>>>>> "Would this make me a digital native?² @Patrick there is lots to respond to here, but in the spirit of trying to keep my posts short and sweet, I¹ll hone in on the idea of the digital native. This term is essentially a device for defining an emerging culture that has never lived in the non-digital world. Unlike you and me, they can¹t remember what is was like to use a tape answering machine, play a cassette, use a corded phone. They are not familiar with a world without a smart phone, text messaging, Skyping, Facebook, etc. There are many of us who were media literate at a young age, but we grew up in a world where television was the primary mass medium, many of us were born before the Internet even existed.
So what I am leading to here is that the digital native, born into the present day world, has a very different sense of reality, a different understanding of a global culture, of information, of privacy, of social relations, of themselves, and their own mutable identity. This is what it means, to me, to be a digital native, to not know any other world than the one we currently live in. And of course, as you reference, the grasp of a larger media history is allusive to the digital native: it is up to us to teach them this perspective, but it is up to them, to teach us theirs. Randall I think something that is quite salient is Sterling¹s ahistoricity of the Net, even multigenerationally. Secondly, what does it mean to be a ³Digital Native², 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, McLuhan¹s discourses before that, and even telegraphy. In addition, in the late 90¹s 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 didn¹t 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 wasn¹t much Internet art before 2000, where I¹d send Peter Weibel, Benjamin Weil and Philip Pocock forth to talk about ZKM Karlsruhe¹s 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-90¹s 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 I¹m venerable, even in my early 50¹s, but as Oliver Grau has so aptly framed the naming of the Media Art History conferences as a play on the ³re-³, 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 60¹s and Internet culture emeged about 35 years ago. We¹re not that new, although some aspects of our culture are. I think that¹s what fascinates me about this discussion. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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