[-empyre-] II

[Jonathan Marshall]

Hi Alan,

>I think some of these myths are true, that we're too much online and too
>close to the 'virtual' to see that.

for me myths can be true in many different ways, but often not in the ways we would like them to be true :)

Anyway which myths do you find useful?

the point for me, is that they did not prove useful for dealing with my experiences on CM,
and were considerably less interesting than the way that people wrote and thought on CM

>You say
>> In either case the virtual world was remote, 'virtualised', different
>> and disembodied.
> but in fact at least from my experince in putting Being on Line and a
>special magazine issue together, the virtual world was seen exactly as the
>opposite - intimate, 'real,' entangled and embodied within the body.

Indeed and that was interesting. There was a whole new kind of discourse
being born at that time, which to me was much more real.

I probably should have emphasised that 'movement', but even so it never got the
kind of coverage or glamour that somehow the disociated stuff ever received,
and still does receive. It was almost unknown, other than to the specialists.

>The comment about the wires maybe refers to "I feel the wires" article I
>republished by Andy Hawks - and its basis was affect itself; it wasn't
>analytical, but talked about the pain and entanglement with the virtual.

I wasn't, in general, refering to people in particular with the remarks just motifs
and emphases, which tended to be recurring.
the only particular reference was the superior social morphology which was a bit more recent :)

>Michael Current and the Walkers in Darkness list were living and dying
>embodiments of that as well, as you know.

Indeed they were, and that was again the point. What people were struggling with
was way more interesting and sophisticated than the official theory of the time.
Because, of course, what people called the virtual was laced with bodies, passions,
cultures, pains, confusions, ambiguities and entanglements they could not easily conceive
within prior vocabularies, including the myths (in my opinion)

the virtual was not virtual in the sense the term was being used :)

jon

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