[-empyre-] online or in-body?

[Anaïs Nony]

Dear all,

Thank you Renate and Tim for opening up this discussion.

This feeling of bodily disconnection is tied to the weakness of the public
sphere in today's society.

While the street was once the place where goods, information, and people
circulate, it has now became the street of the smart cities, where google
map is the cybernetic reference. That is a city made of empty spaces where
anonymity dictates the rules.

Within these cities, protesting in the street directly impact the system of
regulation of flows.
It is still accurate today as bio-political systems are anchored in the
accumulation of apparatuses of discipline and surveillance. However, this
protest doesn't translate online as it doesn't impact our digital double.

Online, we don't know how to interact outside of the rules dictated by the
network.
Thinking of mainstream social networks as the new public sphere is pure
ideology.
Working nowadays as activists is a matter of working hand in hand with
hackers, who were crucial in cracking up twitter in Syria for instance.

To me, the efficiency of online visibility has to become ours for an actual
public sphere to perform and take place in today's social, economical, and
political struggles. We have to develop new online and global platforms in
order to not leave the street fights alone.

My very best,

Anaïs Nony



2014-12-09 3:48 GMT+01:00 Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Renate's remarks about the disconnect between voting and online access
> reminds me to mention the disconnect I felt on Thursday, the day after the
> crazy Garner decision. Thursday marked 45 years since Fred Hampton and
> Mark Clark were assassinated by Chicago police while sleeping in the Black
> Panthers headquarters in Chicago.  At that time, details of the killings
> were sketchy and crawled at a snail's pace across the globe as readers
> depended on the minimal reportage of the traditional news media for
> information.  Reactions and demonstrations lagged, confounded by the
> conflicting news of the media and the delays of national and international
> communication.  Flash forward to 2014 when organized blogs and social
> media sources parse conflicting information while organizing responses in
> almost the same breadth.
>
> Yet the global demonstrations organized via social media, whether in Hong
> Kong, Mexico City, New York  or St. Louis, are notable because of physical
> performance.  While the floodnetting of the Mexican government hasn't hit
> the New York Times, a modest die-in at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue or an
> umbrella assemblage in the streets of Hong Kong receive international
> media coverage, enhanced by the speed of digital media.
>
> I'm wondering what we make of the disparity between the effectiveness of
> online versun in-body demonstration and social action?
>
>
> Timothy Murray
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> A D White House
> Cornell University,
> Ithaca, New York 14853
>
>
>
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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