Re: nettime Phil Agre: Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Soc...
On 20/09/13 10:20 AM, newme...@aol.com wrote: Television has *satellites* that BEAM the same propaganda to everyone. The Internet does not. As a result, MEMES don't work any more! (Sorry, Kalle, you can't advertise your way to a revolution anymore.) If we accept meme theory then memes predate mass media. Neil Stephenson had fun with this idea, Susan Blackmore made some more or less testable predictions based on it. Indeed mass media is a meme The advertising imperative in monetizing social media does tend to the condition of broadcast. Although as William Gibson says reliance on broadcasting is now the very definition of a technologically backward society. I do like (or possibly remember) the idea of a Madison Avenue advertising company being tasked with fomenting a revolution. They couldn't come up with anything worse than actual (counter-)revolutionaries. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Phil Agre: Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Soc...
Nettime: Citizens would grow up accustomed to having a public voice, to receiving intellectual responses from others, and to articipating in a global intellectual culture. The cultural conditions of democratic intellectual life will have been achieved. Sorry (to Phil Agre) but this is nonsense. There is no public. There is no global intellectual culture. There are no citizens (of the world). There is no democracy. There are no morals. All we have is a *technological* environment -- which is in MASSIVE transition from one based on television (i.e. the one that invented all these 20th century *memes*) to one based on *digital* technology. Television has *satellites* that BEAM the same propaganda to everyone. The Internet does not. As a result, MEMES don't work any more! (Sorry, Kalle, you can't advertise your way to a revolution anymore.) Yes, people were still talking that way back in 2001 when this essay was published. Now we (should) know better . . . !! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 9/20/2013 11:17:47 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, nett...@kein.org writes: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/intellectual.html Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Phil Agre: Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Soc...
On 20/09/13 19:20, newme...@aol.com wrote: Nettime: Citizens would grow up accustomed to having a public voice, to receiving intellectual responses from others, and to articipating in a global intellectual culture. The cultural conditions of democratic intellectual life will have been achieved. Sorry (to Phil Agre) but this is nonsense. There is no public. There is no global intellectual culture. There are no citizens (of the world). There is no democracy. There are no morals. All we have is a *technological* environment What part of the technological environment prompted you to apologise twice in this email? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Phil Agre: Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Soc...
MP: What part of the technological environment prompted you to apologise twice in this email? The part that replaced the mass with the *individual* . . . !! While the MEMETIC notions of democracy and revolution were promoted by mass-media (therefore, to no body), digital technology has *flipped* memes into something much more personal. Phil Agre (who I knew) and Kalle Lasn (who I don't know) strike me as people who have tried to personalize these memes, so it occurred to me that they deserved an apology for their efforts. It's not their fault that it didn't turn out as they had hoped . . . Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
