I think something that is quite salient is Sterling’s ahistoricity of the Net, even multigenerationally. Secondly, what does it mean to be a “Digital Native”, versus a technonative, net.native or Web native. For example I believe the recent post-internet wave of art is actually Post-Web as much as people in many developing countries believe Facebook is the net. For example, in my case, I was raised on Star Trek at a very young age, got my first electronics set in 1972, my first home computer in 1978, was in the _Internet_ via Bitnet, Kermit, and UseNet in 1984, ten years before the World Wide Web. Would this make me a digital native?
Secondly, I emphasize the ahistoricity of networked culture, lest we forget the Telematic Age, McLuhan’s discourses before that, and even telegraphy. In addition, in the late 90’s I remember papers on emergent taxonomies of concurrent channels of communication, emergent net.discourses, pervasive computing, the erosion of history in the net archive (actually, a friend used to be a migrator between systems, and there were many interesting stories about corporate migrations). So, in many ways, I feel like half of a paragraph in the conference manifesto has been talked about periodically for the past fifty years. There are new elements, though. I feel that social media and the rise of infopower like the Arab Spring and ISIS, big data, stacks and Baynesian algorithms typify our time. In 2006, I wrote that the pixel would become a cultural choice as of 1998, when Close (the king of the Cartesian) went to Nash Editions and apparently didn’t like the process, and inkjet printers of the day began to stop using stochastic dithering to simulate continuous tone. People like Jon Cates and Cory Arcangel surely have borne this out. My point is that, as in a recent Rhizome panel, one speaker said that there wasn’t much Internet art before 2000, where I’d send Peter Weibel, Benjamin Weil and Philip Pocock forth to talk about ZKM Karlsruhe’s Net.Condition exhibition as well as works being in the Whitney at least in 1996. Or I could dig up some old RTMark paraphernalia from the mid-90’s… So, what does it mean to be a net.native, or any other taxonomy? How do we define a historiography of networked culture? I think Foucault would find the Wayback Machine both problematic and interesting, and especially so in a culture where the foundations of the archive are ephemeral by nature? My point is that certainly our situation is fraught at best, and that even among the best of us, there is an amnesia that is endemic to the fact that our archives are, as I said, largely ephemeral in the age of the digital. This is why I am working on the Open SSTV Archive to preserve some of the first digital video art, and to delve into digital culture before the emergence of the World Wide Web. In net terms, I know I’m venerable, even in my early 50’s, but as Oliver Grau has so aptly framed the naming of the Media Art History conferences as a play on the “re-“, or ritornello, I think even now, we need to keep in mind that the digital spans at least 200 years, and that networked technologies span over a hundred, Computer art was investigated by FLUXUS artists, Knowlton, Vanderbeek, et al in the mi/late 60’s and Internet culture emeged about 35 years ago. We’re not that new, although some aspects of our culture are. I think that’s what fascinates me about this discussion.
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