Hi Geralidine,
oh gawd. I know Mr. Bromide's original snippet mentioned geographical
whereabouts but my little invite (barring the quote from his
provocation) didn't reiterate that at all and I hoped the suggestion
would introduce some deft handling as indeed it may well prove to do.
So I wasn't seeing contradiction so much as deepening ambiguities -
underpinned by postings from Australia and Sicily and so forth. Well
exactly, how can one have any sense of 'britishness' whatsoever' else
explode its absurd constructions? There is an awkward paradox in the
naming of this list, but hey why not have some wicked fun with that
fact?
I see these windows as liminal, both 'on' and 'off' in local and
translocal contexts. Much possibility for syntactical composition to
be exploited thereby. I'm gonna type in a couple of quotes from
Steven Johnson's 'Interface Culture - How New Technology Transforms
The Way We Create and Communicate'.
'If Matteo Ricci could recall an entire biblical treatise by
spatializing the language, turning words into architecture, then
surely the transformation of bits and bytes into a virtual space must
augment our data-recollection skills. The relationship seems simple
enough: spatial information is easier to navigate than textual
information, and windows are just a tool for seeing that space, like
a looking glass or a microscope.
Although the explanation sounds plausible, it doesn't correspond to
the way most of us use windows in our everyday computing lives. The
window actually has little to do with remembering where something is,
the way we might remember where we last saw the car keys, or the
route to a friend's house. Spatial mnemonics are an essential part of
the modern graphical interface, of course, but they're mainly
concentrated in things like the menu bar and the location of desktop
icons such as the trash can . . .
[the] shift from modes to windows was a massive advance in ease of
use - so massive, in fact, that it is now difficult to imagine a
digital world without windows. Creative transformations of this
magnitude tend to have secondary effects on those of us living under
their spell, particularly when the conventions are so familiar, so
second nature that they become transparent to us. (Think about the
way those "memory palaces" shaped the structure of Dante's
'Inferno'.) For cyber-philosophers like Sherry Turkle, the windowed
imagination is emblematic of our larger "postmodern" condition: the
unified field of traditional post-Enlightenment thinking fractured
out into a hundred points of view, each of them equally valid. The
passage from the fixed system of the command line to the more
anarchic possibilities of the window follows the same route traveled
by Western Philosophy: from the stable, unified truth of Kant and
Descartes to the relativism and ambiguity of Nietzshe and Deleuze.
The window, for Turkle, is a way of thinking in multiplicities, as
all good postmodernists are supposed to do. "multiple viewpoints,"
Turkle writes, "call forth a new moral discourse . . . The culture of
simulation may help us achieve a vision of multiple but integrated
identity whose flexibility, resilience, and capacity for joy comes
from having access to our many selves."' Johnson does go on to
critique this lewd dystopic prancing through Sven Birkerts
consideration of the window not as a sign of "multiple selves" but
rather of attention deficit disorder. The ideas laid out here though
might feed into what I hoped underlay the point of suggesting
'whereabouts'.
Now - as to 'doorways', o but there's the bell . . .
love and love
cris
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