Hi Charlotte,
while it is surely interesting to recall individual posts I think it is
also importatt to point out that many of those posting could only do so
because they had access to the net and that in itself was nothing to be
taken for granted. A great role in that respect plaid Zamir net which
started in 1992 and which connected peace activists in former
Yugoslavian states ... there is a wikipedia entry about it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZaMirNET
Another, less well known story is how Serbian hackers ensured email
connectivity for civil society at a time when Serbia was under
international embargo and didn't even have a domain name.
As I have tried to point out in the past, without much success, the
material layer of networking also matters. Arts and humanities scholars
have a tendency to ascribe too much importance to what you could call
the semantic and symbolic layer. No email from Serbia would have found
its way to the syndicate list withoute having a route to travel on.
Those routes are provided by people who also have cultural and political
ideas, so that those human-technical assemblages also have meaning, if
you so want, something that should also be considered, hwever, without
tipping over into a one-sided materialism
all best
Armin
On 10/06/2013 12:40 PM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
> So far we've had little mention of the Syndicate list, which was extensively
> chronicled in a post to Nettime in 2001 by founding members Inke Arns and
> Andreas Broeckmann:
> http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0111/msg00077.html.
>
> One of the things that I believe was so important to this list at the time
> (and perhaps even more so with some historical perspective) was the voice it
> gave people of the former Yugoslavia during its civil war. It's common place
> now to talk about how platforms like Twitter break through political
> censorship Iran and Egypt are good recent examples but on a list like
> the Syndicate, such freedom of speech could be both a benefit and a
> detractor, as Arns and Broeckmann note. I'd love to know if anyone involved
> with the list at this time would like to recall individual posts that
> illustrate this difficult period.
>
> And also more generally if anyone would venture an account of their
> relationship with the Syndicate what collaboration its led to, and what
> it was like to lose it especially in light of the comments we've already
> had about how much of loss the Rhizome Raw list was.
>
> Inke and Andreas, I've BCC'd you in case you have time to offer anything to
> this discussion on Media Art Curating I can forward your responses if you
> are not current subscribers/are pushed for time. You'll find more on this
> month's discussions here:
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=new-media-curating
>
> All the best,
>
> Charlotte
>
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