Re: nettime The Society of the Unspectacular
I'll propose a purely information-theory and somewhat mechanical answer to this issue. As the art is effected through the exposure to information (which will hopefully fire some unused synapses and modify the future behaviour of its customers,) the real change with the networked society is that the noise floor of the information intake is going up. Until up to few decades ago, information feed was mostly a matter of choice - one would go to the church, read a book, watch something on the screen, peep through the hole, etc. Today the choice is mostly about which information gets stopped - our decision efforts are about what we don't want to find out - we are burning brain cycles not for seeking but for defense. Getting less shit is considered to be a success. There are few resources left for finding gems. It's like wartime - you are lucky to find uncontaminated food and bullet-proof shelter, there is no time for chefs and architects. Unlike regular war where most eventually get pissed at the carnage, it is not clear that there is a viable opposition to the information carpet bombing. It is clear, however, that while it's going on you can forget about art. end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: ... # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Society of the Unspectacular
We all like to stand on the corpses of giants; it makes us seem taller, but one should note, that it makes the footing mushy. A superficial attachment of the historical limits of the situationists to a particular set of technologies or their social configurations is very old and very tired news, nor is it particularly accurate. The same condition of pseudo-agency, which the situationists described as the spectacle-once again: not a collection of images but a relationship among people mediated by images-can be seen to reign in the inter-passivity of the internet. What once reigned in the corridors of domestic architecture devoted to worshipping television, now reigns on the screens of laptops in Starbuckstm worldwide. The commodity form still reigns, but it reigns as information. Its masters may have become more shadowy, but they exist. What's the difference between banks of films, tapes, and servers? Youtube has, in fact, become yet another parasitic distribution medium for the materials of the spectacle, the way tv became a distribution medium for cinema; Youtube is now a distribution medium for tv. There is revolutionary potential in the new media--it should never be referred to without quotation marks-, lest it be naturalized i.e. reified--remains. It was there in the old media, but not in its dna, in its social use. It was just more difficult of access. And if you made something, the community of individuals who would see it, would likely be small as your work would get lost amidst the noise of the spectacle--advertising. While there is interest in the fact that your postage stamp sized video may be seen by hundreds of thousands, it will still be accompanied by the ads in which google or youtube embeds your material; like those embedded journalists, who became infected by the spirit of the mission. You remain part of the spectacle of pseudo-agency, just the way you did when you bought the star commodities advertised on tv. The difference is the more direct appeal to narcissism, in order to seduce you into producing the visual trappings proper to selling products--think of the cost saving to industry. The labor of commercial making has simply been displaced on to the users of Youtube, keeping in its familiar place the relationship between those who think they are consuming and those who are actually consuming them. We are again the authors of our own slavery. The search engines which make it possible for others to find your work on Youtube are simply the latest attempt of the basic motors of capitalism to observe the myth Marx refers to in a footnote to the beginning of Kapital: capital is predicated on the myth that buyers have an encyclopediac knowledge of commodities. Of course there is potential for subversion. The way google bombing can work, or browser sit-ins, or the way the do-it-yourself car ads were subverted for statements about the damage done to the environment, but the dream of being famous for 15 minutes--is it still that long, Andy?--is just another phantasm of the unconscious of capital. Plus ça change... Keith Sanborn # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Society of the Unspectacular
On Sunday, 10. June 2007 19:42, Morlock Elloi wrote: If empowerment of the public by cheap self-publishing has demonstrated anything, it is that a vast majority has nothing to say, lacks any detectable talent and mimicks TV in publishing the void of own life (but unlike TV they derive no income from commercials.) If media are made by, and for, one's own community (which might be very small) then talent and excitement are measured very differently. The material on youtube etc is boring, mainly, I guess, because it was not made for you. Most of us produce lots of stuff that is boring to all but a hand full of people. But to them, it's great. It's the stuff that used to be called private, but is now online because it's the easiest way to get to the intended audience of 5 (or 500, or 5000). So I wouldn't say that the classical notion of public has changed in the sense that it got fragmented around new media. It's new media giving content-free personal smalltalk the ability to be globally visible (not that anyone looks at it in practice, but they could, in theory.) The technical possibility that everyone can watch it is pointing into the totally wrong direction. It's doesn't mean that everyone should watch it, it only means that the size of the audience is not determined on the level of the technical protocol but can scale freely up or down. This does, in some from, lead to a fragmentation of the public, not the least because the public in modern democracies was constituted through the narrow bandwidth of mass media. Though I'm not sure if this is the reason, as Eric suspects, for the very manifest trend of governments withdrawing from public discourse. Yet, for whatever reason, there seems to be a inverse relationship between the degree of privacy of ordinary people and the secrecy of governments. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
