Compression, Encryption Index: Cultural and Aesthetic Transformations in Digital Circulation

我的论文旨在阐明三种无处不在的数字技术的文化和美学功能：压缩，加密和索引。至少从20世纪90年代开始，数字技术已经成为文化生产和流通的组成部分，但它们仍然被许多消费者甚至研究文化的人所掩盖。这在一定程度上要归功于技术的复杂性和排他性的行话，但我认为，也是因为它们的影响最近才开始巩固。数字媒体的一个基本要素是其互操作性：在代码的共享文本基础上，数字形式失去了它们曾经与其生产和流通技术的独特关系。以前，当“数字”被前数字形式的传真复制品所主导时，很容易想象这是一种抽象，是物质基础和形式之间的断裂。渐渐地，数字的物质基础已经开始通过新兴的综合和形式、新的文本和经济逻辑来维护自己。这些新的形式和逻辑对任何希望在当代流通中创造或理解艺术和文化的人来说都是直接关注的。由于数字技术应用于各种形式，它们代表了对既定学科区分（文学研究，电影研究等）的挑战。它们的美学必须通过类似的多样形式来解读。它们的改革一直在持续，因此我的分析将离散的协议和平台结合起来，形成更全面的描述。压缩、加密和索引并不意味着对数字流通进行详尽或全面的描述。相反，它们提供了进入其无处不在且通常不为人所知的过程的途径。压缩是减小（代码、文本或对象）大小的过程。我认为，自20世纪90年代以来，数据压缩已经造成了流通时间的显着减少，并已作为媒体丰富和感知文化加速（马克思所谓的“消灭空间通过时间”）的技术先决条件。从通信理论到压缩的应用方法，我将追踪它们的过程和更广泛的经济压缩之间的联系。像压缩一样，加密涉及数据的基本重写：使其难以辨认任何未经授权的用户。如果压缩寻求最大限度地提高文化生产和流通，加密则寻求引导和掩盖其传播。我认为，它允许了新形式的证券化流通，在这种流通中，访问和使用都由专有逻辑编码。这对文物的商品地位产生了根本性的影响，文物不再单独出售，而是被当作一种实用工具，所有权在基本数据层面上得到了确认。与此同时，加密是抵抗性做法和非法流通形式（如影子图书馆）的核心。搜索引擎现在是网络访问的主要点。但在他们能够提供结果之前，他们必须整合一个指数。从技术上讲，索引是整合和组织项目的过程。它形成了一个双重过程：爬虫机器人解析文本并将其转换为标准，然后用于组织结果页面。这两个进程都值得注意。爬网程序识别、集成和抽象项到记录中。对通用记录的追求导致爬虫（人类和机器）将任何他们可以集成到索引中的东西。索引（尤其是谷歌）被复制为结果页面，它们运行着自己的美学系统，其价值判断策划着数字空间。

My thesis seeks to clarify the cultural and aesthetic functions of three ubiquitous digital technologies: compression, encryption and indexing.Digital technologies have been integral to cultural production and circulation since at least the 1990s, and yet they remain obscured to many who consume or even study culture. This is thanks in part to technical complexity and exclusionary jargon, but also, I argue, because their effects have only recently begun to solidify. A fundamental element of digital media is its interoperability: in the shared textual basis of code, digital forms lose the unique relationships they once held to the technologies of their production and circulation. Previously, when "the digital" was dominated by facsimile reproductions of pre-digital forms, it was easy to imagine this as an abstraction, a rupture between material base and form. Gradually, though, the digital's material base has begun to assert itself through emergent syntheses and forms, new textualities and economic logics.These new forms and logics are of immediate concern to anyone looking to make or understand art and culture in its contemporary circulation. Since digital technologies are applied across forms, they represent a challenge to established disciplinary distinctions (literary studies, film studies, etc.) and their aesthetics must be read through a similar diversity of forms. Their reformations have been continuous, so my analysis joins discrete protocols and platforms to form its more general account. Compression, encryption and indexing are not meant to form an exhaustive or totalizing account of digital circulation. Rather, they offer routes into its ubiquitous and often poorly understood processes.Compression is the process of reducing size (of code, text or an object). I argue that since the 1990s data compression has caused significant reductions in circulation time and has functioned as a technical pre-requisite of media abundance and perceived cultural acceleration (what Marx called the "annihilation of space through time"). Working from communication theory to applied methods of compression, I will trace the links between their processes and wider economic compressions.Like compression, encryption involves the basic rewriting of data: making it illegible to any non-authorised user. If compression seeks to maximise cultural production and circulation, encryption seeks to channel and obscure its dataflows. I will argue that it has allowed new forms of securitised circulation, where access and use are both codified by proprietary logics. This has had a radical impact on the commodity status of cultural objects, which are no longer sold discretely but treated like a utility, with ownership inscribed at the basic level of data. At the same time, encryption is central to resistive practices and illicit forms of circulation, such as shadow libraries. Search engines are now a primary point of web access. But before they can offer results, they must consolidate an index. Technically, indexing is the process of integrating and organising items. It forms a dual process: a crawler-bot parses text and translates it into criteria, which are then used to organise a results page. Both processes warrant attention. Crawlers identify, integrate and abstract items into records. The pursuit of universal records leads crawlers (human and machine) to integrate anything they can into indexes. Reproduced as a results page, indexes (especially Google) operate their own system of aesthetics, whose value judgements curate digital space.