Talk:Exe0.1 Winnie Soon
Hi Winnie --
I love your essay, it is a great take on a topic that is fascinating to me. Particularly salient for me is how you've identified that it's not just the fact of interruption, but the nature of it -- as a contrast to the planned break of television. I think obfuscation is key aspect for you, and I like how you've touched on all of these levels in which buffering is present, from signal processing to packet assembly.
Regarding obfuscation, I do think there is something more specifically compelling in this than the "discontinuous temporality" that you focus on, which is fascinating but also so vast in its applicability. In particular, I'd actually like to know more about the throbber itself -- why this shape? what is its relationship to Apple's beachball, or the wristwatch icon, or real clocks? is it that it's providing some proxy for continuous motion? I'm also interested in the question "is it broken?" which hovers over buffering when it takes too long -- what are those thresholds of tolerance and attention? Is there a suspension of disbelief that takes place when we are willing to go with the flow? I'm intrigued by this phrase that you used: the "merely noticeable."
From a technical standpoint, so much of the web is now programmed using asynchronous front end loading, which is another layer of buffering -- javascript libraries, Node.js, Tornado, nginx and load balancing -- all of these technical objects on the software level also express what you're talking about, and are very immediate concerns for programmers which might be useful for your essay.
--Brianh (talk) 16:21, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Dear Winnie,
Thanks for your text, I enjoyed reading it. It has an interesting topic and object of research: the throbber as an icon of network transmissions and transactions. It is weird how pervasive and meaningless (infinite circular motion) this representation of “execution” is. I think your text unpacks the temporal problematic quite well: there is indeed more to the throbber than meets the eye.
You touch upon very important aspects of computing in your text, and there is three points I want to highlight here:
- The first one is about interruptions. You are using it, rightly, as both a phenomenon (William’s “natural break”) and as an operational event (micro-temporal interrupt). I believe it would be interesting to further develop the latter a little bit as the notion of “interrupt” is central to modern multitasked / multithreaded (time shared) CPU architectures and something that could potential bolster your argument that there is no continuous time in computing but rather discontinuous temporalities (micro — CPU interrupt — and “macro” — William’s “natural break”).
- The second as to do with the “coupling of storage and transfer” (aka buffer) as it relates to network transfers. This is indeed a very complex topic which has been central to the development of TCP (see Van Jacobson’s RFC1323 for example). Building on your notion of code “inter-actions,” I believe it would be interesting to highlight the relationship between network delays (time) and buffer or window sizes (“space”) and discuss how/why these are synchronised between the client and the server (flow control — and packets that are “in-flight” in the network). I realise this is complex, but I think it could highlight the non-linearity, multi-rhythmical and dynamics of TCP’s inter-actions / remote executions across “sites.”
- The third as to do with the “coupling of storage and transfer” (aka buffer) as it relates to (media) playback. I like the section in your text where you talk about the discontinuous rates between writes (storage) and reads (removals), which also highlights the non-linearity of "playback buffering," so to speak, leaving the potential of what you call “silences” to emerge. I believe it would be interesting to also discuss how network buffers and playback buffers inter-act with each other, hence further exemplifying the various asymmetrical temporalities and rhythms (network “packet” time vs phenomenological “frame” time - i.e 30 fps) that ought to synchronised with each other across “layers.”
Finally I think it makes sense to capitalise on the contingency of the “event of the throbber” (when threshold 't' is crossed), as it relates to this complex temporal asymmetrical inter-actions and coupling between various machines, code segments and buffers, something that the icon itself refers to while spinning and yet, at the same time, normalises and erases as an hypnotic circular signifier.
Hi Winnie, I thought your article is a good challenge to the omnipresence of the network as a flow and revealing the staccato of data transfer. It is a refreshing argument and to carry it out with the process of buffering and the icon of a throbber is a very interesting way to approach it. I have a few comments which ask clarifications to certain concepts I felt were left little unexplained.
Microtemporality is important to your argument and it would be useful to have a short summery of how Ernst understands it. Defining that would help understand how you use temporality and how it is different from Ernst’s. it seems that ‘micro’ is generally important in your text: microdecisions, micro things as well as microtemporality; it would be good to have more information about how they connect in your text and why they are important.
You seem to bring together the icon and the process, which I think is an interesting focus, but again it seems little unclear why the two relate and how. Perhaps it would be useful to make it clearer that you look at these phenomena as forms of entanglement following Barad, if I understand your argument correctly. If that’s the case, it would be helpful to work on the connection by explaining why they should be considered as entanglement and therefore what it implies.
Also I don’t know what ‘cold gazing of the operational logics of data buffering’ is. Does it relate to some technical term?
When you talk about inter-actions, do you mean what Barad defines as intra-actions?
I really like your argument about discontinuous temporality and the throbber as representing it. This seems to connect to what you define as ‘silence’ and ‘absence’ of data packets. It would be useful to have more links in this argumentation and bit more explanation about how they differ and what they are. Also social unreality is a great concept. I am guessing what you mean by that, but it would be good to be more clear of what you mean by it. I believe you see social unreality to be connected with ‘discontinuous temporality’ and it would be helpful for the reader to know how, if that's the case.
Magda --Magda (talk) 23:36, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi Winnie,
I am really drawn in by your paper on the "throbber" and your description of how it emerges from the interference of inter-actions in the network.
It strikes me that there is also a significant affective mattering of the throbber, that you convey in the images used in your paper. It would be interesting to draw this out, alongside the technical and historical cuts. As you describe the throbber is a "cultural throbber icon", therefore I would be interested to hear more about they ways it has come to matter culturally (or not), and how this extends your argument of temporal discontinuity? Perhaps there is a relation between the queerness of discontinuity, as outlined by Barad, and queering of the throbber icon in network culture (such as pizza throbber) for instance.
Helen