[-empyre-] theory v. history

[h w]

Because the interweb thingie (calling it the web or the internet or online media, or whatever seems so limiting, that I tend to call it different things that are self-deprecatory, like interweb thingie, or The Intertubes, etc.) is changing so quickly, there is a dramatic failure occuring, in that it is impossible to properly (in terms of standard academia) theorise about it, due to the slow motion exigencies of academic process.

Let's pretend I'm getting a PhD (which I am) and it has to do with the interwebs (which it sort of does) but imagine the year is 2004, and it is going to take 5 years to finish my PhD. So, in 2004 I look around and notice that this newfangled Web 2.0 hubris is flying around and it seems to be the Next Big Thing, and in that set of actors, two of the big ones in 2004 were myspace and friendster.

So, 5 years later, this year, 2009, I finish my PhD, and it is not, by definition, really theoretical - my case studies have basically died: friendster is an also ran of the Web 2.0 hallucination, and myspace is now a property of the same goon squad who own Fox News. I would not be writing theory - I would be writing history.

Major attempts have been attempted. But Manovich's book (while brilliant and necessary at the time) is getting long in the tooth and some of it seems as dated as OS9 or Windows 2000. Stallabrass's work points at contradictions that are still unresolved. The list goes on.

Just getting a paper printed in a tree-killer version of a journal is a slow process. You might take 6 months or more to write about something, and then it takes a year to get published. By that time, it's old new and computers now process almost twice as much data per second as they did when you started.

So, I see a process where there are several directions occurring simultaneously, and not in any co-ordinated or even vaguely organised manner, and you can consider this a Theory, sort of kinda not.

These directions are (not a complete list, but a stab at the start of one...)

a. the traditional academic system of journals and juries and all that.
b. the other traditional and still tree-killing scholarly book publication system.
c. online journals (both closed and traditional and open CC type)
d. online books  (both traditional and open CC type)
e. wikis
f. blogs
g. email lists
h. facebook, youtube, et al.
i. twitter.

I only separate out twitter because I find it so utterly useless to me. If I have time for twitter, I have too much time on my hands and need to find a better hobby. Over time, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. will disappear or transmogrify into something completely different.

I'm too tired tonight to go further into this. Someone else can pick up the thread and run with it.

HW