[-empyre-] question about online writing

Thu Oct 29 10:53:24 EST 2009

..on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 10:02:51AM +1100, Anna Munster wrote:
> Hi Adam, Some of your questions I think are elegantly dealt with by Anna
> Gibbs' post in suggesting that perhaps Networked as a book may not be that
> different from other books in the short term but that it might be used in
> different ways for different eductational/pedagogical purposes, for example.
> 
> For me actually this is where I am interested. I need a good online text that
> gathers together a lot of ideas both from so-called poststructuralist theory
> as well as media and networked art/culture in the one place that my students
> can/will read. (they actually do read onscreen!).
> 
> I hope to use various chapters and to ask them to contribute comments in a
> considered way. Ok, this is not some big deal and it is not going to turn the
> world around in terms of writing or participatory culture. Frankly they are
> already doing that anyway in terms of all the other stuff they do in their
> everyday lives.
> 
> But something they don't do very much of (we're talking about 18 and 19
> year-olds) is read and think for extended periods of time. I am not making an
> argument for scholarly book cultures over online participation.  I am making
> an argument for a mixture of speeds of living in media cultures. We don't need
> to constantly be participating in an immediate 'we are there' manner all the
> time where there are no differentiations (ie author/reader). I like to listen
> to an author's words, to an artist's compositions etc and not always be
> concerned about the fact that I am 'only' listening ( I am thinking and
> feeling as well by the way).  We need mixtures of both. Why? because I
> actually think if you just have instantaneous, participatory stuff happening
> all the time in which you are constantly non-differentiated you do
> neurologically affect people via the relentlessness of speed and access and I
> don't actually think it's always such a great neurological affection...maybe
> that's food for a different discussion.

It's an interesting discussion in itself, for sure. This 'acceleration
conformism' - as Odo Marquard put it - leaves no time for the long thoughts that
we expect cultural artefacts (like books) to reflect. 

Another angle (perhaps less disparaging) is that the raw cultural value of
thought, and any knowledge symptomatic of it, is changing in itself. If the
English and Spanish internets are any representation, it appears increasingly
less important to Know as it is to 'have access to' within the social impetus of
a cultural economy. The cultural value of an individual's singularly contained
argument or opinion is decreasing in favour of critical contributions that can
be quickly incorporated and archived into a congruent and accessible public
document.

It would seem that Wiki is a technology that grew out of this and now provides
for it.

Crit theory mailing lists miss out on this last part - there's no coherent
synthesis of ideas that are easily returned by a textual search query - rather
ideas come and are stored as a stream for the reader to further collate and
congeal. As a computer programmer however I find technical mailing lists far
more useful in an archived state: a problem is posted the synthesis of which is
a solution naturally described by the thread (rather than further problematised
as with theory).  There is less redundacy and so is more suited to
computer-aided discovery and redistribution.

Cheers,

Julian

> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of adam hyde [adam at xs4all.nl]
> Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 9:26 PM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: [-empyre-] question about online writing
> 
> i have a very basic question to the turbulence crew. I must first say,
> I'm not an academic so I would really appreciate a plain text answer and
> not have to use the postmodern dictionary to parse....
> 
> ...what part of the Networked Book project is not replicating the
> politics and top-down processes of the established publishing industry?
> I see the mechanics as (slightly) different from what most 'publishers'
> use these days. But the fact that you 'use a wiki' or a blog to create a
> collection of long from texts does not seem to me to be tackling
> anything interesting. Comment Press I like, but this is interesting an
> out-of-the box plugin for wordpress. What are you adding to this?
> 
> When it comes down to it, I think that the process inherent in your
> model is more conservative than most wikis since you have very clearly
> named authorial hierarchy such as "Lichty › Art in the Age of DataFlow".
> There still seems to be a very standard authorship model in place and
> you have not investigated how the networked environment can really break
> established modes of textual production.
> 
> >From the long view, it seems you have a mistake of not knowing if you
> are in the Cathedral or the Bazaar. Which is it?
> 
> 
> adam
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 12:49 +1100, Anna Munster wrote:
> > I don't want to sound like a fascist here...but as  moderator I am supposed to keep people on topic on the empyre list as it is a list devoted to particular topics by the month.
> >
> > The question has been raised about whether networks involve a sustainable form of future energy. This is tangentially related to the topic at hand insofar as reading/writing/making online does involve consuming energy.
> >
> > However, I'd rather not have an explosion of comments about networks and energy use etc in a topic where we are looking primarily at networked writing/reading UNLESS there are salient points to be made about the relation of each to the other.
> >
> > Just a general note about the fact that I will moderate an onslaught of off-topic posts IF they come!
> >
> > cheers
> > Anna
> >
> > A/Prof. Anna Munster
> > Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
> > Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> > School of Art History and Art Education
> > College of Fine Arts
> > UNSW
> > P.O. Box 259
> > Paddington
> > NSW 2021
> > 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> > 612 9385 0615(fax)
> > a.munster at unsw.edu.au
> > ________________________________________
> > From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Julian Oliver [julian at julianoliver.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:37 AM
> > To: soft_skinned_space
> > Subject: Re: [-empyre-] a Question
> >
> > ..on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:20:19PM +0000, sdv at krokodile.co.uk wrote:
> > > I may have missed this during the past month but has anyone here
> > > actually talked about the cost of networks and whether the network forms
> > > are sustainable ?
> >
> > If there's something I don't grokk here it's the strangely time-less,
> > willy-nilly projection of the term 'sustainable'. From when to when and what to
> > what is sustainable?
> >
> > 'Sustainability' is a concept that refers to a temporary control over energetic
> > decay that favours one or more (inter)dependent organisms.
> >
> > We live on a sphere in a void and we're breeding like rabbits. Let's talk about
> > minimising inevitable harm (a 'sensible harm'?) rather than invoking the myth of
> > 'sustainability' no?
> >
> > My 2 watts,
> >
> > Julian
> >
> > P.S For all the hair-dryers, needles, routers, castles, deep-sea probes, Zaha
> > Hadids, Ikea bookshelves and false teeth made, it's my suspicion that the Earth
> > has not grown any heavier and nor has it grown any lighter.
> >
> > --
> > Julian Oliver
> > home: New Zealand
> > based: Berlin, Germany
> > currently: Berlin, Germany
> > about: http://julianoliver.com
> >
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > Anna Munster wrote:
> > > > I'd now like to bring Anna Gibbs and Maria Angel into the discussion, perhaps as 'other voices' and I've intro'd them below. They aren't authorial contributors to Networked but hopefully they might become contributors anyway!
> > > >
> > > > I'm wondering if either of you might comment upon the question of reading new media/networked writing. We've had a lot of discussion the difficulty of reading dense theoretical writing in online environments and hence of people participating in the Networked project. Do either of you have any comments about the screen (broadly speaking) as a reading interface and/or the role and place of the reader in collaborative and participatory writing?
> > > >
> > > > best Anna
> > > >
> > > > BIOGRAHIES
> > > > Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A specialist in affect theory, she works across the fields of cultural, textual and media studies and her most recent publications are in Cultural Studies Review, Interrogating the War on Terror (ed Deborah Staines) and forthcoming in The Affect Reader (eds Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg). A writer of experimental fiction, she also collaborates with visual artists and has recently curated an exhibition on Art, Writing and the Book. She is currently working on a project about Writing in the Media Culture with Maria Angel, and together they have published essays in Literature and Sensation (ed Anthony Uhlman and Helen Groth) and forthcoming in Beyond the Screen (eds Joergen Schafer and Peter Gendolla).
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Maria Angel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Current research interests include the transformation of literary genres in new media contexts, theories of writing, memory, and corporeality. She has published essays in the areas of literary aesthetics and visual rhetoric. More recently she has worked on the convergence of theories of affect with writing and new media. Her current collaboration with Anna Gibbs theorises the emergent field of literary writing in digital media and they are currently completing a manuscript At the Interface: Writing, Memory, and Motion.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > A/Prof. Anna Munster
> > > > Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
> > > > Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> > > > School of Art History and Art Education
> > > > College of Fine Arts
> > > > UNSW
> > > > P.O. Box 259
> > > > Paddington
> > > > NSW 2021
> > > > 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> > > > 612 9385 0615(fax)
> > > > a.munster at unsw.edu.au
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > empyre forum
> > > > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > > > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> > > >
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > empyre forum
> > > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
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-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany 
about: http://julianoliver.com