Hi Simon, I'll look at the report of course. You might look at Sartre's
notion of seriality in Critique of Dialectical Reason for a philosophical
discussion backing up the points you make. I may be living in somewhat of
a dreamworld here to be sure, since there are so many projects I see
happening all the time, including what might be considered maverick AR
which is pretty unsponsored. It doesn't appear to be the monolith you're
seeing, but then I'm also looking more at the creative / new media
activities going on.
More later, we're getting ready to go to Pennsylvania, the flood waters
are receding and I'm meeting my brother there to go through the family
house etc.
Apologies, Alan
On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Simon Biggs wrote:
I hope you are right about the net becoming more open source and heterogeneous
Alan. But my experience leads me to think otherwise. I can't speak of what is
happening in the States but here in the UK (and the EU) government is going to
great lengths to work with industry to find ways to monetise the net. This is
about big business, who have the resources government needs to make its
policies happen, and small companies (from one person micro-startups to SME's
with maybe 100 employees) working closely with government policy makers and
various research agencies to reformulate how people access and use the net. A
recent and substantial shift is the advent of mobile smart media. These
handheld devices are undeniably powerful and allow all sorts of things to be
done that are difficult with conventional computers (like GPS, AR, etc) but a
key difference in these devices is that they are not computers in the sense
that Turing proposed the computer. They are not programmable system
s but client devices. You need to programme them with a computer and load the software onto the client.
Policy makers, both in government and commerce, love this. I've been at meetings where "suits"
debate the importance of the development of such devices in ensuring control of access to and use of the net.
To a small degree they are thinking about how these consumer technologies make it more difficult for
"alternate" or "perverse" uses of the net to be sustained but mainly they are thinking
about IP and money. They want to make sure that centralised authorship (the means of production), which has
been under threat since the advent of the PC and the internet, can be re-constructed and traditional
producer/consumer relations re-established. These are people from News International, the BBC, Pearson,
Apple, Google, Microsoft and various corporations of diverse character. But they all share this focus on
regaining control of IP. A good place to begin in comprehending what gover
nment is seeking to do, in complicity with such corporations, is to read the
Hargreaves report (link below). Here you will find that things like co-creation
are identified as emerging trends but you will note that by this they do not
mean an enabled populace liberating themselves through creative activity on the
net but a supplicant audience hooked on a centrally produced media product
through their sublimated engagement in it. Here you can keep the image of Julie
Christie in Fahrenheit 451, engaging in false interactive dialogue with TV
characters who are actually not aware of her existence, to the fore. It is
beautifully tragic moment which sums up so much of our contemporary media -
along with the drug overdose that follows and her complete forgetting of
events. I'm afraid that this will be definitive version and people like you and
me will end up in the forest, living amongst the detritus of a lost society -
but as I said, I hope you are right and I'm wrong.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf
best
Simon
On 10 Sep 2011, at 01:51, Alan Sondheim wrote:
I'm not sure how that was decided, i.e. her importance. Universities here
tended to know her by which I mean media people.
Of course the net's different but not all that different - I think of
Wikileaks for example. It's just that a lot of the edgier stuff has gone
underground which is natural; the demographics favors of course average
users for whom Fb or + are gods of sorts.
You're right about students not knowing the early net, but that's also the
job of universities, to critically deepen the understanding of tools and
conditions we're working with/under. Usenet's an obvious example.
Fidonet's an example of a different form of organization for social media
- and one that might become increasingly necessary in the future.
I do use Fb a lot, as well as the lounge.espdisk.com blog, Eyebeam's blog,
who knows what else, + I guess. But it's my understanding, say, of the
phenomenology and promise of lists that makes me able to deal critically
with them.
I do wonder what the stats are for email lists and how they're gathered -
do you know? A list like Poetics is going full blast, although I have
problems with what 'going' means in that context. I'm also curious about
IRC stats and newsgroups, since some of the last are functioning on a
highly technical level.
Finally, I find it problematic that you find the net 'dominated by big
business, etc., that is going to be more like that' (pardon the bad
quoting). I don't feel any of us know how things are going to develop; we
all have our contacts, habitus, invisible colleges, networkings, etc., and
radically different experiences and predictions as a result. I see a far
more open source and open net coming, but then I'm dealing with AR and at
Eyebeam, hactivism people. I think the net in fact is getting too large to
characterize uniformly, just as "America" tends to resist (at least from
inside) generality, beyond the problematic of formal governance.
- Alan
On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Simon Biggs wrote:
Who was voting? There was a period, back when NN was active, when the
Net was smaller and less commercialised. In that context a certain
sample of users would have known NN and voted for her. Nowadays the net
is a different universe, dominated by big business and government
policy. It is only going to be more like that. It is the infrastructure
of the knowledge economy - and government and business have a particular
understanding of what the term economy means: making money and creating
jobs/consumers. As I often work at the juncture of academic research
(into the internet), government policy and commercial development it is
clear to me that the net's future is nothing like its past - and the
future is now.
My students have little or no knowledge of the early net. They know it
through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, BBC, apps and other commercial and/or
custom portals. They haven't the faintest what The Well is, much less
Nettime, Thing or 7-11. In the case of 7-11 you cannot teach them about
it as the archives and other traces have been so effectively removed.
Only individual artist's documentation exists - but that isn't the same.
7-11 was a creative community/happening and it would be great to present
it as it was then, in its entirety. I only have my own archive (probably
25% of the material) to show them.
Many of our researchers also have little knowledge of these early
examples of net culture. Some do (the artists, media nuts,
anthropologists, etc) but those working between academe and industry
(which is most) simply aren't interested. They see the net as the
saviour of TV and publishing. They recognise it is fundamentally
different - but their response is not to consider cultural alternatives
but to work out new business models (eg: social media means social
gaming linked to a network TV series). I'm sorry it is like that, but
it's how it is. At this point we probably need an under-net, and it is
possible that list serves (like usenet, almost a subject for media
archeology) are that.
Ana is right that list serves are dying. The number of people on the net
has exploded but the numbers using list serves have shrunk. Many
artistic communities that once communicated via list serves have moved
to blog, nings or Facebook groups. Google+ Circles, despite the failure
of Google Wave, are the next development. Alan, you make good use of
that...
best
Simon
On 9 Sep 2011, at 17:48, Alan Sondheim wrote:
She was actually voted one of the 25 most important women on the Net. I
had some dealing with her. And everyone I knew, knew her - she might have
been better known in the US; NATO55 was in a lot of places.
On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Simon Biggs wrote:
Seems to overstate both the worth of turn of the Century network culture (we
are talking about a few hundred people here on a list serve or two) and NN.
More like a sub-cultural splinter group... Of all the people on the internet I
doubt more than 0.01% have ever heard of NN. Hardly infamous.
(but as NN is eternally prescient I am sure I will now be burned to a crisp ;)
best
Simon
On 9 Sep 2011, at 14:25, marc garrett wrote:
Netochka Nezvanova.
One of the most famous and infamous EccentricCharacters in
turn?of?the?21st Century Western artistic NetworkCulture, Netochka
Nezvanova (aka N.N., antiorp, integer, Irena Sabine Czubera) remains an
enigma to many. Widely believed to be an IdentityCollective?, Netochka
Nezvanova is a PenName named after the title character in [an early
unfinished Fyodor Dostoevsky novel] whose name means "nameless nobody"
in Russian. The identity always presents itself as female, though it may
not be in reality. Despite the meaning of her moniker, N.N. has coveted
attention and recognition like few others on the Internet.
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/NetochkaNezvanova
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eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt
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eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/
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web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt
==
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web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt
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