[-empyre-] question about online writing

Fri Oct 30 09:02:39 EST 2009

Many thanks to Marco and Adam for their comments about the differences and shades of writing models vis a vis cathedral vs. bazaar. This brings me to an issue or two about the 'bazaar', which is essentially a marketplace (albeit one that has gone through many different political/historical/cultural economies). 

I have never been comfortable with the model of the bazaar as an alternative to the cathedral even if metaphorically it provides a great critique of cathedralism! This is precisely because it implies (and has been taken up most obviously via the ongoing discussion of the 'gift economy' in information societies) as a great place where you can 'trade' ideas, where you can get and strike a 'bargain' etc. 

The bazaar as it has most popularly entered new media discourse and culture is about the marketplace of ideas, labour, business etc. It's all through Shirky for example. I don't find this provides much of a 'model' for collaboration either quite frankly. It's deeply rooted in utilitarian economics and thinks about collaboration as what I give to you, I get back in some other form. Altruism explicable due to  ultimate individual gain....

Maria mentioned the shift from atomised and solitary subjectivities of writing to distributed and collectivised subjectivities and sited Chris Bowers experience of blogging. But I'm not convinced of a generalised shift to collectivity via new media precisely because of the continuity of the marketplace as an organiser of many of our modes of online exchange (or at least as an account and ground for how and why we exchange).

But what Marco has also pointed to is somewhat different and I guess is also something Adam you are suggesting comes up around specific community produced FLOSS books, and that is the  'shared project'. Brian Holmes wrote about this in relation to the differences between networks, swarms and the creation of 'micro' worlds. (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure). he argues that a shared ethico-aesthetic horizon must be present to go beyond 'network' or 'swarm' and to actually give coherence to self-organised groupings together of people via distributed networks. For me this is what differentiates and makes something collective.

This incidentally is what I as also trying to talk about when I spoke about the cosmological or 'world-making' dimensions of such projects as ShiftSpace and the whole shift to using Firefox plugins among artists/designers/developers that we see going on with much networked art and design right now in my chapter. Perhaps Marco this is also what you meant by networking also involving a community of practice?

best
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 adam hyde [adam at xs4all.nl]
Sent: Friday, 30 October 2009 1:40 AM
To: Marco Deseriis
Cc: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] question about online writing

On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 21:56 -0400, Marco Deseriis wrote:
> Hi Adam, :-)

Hey Marco :)

>
> So I want to ask you a question. In your experience with the Floss
> Manuals Foundation, how many times have you noticed that the workshops
> you run are actually driven by a shared project? In other words, do you
> think that the "HowTos" can create communities *beyond* the hackers and
> the technologists (who, by definition, are interested in rules and
> practices of manipulation) or do you think that in the case of art,
> activism, design, architecture, and even the hard sciences the sparking
> motivation has to be external to  an interest in
> pragmatics-for-its-own-sake?
>

Many thanks for the points and the question. I think you are asking me a
question that is beyond my experience to answer. I actually dont know
much about the demographic of the project beyond those individuals that
make themselves known to me or to the community. There are many
contributors, and some quite regular, that I have never met and I don't
know what their background is. I obviously can't speak then about the
motivations of the majority of contributors because of this. From the
small subset I do know, there are many artists involved, designers,
educators, radio enthusiasts, free content evangelists etc. The
motivations vary, as they would for any open & free content project. The
most interesting motivations to me are those that sign in under a
pseudonym - there is no hope in identifying them although they might
make large contributions. What motivates them? I would love to know.

To bring the focus back to the networkedbook - I find it very
interesting that projects in FLOSS Manuals that are born by a community
have a broader contribution base. There are a number of books in FLOSS
Manuals that are 'born' by an individual. They are excellent books, but
we have more that are of the same quality whose genesis lies in 'the
community' or a small niche orientated group (we have more community
written books largely because it takes a single author 5 months - 2
years to produce a book that the FM community can produce in 2-5 days).
Those books that are instigated by an individual, and who could be
identified as having 'an author', have _far_ less contributions than
those that are created by community (this is my observation by anecdote,
no metrics I'm afraid).

It seems very true to me that if content wants to flourish in the bazaar
it must be native to the bazaar. I believe this has a lot to do with
mandate. Those that wish to contribute will feel more likely to have the
mandate to do so if the book was created by community. Those coming from
the Cathedral will be largely ignored because no one knows how to
interact with them (this is an over simplification of course). This is
why I find the NetworkedBook project problematic. It seems to be
attempting to enter into bazaar space, but with Cathedral attitudes.
Hence the form will be 'commented on' but not collaborated on. I
personally think there is _much_ more to be gained by exploring
collaborative content production than by exploring 'author - commentary'
dynamics. However, I understand there are many shades and each to their
own, of course.

adam

> Best,
> Marco
>
> adam hyde wrote:
> > 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
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>

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