[-empyre-] Geert Lovink: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Sean Cubitt]

Hey geert

All good, though we might differ on specific cases (!)

Your resolutions 234 and 7

> 2. Renaissance of theory, radical texts that appeal to young people
> and help them to dream again
> 3. Dismantling the academic exclusion machine.
> 4. Overcoming media genres and expertise prisons
> 7. Opening channels for collective imagination.
All sit together. The problems are two: one how to ensure quality, and two
how to gather distribution. The academy already uses citation metrics as a
quality indicator: the umber of quotations by others shows the importance of
the piece. Tho open to abuse, the system works well for sciences, not too
badly in medecine (where it tends to be normative, eg the largest citation
counts are for the most-funded areas of research), poor in social science
and humanities where the range of specialisms is too broad and diverse.
Citation counting is an enumerated form of folksonomy. Alternatives like
linking blogs are a) too personal/idiosyncratic and b) can be disappointing
if you follow limnks to 'a blog like this' and hit a bad entry (where 'bad'
= not what I was looking for). Journals and book publishers can claim they
are better at securing quality through peeer review.

At the same time we all know journals that started with a project, went
refereed, and became just another journal. Open access journals are a step
in the right directio nfor distribution: DOAJ and, among others, the Open
Humanities Press initiatives are steps in the right direction. But the
economics is based on the unpaid labour of referees pus the expensive
skilled labour of preparing texts for publication

The simplest way to avoid refereeing is to publish yourself: most of us do,
at least some of the time. On the other hand, don't know about you but I'm
my own worst editor. Besides the vanity press stigma, there's also the
problem of individualism.  What you call for is a socialised production.

New open access journals come into being regularly: some like first Monday
and telepolis have been here sicne the web started and even before. But how
can we distinguish the old pals act from a community of like-minded people
sharing a vision for the development of a socialised theoretical meme?
They're either a community of some kind, or they're a political party, and
in both cases there is going to be an inside to the system.

It's still worth fighting to keep open channels inside the established
media: they cannot be abandoned to the people who already have
near-monopoly. At the same time, this kind of tactical activity is only part
of the larger issue of multi-networking the specialist activities of
thinkers and makers. There are times when you need to discuss openly in a
shared language, and times when you need to argue technical points in jargon
(because it is condensed and quick) *before* you go public. What we need are
multiple specialist forums, each of which take sit as a mission to circulate
to other such forums the fruits of their labours in terms the rest of us can
understand. Oddly enough, the scientists are good at this, and the social
sciences are mainly poor, while humanities are completely self-absorbed.

It's a big challenge: how to democratise not just knowledge but the process
of creating ideas, and to do that without becoming unpaid labour for the
knowledge industries, or falling for ownership models of the product of
thinking. 

Tricksy

sean

Prof Sean Cubitt
scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
Room 127 John Medley East
The University of Melbourne
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