoverish our being in the world.

In "Upsetting the Set Up: Remarks on Heidegger's Questing after Technics," Samuel Weber sheds fresh light on "The Question Concerning Technology" by addressing some common but misleading interpretations. Weber reworks technology (technik) as technics, which binds together technology and rhetoric while highlighting how technics "remain above all a way of un securing (and of disclosing)" (980, 989). This un securing points to the radical dis-ease challenged forth by technology. Weber notes that technology emplaces us, but "the more it seeks to place (the subject) into safety, the less safe it becomes" (990). When we theorize technology, spurred on by its ways of challenging and unsecuring, the problem is always with the technology itselfand our ability to marshal our will through it, creating the proper order (that is, a properly ordered and secure place). We rarely, if ever, question human beings and their relation to the technology (or, put differently, the will to will through technology). Technology and its artifacts appear as our objects, themselves manipulable through technical thinking, and not as objects of concern in and of themselves: "By determining reality as standing stock, objects are treated as calculable data ... objects are deobjectified by becoming increasingly subject to the calculations of a subjective will struggling to realize its representations and thus to place itself in security (sich sicherzustellen)" (Weber 989-90). This returns us to our earlier observation via Kittlerthat we tend to ascribe agency to people rather than to things. The concept of the fourfold asks us instead to reflect on the ways technological things gather and emplace, and on how rhetorical action is threaded through people and things to build a sense of home in places, even those that-being mobile, dynamic, and/or "virtual"-are seemingly the antithesis of what makes a place.

Into the Fourfold

With the concepts of dwelling and the fourfold, Heidegger strives to recall for concrete, lived experience a more fulsome relation to the world

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and the technologies that permeate it. We have always been gathered by things; technology has always enframed us. If it does so now in fresh and disconcerting ways, we wonder what it would mean to dwell with technology in accordance with the fourfold (in contrast to living with technology as a tool, as a merely, human creation, as an object through which human will is exercised). If we transform our understanding of technology-media and artifacts--<loes this in turn impact our sense of how they fit into the world and into human affairs? If they are less tools or value-less objects of our will and contemplation but active participants and co-shapers, themselves embedded in complex and ultimately indeterminably rich and varied contexts, does this place us differently in our worldly ecology? Does it ask us to revise our sense of how technology shapes ("enframes" in Heidegger's idiom) all aspects of how we understand and comport ourselves in the world, including, for our purposes here, how we understand and inhabit new media itself?

Heidegger provides striking examples of how things stand fourfoldly in the world, discussing peasant shoes, brid,ges, houses, jugs, Greek temples, and more. None of these things exist as objects in a naIve realist sense, as a simple "what-it-is-ness." A Greek temple is not just a humanbuilt structure serving wreligious function; a bridge is not just a construct for spanning rivers and chasms. Yes, the bridge is a thing, but as Heidegger says, it is a thing "as the gathering of the fourfold," which is to say, "the bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals" ("Building" 153). The bridge, then, exists in customary ways, such as a functional object or a symbol. But these are also reductions that decline to grant the bridge its autonomy, its unique manner of holding sway in the world. Heidegger points out how the banks of a stream emerge as banks only as the bridge joins them; this happens because the banks show forth in a new relation to each other due to the bridge bringing them into each other's neighborhood. The bridge too is an assembling of wood, metal, and/or stone. This strong sense of generative but withdrawing support, of gathering through emplacement, conveys earth ("Building" 152). The bridge weathers the sky and the seasons, exists in complex relations to physical forces like gravity and affective qualities like mood, and thus invokes a second element of the fourfold, sky. It connects people in complex ways as well, opening up


commerce and travel, invoking the coming oflife and death, and thereby brings us to the third element of the fourfold, mortals. Lastly, a bridge gathers the divinities (gods), or the sacred/heroic figures who make demands upon us, who call us to act or make valuations in particular ways.7 Dwelling in the world would indicate a mindfulness of these fourfold elements, which is to say, constructive activity driven by care for how the fourfold manifests itself, not as four different elements, but as a oneness with four expressions (see "Dwelling" 150; Elucidations 188, 195).8

Figure I: The bridge at Heidelberg, one of the bridges discussed by Heidegger in

"Building, Dwelling, Thinking." Photo by Thomas Rickert.

From Heidegger's perspective, technological thinking diminishes our attunement to the fourfold, and in so doing, impoverishes human life by reducing our capacity for dwelling. Heidegger's famous example of a Black Forest farmhouse illustrates this point concretely. The farmhouse, of course, is a constructed thing, which is an important point: dwelling

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necessitates building.9 But it is the sort of building that is itself attuned to the affordances of the surrounding environs. Heidegger says, "From the simple oneness in which earth and sky, divinities and mortals belong together, building receives the directive for its erecting of locations" ("Building" 158). It is important to note the locus of agency: building

receives directives; it does not, as it does under the sway oftechnological thinking, strive for mastery through calculation. This is why, in describing the . building of the farmhouse, Heidegger downplays the role of human doing: "It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered slope looking south .. .. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof . .. " ("Building" 160). What is this "it"? Dwelling. But this dwelling is not simple habitation. Heidegger's description of the farmhouse attends to each element of the fourfold: the farmhouse is placed on a mountain slope by meadows and a spring (earth), designed with snow and storms in mind

(sky), and furnished with an alter (the gods) and room for childbed and coffin (mortals). Dwelling connotes the full richness of human life in the world, in touch with all aspects of what makes a place aplace, and how this sense of place in tum discloses world; this cannot happen by focusing solely on human being, as if the richness of human life sprang exclusively from human concern and its expressions of wi 11. Such a presumption takes the world in its simple, direct givenness as being the entirety of what is. Heideggerwould rather us take note that the world is not a fixed ensemble ofthings but ongoing events, w,hich he describes in terms of the fourfold. This is why, as DavidKolb argues, we cannot translate the fourfold into simpler terminology, a la the social sciences, as "objects, times and moods, values, and individual subjects"; such reduction, for all it gains in cognitive precision, nevertheless "reduces the revelation of things to a process going on among already revealed items" (124).10 Dwelling, then, indicates the absolute necessity of things as emergent events, deeply interconnected with everything else in a way that also gathers human being. It is things, in their "thinging," that bring the world ("Thing" 181). As Heidegger says, "we are called by the thing ... we are the be-thinged,

the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all

unconditionedness" ("Thing" 181). Our lives are conditioned by things; we flourish in a responsive

attunement to them, and doing so brings the fourfold. But can this be


reconciled with the detrimental effects of technology? New media in particular are held up for sharp criticism, and for every benefit they are

hailed to provide (grass roots democracy, connectivity, virtual identities, new art and business forms); they are also shown to fall short. Heidegger' s own comments about television and radio, for instance, are largely negative (see Discourse 48-49). We believe, however, that Heidegger himself was conflicted on this matter. While on the one hand he upheld models of traditional handicraft and rural life, he also acknowledged the necessity of building a relationship with technological things. This has to include new media, and we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the nostalgia Heidegger was overly prone to. II Even then, it must be emphasized that this cannot be solely human doing. The world is rife with objects, appearing as resources and means in accordance with technological enframing, and the object becomes a thing when it clears itself into the fourfold. However, things "do not appear by means o/human making"; at the same time, "neither do they appear without the vigilance of mortals" ("Thing" 181). Representational/technological thinking-which is what the "by means of" corresponds to-impedes the appearance of things as things, which, to appear, must emerge from a "co-responding," an appealing to "the world's being by the world's being" (181). Rather than direct and master things, we take up and respond to their offerings as they show forth and circulate in ecologically conditioned places.

We need to add that Heidegger was not always a sure guide about the fourfold. The poetic language used accomplishes rhetorical work but does not lend itself to precision. We mentioned above the connection to ecology, and indeed, deep ecology and environmentalist literature is dotted with references to Heidegger's conceptions of dwelling and the fourfold. Unfortunately, they also typically lack genuine insight into the matter, since they take Heidegger too plainly at his word. As Graham Harman argues, we need to be careful, for Heidegger is not merely carving up the world into four realms saved from being entirely arbitrary only by their my tho-poetic resonance. 12 He is describing the world quite concretely, while at the same time presenting his discussion through poetic language that speaks to the ways human beings disclose the world experientially rather than scientifically. In short, Heidegger's mytho-

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poetic language attempts to make philosophy itselfbespeak the fourfold. Still, Harman's point hits home: why divide up earth and sky, for instance? Why not earth and water? Space and matter? And etcetera. What needs to be emphasized is that the poeticizing language marshals an evocative obscurity in order to conyey themes Heidegger has long worked with, including the tension between concealed and revealed being. When Heidegger describes a bridge as gathering the fourfold, he is also saying that neither the fact of humans building it, the purposes to which it is put, the roles it fulfills, nor even the full range of contexts in which it is or could be embedded suffice to capture the bridge in its bridgeness (Harman 124). Our point is that the same is true of new media artifacts and technologies. For all their embeddeness in human contexts, they cannot be reduced to them. For all that we make them, they cannot be reduced to the facts of our making them.

Perhaps the key element to Heidegger's concept of dwelling is the elevation of the ultimate independence of the things of the world from human control to a mode of being. What the ,fourfold describes is the richness that results from this alteration in being whereby we let our way of living be conditioned by letting things show forth beyond the strictly technological or instrumental horizon. Such a conception never denies that things are important to human beings and that we do use them. Dwelling conveys fostering, cultivating, sheltering, shepherding because care for things in the ways they call for is what builds a home-and, crucially, this is also what in the ehd benefits human being the most, too ("Building" 147). "Letting be," as Heidegger sometimes describes this relation, means nothing passive, such as apathy or inaction, but rather the action of allowing something to come into being as it is. But this requires a certain attunement for what is coming into being, which Heidegger oftentimes describes as a call to which we should harken. This call, however, is never simply there, present in the things themselves, but only emergent in conditions that cultivate it. 13 Even when the call is described as a directive, rhetorical work is present, but such work requires an understanding and sensitivity to things in their complex ecological relations to a specific place. Recall the farmhouse example: as a home, every element of its building is conditioned by the surrounding environs, and the surrounding environs itself reflects the fourfold.


We see here why Heidegger was attracted to a rustic nostalgia. If media technologies like television or radio wrench and dissipate local communities, uprooting them, it is easy enough to fall into two traps. In the first, we can simply say, as the technological drive for progress and mastery would induce, "Such problems are easily surmountable through further study and technological accommodation and advance." This is a technological solution for a technological problem, and it comes forth

from a desire for mastery. Rusticism is in actuality the reactionary flipside to it-the flee from technology without the necessary and attendant working through of technological enframing. For the second trap, we simply take new media technologies like television and radio at face value, saying, "Television and radio link us globally in ways that can destroy the rooted, close-knit qualities of local communities, but they provide other worthwhile advantages." Such a statement is true enough. What leaves us leery, and hence what spurs this essay, is the larger sense that new media, whatever the particular detriments and benefits that might emerge as issues in our scholarly and public discussions, cannot be reduced to these positions. The tension between concealed and revealed being characterizes new media as much as any other worldly phenomenon, and, thus, they must offer still more beyond what we currently conceive or extract. "Dwelling" is the term Heidegger uses to convey this profound, respectful, even sacred comportment toward things, so that they emerge as integral elements constituting a way oflife, a way of being in the world. It is not that new media dominate or diminish us in and of themselves or in their essence. It is that our current, technologically enframed mode of being limits how new media show up for us, and, as this technological ground was already reductive of the full (fourfold) scope of being, so too is new media's place in everyday life.

My Life with iLife

In addressing the issue of new media through Heidegger and the fourfold, we have stated that the world brought forth in new media cannot be reduced solely to human willing and practice. As in Heidegger's farmhouse example, dwelling itself takes on agentive force. Dwelling is a

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conditioned response to an environs arrayed with things, and these things call and beckon, conduce and gather. Dwelling declines to reduce things to the simple face they show to naive understanding or the wrenched face they showto science. Further, things are complexly interconnected and latticed, so that, as Harman puts it, they are more akin to undiscovered planets we have yet to invent the probes and sensors to explore (19). This interconnectedness beyond all human understanding is in particular conveyed in that aspect of the fourfold

called earth. It is rare in new media studies that we come upon a language of

dwelling (see Kolb for an exception). We often use terms such as "portal" or "site" or even "entry" to describe what takes place when we encounter a new media entitity, be it a website, a virtual world, or a game. We are visiters, travelers, players, with avatars as "representative" agents. The problem with such language is that it implies we are entering into a different world, a separate realm, that is less real in some respect. Much ofthe early literature on virtuality depends on this distinction. A "cyberworld" is seen as distinct from our own reality, and thus, the narrative goes, we operate through a different sense-even multiple senses-of self or identity (see Turkle and Stone). In contradistinction to this model, what it means to dwell with new media bespeaks a different relation, one predicated on rhetorical building. That is to say, rather than see a game or website as a distinct world, we view such new media entities as furthering the breakdowns of the subject/object and human/nonhuman dichotomies, in part by expanding our understanding of what a place might be. Virtuality, then, is better understood as experiences and encounters that elude description across our historically derived idea of a material, objective real. While such understanding has a profound suasive command, it is also a declination to see that our prior notion of an objective, empirical real was already flawed. But the compulsion to see the "virtual" as a secondary or derivative order of reality needs to be abandoned. The "virtual" as it has insinuated itself into daily life is ontologically no different than Heidegger's bridge at Heidelberg, even if its particular composition, and the way it gathers the fourfold, remains its own. Virtuality may not be materially the same sort of thing a rock or bridge is, but it is necessarily thing-like because it organizes energy and


matter, gathers constellations of human and nonhumans, and transforms relations within the world.

The virtual, then, must have ontological bite; it simply manifests different ways of organizing matter, energy, place, and interrelation than what we are accustomed to call "reality." Such a point is crucial for highlighting how new media artifacts have come to reorganize and reconfigure our shared sense of world. As Bill Brown notes, "The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation" (4). Can we, however, be more precise and specific? Can we, within new media, and more specifically with iLife as a current popular example, reconsider the still entrenched dichotomy between a primary subject (humanist) and secondary object (mundane) in terms of the rich ontological interconnectedness offered by Heidegger's conception of the fourfold?

The Apple iLife software suite-a battery of computer applications for creating and editing text, photos and images, video, sound and music, publishing to the Web, and more-is designed to provide an integrated experience for Apple computer users. The name iLife itself suggests that these are not just a group of applications but something more fulsome, a range of digital practices that encompass one's life. In another sense, the software suite attempts to build a world; these programs are far ranging enough that they create a habitable place in which one can create, receive, interact, communicate. Such an impulse already bespeaks at least an awareness of the fourfold; it is the drive to more completely allow for the integration of the computer and its new media capabilities with a fuller range of human activity, with what it means to be a digital (post)human being. We might see here what Donna Haraway calls the "constitutive social relationality" of technology and the larger environs becoming integral partners in existence-which is also to say that this is a move toward dwelling with new media ("Promises" 310). Note, too, that while

ideology and the commodity forms are certainly present here, they cannot be the last instance for explaining new media. Haraway points out that "technoscience is more, less, and other than what Althusser meant by ideology; technoscience is a form oflife, a practice, a culture, a generative matrix" (Modest 50).

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Apple iLife attempts to materialize and enable the promise of technoscience. Apple claims to allow iLife users to do everything they have ever wanted (at least digitally); as the company website explains,

iLife '06 is the easiest way to make the most out of every bit of your digital life. Use your Mac to collect, organize and edit the various elements. Transform them into mouth-watering masterpieces with Apple-designed templates. Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling DVDs, perfect podcasts, and attractive online journals. All starring you. (empha

sis added)

Of course, the user experience is obviously constructed by Apple, and it is understandably humanistic in its emphases. Ideologically, the user that Apple presents is an experience we "buy" into. But if we stay at the level of ideology critique, we miss most of what is interesting here: that technology itself worlds us (see Hataway, "Promises" 297). Think about the integration of technologies that Apple sejls: the iPod interfaces easily with Apple's computers, with iTunes, with GarageBand, with iMovie. iTunes now even interfaces with one's cell phone, as do many chat programs. And this integration is not all. The easy, smooth, nearly tactile interfaces and designs construct a way of dwelling, of making a home in material and digital places that is simultaneously material and electric, stable and mobile, ephemeral and networked. Indeed, the seamless integration between software and digital entities in the iLife suite makes it difficult to individuate entities as we are accustomed to; further, the spatial relations we typically assume as determinative of materiallocation are also reworked. A recent battery of commercials by AT&T makes this point geographically: in one ad, a spokesperson informs us that he is a student in Delaware with parents in Philadelphia, a brother in Prague, and many friends in Chicago, so that he needs a communications network that works where he lives, a place called "Philawarepragueacago." Like Heidegger's bridge, the network works through people, places, and technologies such as iLife to rearrange space and relations, in a very real sense remaking the world. 14 If things gather and bring the world, then digital things afford a subtly different world, not just a different web of

ideological meanings within the world.


The tremendous range of interaction and creation brought forth through iLife evoke the fourfold in ways we can only describe schematically, since the fourfold as a descriptive term must also convey the event of revealing. This means that much of iLife remains concealed to us because aspects of it actively withdraw; it is through use and interaction that it unfolds and discloses, creates and connects. Nevertheless, we can point to generative but withdrawing support (earth), ephemeral forces and moods (sky), and even the sacred that comes forth in creation, futurity, and valuing (divinities). The fourth aspect of the fourfold, mortals, is perhaps obvious.

We want to emphasize that Apple's designs and intentions are never sufficient to account for the conditions of possibility made available through digital technology and new media; the fact is that digital technology and new media have their own designs and "intentions" on us, that they maintain their reservoir of unconcealedness, and that they are integral to the cultivation of being in a manner we might call thriving. IS

Granted, Apple Corporation has designed the software with specific purposes in mind, and neither the computer nor iLife can escape their commodity status. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to equate designed form, assigned context, and intentional purpose with the being of a thing. A turntable, for instance, may well have been constructed to play records, but the emergence ofDJ culture has given rise to an entire art and culture based on the idea that the turntable is itself a musical instrument (see Fuller). We cannot say what iLife may give rise to; we do not know what lays concealed within its battery of programs that may be coaxed into what Heidegger would call the clearing. So, we should acknowledge Apple's efforts: building-which here describes new media forms and technologies-is a mark of dwelling, and the commodity status of iLife can in no way contain what it enables for rhetorical activity. Like Heidegger's bridge, iLife gathers the fourfold. It brings people into communication and relation, affords tremendous creative opportunities, spurs new forms of community, connects other technologies, manifests values and concern for the future, and places us in ways that secure a home.

Of course, all these possibilities can remain locked into technological/instrumental thinking and practices, so that they only show up as

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aspects of human will, the tools enabling the mastery of one's environs. But what we have argued is that new media entities offer more than this . As Veronique M. F6ti points out, the Heideggerian thing is what enables alternate paths than that which comes from the technological reduction of the world: "it is the thing, and not the human being, that, in its standingwithin-itself (selbstandiges Insichstehen), holds its own against the reductive and totalizing posit (Ge-stell) oftechnicity" (398). What we would like to do next is explore this idea still further through one new media place, in this case Facebook, which offers more potential than iLife, particularly in the way it lends itself to rich forms of rhetorical interaction beyond the engineered purposes and commodity status that

cannot define but yet delimit iLife.

Being There in Facebook

One of our primary claims has been that new media needs to be granted greater ontological weight than it tends to get in theoretical studies, and that this ontological weight nevertheless shows up in actual new media practices. That is, in terms of how people interact with and integrate new media technologies into a way of life, we can see germinal, inventive forms of co-existing with technology that cannot be reduced to technology's way of ordering us-a way of being Heidegger describes in terms of the

fourfold. We can see such practi2es emerging in online social networking sites such as Facebook (see Fig. 2). Danah Boyd and NicoleEllison define social networking sites as "web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system." They go on to explain that their choice of the term network rather than networking points to the fundamental rhetorical

purpose of these kinds of sites:

"Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many ofthem, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC).

Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert

What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks.

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Facebook, as a form of purposeful connection, adds heretofore unavailable richness to online experience; one is no longer a singular user cultivating online plurality. Instead, one is always already in a plurality of networks and strengthening or extending them. We want to emphasize that the digital place called Facebook is not a tool or means for digital sociality, but a part of digital sociality itself as a composition of human and nonhuman elements.

Facebook's explosive growth helps illustrate our claim. It started in 2004 connecting Harvard University students but has now expanded to over 70 million active users in the U.S. and abroad; it allows for the development of applications that can be imported to Facebook pages, 20,000 of which have been added so far, with 140 new applications added each day; and it is the fifth most trafficked site in the world, but, impressively, the second most trafficked social site.16 Users go there to catch up with friends, share images and experiences, post thoughts, play games, and form communities. They build the space according to their liking and in collaboration with others, often through some of the 20,000 applications that can be added to Facebook. Considered from the perspective of virtuality, one might say that Facebook is like other technological places in wrenching people out of their particular, material locales and bringing them into a false sense of belonging. We contest. Facebook adds to and complements the deep interconnectedness of things that constitutes our surrounding and sustaining environs. Granted, the place it creates calls for alternate ways of being together, many of which we are only now discovering, and even more of which remain to be discovered , but this is no reason to discount them as secondary, inauthentic, or impossible. When one looks at a Facebook page, even a skimpy one, with its brief categorical descriptions, social networks, and modest decor and add-ons, one nevertheless gets the sense that this is a mode of beingtogether-in-the-world. Ifface-to-face communication calls forth gesture, intonation, facial expression, posture and so forth as ways of enriching the encounter, Facebook calls forth asynchronous conversations, geographically impossible encounters, minutia of daily existence, taxono-

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mies oflikes and dislikes, and other alternative modes of interaction that

face-to-face encounters cannot.

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Figure 2: Screenshot of Facebook profile page.

The gathering that Facebook performs is a form of rhetorical building. That is, the technology manifests a kind of agency that calls forth and safeguards persuasive and affective relationships among humans. It is not that humans alone are cultivating those relationships using the technology; that aspect is assuredly there, but if we focus only on what humans bring to Facebook (or other new media phenomena) we miss the ways in which technological things call us to the richness of dwelling in the world. Dwelling, we emphasize, calls us to a co-responsiveness necessary for connection to place and people. Further, we should highlight how


connection and communication are not utopian goods, and dwelling is not a naive "we ' re all getting along" sense of cozy togetherness. Thus, Facebook, like all forms of rich connection, keeps sociality open to the boredom of false intimacy and the discomfort of over familiarity (the twentieth time someone "throws a sheep" with the SuperPoke application) as well as genuine, lasting warmth.

Another way in which we can see creative, emergent connection is across the innocuous practice of gaming in Facebook. Debates have recently surfaced about Scrabulous, a digitized version of Scrabble that was introduced into the Facebook environment. It was created by two programmers from India who wanted a way to play Scrabble asynchronously online and for free. Mattei and Hasbro, the owners ofthe game, are suing the two programmers for copyright infringement. A New York

Times article describes the outrage among the hundreds of thousands of users of Scrabulous, further noting that according to John Williams, "many people assume that a game like Scrabble is in the public domain, like chess" (qtd. in Timmons). Obviously, we see here a reprise of the idea that new media and digitality challenge traditional beliefs and laws about ownership. But there is more going on. When a technology such as Scrabulous is "set free in the wild," so to speak, it can propagate and flourish. Human players are the means for propagation. Indeed, as is noted in the New York Times article, while Scrabulous was mildly popular when it first started, it was only when it was embedded in Facebook that it exploded (Timmons). Scrabulous, though, is not Scrabble. The striking popularity of Scrabulous is indicative of an online appeal as great or greater than the face-to-face, "real life" Scrabble game. This seems counter-intuitive, flying in the face of criticisms of online affiliation as superficial in comparison to the richness of "real life." How can this be understood? Scrabulous thrives in its Facebook environs and, enabled by the affordances of asynchronicity, gathers people and galvanizes performative, communicative, and affective interactions. The startling popularity ofScrabulous highlights the agentive power and pull of new media technologies, a pulsion that bleeds over into other things; indeed, Timmons notes that sales of the material version of Scrabble have risen with the spread ofScrabulous. Like money, the (thinging of the) technological thing changes everything.

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Community, competition, affection, sociability, thought-all these and more are fostered within the Facebook environment because of the technology. Human agency, while important, is not solely accountable for what transpires. As Bernadette Wegenstein elucidates, "Thought, as Haraway and others have pointed out, no longer is the domain of humans, but of machines as well" (14). Human sociability and homemaking are occasioned by and threaded through new media technology. It is not that Facebook is simply a medium whereby dwelling occurs. Facebook itself provides for, shapes, conduces, and gathers, and in these pulsions we glimpse Facebook "thinging" as we might put it in Heidegger's language,

or Facebooking, as we might rework it.!' This "thinging" power can also be seen in Facebook's "suggestions"

for friends. Much like Amazon.com's recommendations of books based on recent book-buying habits, Facebook suggests contacts based on one's current network. On one's profile page, Facebook lists "People You May Know," users who are potential contacts that Facebook has discovered based on one's existing connections. If you click through, Facebook will ask, "Do you know any of these people?" In this sense, the technology uses data to learn likes/dislikes/potential networks for users. IfFacebook is not a networking SIte as much as a network site (as Boyd and Ellison claim), then Facebook is continually assessing a users's possible current networks. It is not just a matter of "suggesting" friends so much as the technology assembling and givi.Qg place to networks of people. Querying users for connection and interaction constitutes rhetorical world building, a digital homemaking that rearranges the near and far radically different from what is afforded by material geography (as per our discussion ofPhilawarepragueacago above). The significance here is that it is not just humans building a world but technology and humans cocreating that world.

Important for Facebook's world-building capabilities are the applications fostering communication and contact. There are thousands of them, but particularly relevant to our discussion are those that promote civic or communal sociability. For example, there are many garden

applications (My Garden, My Organic Garden, and (Lil) Green Patch) that enable users to give plants to friends and build their own gardens/ green places. The (Lil) Green Patch application (see Fig. 3) is of especial


interest because it purports to "save the rainforest" when users give plants to one another. Reminiscent of The Hunger Site, a website where sponsors pay for cups of food when users click through to their website, (Lil) Green Patch elicits the persuasiveness of the click. Simply clicking on a link induces users to feel as if they are advancing a worthwhile cause and asserting rhetorical power in the world. We are not so much interested in the legitimacy of these sites-they may well be spurious or ineffective-as much as we are interested in how they function (a) to cultivate or build connections with others and (b) how technology and not people emerges as a primary agentive force. The rhetorical act of clicking is an enablement of civic responsibility for the user, which bespeaks a larger sense of care for the world and its being(s). The click arises because the

G (lU) Green Patch

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Figure 3: Screenshot of (Li!) Green Patch description.

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technology emerges from and takes part in a call for caretaking and shepherding as an ethic. Facebook's activism issues forth from Facebook as a technology with unique affordances that stem from its invocation that we dwell there in the rich, fourfold sense described by Heidegger. Facebook becomes a home from which one can click forth in civic or ethical mindfulness.

We acknowledge how easy it may be to mock Heidegger and criticize the argument we are making. The fourfold can seem overly precious, and the notion that a click is in itself civic or ethical is troublesome if it cannot be substantiated by concrete studies showing that an application like (Lil) Green Patch actually makes a difference. Perhaps just as troublesome is the sense of ease it cultivates, without a corresponding acknowledgment that genuine progress is not so effortless. But such mockery or critique is cynical and nihilistic if it sweepingly castigates the genuine feelings involved and ignores how the. technology itself evokes such ethical investment and enables its actualization. Ifit is further objected that such "actualization" is self-serving, palliative, or ineffective, we would reiterate our main theme: have we harkened to what the technology calls us to as co-dwellers sharing a world that requires the work of care?

Nevertheless, despite our strong claims, we also need to introduce s~me qualifications. New media such as Facebook are only an emergent

place for (digital) dwelling. For all the (potential) genuineness of applications, there are others that spur questionable actions, such as spamming one's network. Such activity revives a calculative/technological framework by forcing optimization or maximization in terms of an outcome such as profit While there is nothing necessarily objectionable about goals or profits, it becomes problematic when achieved in ways that corrode the rich forms of dwelling that new media can also beckon us toward. Recently, Facebook tried to introduce Beacon, a program that would broadcast particular purchases on a user's news feed. This kind of covert advertising, what Ari Melber calls "social advertising," was soundly rejected by users (22). While the messages were touted as innocent recommendations, in actuality they served up commodification and commercialism at the expense of homemaking. By analogy, consider the effect of inhabiting a house with a subclause, more or less unbeknown to you, that allows marketers to publish your purchases as endorsements.


Contrast this form of hijacking sociality with calculative intentions to the News Feed, a program that lists updates of one's contacts and profile changes. At first, as with Beacon, users were initially opposed. The tide turned, however, and now it is a regular feature on the site. Melber reports that when Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, "speaks on campuses these days, students approach him to say that while they initially 'hated' the feed, now they 'can't live without it'" (22). The difference between the two is that News Feed aids in building one's Facebook world; Beacon subverts new media's contribution for such building by narrowing the full range of possible expressive sociality to crass profiteering. Again, we are not objecting to profit, but reducing our fourfold expressive range only to commercial interests impoverishes us. Such a reduction is itselfhuman-centric, we add, even if achieved through technology, for technology is apathetic about profit. Information wants to be free, as the saying goes, which might also open us onto a possible prime directive for new media technology: share. But this notion of sharing is not a shrill one; it is an ecological one, attuned to the fourfold richness permeating all the human and nonhuman entities as they assemble and are assembled.

Dwelling with Danger and Hope

For all our talk of dwelling and the fourfold, we would be remiss if we did not discuss the dangers of social networking's information-rich environment Even here, though, we find further support for our argument: dangers, after all, characterize "real life" or face-to-face interactions toO.18 Neither Heidegger's notion of dwelling nor the fourfold ca~ eliminate strife or agonistics. What we have argued here is that these concepts can aid us in developing and finding new ways of being with technology, not that they eliminate all technological danger and insecurity. Rich forms of connection and interactivity are always replete with risk; indeed, such risk contributes to what makes connection worthwhile. With connective technologies that operate and communicate beyond the direct control of humans, fresh dangers and challenges emerge. Indeed, this underlines the core of the controversy around Beacon; the Facebook

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community did not have an opportunity to "opt-in" to the program so full

participation was the default. In Control and Freedom, Wendy Chun makes this unawareness glaringly apparent when she explains that while we think we are in control of our data, in actuality, our machines are:

Your screen, with its windows and background, suggests that your computer only sends and receives data at your request. ... Using a packet sniffer, however, you can see that your computer constantly wanders without you. Even when you are not "using," your computer sends and receives, stores and discards-that is, readspackets, which mostly ask and respond to the question "Can you read meT' (3-4)

Chun embeds this brief example in a larger discussion of Deleuze's theory of control society, in which "[ d]igital language makes control

systems invisible; we no longer experience the visible yet unverifiable

gaze, but a network of nonvisualizable digital control" (9). Our discus

sion of new media and digital technology is not meant to sweep such dangers away. What we are highlighting is the fundamental difference between an attunement to the affordances oftechnology, the harkening to

its suggestive ways, marking out a new way of being with new media, and the attempt to master that technology as the means of controlling its

threats and dangers. This is what Melber means when he observes that both Facebook and those against its technologies operate "within the

same model of privacy control--opt-in versus opt-out, sharing versus

concealing" (22). Many understandings of culture, technology, and new media tend to

fall within such a humanist paradigm, and we have argued that this is

limiting, particularly for rhetorical thought. New media cannot be under

stood in terms of subjective approaches to technologically-derived ob

jects, objects that stand against us in a kind offor/against relation: those that empower and enable us, and those that restrict or oppress us. New media do not enter us into a use or be used framework. While we argue

that new media technologies do in fact have their own unique trajectories

sundered from direct human control-that they share equally in the constitution of the world and place their demands upon us-this is less an

implicit demand for critique than an invitation to rethink our relation to


new media, and how new media stand to refigure our notion of world as

such. The gathering and assembling new media generate are vital, but not innocent; enriching, but not without their dangers.

Things, whether material, technological, or digital, are those that conduce toward caretaking and homemaking. As Silvia Benso notes,

"Things thus impose an imperative which comes close to an ethical

demand. They request an act of love--ethics-which let things be as

things, and which therefore opens up a space for the hosting of the Fourfold" (13). When we extend our homemaking to online places, this shows care and affective investment in things that in turn opens up and

discloses our world. It is a harkening to a call. Nevertheless, we cannot

forget that technology'S way of setting upon the world and forcing it to show up as resource subject to calculation and will is ever present. As we have discussed, applications like Beacon can transform the rich, surpris

ing, and creative disclosiveness of human/machinic interaction into

narrow, diminished frames. Nevertheless, we think that the affirmative approach of seeing emergent forms of dwelling with new media needs to

take precedence. Precisely such a background understanding brings a sensitivity to what new media things offer for a modus vivendi that would

be rewarding, sustainable, and generative. It remains for us to hear what

new media beckons forth.

Notes

Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana

1. The opening chapter of Jameson's 1991 opus, Postmodernism, which includes the discussion of the Bonaventure Hotel, is reworked from an earlier essay, "Postmodemism and Consumer Society," first published in Hal Foster's influential 1983 collection The Anti-Aesthetic and heavily anthologized since. It is worth noting that Jameson indicates that the essay was itself based on a talk given at the Whitney Museum in 1982, meaning that his thoughts on the Bonaventure Hotel go back at least a decade from the quotes we present here.

2. For example, Selfe complains of the situation whereby we can use technology in the classroom "while generally absolving ourselves from the responsibility for planning for technology, thinking critically about technology, systematically assessing the value of technology, and making the difficult

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decisions associated with who pays for and has access to technology" (10). Regardless of her intention to provide a richer understanding of technology, the keywords here-responsibility, assessing, critiquing, deciding-indicate that technology is itself calculable, controllable, and predictable. This stance exemplifies Heidegger's claim that technology's sway over human beings can be seen in how technology spurs technological thinking and solutions to the problems it brings forth. Heidegger's point is that technology cannot be so mastered. More on this below.

3. Examples of Lazzarini's work--distorted hammers, skulls, chairs, telephones-can be seen on the web, including these two addresses: http:// www.robertlazzarini.comland http://www.pierogi2000.comlflatfile/lazzarin.html.

4. Some of this work goes by the label "thing theory"; see Brown for an overview (he is also credited with coining the term). While our essay utilizes Heidegger for its orientation, it should be noted that Gilles Deleuze is the primary figure for Bennett, Grosz, and others. As will be clear in our focus on the fourfold, however, Heidegger's work evokes different emphases and ethics. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this essay to treat this comparison further. The current best resource for further exploration of how Heidegger's and Deleuze's projects differ is De Beistegui. Lastly, we should also note the work of Bruno Latour, who has done,much to demonstrate the agency of nonhuman artifacts in science and culture. Not coincidentally, Latour has connected his work to that of Heidegger.

5. Graham Harman notes that "fourfold" is not the only translation of das Geviert, suggesting "quadrate" as a~other possibility (Tool 190).

6. There are several senses to this idea that we are never entirely at home. The first harkens to a fundamental aspect ofHeidegger' s thought. The Greek word for truth is aletheia, the root of which is lethe, forgetting or concealment. Heidegger emphasizes the profundity of the privative a-, making truth an unconcealment, i.e., a wresting of truth from hiddeness into a clearing. A home, then, as an always ongoing activity (dwelling) is also always caught in this play of concealment! unconcealment, which introduces the uncanny (the mystery, the unknown, the fact of being's withdrawal even as it shows some aspect ofitselt). The uncanny, it might be recalled, is unheimlich in German-which is to say, unhome-like. A second aspect refers to the later Heidegger's idea that we as existent beings are only on a sojourn (aufenhalt), i.e. guests staying only a short while (see Zollikon 114). Our finitude casts us. Finally, technology contributes to human beings's security and dwelling but, as discussed below, also challenges us in ways that unsecure or produce dis-ease.

7. Yet the divinities remain mysterious, withdrawn, which is one reason Heidegger describes them in "The Thing" as "the beckoning messengers of the godhead" (178). They emerge from out of the things and places we hold sacred but yet remain hidden.


8. Heidegger describes the activity of dwelling in terms of "sparing and preserving," which is Albert Hofstadter's translation of Heidegger's word "schonen" in "Building, Dwelling, Thinking." We are unable to unpack the full meaning of this activity in this essay. But it will be helpful to note Julian Young's translation of schonen as "caring-for" (Heidegger's 64 n.2). For Heidegger, dwelling not only involves the fourfold as the full range of human activity, concern, and environs, but such activity requires fundamental affective investment.

9. At the beginning of "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," Heidegger connects building and dwelling through the Old English and High German word buan, which means "to dwell," but which is also the root of bauen, German for "building" (146-47). Building is dwelling, and dwelling building, because they cultivate human flourishing in the world.

10. The attempt to explain the fourfold by sidestepping Heidegger's poeticizing language creates problems for interpretations such as that of Jussi Backman, who argues that the fourfold are a rethinking of Aristotle's four causes (earth as material cause, sky as formal cause, mortals as efficient cause, and divinities as final cause). While such work is insightful, the declination to work though the poetic language is also a reduction of the work accomplished through the full spectrum of Heidegger's presentation of the fourfold, all of which contributes to evoking the fourfold's character as an event emerging from the play between concealed and revealed being.

11. This tendency marks some ofthe work already done on the fourfold, such as Platt's explication of how a seashore gathers the fourfold, and, to a lesser extent, Young.

12. One reason the mytho-poetic aspect is so prominent, besides the fact that this marks the later Heidegger's style and accomplishes a good deal of his argumentative work, is that Heidegger derived the fourfold from the German romanticist poet Friedrich Holderlin. See the chapter "Holderlin's Earth and Heaven" in Elucidations of Holder/in's Poetry, 175-208.

13. Wrathall makes this point in regards to Heidegger's thoughts on the divinities. Wrathall argues that barring a new revelation, past religious practices are all we have to attune ourselves to the divine. This pinpoints why Heidegger thought that such practices must be nurtured: a sense for the holy must be preserved because "God can only appear as god in the dimension of the holy" (Wrathall 85). Ifwe lack a set of background beliefs, practices, and rituals that open up a horizon for something's appearance, we wait in vain, for it will not resonate for us. Wrathall's remark applies as well to our argument. Without a sense that technology can gather the fourfold-that is, gather aspects of meaningful existence in places we can dwell-we miss its emergence and the occasions to cultivate it further.

14. A blog devoted to commercial analyses has a video ofthis advertise-

240 jac

ment; it also reproduces the dialogue: http://www.commerciallygreen.coml 2007/ I 0/03/att-philaware-commercial-philawarepragueacago/. While Philawarepragueacago is a geographically impossible place, the advertisement makes clear that is a digitally realizable place. Further, we see here a striking example of the power of things to gather in ways that may be unprecedented, in part because te'chnological things such as digital networks present different affordances than, say, the material things comprising geographic location. It may also be of interest to note that a Google search ofPhilawarepragueacago produces an impressive number of hits, far beyond what one would expect for a commercial barely over a year old, suggesting that the term powerfully captures the public imaginary.

15. While we unfortunately came across it too late to integrate it into this essay, the film Primer might indicate a sea-change in the cultural imaginary as regards the theme of technology. Young entrepreneurs build a machine in their garage-an obvious allusion to the development of Apple computers in Steve Jobs' garage-but the machine they wind up with is not a direct product of their intentions. It is in large part accidental. Further, and pertinently for us, this machine allows a particular form of , time-travel, which in turn profoundly changes who these people are and what their lives are like. The film is complex, but some clear themes include the reversal of agency onto technology and the dismissal of notions of virtuality. Note that this is not technological determinism; it is simply a profound meditation on how technology opens a different world for us, and hence a different way of being in that world. The film conveys that mediated existence is not a lesser or subsidiary existence; contra Plato, it is perhaps more fulsome, more primary, as the doubling and tripling of the characters (with their own, unique motivations) seems to suggest. This, and not The Matrix, gives us a much better s,ense of what it means to dwell with new media

and technology. 16. These and other statistics can be found on Facebook's statistics page:

http://www.facebook.comlpress/info.php?statistics. Accessed May 18,2008. 17 Facebooking, according to the online Urban Dictionary, is a slang term

usually reserved for "wasting time" on Facebook. We prefer to think about the term as a way of being for many users of the site, one that has potentially significant and lasting potential, in the same way that small talk or chit chat, while frequently disparaged, nevertheless serves a powerful function in daily human interaction. http://www.urbandictionary.comldefine. php ?term=facebooking

Accessed April 20, 2008. 18. News reports about the dangers of social networking sites such as

MySpace and Facebook are too numerous to address here. Suffice it to say that most of these articles cover the dangers to women and children--especially the perils of sharing "too much" information-from "online predators." This kind of fear-mongering reflects some ofthe more current real-life obsessions with child


predators and pedophiles. Online social places, then, can, just as material geographic places, be sites of fear and danger.

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A Pedagogy for Online Place: Emergence, Noise, and Student Discourse

in Course Management Software

Sue Hum

"E veryone-with (MAYBE) the exception ofherrnits and lepers-is involved in several discourse communities," writes Nydia as she opens a multilogue that discusses the ways in which discourse communities can improve teaching and/or writing. A student in ENG 3303, Theory and Practice of Composition-an upper-level course populated by English, English Education, and Communications majors-Nydia is fulfilling an assignment that asks for weekly responses to be posted to the course electronic bulletin board provided by WebCT, a course management software. Carlos, however, a student in the same class, chooses a more conventionally styled opening for his view of discourse communities, using a clear, direct topic sentence that doubles as a thesis statement: "There are two possible ways that discourse communities can function as a pedagogical instrument for teachers." As he explains, Carlos's goal in conveying his ideas is to be "intelligent, clear, concise, and instructional" (email). A third student, Ron opposes the theoretical framework out of which the concept of discourse communities springs, saying, "Sorry social-rhetorical believers, but you're a self-centered human fad that will pass like a kidney stone." In his post, Ron objects to the belief that language influences cognition because he considers language a "convenience, not enlightenment," expressing his deep dissatisfaction through a body-based analogy. Carlos, Nydia, and Ron contribute to multiloguesnonlinear, digital "discussions" where author and respondents share control over the direction of the thread-using different discourse strategies.1 A rich site of learning, multilogues are a complex phenomenon

jae 28.1-2 (2008)

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Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert - New Media and the Fourfold

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