[-empyre-] Narrativity and Reading Regimes

[Julian Oliver]

..on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 02:42:56PM +1000, Michael Dieter wrote:
> 
> > As a literary critic, I highly value immersive reading and desire it to
> > continue. I suspect, however, that the enemy here is not the internet, but
> > rather the neo-liberal economic rationalism that results in
> > ever-increasing
> > work hours, and diminishes the free time required for people to engage in
> > sustained reading practices.
> 
> Great post!
> 
> I wonder whether there might be something more to add from a media
> specific perspective also: the devices associated and deliberately
> engineered for informational 'hypertext' scanning are increasingly
> imbricated throughout our everyday lives as constant companions.
> Neoliberal economic rationalism cannot itself be sustained without
> rallying a material infrastructure in support of the logic of increasing
> work hours, competition and value-added knowledge work. The blurring of
> work and leisure that underpins attempts to increase productivity is
> actually facilitated by mobile networked devices, such as the iPad. I fear
> is that the problem is additionally encoded into these technical objects
> themselves, things that are privileged as central to these economic
> systems and regimes of labour.

Also a great post! And it's here that the 'gift' of social networking is an
ideal capital model; managing ourselves and our data across so many devices and
networks becomes a kind of labour regime in itself, requiring increasing hours
of attention to maintain social exposure. The hidden fruits of our
self-and-social interests are then sold on to data miners and marketeers, or
simply repurposed as a canvas for ad revenue directly.

Here's a timely remedy:

	http://suicidemachine.org/

Cheers,

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com