Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 15:10:58 +1100
From: Ned Rossiter <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NEW BOOK: politics of a digital present
To: The Cyber-Society-Live mailing list is a moderated discussion list
for
those interested <[log in to unmask]>
[dear John - we'd appreciate it if this could be posted on
cyber-society....when it gets back up after a well earnt break! best
wishes, Ned]
=46IBRECULTURE READER - ORDERING INFORMATION
Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh,
Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digitial Present: An Inventory
of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne:
=46ibreculture Publications, 2001).
Paperback 150 x 230mm 300pp
ISBN 0-9579978-0-9
RRP $30AUS (includes GST) or $16US (for international orders) plus
postage - payable by cheque or money order made out to Fibreculture.
Please make international bank cheques or international money orders
payable in US dollars to Fibreculture.
Contact the administration address (below) to place an order and find
out cost of postage. Mail to:
=46ibreculture
c/-Ned Rossiter
Lecturer, Communications
School of Political and Social Inquiry
Monash University
Berwick Campus
Clyde Rd
Berwick VIC 3806
Australia
tel. +61 3 9904 7023
fax. +61 3 9904 7037
email: [log in to unmask]
WEBSITE WITH INFORMATION ON ORDERING THIS BOOK
<www.fibreculture.org>
EMAIL ADDRESS
<[log in to unmask]> (for list administration and book ordering)
BACK COVER BLURB
Established in January 2001, fibreculture is a forum for Australian
net culture and research, encouraging critical and speculative
interventions in the debates concerning information technology, the
policy that concerns it, the new media for(u)ms it supports and its
sustainable deployment towards a more equitable Australia.
=46ibreculture is committed to fostering and promoting open,
independent, critical, participatory and sustainable forums.
The fibreculture network comprises theorists, critics, journalists,
academics, artists, activists, policy developers and all sorts of
media producers, designers and other information-workers.
=46ibreculture is working towards productive dialogues around our
distinctive engagements with/in new media & internet theory and
practice. The inaugural fibreculture reader is an encounter with
some of these dialogues in process: offering not conclusions or
closures but rather an invitation to further reflection, debate, and
action.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Listing Media in Transition: An Introduction to Fibreculture
Theory
Abstraction
McKenzie Wark
Net Affects: Responding to Shock on Internet Time
Anna Munster
(S)end
David Teh
'Don't send me your saliva': Fantasies of Disembodiment in Email and
Epistolary Technologies
Esther Milne
How to Launder Money: Finance Capital, Value, and Biopower
Brett Neilson
Networks, Postnationalism and Agonistic Democracy
Ned Rossiter
Politics
Grassroots and Digital Branches in the Age of Transversal Politics
Guy Redden
Strengthening Cohesion, Networking Cells: Environmental Activists
On-line
Jenny Pickerill
The Lens of Images: Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking
David Cox
KNOBS and NERDS: What's So Good About Being Networked?
Ann Willis
Hack
McKenzie Wark
Policy
The 'New Empirics' in Internet Studies and Comparative Internet Policy
Terry Flew
New Threats, New Walls: The Internet in China
Kay Hearn and Brian Shoesmith
'Until there's evidence there's no comment': Risk, Fear and the Mobile
Phone
Sean Aylward Smith
Intellectual Property: A Balance of Rights
Terry Laidler
The Knowledge Economy as Alienation: Outlines of a Digital Dark Age
Phil Graham
Arts
To Ephemeral Peace
Sean Cubitt
Ephemeral Pieces: An Interview with Sean Cubitt
David Teh
The Human Phenome Project
Kevin Murray
Interview with Kevin Murray
Geert Lovink
Empyrean| soft_skinned_scape
Melinda Rackham
Theatre as Suspended Space
Andrew Garton
Diagramming Innovation-scapes
Pia Ednie-Brown
When is Art IT?
Scott McQuire
The Art of Real Time
Daniel Palmer
Education
What is New Media Research?
Chris Chesher
Locating Community in the Social: Reorienting Internet Research
Tania Lewis
All Wired Up: Reflections on Teaching and Learning Online
Helen Merrick and Michele Willson
Cultural Functionality: Media Research and Error
Stephi Hemelryk Donald and Ingrid Richardson
=46ibrous Amigos: The Critical Pursuit of Difference
Molly Hankwitz with Danny Butt
Appendix: program of events
List of Contributors
INTRODUCTION
Listing Media in Transition: An Introduction to Fibreculture
Internet mailing list dynamics are hard to predict. As tiny living
entities these online communities in the making can be pretty
stubborn. Their growth and direction is pretty much unknown for the
founders, moderators and participants. Unlike the (web) magazine
format, the "editorial" policy of those who would like to build up
and maintain the list are rather limited. However, fibreculture has
had an interesting first year of its existence and the aims set in
early 2001 were by and large fulfilled.
One of the central challenges for fibreculture so far has
been to at once determine and invent the "location" of a critical Net
practice in Australia. Where is such work happening, and who is
undertaking it? Academia? The independent "tactical" media groups?
The "new media arts" as defined and sanctioned by the funding bodies;
user cultures; open source software communities; IT-experts; official
entities such as ISOC?[1] The fibreculture facilitators' group felt
that what was particularly lacking in Australia was not so much Net
practice or new media theory in general but a critical, theoretical
reflection on what was actually happening at the crossroad of arts,
culture, policy, education and new media.
How might we give the Net a sense of place within our
national frame? The third wave or "generation" of Net studies on
"virtual communities" seeks to redress this search for heimat (or
public home) with its empirical work on ethnographic uses of
networked media and its attention to policy and regulation issues.[2]
Even so, we felt that the range of work going on in Australia didn't
fit neatly into cultural or critical theory agendas, and that the
field of Net studies and practice was still very much up for grabs.
This isn't to say that it was any less "mature" than its
international counterparts - such a distinction in itself demands
qualification - but that a cartography of differences was yet to be
assembled in Australia that registered and gave a platform to the
variety of work being undertaken on and using the Net.
After a few quiet months in which the list reached the two
hundred subscribers range the list took off. Fibreculture debated
across an extensive and diverse range of topics, including government
involvement in (Net) culture; the political economy of broadband
scarcity ("ba[n]dwidth"); the imminent end of DNS, ICANN and global
domain name policies; globalisation and the nation state; Microsoft
and the virtual classroom; "the hoax is the virus..."; the
post-information age; syndicated content and the future of Australian
writing; intellectual property versus digital technology; media
tactics and ethics; free code and the divisions within; Internet
culture and advertising; migration, the Tampa crisis and the Net;
visualising the WWW; telepresence; online petitions. And then there
were a host of discussions about the papers collected in this reader.
These issues constitute part of an inventory we call *a
politics of the digital present*. Not because they are special or
noteworthy per se, but because their crisis is articulated in one way
or another with a *digital mediology*. For R=E9gis Debray, 'mediology'
involves 'not media nor medium but mediations, namely the dynamic
combination of intermediary procedures and bodies that interpose
themselves between a producing of signs and a producing of events'.[3]
Digital mediology for us, then, is a politics that consists of
writing within the media architectonics of an Internet listserve, in
the time of the present, in the space of the social. It is a
politics of writing the social in the abstraction of a code, and of
contesting the codes in which the social is read.
If we can assume, momentarily, to represent a geo-culturally
differentiated network of list subscribers, then one of our aims is
to very quickly articulate the body social of fibreculture with other
political actors. (Or perhaps, if at odds with those actors, to
tackle them side on.) Here, we are speaking of articulations with a
variety of entities whose spatial scale ranges from State and Federal
parliaments and their auxiliary departments, to entities such as the
anti-corporation networks and IndyMedia activists; from educational
and contemporary arts institutions, to community organisations
dealing with local issues. Perhaps this sounds terribly like empire
building. Perhaps it's overly ambitious. And perhaps it reads as
yet another deluded installment of Third Way ideology. Let's hope
not! Certainly it's na=EFve to assume to overcome in any multi-lateral
sense what Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard astutely termed the problematic of
the diff=E9rend - those phrases in dispute, those cosmologies of
incommensurability, that condition the possibility of the social.
More pragmatically, such speculation on political arrangements to
come speaks of a difficult or agonistic universality, but one which
nonetheless enables (to some degree) the very iterations of
fibreculture - both online and off.
In the history of fibreculture, there have also been politics
of another kind to negotiate. There are the politics of definition
and identity that are peculiar to any mailing list: what voices
dominate, what modes of expression are considered (il)legitimate,
what and whose interests are advocated? People have joined, people
have unsubscribed. Going beyond the list's ever shifting phases of
enculturation, there are other political ideologies and practices
that fibreculture seeks to address and intervene. From the beginning
fibreculture primarily focussed on Australian Net culture. Within a
global medium such as the Internet, it would be logical to question
the boundaries of the nation state. Many of us are very well
connected overseas. What was missing was a critical forum closer to
home.
Whilst a neoliberal paradigm apparently remains unassailable,
challenges to its irrational logic of instrumentality, to its violent
assertion of absolute sovereignty, are too often assumed to be
illegitimate and are deemed anachronistic or hysterical. The techne
of neoliberalism is reproduced across institutions many of us are
affiliated with in one way or another. After a decade of
evisceration, and effectively without representation, most academics
have devolved into bureaucrats, modelling their institutional
subjectivities or habitus according to the dictates of DETYA,[4] who
determine what constitutes intellectual labour and its value.
Contemporary cultural institutions across the country are run by
boards and managers who have usurped the authority of curators.
Cultural critics play the emasculated game of mutual affirmation, and
artists, like all good careerists, display an obsessive preoccupation
with enhancing their CV's. Even the culture industries are driven by
a corporate institutional complex (including States) for which the
integrity and wisdom of markets is paramount; this compounds the
dislocation of their unwitting public which, long since removed from
most political processes, now finds itself even culturally
disenfranchised. The ideology of managerialism has all but triumphed
over the administration of the arts. These are just some of the
indices that register not so much the abolition as the transformation
of the nation state. It is within these prevailing conditions that
fibreculture emerges.
=46ibreculture wants to be more than social noise (or digital
cosiness). An independent critical Net discourse has to fight to be
taken seriously. Now that new media are no longer that new, the Net
is in immediate danger of being reduced to a vulgar e-commerce
platform plus push-media for second grade content of the old media.
But the potential of digital media has yet to be fully realised. New
and innovative techniques and applications are still being sought. It
is too early to foreclose discussion - rather, fibreculture wants to
initiate/instigate a vigorous and critical debate about where to go
now, in the past-future of the present.
Given fibreculture's broad and for the most part unknown
constituency (since many subscribers do their fibrework as lurkers),
it would be an instance of utter delusion to claim autonomy in any
absolute sense. However, fibreculture has been, and can continue to
be, a partially autonomous zone, a space peculiar to the dynamics of
listserves and the parallel forums it spawns, such as meetings,
books, newspapers, policy debates, consultations on communications
and culture, and so on.
This first fibreculture publication may seem a bit academic.
So be it. There will be more Gutenberg projects to come. The
academic discourse is just one of many discourses and ways of telling
the story. The format of the academic paper which dominates this
first fibreculture reader could be seen as a response to the
all-too-Australian tendency to chat, thereby reducing online debates
to the level of casual conversation. While the papers are
necessarily presented in the order you find them in, this says as
much about the medium of the book, and the particular constraints it
places on sequencing, as it does about the content of the reader as a
whole and the editorial decisions made. Another mix would have been
possible, and it is up to you, the reader, to finally determine how
this book is used. Perhaps, too, you might be inclined to join
fibreculture and contribute to the ever expanding inventory of
writings on Net culture, to a forum whose limits and possibilities
will reflect those of this digital present, and the next.
Notes:
1 ISOC is the Internet Society and represented in Australia by
the the Internet Society of Australia. See http://www.isoc-au.org.au/
2 See Terry Flew's contribution to this reader for a summary of
these three phases of Net studies.
3 R=E9gis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological
Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (London and New
York: Verso, 1996; 1994), 17.
4 DETYA - the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training
and Youth Affairs - is the key administrative body for funding
universities and academic research in Australia.
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