Blog Art! The Death of Email (or Death by Email)

I liked you paper and I wish that I had have heard you presenting it. I especially like the idea of embedding your arguments of masculinity and patriarchy within the culture in which we live. All too often the Gibsonesque drones look for an escape in that barren soul-less place called ‘cyberspace’. I saw one of those awful bubble cars the other day–you know, the sort that Bikers used to piss on at the Broadford rallys–and it had the word”Cyber” blazoned along it’s side. Now there is Cyberspace. Surely there is more room in a HR Manaro?

I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of Fukuyama either. There is a great book by an Australian named Keith Windshuttle The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Theory and Cultural Critics. The past and history are two different things. The past is just there, but history is something that allot of dedicated people spend years scraping through dusty archives to support an argument or empower some group, be they conservative, liberals, or lefties. The thing that makes History different than all other disciplines is that it requires the weight of evidence to support the seeking of truths. The history department at Melb Uni is ironically called “The Department of History and Women’s Studies”. History is the solution, not the problem. It is the lack of History that is the problem. A lack of History means that all these young boof-head Kennett clones get around thinking they are hip when really they look like Duran Duran or Culture Club or some other 80s relic. Now this is tragic. No one owns the past as no one owns history. History is political and this is why Henry Reynolds helped win the Mabo case. It is the lack if History that makes us patriarchal or capitalist or whatever. Now I remember a country where rabid right-wing red-necks had to read a few books before they took public positions….such a long time ago.

His-story

>If you want to learn how to become a success in the multimedia &

>Internet industries, don’t miss the Building A Multimedia Business

>Workshop.

What is the definition of success?

Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999, 11:00:46 AM

Subject: The Death of a Cyber-Hick..

===8<==============Original message text===============

(from a Tasmanian polemicist)

This is a poem I lifted form Ted Hughes. I could be about cyber-hicks…or

some other backward parochial cowboys. Cyberspace is like Texas, brash,

crass, marginal full of new-money oil barrens who think that they own

everything they see, until they position themselves in discourses outside

of their box and they realise that they are mere weeds in an anthill,

lacking nourishment from

boater intellectual and cultural engine rooms, thus they will shrivel up

and die.

The Death of a Cyber-Hick…

Once upon a time

There was a person

Running for his life.

This was his fate.

It was a hard fate.

But Fate is Fate.

He had to keep running

He began to wonder about Fate.

And running for dear life.

Who? Why?

And was he nothing

But some dummy hare on a racetrack?

At last he made up his mind

He was nobody’s fool.

It would take guts

But yes he could do it.

Yes yes he could stop.

Agony! Agony!

Was the wrenching

Of himself from his running.

Vast! And sudden

This stillness

In the empty middle of the desert.

There he stood- -stopped.

And since he couldn’t see anybody

To North or to West or to East or South

He raised his fists

Laughing in awful joy

And shook them at the Universe

And his fists fell off

And his arms fell off

He staggered and his legs fell off

It was too late for him to realise

That this was the dogs tearing him to pieces

That he was, in fact, nothing

But a dummy hare on a racetrack.

And life was being lived only by the dogs.

Ted Hughes.

Date: Thursday, October 14, 1999, 5:06:30 PM

Subject: instructive critisism

===8<==============Original message text===============

Mr Alan,

I do belive dear Allan that I was simply retturning an e-mail with your

header still atttached. Sorrry that I didn’t correct it

for you.

The word “critisism” is the correct historical spelling of the word. It

comes from the Greek word “critis”. Critis was the Greek

god of lesbian tendencies, but the work has lost its correct meaning and

correct spelling over the years.

>Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History Of The Internet : Connecting The Suits Part 2

>Bob Cringely trains his well-informed eye on the intriguing history of the

>Internet from its birth deep in the Pentagon to the cutting edge of the

>World Wide Web today.

Not sure if you actually saw this show, but I would like to hear your comments. I watched it with my house mate last night. It seemed to contain the usually stuff…the myth of the self mad man–very strong in IT–the idea that hard work, good products and deals are the driving force behind industry progress–the idea of merit, conservatives masquerading as radicals etc. This is a history of the Internet seen from the back of a ute, with Bob “Cringe”-ly aiming his red neck shotgun at Alexander Graham Bell, Ted Nelson, APRAnet, Berkeley, post-industrialism, globalisation, cold war, Californian pork-barrelling, etc.etc.

>existence is based upon perception and

>imagination,the receptive and active modes of our reality, intertwined

>both consciously and subconsciously..

Relativism…very 60s. Gnosticism…Perhaps VR is the return of Jesus

Christ. It is good to see religious studies back on the curriculum after a 50 year hiatus.

What I see as one of the great problems when discussing VR or other ephemeral terms such as interactive or ‘cyber’ or ‘multi’ or other computer-mediated expressions is that often the hermeneutic apparatus used to describe them is often little more than a wish list or projections. The potential for VR is huge, but the proof is in the pudding so to speak. Jetfighers, banal street scapes, elevator musak, corporate logos, classical references to dated notions of ‘high culture’. I’m just telling it how it is..street level. Every time I turn on the television I think, such potential then turn it off.

So much for the medium telling us about the world in which we actually live…