[-empyre-] Lurking/confession/devils - or LCD as I like to call it! ; -)

["Charlotte Frost" <charlotte@digitalcritic.org>]

Mathieu, 

I find your use of the list very interesting as it reflects my own. As you
say, you didn?t participate so as not to ?compromise? the material and I
often do the same. It is of course the case that there are relatively few
books or journals dedicated to new media and it is often impossible to
create them given the print-lag of publishing, whereas lists of course can
catch, chew over and digest subjects before half the world is even out of
bed!

You are perhaps therefore the right person to ask about your methods of
research...and I would be interested to hear other peoples? thoughts too.
Perhaps as well as the lurkers, we could hear from more people who feel they
don?t always fit the categories we are used to hearing from?

Do you subscribe to lots of lists, and which ones do you find most useful
for your research and why? Do you regularly look at the archives of the ones
you don?t subscribe to, and if so, how do you find the search functions of
list archives? How easy do you find it to trace a debate, given that a
thread which a lot of people have contributed to is so littered with ?>?s
that separating each persons ideas can be a nightmare for quoting purposes,
or do you think the list is a group and should be attributed as such? Are we
shaping communal knowledge, and if I say something particularly prescient
(which I very much doubt ;-), should it be mine or empyre?s when quoted in
someone else?s work?

I am genuinely interested in these questions because as I find myself making
notes and quoting from lists more and more, and where it is sometimes easy
to say Melinda Rackham said ?xyz? it is sometimes harder to know that she
definitely did say it, or that she said it first, or whether it matters.
Many of our everyday phrases and slogans were said first by someone
somewhere sometime, but we don?t quote them specifically. So what we are
witnessing in part might be such a vast speed up of the creation of a
language of new media, that phrases are specifically quoted one week and are
clichés the next. 

It also might be the case that it isn?t so much we don?t have a language of
new media, but that it is forming and adapting so rapidly, it isn?t
visible....yet?!

In a moment, I will paraphrase and add to an idea I head from Helen Sloan,
but when the chinese whisper/exquisite corpse moves on, how will a
researcher know the source? And will they always need to? What other models
do we need to create/can we create to deal with this type of knowledge???

>(or whatever - please, let's skip the definition riff)

I like the fact you have said this, because I observe so many debates where
posters leap upon the ?what to call it thing? without looking at what other
points people are making, regardless of what they have called it. Most of us
on the lists, and I am not trying to be exclusive, many lists have archives
where newcomers can seek out such debates, but most of us on lists know that
no one knows what to call it! 

Helen Sloan from Scan said in a discussion at the Tate (I think) that
perhaps the ?new? in new media relates not so much to new practice or tools,
but to the archive and the discussions such work inevitably has with
existing structures of historicisation. Terms themselves are ways of
archiving, as they allow concepts to be passed on, referred to and
critiqued, so I think the ?new? in new media symbolizes the new trend for
arguing about terms and therefore never creating an archive. In which case,
the list arguments which go on about the ?what to call it thing? are,
perhaps deliberately, creating a body of text which looks like an archive,
but to all intents and purposes, evades it yet again!?

However that isn?t an invitation to start strumming the riff again! ;-)

Charlotte