> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 5:04 PM, anniea <[email protected]> wrote: > (ENG)* Collaboration* on and via the Internet has been a hot topic for > some time. Now everyone tends to see the Net more as a space for > conservative individual self-representation and mediation. I wonder about > this. What makes it so difficult? Why doesn’t, does it work? Why are > people > less interested?>> >> Any thoughts on this from you netbehaviourists? >> If yes, thanks a lot in advance!
There's more collaboration than ever before, but it's with Facebook and Twitter rather than with other human beings. This looks more socialised than web 1.0 because the machinery is hidden behind a slick veneer. But so are the people... The barriers to entry of the old email-and-homepages net art era are easy to paint as having been more exclusive than web 2.0's easy sign-up. This doesn't explain why there's less collaboration, though, you'd think it should be the opposite. I think that having to be able to deal with *people* enough to find out how to code html, get some space on a server, and ftp a file or set up an email client, or locate a mailing list and subscribe, was more socialising than just having Facebook template up the same information about you as about everyone else. You had to be able to find and communicate with *people* who knew about the technology, and you this led to a shared body of technical and social experience. Having tasks that everyone had to do meant that everyone had to start out by collaborate on them. With that intital collaboration established, you could continue from there. Second Life is an interesting halfway house between web 1.0 / web 2.0. It's reasonably simple to log in as a porn-star-look-alike, but much harder to build things. Eventually a Facebook-style sausage machine will emerge that means you don't have to struggle productively with the medium, you can just be cool like everyone else instantly. And the people who use it will laugh at the old prim hackers and their ignorant, restrictive ways. Web 2.0 is a race to the bottom for individualism. Everyone is expressing their recognisably individual selves (sic) in a global context. The pressure to conform is much greater than just for an immediate social group (even where that is the limit of someone's personal Facebook interaction). When the pressure to conform requires that you choose reified, consumable signifiers of "individuality", or even that you package any actual individuality into an anti-individualistic presentational schema, it becomes much harder to laugh like all the other cool kids at the twinkly star backgrounds on old homepages. At least there were figure and ground relations then. There aren't any on Facebook. There's not enough distance between technology and society any more for art computing or net art to continue as before, therefore there are not the tasks to collaborate on. We need to move from collapsing that distance to recreating it, or to problematising the closeness, or to finding a new distance where it now exists. We'll need to collaborate on that. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
