Re: [-empyre-] One more try

[murphy <murphy@thing.net>]

On Friday, January 9, 2004, at 06:34 PM, Nick Montfort wrote:

> Sorry that my thinking seems blinkered and stupefying. I'll try once 
> more
> before the onslaught of the semester begins to restate this to everyone
> and their single or double arrows:


Part of the problem may be that some of us do not have to deal with "the 
onslaught of the semester". Some may be sweating out a pending IPO or 
mid-career retrospective or just the daily grind of trying to support 
themselves and their new media hobby. Having taught new media to arts 
administration students at NYU for three years I have some perspective 
on the difficulties of cross-discipline studies, not to mention 
cross-departmental politics. Of course I was just a hired hand with no 
academic career plans but I thought there was a place for the kind of 
discipline you describe. Odd as it sounds I situated it within the 
library system because that is where there was a sort of institutional 
confluence of various Information Systems. Plus, I found, Librarians are 
pretty cool people who tend to get left out of new media discussions 
even though they have been at the forefront of information technology 
for years.

Now that I no longer have an academic affiliation but need resources to 
do my new media work (such as it is, it's sort of along the lines of 
what Brett wrote about earlier) I am in desperate need of a New Media 
Library. Your New Media Reader is an excellent start but it's about 
teaching students not about "access to resources" to quote Stewart 
Brand. It also stops at 1994 and describes the new media environment at 
a time when it was exploding because of the WWW and completely changed. 
There has been a great deal of work done since.

Seems to me MIT Press (or someone else) missed a golden opportunity to 
establish a profitable resource center for those working with new media. 
I'd pay for that access while I probably won't buy your book.

BTW: where are the new media curators (and their counterparts) in this 
discussion?

Robbin Murphy

murph
offshore|online