Re: [-empyre-] Lurking/confession/devils - or LCD as I like to call it! ; -)
Hiya
On 05/08/2004, at 2:25 AM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
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!
OK, I was being half-serious there. I mean, there's something a little
shifty about doing that. After all, in participant-observer there's
"participant".
Though as a list is a public phenomenom, we are free to use it as we
please I suppose.
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 don't subscribe to that many lists: fibreculture, artscom
(singapore), nettime. And empyre of course. i looked at the empyre
archives when i joined, mostly to catch up on the criticalartaware
stuff. empyre was definitely the most interesting as the shifting
topics keep it very specialized and focused. I was really struck by the
tone, as opposed to more "generalist" lists like the others I cited. I
got the impression that here was a fairly homogenous community which
has constituted itself as a field (in the sense Bourdieu uses) with
well defined rules, values, goals, orthodoxies etc. I might have had a
different impression if I had joined at a different time, I have the
impression that the liken people were very active.
In order not to get lost you need to read everything, I guess. Once
again the quick rotation of topics on empyre means you never have to go
back that far. I would cite both, ie this person said that on this
list.
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.
Well, once again, there is the archive. I don't know, if you're dealing
with scientific research it's the norm to attribute quotes precisely.
One of the things I'm a little wary of is the idea that ICT must
necessarily revolutionarize the whole of social practice. In fact, I'm
actively opposed to that notion.
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???
Sure, when you're dealing with the permanent works in progress of remix
culture, there is no ultimate source, originator. Things have to be
seized "in the middle". Well, that becomes the effective source - or at
least the attributable one (in a scientific context, once again - I'm
not arguing for IP).
(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! ;-)
Perhaps lists such as empyre (which I don't mean to knock, I love the
principles of free software) necessarily, nevertheless by the very
nature of what they're about and who contributes, exude a whiff of
"gee, we're so cutting-edge, out there making digital/network/tech/art
history..." and I guess by association this implies that links to the
rest of social practice are severed, or loose, or in any case
irrelevant. Hence the impossibility to categorize, pigeon-hole, archive
such a fleeting, mutating transitory form. OK, but every social
phenomena reflects the society that produces it... nothing exists in a
vacuum. Let's not forget that this is all (free or proprietary, no
matter) content for the hardware manufacturers and service providers to
tout their warez.
Cheers,
mathieu
Charlotte
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Mathieu O'Neil
Visiting Fellow
Centre for New Media Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
T 61 2 62 60 61 24
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