Jos de Mul

The Game of Life: Narrative and Ludic Identity Formation in Computer Games

Human identity is not a self-contained entity hidden in the depths of our inner selves, but is actively constructed in a social world with the aid of various expressions, such as social roles, rituals, clothes, music, and (life) stories. These expressions not only mediate between us and our world (referentiality) and between us and our fellow man (communicability), but also between us and ourselves (self-understanding). Consequently, changes in these mediating structures reflect changes in the relationship between us and our world, in our social relationships, and in our self-conception.

Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures

In this edited volume, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. Going beyond computer games, this interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities, but are in fact the means by which people create their identity. From discussions of World of Warcraft and Foursquare to digital cartographies, the combined essays form a groundbreaking volume that features the most recent insights in play and game studies, media research, and identity studies.

Possible Printings: On 3D Printing, Database Ontology, and Open (Meta)Design

3D printing has the potential to bring about important changes in many domains, including the world of design. Especially because of its open character––the idea that anyone can be a designer or producer––3D printing challenges traditional design practices. In this light De Mul discusses the rise of Open Design, which is characterized by the fact that it involves downloadable works, that design is distributed, and that it is possible to recombine modules to personalize designs and to 3D print them at home or in a specialized shop around the corner. In order to gain a deeper insight into both the chances and the pitfalls of open 3D design, De Mul sheds light on some of the fundamental characteristics of the digital domain, specifically on database ontology, the ABCD of computing. Next, he examines the implications of database ontology for the world of 3D design. He argues that in a world of Open Design the designer should change (redesign) his activities. The designer of the future has to become a database designer, a meta-designer, who does not design objects, but creates multidimensional design spaces in which unskilled users are able to design their objects in a user-friendly way.

Database Identity: Personal and Cultural Identity in the Age of Global Datafication

On February 27, 2004,1 I contributed to the — at that moment rather heated — Dutch debate on multiculturalism with an essay in NRC Handelsblad, one of the prominent Dutch national newspapers.2 The essay began with a short description of a young Arab girl, who — several months before, in the Kralingse Zoom subway station in Rotterdam — had passed me by on skeelers. Apparently the girl was a student on her way to Erasmus University, just like me. She was dressed in baggy harem trousers and a T-shirt with a smiley on it, had a small backpack on and was wearing a black headscarf, the cord of the headset of her mobile phone peeking from underneath. When she came near I overheard some fragments of the conversation, in a strange mixture of Arabic and Dutch with a broad Rotterdam accent, that she was having with, as the tone of the conversation made me think, a female friend. The image of a skating Muslim girl was somewhat unfamiliar in 2004. However, according to an article recently published on one of the websites of the Turkish community in the Netherlands, rollerblading is becoming increasingly popular among Dutch Muslim girls.3 Moreover, skating even seems to enjoy a growing popularity in more orthodox Muslim circles. In April 2012, skating enthusiasts in Italy had the privilege of seeing Zahra Lari becoming the first niqab-wearing figure skater from the Gulf.

The (Bio)Technological Sublime

Since its emergence as a specific discipline within philosophy in the middle of the eighteenth century,1 the history of aesthetics shows two remarkable tendencies, reflecting specific developments within (post)modern art and culture as a whole. On the one hand, the development of aesthetics is characterized by an impressive differentiation and multiplication of aesthetic categories. Whereas early aesthetics was predominantly focused on the category of beauty, since the beginning of the nineteenth century until now a wide range of new aesthetic concepts have emerged, such as the sublime, the ironic, the comic, the absurd, and the banal. Without doubt this development reflects developments in modern art itself, which has restlessly expanded the domain of aesthetic experience and expression. The fine arts became the no-longer-fine-arts. The second tendency has also to do with another type of expansion which characterizes modern aesthetics. At least since the Romantic Movement there is a tendency to comprehend aesthetic experience as a, and sometimes even the, fundamental type of human experience. Here again, the history of modern art has played a crucial role in this development. Following the revolutionary spirit of the early-romantic movements, the artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century aimed at a fundamental ‘aesthetization’ of the world and at a transformation of human life into a work of art (De Mul 1999: 8f.). In this way the no-longer-fine-arts ultimately became no-longer-artistic-arts. This implies for aesthetics that everything becomes an object for aesthetic interpretation. The domain of aesthetics is no longer restricted to the aesthetic dimension of nature (‘natural beauty’) and specific cultural artifacts (‘artistic beauty’), but covers the world and human life as a whole. In this contribution I want to investigate a phenomenon that is located at the crossroad of these two tendencies: the technological sublime. Although the category of the sublime has a long history, it became a dominant concept in nineteenth and twentieth-century aesthetics. In (post)modern culture however, we witness a fundamental transformation of the experience of the sublime. Although originally the concept of the sublime predominantly referred to a specific rhetoric effect, in the nineteenth century the sublime became strongly connected with the

Structuralist and hermeneutic approaches to development

The philosophy of development presented in this book has its roots in various philosophical traditions. In this chapter we will direct our attention to two of these traditions, structuralism and hermeneutics, in order to situate our metatheory of development in the contemporary philosophical landscape and to show that it is itself the result of a specific course of conceptual development. (In the next chapter we will defend our position against some postmodern critiques directed at earlier structuralist and hermeneutic conceptions of development.)

Ecyclopedias, Hive Minds and Global Brains. A Cognitive Evolutionary Account of Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced, hypermedial encyclopedia, available in more than 290 languages and consisting of no less than 40 million lemmas, is often hailed as a successful example of the “wisdom of the crowds.” However, critics not only point out the lack of accuracy and reliability, uneven coverage of topics, and the poor quality of writing, but also the under-representation of women and non-white ethnicities. Moreover, some critics regard Wikipedia as an example of the development of a hive mind, as we find it in social insects, whose “mind” rather than being a property of individuals is a “social phenomenon,” as it has to be located in the colony rather than in the individual bees. In this chapter an attempt is made to throw some light on this controversy by analyzing Wikipedia from the perspective of the cognitive evolution of mankind. Connecting to neuropsychologist Merlin Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), in which he distinguishes three stages in the cognitive evolution (characterized by a mimetic, a linguistic, and an external symbolic cognition respectively), it is argued that the development of the internet, and crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia in particular, can be understood as a fourth, computer-mediated form of cognition. If we survey the cognitive evolution of hominids and the role played in this evolution by cultural and technical artifacts like writing, the printing press, and computer networks, we witness an increasing integration of individual minds. With the outsourcing and virtualization of the products and processes of thinking to external memories, softbots, and other forms of artificial intelligence, we appear to be at the edge of the materialization of the hive mind in a superhuman or even post-human “global brain.” This chapter ends with some speculative predictions about the future of human cognition.

Psychosis as an evolutionary adaptive mechanism to changing environments

Background: From an evolutionary perspective it is remarkable that psychotic disorders, mostly occurring during fertile age and decreasing fecundity, maintain in the human population. Aim: To argue the hypothesis that psychotic symptoms may not be viewed as an illness but as an adaptation phenomenon, which can become out of control due to different underlying brain vulnerabilities and external stressors, leading to social exclusion. Methods: A literature study and analysis. Results: Until now, biomedical research has not unravelld the definitive etiology of psychotic disorders. Findings are inconsistent and show non-specific brain anomalies and genetic variation with small effect sizes. However, compelling evidence was found for a relation between psychosis and stressful environmental factors, particularly those influencing social interaction. Psychotic symptoms may be explained as a natural defense mechanism or protective response to stressful environments. This is in line with the fact that psychotic symptoms most often develop during adolescence. In this phase of life, leaving the familiar, and safe home environment and building new social networks is one of the main tasks. This could cause symptoms of “hyperconsciousness” and calls on the capacity for social adaptation. Conclusions: Psychotic symptoms may be considered as an evolutionary maintained phenomenon.Research investigating psychotic disorders may benefit from a focus on underlying general brain vulnerabilities or prevention of social exclusion, instead of psychotic symptoms.

The Possibility of an Island

ABSTRACTVarious authors, including Friedrich Nietzsche and George Steiner, have argued that the tragic worldview, as we find it expressed in Greek tragedy, has become an entirely incomprehensible phenomenon for (post)modern man. The claim defended in this article radically opposes this view. It is argued that tragedy can still teach us something today, and maybe even more so now than in the many intervening centuries that separate us from her days of glory in the fifth century BCE. The tragic reveals itself once more in (post) modern society, and nowhere more clearly than in technology, the domain in which we believed the tragic had been domesticated or even eliminated. Referring to the tragic humanism in Michel Houellebecq’s novels The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island it is argued that it is precisely in (post)modern (bio)technologies that we experience the rebirth of the tragic.ABSTRACT Various authors, including Friedrich Nietzsche and George Steiner, have argued that the tragic worldview, as we find it expressed in Greek tragedy, has become an entirely incomprehensible phenomenon for (post)modern man. The claim defended in this article radically opposes this view. It is argued that tragedy can still teach us something today, and maybe even more so now than in the many intervening centuries that separate us from her days of glory in the fifth century BCE. The tragic reveals itself once more in (post) modern society, and nowhere more clearly than in technology, the domain in which we believed the tragic had been domesticated or even eliminated. Referring to the tragic humanism in Michel Houellebecq’s novels The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island it is argued that it is precisely in (post)modern (bio)technologies that we experience the rebirth of the tragic.

Database Architecture: Anthropological Reflections on the Art of the Possible

In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary architectural proposal for a future global society; he didn’t stop for almost twenty years. New Babylon was elaborated in an endless series of models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photo collages, as well as in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. New Babylon envisages a global society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up. Unlike most other representatives of the counter culture of the 1950s and 1960s Constant fully embraced technological progress: ”Technology is the indispensable tool for realizing an experimental collectivism. To seek to dominate nature without the help of technique is pure fiction, as is collective creation without the appropriate means of communication. A renewed, reinvented audiovisual media is an indispensable aid. In a fluctuating community, without a fixed base, contacts can only be maintained by intensive telecommunications” (Constant, 1974). However, it is not only because of the use of ”intensive telecommunications” and computers that New Babylon prefigures the world of cyberspace. It is also, and more profoundly, the flexible database-like structure of New Babylon. The dynamic, endless recombination of architectonical elements that characterize New Babylon expresses the database ontology that rules our present world. It will be argued that ”database architecture” of New Babylon foreshadows the ambiguous qualities of ”recombinant global urbanism.”