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

>So much unchallenged racism on this list against americans. Is that OK? I’m
>not saying microsoft doesn’t piss me off, but my impression is of list
>members attempting to create their own private virtual Ivanhoe.
>
>Maybe this list was always defined as being concerned with australian
>issues. that’s OK. But as I have been struggling with in another context,
>it’s not possible to be just Australian any more … We have to have dual
>identities as local and global and I don’t see how relying on outmoded
>concepts of national identity as a basis for a flippant critique is a
>progressive move.


Since when was “American’ a race? And when haven’t we dealt with the
local/global. My own work is centred around this question. Sorry, but I am
just Australian and being just Australian is a complex thing, strewth,
always has been. We need to think carefully about what a nation is, it is
more than just a theoretical construct. There is nothing new with seeing
‘Australian’ as being beneath us. It is beneath us, it was built by people
who now prop us up. The middle class in Australia has always seen
“Australia” as beneath them, at least since the 19th Century. We now have
this new-class of cyber-colonials who are part of the brain-drain with out
even leaving home.

Thanks
>The enormous amounts of information available to us all thanks to the Net
>is a wonderful thing, it is not a problem. It is how we deal with the
>anxiety it can create that can be a problem. Perhaps the cure for
>information obesity is simply a sensible diet…

Perhaps we are entering a post-information age, or a time when too much
information is as disabling as not having enough. It was only in the 60’s
(so I am told), that the Communist part had a printing press hidden in a
shed in Bendigo waiting for the revolution. And the crusty old bloke that
had the skills to run the thing, was one of the most important people in
the organisation. Perhaps now we are going too far in the other direction.
We have so much information, that we are disabled by it. Disable the
illusion, go to the library.

When I grew up in Tasmania in the 80’s, we only had two television
stations, the ABC and a commercial station. There were also only two radio
stations, the ABC and another station that played near-death reflective
tunes. Both stations ended at 11.00PM each night. The only newspapers were
the Advocate, a parochial Christian luvin rag, and the mainland Herald Sun.

Tasmania is also perhaps one of the most democratic parts of the nation,
certainly one of the more politicised regions (I love the way they nail the
election candidates portraits to the gum trees). I grew up through the
Franklin Dam debate as well as the Wesley Vale Pulp mill. The later was a 2
billion dollar development in one of the most economically depressed
regions of the country. There were pro-mill advertisements on television
every 10 minutes or so on television for weeks, and almost no opposition
media. The mill was never built, the people didn’t want it. They used the
political tools at their disposal to stop it. The media didn’t matter.

I also remember that we used to have a media black out a couple of day
before an election. This was so people could stop and think about their
choices. They made these choices in a number of ways, who they trust, the
policies that were important, the party that most supported their class or
had looked after them in the past.

We live in a culture, it is bigger than us. America has just taken over the
surface of Australia (and the superficial). We have our own hierarchies
based on our own history and meritocracies. We are importing McDemocracy,
the cheap popularist 5 minute version of the US (thorough its media), the
the veneer of democracy. It resembles democracy like McDonalds resembles food!

There are a lot of globalisations happening, the media is just one of them.
People have personal, and cultural, and family histories. The media doesn’t
understand this. Media people deal with daily generalisations, this is
their craft. I see a world in the future when there is just so much media,
where everyone knows everything about all the evils of the world, but it
changes nothing. Media subversion is very important now, but only for the
next five minutes. We also need to understand our democratic tools.

There has been a lot or research done that supports the thesis that
advertising is not cost effective: that the media only exists because of
its duopoly relationship with advertisers (in which we all pay for in the
products that we buy). Perhaps we could also find our selves in a similar
situation with media and subversive information. A duopoly between
corporate main-stream media and subversive information. We are all so
tied-up with cold-war ideas of restricted information flows, that we have
become obsessed with the process of subversion rather than the outcomes. We
only understand the popular surface of democracy, rather that its inner
workings. I am not sure where all this goes, but just get the vibe that
things are a changing man. I’m an educated bloke, I have always filtered
information. Perhaps the key is more education, not more information.
Information is making us stupid, it is oppressing us. My life is a series
of media releases with a string through the middle.

Anyway, I am going to the Napier Hotel now in Fitzroy, it is 10.30 on
Friday. If anyone is in the area, drop in and have a beer.

warm regards,

I went to the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative conference at the
University of Sydney last week. For those who don’t know about ECAI, I have
enclosed a brief description.

www.ecai.org

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is a time and placed based
collaborative project led by UC Berkeley and to a lesser extent,
Archaeology at the university of Sydney. ECAI is a GIS based project that
plans to build a global atlas that will link projects from around the world
through time/place interfaces. At the core of ECAI’s innovations are the
ECAI Information Technology Architecture and its central unifying feature,
the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse. The Metadata Clearing house will allow
data-sets to be re-purposed on other web-based projects on a global scale.

http://www.timemap.net/

The Time-map project is an initiative from Sydney Uni’s Archaeology
Computing Lab and is an attempt to map cultural data through a time-based
GIS interface. One of the time-map projects is the attempt to map the
historical growth of Sydney through digitising all the known historical
maps of the period and layering them with historical images.

call for action: ICANN comes to Melbourne

Hi,

I an a disbarred historian working on the
history of Fitzroy and milkbars to help understand things that effect the
whole world! I also don’t understand what ICANN does, but we could always
ask them. Someone once described democracy to me as hanging out with a
bunch of cretins who you don’t really like but you will try and get on with
then anyway in the name of some bigger picture. Can’t we hang out with them
when they come here? A Palestinian also told me that ICANN’s twelve
employees will become a world government really soon. Perhaps after they
string up all the Arabs, and torture all the Hindu’s, and free all the
Chinese from the tyranny of being Chinese. Anyway, trying not to be a
devil’s advocate here, but before we spiral into some narrow determinist
argument about DNS being the new world order, lets contextualise what
ICANNDY does in a larger circulation of ideas and power. Am I missing
something?

Date: Saturday, December 11, 1999, 11:17:55 AM

Subject: Winners and Losers..

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In the constructive desire to halt any animosity that I may have created

with Damien by my rather pedestrian concerns that technology

can only be understood within broader social, historical and political

structures, I have decided to log-off and find a less conflicted soap-box.

Sorry if I have offended anyone, just a grumpy young historian in a dying

discipline flogging out-moded ideas in increasingly constricted spaces.

milkbar boy…

Date: Monday, October 18, 1999, 2:18:09 PM

Subject: Remediation…

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Hi All,

One of the best books that I have so far read about “new” media is Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. It is not generally available as yet and is expensive to buy. ($75) This book is bound to become one of the seminal texts in the field if it hasn’t
already. I think that one of the most refreshing aspects of this book is that it doesn’t set up the arbitrary categories of “new” vs “old” by using the dogma of the ‘new’ to probelematise and imagine hierarchies in the ‘old’. The idea of the ‘new’ is often used in ‘new’ media discourse as a vehicle to flog fringe laissez-faire rhetoric or as a vehicle for intellectual expediency. ie the hypothetical

why should we have to read all those nasty books or see those ‘linear’ films or write articles as well as produce stuff because what we are doing is so ‘new’ and radical that we can redefine the entire intellectual process or any other process in our own god-like image.

” What is a medium”

” A Medium is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media”

P98 Remediation.

Date: Tuesday, December 7, 1999, 10:23:43 AM

Subject: Macromedia and the 20th Century…

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>An event which was to greatly affect Turing throughout his life took place

>in 1928. He formed a close friendship with Christopher Morcom, a pupil in

>the year above him at school, and the two worked together on scientific

>ideas. Perhaps for the first time Turing was able to find someone with whom

>he could share his thoughts and ideas.

That’s not all they shared…

Subject: Labor and Multimedia.

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As Victoria has now changed hands from a Liberal to a Labor government, it will be interesting to see what is in store for the multimedia
“industry” in this state. Kennett’s government often abused the modernist mantra of ‘technology as progress’ or the idea that imbedded in technology is its own agency…as opposed to the more socially progressive direction of Labor ie. you have to be able to afford a computer in the first place.

Does this mean no more “minister for multimedia” or does it mean “e-merge” will finally arrive? Does this mean that there is a possibility
now that those of us who are interested in “thinking” about interactive media can distance ourselves from “industry battler” types who are more interested in revenue generation?

Is Victoria finally on the move and can we now think about technology a little more sophisticatedly that the often simplistic logic that just because a new model Falcon comes out every two years, that we are rocketing ahead? How will the funding bodies change?

something to be aware of I ’spose.