A STORY: OF BANKS AND NOMADS
Arzu Iseri, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
"Arzu Iseri" iseria@boun.edu.tr
From IABD Yearbook - presented in Deconstructing Las Vegas Track, April, 2000
ABSTRACT
In economies based on flows of information and symbols, signs and symbols, representation and meaning become crucial. The cyberspace is both a created environment and a means of ‘transportation’, of moving. This paper asserts that technology is a representative of the potential (secret power) for organizations to move to a nomadic existence. In this transition, organizations in the field of financial services deconstruct and reconstruct their identities both consciously and unconsciously while their products and services are becoming ‘fictional’. The notions of ‘nowness’ and ‘nearness’ are redefined in relation to new social interactions generated by cyberspace transactions, suggesting that ‘illusions’ may replace identities in fictional spaces.
Organizing is accepted to be a continuous and fuzzy process. We are constantly being reminded (and persuaded) that organizations are becoming ‘virtual’, acting in ‘cyberspace’, ‘networking’ as a life form. The new ways of organizing calls for new ways of understanding. In economies based on flows of information and symbols, signs and symbols, representation and meaning must enter our analyses. The cyberspace is both a created environment and a means of ‘transportation’, of moving. The binary distinction between image and reality is transcended. An increased level of complexity leaves traces of fear, surprise and admiration (may be all due to the incomprehensibility of practices) in audiences. However, audiences are not simply recipients of new ways of living but also contributors to the very making of them. So workers, managers, clients/consumers, spectators are the actor-writers (i.e. the storywriters who are also acting in the play). The practices of the ‘segmented’ and the ‘segmenters’ interact to define the boundaries of existence and identity, both for themselves and for each other.
Cyber-marketing, e-commerce and one-to-one business are all ‘fictions’ intended to break down the boundary between the organization and the client/consumer. In this context, where fiction ends and something called ‘fact’ begins is hard to discern. The organization has itself been ‘fictionalized’ recently (Parker, 1999). There is also an increasing trend in types of organizations which are not limited by time and space constraints, (‘cybercorps’, Martin, 1996) relying heavily on notions of flexibility as a response to turbulence and ambiguity. In order to survive, corporate dinosaurs must be replaced with smart networks that add value. This invokes notions of self-organization, chaos and complexity – all adding a science fiction gloss to the accelerating pace of change (Smith, 1998). As Land puts it, ‘postmodernity is registered as an explosion of infotech-intermeshed and market dynamised chaos culture’ (1995, 132). Concerns about what it means to be a human, the scientific rationalization that corrupts and destroys fragile humans and the joins between people and things parallel views in actor network theory, most specifically in Cooper and Law’s (1995) formulation of ‘cyborganization’ as a way to express the complicity of people and things in organized contexts. It is suggested that the boundaries between humans and machines are becoming irretrievably blurred (Schroeder, 1994). In the bank advertisements, the phone becomes the bank, and vice versa. Furthermore, the client and the bank coexist in the cyberspace reconstituting each other. By emphasizing the human factor and security in service provision over computers and consequently the internet services, advertisements signify the more destructive view of technology in science fiction.
Technology is a representative of the potential (secret power) for organizations to move to a nomadic existence. Becoming, heterogeneity, continuous variation describe the nomadic notions. Innovations in technological elements and in strategy are well known characteristics of nomads. The nomad distributes people in an open space, one without borders or enclosure. He also moves as a consequence along a trajectory, leaving points behind rather than aiming at the next one. This movement occurs without actually moving but rather in an intensive way and it is mirrored in the practices of Internet banking or telephone banking. In such practices, subjects do not need to move from one point to another but the transaction still takes place in a ‘space’ where flows of information and money are ‘fictionalized’. In nomadic experience, numbers are no longer tools for counting but vehicles for moving. ‘It is the number itself that moves through smooth space... A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering number...’ (Deleuze and Guattari , 1987, 389-390). The number becomes a ‘cipher’ and translates the partial identity of the actor-writer into ‘fiction’ and moves in the open space in the name of the actor-writer. Thus, cyberspace is not reduced to a world of mere numbers, devoid of meaning, but becomes a world of people and their respective knowledge, inclusive of meaning and interpretation, where mental construction of truth as ‘disclosing a world’ (Coyne, 1994) is of primary concern. Therefore, movement occurs without moving, but through a fictional identity.
In this transition to a nomadic existence, organizations in the field of financial services deconstruct and reconstruct their identities both consciously and unconsciously (very similar to the ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ consequences of strategies) while their products and services are becoming ‘fictional’. This view is similar to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the characteristics of the game Go – ‘arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival’ (1987, 353).
The reordering of material practices arises from IT’s capability to create new conditions for social interactions which influence actors’ feelings of ‘inclusion-exclusion’ (belonging to the organizational core or periphery) and ‘presence-absence’ (notion of proximity; authenticity and real experience / distance and abstraction) in relation to the social system. Giddens (1990) discusses two main forms of interaction: one in which the actors are temporally and spatially present (co-presence); two when actors are both temporally and spatially absent (absence). However, new forms of IT are introducing a number of different conditions under which social interactions can take place. For example, actors may interact with each other and also with themselves under imagined time and space (virtual reality), or with others when being temporally present but spatially absent, and vice versa (video conferencing and Internet, respectively). Since change in interaction patterns tends to be more qualitative than quantitative, these notions of inclusion and presence are important to how individuals construct their reality, and to the formation of group norms about ‘nowness’ and ‘nearness’ (Sahay, 1997). In the advertisements, the bank is promoted as not being far away any longer but as near as a phone or a computer. As Fricke suggests, ‘the potential of virtual reality technology to free us from the constraints of time and space appeals to a human longing for transcendence’ (1994, 277). Moving in cyberspace via choice, response, interaction and navigation, enables actors to develop multiple interpretations of similar transactions around the same material technology. Conversely, it has also been proposed that ‘there is no real choice in a mapped interactive matrix’ and the preprogrammed choice creates a false empowerment illusion (Dove, 1994). The actor-writer assumes the power to create worlds and be the God of his enacted universe (Woolley, 1992).
Segmentation can be seen to constitute the ‘norm’ and facilitate the formation of self as a particular sort of subject. The ‘willingness’ of subjects to adopt identities of this form lies, as Curtis (1988) suggests, in the existential anxiety of individualization processes whereby people come to seek a sense of ‘belonging’ but, at the same time and paradoxically, also a sense of distinctiveness and individual autonomy and control of their world. The internalization of such messages is a complex process since there is an implicit tension in seeking belonging and autonomy (e.g. individualism and solidarity – which compete and coexist) (Sturdy and Knights, 1996). The way financial institutions introduce and promote their ‘cyberspace’ services is accepted to incorporate such tensions. The rhetoric of human connection and closeness is used to address the anxieties of disembodiment, loss of physical reality, inability to touch, and a sense of distance or alienation (Dove, 1994). Indeed, market segmentation is viewed as a technology for the regulation of subjectivity (Sturdy and Knights, 1996). Notions of isolation, being consumed and controlled can also be found in a ‘synthetic reality’ of cyberspace referred to as ‘an infinite cage’(Gibson, 1984 ). It is worth noting that cyber is derived from the Greek word kyberman meaning to steer or to control (Benedikt, 1991). Illusions of both control and freedom are focal to understanding interactions in cyberspace.
It is suggested here that ‘illusions’ may replace identities in fictional spaces. Pseudo individuality (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979) pervades financial institutions’ self representations in advertisements. The claims to difference and uniqueness of their internet services are no more well founded than their claims to being different at a more general level. For example, the bank exists as the name written in the web site address (www.bankname.com ), and the ad suggests that the name of the bank makes the difference in the services provided. The text, then, becomes the context. It may further be questioned whether fictional services in fictional spaces make the services or the spaces real. Is there a transference among the image, the imagined and the reality?
" MORPHEUS
If the virtual reality apparatus, as you called it, was wired to all of your senses and controlled them completely, would you be able to tell the difference between the virtual world and the real world?
NEO
You might not, no.
...
CYPHER
The real world. Ha what a joke! "
(Source: Matrix script, http://www.screentalk.org/galleryM.htm#Matrix )
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