I liked reading Levy's book and I imagine most people did. I think it would be hard not to like the book, seeing as how it does a great job of inflating the status of what might otherwise be defined as nerdy, anti-social dorks who happen to be good on a computer. The book treats hackers like sports stars are treated in popular press--they are doing something that mere mortal men are incapable of even dreaming (note how all the hackers are men, much like sports stars). Programming is written in such a way that it becomes something divine. The book gets you "pumped up" about hacking, computers, and programming.

However, taking a step back from this and registering it as a bit of an ode, I think our discussion might be best served if we explore more critically the Hacker Ethic and whether the hackers at MIT were really engaging a revolution. How much of the program was about global politics and social change, and how much might be reflective of an attempt at binding their own clique? Does the hacker ethic serve as a call to arms for others, or as an in-game that these guys wrote at 4am waiting for their turn on the computer?

I enjoyed the "Switch Thrower for the World" poem in the first chapter of Levy's book. Especially.....

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them; for I have seen
your painted light bulbs under the lucite luring
the system coolies . . .

It's not that this is great poetry, but the inclusion of this in Levy's book gives the reader clearer insight into the minds of the hackers. Not only are they pranksters and computer geeks..... they're artists, too. Hacking is beautiful! Perceiving yourself as an artist is more important than actually being one.

"If you're not a programmer or don't know many programmers, the
word hack has a particularly unfriendly connotation. Nonprogrammers
hack bushes or weeds. Nonprogrammers in horror movies do even
worse. But to programmers, or coders, as I call them, hack is a much
more positive term. Hack just means code that enables the program to
do something it wasn't originally intended or enabled to do. If you buy
a new printer for an old computer, you might find the old computer
doesn't run, or "drive," the printer. If you discovered that, you'd later be
happy to discover a hack on the Net by someone who has written a
driver to enable the computer to drive the printer you just bought.
Some hacks are easy. Some are unbelievably hard. Hackers as a
community like to challenge themselves and others with increasingly
difficult tasks. There's a certain respect that goes with the talent to hack
well. There's a well-deserved respect that goes with the talent to hack
ethically."

Going back to last weeks discussion about Hackers being heroes or anti-heroes, Levy writes from 1984, when the Hackers were not only heroes, but of a different definition. Hackers were actually used to create programming software that was designed to get optimal use of the TX-0 computer -not disabling programming from its intended use. Levy goes on to say that 'No Manifestos were required,' but his group of hacker friends did have a standard they lived by. My question is: do other people in the class feel his short outline of 'Hacker rules' was that much different than the Hacker Manifesto?

Muntadas’ "The File Room" is clearly indebted to the conceptual works of the Art & Language collective, particularly to card index systems such as Index 01 (1972), consisting of eight tall file cabinets of variable dimensions (appearing like columns topped with drawers) and photostats; Index 2 (1972), consisting of a similar installation and surrounded by a wallpaper of index cards, plus file boxes on a table; and Index 5 (1973), offering “Instructions for reading the index”. While net art may disregard the modernist ideal of the artist who originates or perfects a single skill or style, it still differs from conceptual art in that it often suffers a separation of interface and content; projects such as the I/O/D Webstalker (1997) strive to make that gap of digital representation the main theme. Full comprehension of the influence new technologies have on literature and literary studies in particular, and on our culture and its self-representation in general, may seem to recede perpetually into the distance. But while popular views of distance remain cathected with forgetting and repression, distance is arguably nothing but the medium of appearing – as long as simultaneity equals noise, distortion, incomprehensibility, the delays and processing cycles of human or machine intelligence remain necessary. Information lies dormant until it is accessed through an interface; yet that same interface may be distorting the information, obscure its sources, and perhaps even its crucial processes. This kind of information hiding is at work in every machine, and in the recesses of the very code that carries hypertext; it is what database art tries to tease out and foreground.

That the exclusionary meaning of the word index, in the sense of an instrument of censorship, can never be excluded, even in the most efficient file management, is illustrated amply by the computer art installation, "The File Room" (1994) by Antonio Muntadas, which indexes cases of governmentally suppressed speech from classical Greek drama to contemporary journalism. It includes works censored throughout the history of art because of their sexual orientation content, and directly addresses freedom of speech; when the project opened in Chicago in May 1994, it contained 400 cases spanning 25 centuries, from Aristophanes to Salman Rushdie. Viewers could ponder Diego Rivera’s dispute with the Rockefeller Center over his depiction of Lenin, or TV moderator Ed Sullivan’s request to The Doors to change one line of their lyrics in "Light My Fire." The architectural refinement of the installation belies the immense amount of information compressed into its representation of censorship; in its dark chambers of bureaucratic compartmentalization, containing black file cabinets and low lamps, viewers browse case histories – or indeed add their own case to the archive. Chicago high school students reported the confiscation of pamphlets about teen sexuality; entries were also made possible via the Internet. Hypertextual case management allowed the integration of images and other data from the Internet into the "The File Room" – hundreds of users logged on daily and explored notorious or half-forgotten incursions into private or public lives. Thus "The File Room" earned its reputation as pioneering net art. But while such computer-mediated extension seems to explode the frame of the project, the installation remained site-specific in another sense: Muntadas had chosen the Cultural Center in Chicago because it had originally been built as a city library in 1897. Foregrounding the precarious and unfinished nature of archival processes, "The File Room" attempts a re-integration of the exclusions of the archive into the institution that has been shaped by censorship as much as by preservation. In the final analysis, "The File Room" can never be closed, its promise to render invisible images and make unreadable texts legible must remain in permanent deferral. By the same token, with the inclusion of formerly censored art and literature now widely available online, the specificity of Muntadas’ hypertext project is in peril of paling into the grand nowhere of the Internet, an unremarked irony for an art installation which despite (or because) of the intentionally claustrophobic atmosphere of its physical setting sought to transcend certain limitations of time and space.

This testimony was given less than a year after September 11th, 2001. It's pretty interesting...

Look what you all have gone and done. All this talk about websites and I actually found one that I really like that uses flash and other technical things that I can't identify. Check it out:

www.bornmagazine.org

Wark's Manifesto is a nice breakdown of social class and its predetermined contexts of individuals. The 'hacker class' seems far superior to all the other shmucks who fell into the constructs designed for the unoriginal. My favorite point of the essay was the section on education.

She writes, "They [middle class] work in factories, but are trained to think of them as offices. They take home wages, but are trained to think of it as a salary. They wear a uniform, but are trained to think of it as a suit. The only difference is that education has taught them to give different names to the instruments of exploitation, and to despise those their own class who name them differently."

OK, fine. But for hackers she writes, "The hacker class desires knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being though the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself. The hack expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions that do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime of managing and commodifying education. . Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning, the gift of the result to a network of peers. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge subject to the claims of public interest and free from subordination to commodity production. This puts the hacker into an antagonistic relationship to the struggle of the capitalist class to make education an induction into wage slavery."

Wow, that seems like a lot of mumbo jumbo for the same definition that Carelson students would argue for their factory positions. How is replacing the word 'knowledge' education any different than replacing the word 'salary' for 'wage'? Here is where I am pretty hazy on the construct of the Hacker class...who pay's their morgage? I mean Wark seems to portray a complete disregard for structured capitalism, but aren't the hackers just falling into the same societal confines that every other American must do? How are hackers any different than the Mark Twain of writers who didn't want to conform? This new age approach to society sounds like the same old song and dance.

An innovative approach to associative indexing is explored in this collaborative database tool, called nic-las in homage to the great late sociologist, developed by a Swiss team of programmers. Billed as a “nowledge integrating communication-based labeling and access system” (sic - acronym: nic-las) or a “software prototype of an autopoietic knowledge landscape for social systems,” it is basically a cooperative digital space for research groups, made up of textual components and java objects. Shielded and organized by a personalizable multi-user access portal, each team can decide to what extent their collaboration is visible also to outsiders, and to what extent their notes, citations, exchanges, and other documents are made available to search engines. Anonymous use is possible at least in principle, but experience has shown that the thirty or so research collaboratives currently using nic-las tend to express themselves in the idiosyncratic ways of a typical academic gathering, with concerns over attribution, credit, and accreditation still extant. New entries or modifications of existing entries are recognized and dynamically linked to relevant other notes in the system. An intriguing feature is that deleted elements end up, for a while, in a digital unconscious; they remain accessible to certain search operations, and can even return in unforeseen ways. The system distinguishes between a Freudian and a Deleuzian unconscious; while the former pushes some deleted objects back onto the documentation surface, the latter generates a random selection of deleted and undeleted objects in the form of new virtual index cards.

Of course computers have no need to distinguish between a poem, a portrait, a video file, or a chunk of Unix code – sounds, images, texts all disappear into binary states and are only simulated on screen. The readability of hyperfiction relies on HTML and its extensions like Javascript, on the server software and its integral and occasional components that make the Internet possible, and on the operating software the computers run. Thus in the final analysis, literature on the computer is simulated literature; strictly speaking, there is no hyperfiction, there is no net literature. But before this is seen as belated confirmation of the again and again greatly exaggerated news of literature’s death, informed hypertext criticism requires competence both in the technologies of literary form and in the arsenals of code. The true challenge of multi- or hyper-mediality and interactivity is that the integration of sound and image tends to distract from the fact that ultimately, they are all code – and integrated only to the extent they are compatible on that level. As for hyperlinks, they challenge policies covering citation and fair use only to the extent that they go beyond the confines of a web or net of references internal to a text; rather than radicalize the poetic possibilities of creation, the whole tangle of questions is reduced to a matter of user interface design.

Canonization is disheartening. I realize that it's inevitable, but seeing potential slip away, even for the sake of continuity (and the inevitable criticism).
Revisiting the touchstone of old media, I've come to understand the free-verse movement as an attempt to deconstruct the poetic canon, only to re-construct a (in my opinion) much less satisfactory canon that "throws the baby out with the bathwater". I'm afraid (and certain) that this will develop with New Media; it's often disenchanting to work within strictures that define viability. Devaluation of R&D.

The section on collectivity in Rodowick's article about audiovisual culture illustrates one of the drawbacks to the ever-expanding culture of inter-connectivity. The culture in this country was already too work-driven, too driven to sell/trade time as a commodity in order to consume other commodities, all at the expense of cultivating meaningful interpersonal relationships and egalitarianism. With the rapid proliferation of instant communications that know no space or time constraints, over-working is given the chance to thrive unfettered.

"An old cliche still rings true: television does not sell products to people, it sells markets to advertisers." Beyond television, just about everything is a market for advertisers. As much as you like to think that you and your television had a really close, personal, meaningful relationship, you're wrong. It doesn't love you, it loves Coca-Cola.

Audiovisual Culture and Postmodernism:

How long can the past be prolonged before it catches up to the contemporary? Why is post-modernism given more value than modernism since the world clearly has room for both? After all, are the Flintstones not infinitely funnier than the Jetsons?

How is the nature of representation changing?

The photo of the New York skyline digitally manipulated to include the Eiffel Tower had quite an impact on me. To hear a man's voice reproduced by a digital .wav file telling me about a cut-and-paste digital photo of the skyline was incredibly synthetic. Nevertheless, my feeling of the photo was still one of simplicity and an "analog" life. Quite amazing.
"the field of the visible, as the silent representation of things, has become increasingly heterogeneous and complex. Formerly, discourse was considered a linguistic activity; now it is a multimedia activity."

What image of collective life is proposed by the new communications technologies?

"Sure you can fax at the beach. But this also demonstrates how the widening of access means not more information, but the transformation of leisure time into labor time. " What are the repercussions? How does (and has) leisure time as we know it changed in the last decade or so?

Is it enough to simply be aware of class divisions caused by tech knowledge?

Surpassing the Real

"new technologies benefit culture and society. It works as a classic ideological paradigm, appearing simply as 'common sense', as any advertisement for anew car or computing system will show. Ironically, it was one of Futurism's most fervent proponents, the Italian Filippo Marinetti, whose oft-cited aphorism illustrates the principle's reductio ad absurdum, 'Progress is always right, even when it's wrong'."
***This is exactly what I've been wanting to hear. The idea of progress always being benevolent is absolutely absurd, and I think anyone who knows the history of the any of the great empires (French, British, American, etc.) of the last 500 years would agree. It's time to start discussing the empire of technology and how this argument of progress for progress' sake is being used.

"We habitually think of the world we see as 'out there', but what we are seeing is really a mental model, a perceptual simulation that exists only in our brain. That simulation capability is where human minds and digital computers share a potential for synergy." Good point.

**The decline of modernity in relation to the deligitimisation of the image in the industrial world is an interesting observation that relates to my questions about empire (because so many colonizing countries justified their murderous exploits with modernity). Is this really the decline of modernity? The rejection of it? A new modernity?

Media, Technology, and the Market: the Interacting Dynamic

As someone who works in (old) media, I completely agree with Schiller's assertion that advertising transforms broadcast media. In many cases programming exists not for information or entertainment, but rather so an advertisement can be tacked on and something sold. The quality of the broadcast is not important (as those of you who watch the FOX network know all too well). It's the ad time that is key. John Larroquette once said television exists only to sell soap. Amen.

-Perhaps the author’d have been wiser to have used morality in place of ethics; the former embody the rigidity he intimates.
-“That's our cooptation as servomechanisms of the cybernetic grid (the digital superhighway) that swallows bodies, and even whole societies, into the dynamic momentum of its telematic logic.” This anxeity applies not only to economics, but to cultural theory and criticism as well.
-“The dream of being the god of cyber-space--public ideology as the fantasy of pre-pubescent males: a regression from sex to an autistic power drive” is Pedantic for “revenge of the nerds”.
-“…where the Net comes alive, and begins to speak the language of wireless bodies in a wireless world.”
Like I said. Subsumption of technological medium into the body, into the self, both obivating and integrating it.
-I assume that virtualiy is transcendant of the present “reality” “Soft idealogy”. Neither morals nor ethics are current there.

This was fun to read.

I always like the first one best.

Moderation:

This essay is preoccupied with themes of self-reference (feedback loops à self-continence). Page 116 alights momentarily upon the idea of a perfectly transparent medium that ‘directly connects to the body’s nervous system”, bypassing the media of the senses. Last week, we discussed the “new medium” as an effective closer of the perceived distance between the “user” and the “object”.
Are we facing a drive towards the Blakean return to innocence, an effective abolition of the medium?


Cyberculture in the Dot.Com Age:

Everything is marketable—even the (Visa-termed) priceless. The patent office (which giveth and taketh away) has become God; patent-flouting Lucifers are relegated to a hell of obscurity on “art” and warez sites. Old media resents the usurper; will the internet always be treated as if it were in relatively immutable print?.


The Rise and Fall of Dotcom Mania:

“Nothing is spectacular if you aren’t part of it”. We discussed the disenfranchisement of information, including that of what used to be communal information (the Sistine Chapel) in class.


Hi-Lo
Great typo at the end of the first paragraph; answer: no vacancy (or perhaps I’m being dishonest).
Overpricing as a “lack of demand”. Perhaps bandwidth will become the newest chic accessory to replace Mercedes convertibles and Hermes scarves, where the rich and/or resourceful will be represented in scintillating definition and the poor and unresourceful in ascii ; Snow Crash broached it obliquely (Brandies and Clints v. programmers avatars).

This section of Lovink's book is the least personal, but I felt it contained some of the most salient points. I was most affected by the final chapter, "Hi-Low..." In Charles Leadbeater's stance that we have moved from a first internet to a second internet, I felt a strong sense of abandonment. The Internet as a site of freedom and of non-trade activity has moved aside for the process of e-business. Worse, Leadbeater argues that the Internet was raised by the Will to business. This seems to be revisionist history at its worst, a self-realizing argument that justifies a total convergence of an open web to one controlled by corporations.

The drive toward broadband has been a cultural slogan for as long as I have been watching television. Only recently did AT&T abandon ads that showed future customers doing everything with speed and ease. Broadband, according to the mythmakers of the 90s, would become linked to everything in our lives: computers, televisions, refrigerators, etc. The utopia has not happened, but broadband is driving the Net. I am currently writing over a $45.00 per month Time Warner Road Runner cable modem connection that I don't feel like I could live without and, to access much of the web, couldn't.

One of the keys here is the lack of consumer choice in the model. As the content providers continue to merge with the owners of the access tools, consumers will not have the ability to reject the prices and demands that corporations set. We are left to both access the Net in the way they choose and view teh content they provide.

Lovink raises very important areas of exploration in terms of net crit. My reactions to what I thought were the three most compelling issues:

--The Storage Question. This seems to be one of the gripping questions of what some have dubbed the postmodern age. As we have achieved through computer technology the ability to store more information than can be accessed in a lifetime, the concern for "information overload" becomes an important one. As Lovink indicates, what becomes information is that which can attract users. His framing of this is interesting. Those sites of information that cannot attract accesors become not only marginalized but non-existant. The implications of this are critical, and we will continue to experience the conversion of all things into entertainment.

--The Theory debate. On page 169, Lovink writes: "Can we already speak of a tendency towards a General Media Theory? Or have we passed the media age, without proper theory?" He addresses this by acknowledging the lack of critical understanding of the history of the Internet. Although his discussion does not raise the issue explicitly, I thought about the issue of who are and who will be the theorists of new media. I have read a lot of film theory and, although some theory is written by practicioners of the medium, i.e. directors, most important theory comes from observers and critics. Do the technological requirements of new media allow for the outsider/user approach to theory creation? What sort of obstacles face a critic who is not a programmer or a hacker? What are the ramifications of a theory only created by those who are within the system?

--The corporate stagnation discussion. Lovink suggests that corporations would never have created the Internet, due to its slow build up from small network to worldwide system. He goes on to argue that the way in which the corporate world demands rapid return on investment may "slow the digital revolution." Although it seems as though technology and corporations who deal with it are always attempting advancements, his point is an interesting one. But when we consider that colonization of the Internet is coming to an end and the backbone of the system is becoming entrenched by huge corporate conglomerates who favor stable economics over risky innovation, it is not difficult to see how his prediction might come true. How much "new" can we expect from corporations if they are already making a killing off of us?

P.S. I really like Sloganomics

Perhaps under the conditions of computerized society, the assumption that literature is the highest form of human language may seem obsolete. There is no Turing-test for literature. But before we hasten to the conclusion that the introduction of computers turns “even the most intelligent poetry into myth or anecdote,” as Kittler mocks, the fact remains that the new systems are used not only for the technical documentation of airplane construction and open-heart surgery, but also for the writing of poetry. Of course historically (and systematically), the first electronic texts were computer programs, and without them there could be no hypertext. But there is also plenty of serious work on literary software. In 1962, the software “Auto-Beatnik” was introduced by R.M. Worthy in Horizon Magazine, “Auto-Poet” and “Scansion Machine” followed, and in 1984, the Scientific American reported on “Racter,” the first prose generator. It uses a vocabulary database to generate complex, grammatically correct sentences. By now, numerous such programs are available on the Internet; among the best known are “Eliza,” imitating a psychiatric conversation, and sentence generators like “Prose.” Many commercial websites now use customer service bots that interact with visitors handling standard queries and complaints. Search engines parse natural language to better determine the exact nature of your question. A program, it turns out, is just a text that generates text.

I guess that I find myself agreeing with Tim on the first section, as well as stealing/modifying his metaphor: I am sailing with Lovink in a boat of vagueness and damnit, i want it to capsize...now. Lovink seems pretty chummy with fellows such as Kittler, Zielinski, Baudrillard, and others, but I could care less. Superly (that's right...superly), Lovink gets a bit more salient in successive sections.

In the Virtual Intellectual, Lovink goes in search of the, well, virtual intellectual; first he tries to define an intellectual (or determine if such a person exists), then he brings in the virtual aspect, because as he explains, other types of intellectuals are no longer effective. Lovink, however, says that civil disobedience, activism, is dead. Someone else pointed out that the protests of the Iraq war were in vain because Bush went to war anyway. Maybe. But I would argue that activism and protest and more precisely, ceaseless Bush-hounding is not at all completely ineffective. Albeit in a different form than public marches and protest, the attacks on Bush's credibility, reasons for going to war, etc. are putting him on the defense to the point where he really seems worried for the first time since taking office. His support from the public in polls has plummeted and we just might see the first tangible evidence of effective Bush-hounding come this November.

I love the portion of this essay that deals with "autonomous media." Such as "when media starts to float, it first of all has to cut all references to journalish, social sciences, ideas of progress and enlightenment, tate propaganda and public opinion." I am afraid that would be imposible to obtain for the author of such a work could not be human. It references Jacques Lacan further on; I have read some of his writings, I do know you can not throw him in for one paragraph and have complete understanding of his viewpoint.

It seems in these two essays that both the DDS and Nettime had one fundamental problem in common, a lack of structure. The Digital City had no form of internal government with which to regulate and preserve it's systems, at least in its earliest forms. In the same way, Nettime was just a flux of meetings and opinions. Though real world gatherings of Nettime subscribers were quite common, the lack of organization in the virtual space led too a few near shutdowns, and its eventual end. Could a greater structure of organization, rather than sticking to the completely free democratic ideals of the new cyberspace, have saved such forums for introspection? Or, due to the fact that both systems would rely too much on the trust of their respective users, could they ever be a complete success?

On page 34, this essay says that we are witnessing the "end of ideology." It says that ideas 'are no longer by definition "weapons'" I would tend to disagree. I think this is an age where ideology is rampant. Everybody seems to have their own ideas and philosophies, and usually pushes them on everyone else. I think that this is the birth of a new ideology, one of a technically literate, empowered individual who will not rest until all have heard what s/he has to say. Ideology is not dead.

Is technical media as new as this essay presupposes? I find a direct correlation between reading things posted or published online to reading them in a book, or newspaper. Criticisms may have found a new realm in which to be seen, but has the technology itself changed the criticisms?

I will be perfectly honest. When it comes to this essay, Spectulative Media Theory, I have absolutly no idea what Lovink is talking about. Just as I feel that I am following his train of thought, he throws in a reference to another author, an author that I have never heard of let alone read, with no explainations besides the name dropping. "We did not think "micro politics," but rather practiced them (a Deleuzean era in that sense)". Yet thankfully someone must have thrown a stone and knocked Lovink out of the vague tree for the later essays. The Virtual Intellectual explores the very grey area of the characteristics, abilities, ideals, and desires for the theoretical Virtual Intellectual.
In reference to "The Digital City-Metaphor and Community": Lovink writes: "Not being involved in its daily operations, but still dedicated to certain aspects, this relative distance gave me the freedom to report and theorize about the inner workings of such a large system with tens of thousands of users". How does distance from the daily operations give Lovink an increased ability to study and theorize about the Amsterdam Digital City?
tim

Case Studies:

The Digital City:
A lesson in the inefficacy of organizational translation: the 'net and its users must embrace a newer, perhaps more mechanical identity, not insist upon recreating preexisting social structures/strictures.

Moderation:
What and why is the moderator? A pre-parser, setting up a "sensical" subjectivity to substitute for the pre-moderated objectivity. Does the presence of a moderator remove one's obligation of moderation?


This book is delightfully lacking of jargon.

A sutainable alternative to commercial can be found in the internet? Not really. The internet is fueled by commercial support right now. Even our name-conscious author cites the Digital City's failure to remain a free resource, eventually sucumbing to the desire for money. So why bring this up as a valid option? Did I miss something in the section?

"civil disobedience is ineffective" (35) True! Look at the recent massive social movement against the war in Iraq. Look at the stunning effect it had on the people in power.

Althought this entire section is devoted to creating a portrait of a Virtual Intellectual (VI) it seems to be more about the lack of virtual intellectuals, or the shortcomings of the existing ones. It irritated me that the interenet was referred to as 'hyper commercial'. This seems to be the case with most medias at present: film, television, literature (oh the junk mail), and of course the internet too. It just seems that this is the nature of our society, we turn everyform of communication in to a way to motivate consumption - consume, consume, consume!

I am beginning to suspect this book is just an exercise in Media Theory name dropping. The bit about the status of text/writting/language in new media was interesting, much like we talked about in class - how does book text differ from text on film or hypertext. I disagree with his comment that media is getting faster. Maybe the techniques for creating equivalent results are faster but the media itself really isn't faster, is it?

This piece on nettime offers, like Brooks's comments suggest about all of Lovink's book, the beginnings of what should be significant debates about the Internet domain. That Lovink does not reflect upon the issues does not mean we cannot. What initially caught my interest was the continued use of real meetings to decide online policy. Understandably, this became an issue for nettime, as it rightly should. When perhaps a quarter of members are making decisions about a community, there is a problem when democracy is a goal. However, when considered in terms of a reflection of broader Internet culture, the nettimers who met at conventions were being transparent about a practice that occurs for all online systems, that of the real life controller. At least nettime acknowledged their practice, instead of attempting to shield it as occurs in numerous places.

Another point of discussion here is Lovink's calling upon the idea of the Maussian idea of the potlatch. Should members of an online community be required to give as they receive. This issue is prevalent in cyberspace, as in the issue of peer2peer networking and other venues. It merits more attention.

One more thought came to mind as I read this. If I am reading the numbers accurately, nettime had as much as maybe 1000 users. Lovink claims membership was greatest at the end, so present numbers may be higher today. With that being considered, what should we make of the democratic possibilities of the forum? Is there a critical mass of people required for actual changes to happen and, if so, how will those numbers affect the mailing list? Is Nettime just one of many fragmented groups all spouting off on the same issue, but not really accomplishing anything but infighting and self-aggrandizement?

Essay on Speculative Media Theory:

This chapter is very informational, if frustrating. Lovink makes numerous good points the nature of "new" media and how theory have affected its progress. However, Lovink does an awful job of clearly spelling out what German media theory is, what its relation to theory and cultural studies are, exactly what effect Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Nietzche and the rest are having on modern day media. On numerous occasions, Lovink appeared to be on the brink of a very interesting explanation of some the above mentioned (for example, Lacan and the question of language); but instead he added just one or two more semi-explanatory sentences before moving on to some tangential thought on pop culture or Siemens salesmen. In short, I was interested, buy wanted to hear a lot more.

The Virtual Intellectual:

I take issue with Lovink's criticism of Said's notion of the intellectual's role. I agree with the author's contention that "What is missing [in Said's argument] is an analysis of the dramatic changes in the public sphere itself" (33). He goes on to describe a domain formerly considered "public" consisting of streets, squares, parks, et cetera, that are no longer public because they are constantly under surveillance. Even if this is true (which is extremely debatable), the role of Said's intellectual as a "moral agent" is not depleted. It can, if one wishes it to be, be enhanced. The intellectual can serve a more important role to grow the debate between the constantly observed citizen and the state, which has a monopoly on aggressive observation and other forms of force. And by the way, please explain to me exactly how the days of Foucault's discursive regimes are over. I'd love to hear about it. In sum, 99% of what Lovink says in this chapter is incredibly provocative, but he is to forceful in his arguments ("The fact is that the intellectual as opinion leader is losing ground") and fails to supply sufficient evidence to back himself up. If the VI is so hell-bent on not representing the off-line population (The Other) then there is clearly room left in this tiny world for the traditional intellectual.

The Digital City:

Lovink's anecdote about the internet and public access media in Amsterdam in this chapter is informational, but continues Dark Fiber's trend of focusing on media culture in a small corner of the world called northern Europe. All the more reason for the traditional intellectual to exist: to represent the rest of the world. Again he makes good points, but in a parochial framework. Tell me about the Middle East, Africa, India, Asia, Latin America, the Balkans. Tell me about "The Other." If Lovink wants to focus the study on one singular and specific plot of land, that's fine, but he should also qualify his sweeping generalizations as such. Now that I'm through with that rant, I should, in fairness, says the DDS story was extremely telling and a great case study on new forms of (and potential for) democracy.

Moderation:

I honestly got little out of the first 10 pages or so of this chapter. It seemed a bit self-indulgent on Lovink's part. However, on page 83, when he began talking of a mailing list as a "grey zone" in which information is not being published per se (because it is not a website), but rather circulated. His talk of authors pre-publishing essays was new to me. "Copyright is not the must urgent issue here, but the buildup of trust between subscribers. This bond is based on face to face contacts and mutual friendships" (84). If only life with EMI were this simple.

I will admit to having a hard time getting through Lovink's book. There isn't too much to read, the stuff isn't all that heady, but yet I find myself drifting off and getting lost or disinterested in the material. Consequently, I think my postings have lacked a certain degree of depth that they ought to have.

Do I have an excuse. Oh yes, of course.

In the acknowledgment, it is stated that this was pieced together from mailing lists and other sources (cut and pasted) to make a book. You can tell that the book hasn't been that well edited. But, there is more than just grammatical errors at work here. There is a certain lack of flow to the writing that is giving me a headache and leaving me without much to say in these postings. His writing is reflective of not an in-depth study, but a personal account, and it shows, and it's hard to read. Frankly, I don't give a shit how many conferences Lovink went to between 1993 and 1997.

Ok, I'm not that mad. But I do think that the noticeably pasted together quality of this book is making it difficult to read. Are others having similar issues, or am I just overtired?

The tale of the Digital City is a bothersome one. In reading Geert's back history of the Amsterdam online cutlure, it seems that there was a distinct possibility that this form of democracy could have succeeded online. That it failed in the sense of becoming nothing more than a common ISP seems all the more disheartening due to its rather utopian beginnings. Not only does the article call into question the idea of community, it represents the general concerns facing internet activists--economics and legality. As he says in his last line, such a community is a difficult task to manage without support from government. Well, what government is supporting such communities. Lovink seems to hold a certain degree of hatred for Joost Flint, but how much can the individual corporation (or capitalist) be blamed when the entire structure favors commercialization?

I sort of enjoyed the polemical nature of this essay. Although I took exception to his insistance that we are approaching the "end of ideology" (34), Lovink's depiction of the VI is a fun one to read. The VI who is "equipped with technical skills" (36) and their dual nature as critic and creator (37) gives the character a sort of cowboy feel. Sounds like a fun job.

This was an interesting way to start. On my first read, I felt it was an unnecessary addition to the book, due to its somwhat esoteric take on the developments in media theory over the course of several decades. However, in looking back, the personal confrontation becomes important, as Lovink's own experience with media theory plays out in later chapters. Still, the least rewarding of the four chapters.

One question: What, exactly, is the 1968 generation and what happened in May 1968? Perhaps I missed this somewhere in the text.

Speculative Media Theory:
or, Theory in Crisis. This must be the introduction. Essentially, we have discovered a new means of communication (did our ancestors struggle thusly when they invented or evolved writing? it's implied in p. 26, paragraph 2) and haven't acclimated ourselves to it yet. The air of confusion pervading this well-written piece embodies the essayist's struggles with the idea of "autonomous" media of p. 25, which is necessarily self-contained and defined, abeit surrrounded by other disciplines, and what I believe is a human need to define by dichotomy. The rejection of subjectivity for a nebulous mechanical objectivity is self-deluding. I defy a machine to theorize, and similarly defy a human to be a machine.

The Virtual Intellectual :
Perhaps the intellectual as public champion isn’t so démodé : Lovink interprets the internet as a potentially highly public place, where the old « intellectual »-elitist monopoly over criticism and interpretation is negated by a universality of accessability to media and to its publication. What else might a « virtual » intellectual (all implications intended) working with such procreative media be but a facilitator ?


Finally, a propos to the links: is art appreciation, when not wholly dependant upon an acadmic, critical heritage, itself a cult?