[-empyre-] re: textual community

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

lachlan wrote and asked:

> I suppose I?d like to reference the development of digital  culture
> studies with a question addressed broadly to the txt->vog
> 'progression' in this discussion. We've moved from the refreshing
> Blog 'confessional' of jill/txt (great to see the "History/'her
> story'"  proposition alive and well in the new millennium, Jill,
> but isn't this  view a bit essentialist and 70s? doesn't it
> perpetuate the myth of the  radical reversal of the roles of active
> male/passive female, and assume  that gender relations must be
> antagonistic? Surely we?ve moved on?

not sure what you mean here, so more detail or clarification would be
good, though if you're suggesting jill proposed an essentialist
gender thing about blogging, that one passed me by :-)

though i am reminded by a comment from someone who should've known
better who once suggested (in an essentialist moment of patriarchical
assumption of the normative value of each pair) that hypertext was
for for girls and computer games was more masculine. and so of
hypertext wasn't/isn't serious or real theory.

what's interesting though is that there are *a lot* of women
hypertext writers and theorists, and a lot of women bloggers. and i'd
also argue that the new media community has *never* taken hypertext
theory seriously.

>  To  revive this important but historically contingent method a
> generation  on would require a re-pathologization of the Blokes that
> the Blokes  are unlikely to go along with for very much longer
> [despite out collective  regard for Angela McRobbie]) to a more
> 'highly or finely mediated' cam  work speaking to the power
> discourse of Screen Studies. I mean, we are  in danger of arriving
> at a reified notion of 'multimedia' presumably distributed on CD Rom
> retailed through Virgin megastores with Lev  Manovitch signing
> copies as the logical outcome of a digital revolution. And it isn't
> going to be like that.

not sure i'm following the thread here but i've always thought
multimedia had a reified notion of itself. (i wrote about this rather
naively quite a few years ago in an essay called 'the emperor's new
clothes'.)

i'm not sure if we're on the same thread but a simple thing from my
posthypertext perspective. hypertext is low tech and partial. it
recognises that the computer screen is domestic, not public, nor does
it assume that the only thing you're going to do for the next hour is
click buttons. most multimedia strikes me as monumental and
monolithic, sort of wanting to be cinematic but cinema +. it wants
all my time and all my screen. there's great work out there, but it's
not the only model.

and neither is the other end the only answer (text only code work).
there's also great work there, but it's not the only model. there
also needs to be a middle ground. mid bandwidth, interactive,
pictures and text, doesn't own the screen, bandwidth, or time.

as brandon barr mentioned in his blog a little while ago, movie
credit sequences (and tv advertising) have *a lot* to teach.

> The shift in distributive relations, surely, is what permits this
> discussion and the sharing of your vog work in progress, and these
> new distributive relations provoke the new relations of mediation
> that  Melinda is exploring through this format.

yep. which gives me another soapbox:
US telco's spent i think it's 4 trillion rolling out bandwidth, over
2 trillion of this was paid for by debt. the majority of this
bandwidth is unused, and numerous major telco's and telco come isps
are in serious trouble. i'm just amazed (call me naive) at the
corporate dumbness that just doesn't get that the network is about
peeer to peer, not consumption. email, ftp, blogs are all evidence of
this. i'd argue html is too since it's more about writing than
reading. yet if i buy broadband access i am not allowed to send
content out, i cannot become another peer on the network reading and
publishing (surfing and serving). it's a broadcast model (hell, in
australia the early adopters of broadband all had assumed they could
run servers back out, and got a rude shock when they were told no,
not that the infrastructure supports it anyway). it's about writing
in and with and distributing. vog's are for writin', not readin'.

cheers
adrian miles
--

+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]