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

Nice to read of something kind of  familiar for a change, like Fitzroy. I’d be interested in reading  your next instalment though, because your title and a number of points raised offer much … and leave us waiting for the delivery!

The United States defines the ideology of globalisation and
Corporations are the main catalyst.

Here, I’m not sure. For a start, and as others on ::fc:: have raised
previously with respect to your gun-in-the-head swipes at the US,
your argument is not consistent. If, for instance, national
sovereignty has declined with the onset of globalisation - and this,
I think, is an argument that needs careful theorising and empirical
work - then surely the ‘US’ is a diverse, asynchronous
socio-political entity that is also subject to such changes? What
you’re hedging at is quite specific institutions I suspect, and I
think your argument would do better to name them upfront. It’s
pretty hard to argue that nation-states are defined by hegemonic
unity.

As for Corporations as the main catalyst - this too, I think, needs
to be tempered by considering other forces at work. Castells is one
among many (and indebted too many!) that recognises a prehistory to
corporate power predicated by the internationalisation and history of
communcations media & transport technologies - arguably the hardware
that makes possible the transnationalisation of corporations along,
of course, with that other key catalyst: the mobilisation of labour
and the attendant mingling of cultures.

So, in short, too short a take on what could be called the economic
sovereignty, as distinct from the popular sovereignty, of US
corporations and supranationally governed institutions (UN, IMF,
World Bank, etc).

Capitalism has always been international and relied on
internationalism to expand, but this has entered a new stage.

Here, I’m curious as to how you see the figurations of this ‘new
stage’. And, more than anything, I’m eagerly awaiting how you go
about articulating the historical everydayness of Fitzroy with
globality, beyond the waves of migration outline as characterising
that suburb.

> As Morley argues ?maintenance of national sovereignty and identity
>is becoming increasingly difficult, as the unities of economic and
>cultural production and consumption become increasingly
>transnational?.

Morley, of course, is reiterating a common line (one of many that
make up a close to plagiarised book, if you’re drawing on Home
Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. Try and find a few lines
in there that aren’t a quote or paraphrase! Very handy for his
footnotes and synthesis of debates though.)
And it’s too simplistic a line, in my view. National sovereignty,
in its *modern* form, is closely articulated with institutions of the
state and the territory of the nation. This said, I think it’s
dubious for any post-colonial nation-state to assume ever to have
extinguished the sovereignty of the colonising power. While
currencies, populations, industries, legal systems and so forth may
be regulated by the nation, the residual power of a colonised or
displaced colonial imaginary is not to be underestimated and still
commands considerable authority: the cringe factor has still not
evacuated this nation’s culture. (And as Keating knew so well, for a
politician of this country, the relationship between culture and
economy is a mutually constitutive one.) In this respect, I think
it’s dubious to assume a history of absolute sovereignty for a nation
state like Australia. We still have monarchical rule, after all.

Without having done the necessary thinking or research, and hence
setting myself up for pretty fast invalidation!, I’m inclined to
think national sovereignty is not undergoing a crisis so much as a
transformation, one that indeed has had, as you outline, devasting
affects for many of those under the rule of sovereign power - but
this is different from sovereignty itself having a crisis.

National sovereignty is articulating itself through and with a
different informational and cultural architecture, in both material
and immaterial ways. The media event of the Sydney Olympics
demonstrated that national difference is as important as ever in the
quest to turn the wheels of capital accumulation, which has always
depended upon the differentiation of commodity objects - something
the unity-under-negotiation of the nation has managed to do since its
inception .

So, while the corporations that own the mode of production may have
become subject to transnational corporate usurptation, the identity
representations (if not interpellations - and there, sure, is a bit
of a key difference, though one might argue that representation is
conditioned by the possibilty of interpellation…) are still very
much about national difference. While the nation-state (with the
hyphen) as an entity aligned with national institutions and
geographic territory has lost some of its grasp of sovereignty with
the advent of, as you point out, the floating of the dollar and
corporatisation of public institutions, the sovereignty - as a
‘victory of one side over the other, a victory that makes the one
sovereign and the other the subject’ (Hardt & Negri) - of the
postmodern nation state still takes on national forms. The cultural
life of industries within the imaginary realm of the nation are
still, and necessarily, embedded in the empirical & aesthetic
multiplicity of social practices, and I’d hazzard to suggest a sort
of sovereignty of phenomenology is occurring at this level - or, more
simply, the rule of perception bounded by the materiality of
everydayness.

In the paper I posted to ::fc:: a few weeks back, I was starting
work that sought, in ways perhaps similar to yours, to demonstrate
that sovereignty is something up for grabs, but still something that
takes on figurations within the nation. Processes of deregulation
and so forth have freed up the space of sovereignty within the
nation. It’s what I’d call the materiality of virtuality. Something
that is highly contingent upon the loosening up of otherwise
sedentary variables. This may sound like a neoliberalist apology,
but there are possibilities for alternatives within such a
transformative space. Education is one. The legitimacy granted to
denationalised political subjects at a supranational level might hold
a symbolic authority, but this remains illegitimate until it is
successfully articulated with the symbolic and actual structures and
lives within the nation. The future of representative democracy, if
it isn’t a complete historical farce, is dependent on such processes
of recognition *within* the nation. Herein lies the present
condition for a future democracy, at least in its representative form.

The New Frontier

Hi Fibre, I have finally written something serious for once. If you have
any comments, then they would be more than appreciated. It is about
Australia and globalisation and Fitzroy and technology. It is a little
rough, but then again so are you lot.

(sorry no footnotes in email)
The New Frontier

It is perhaps surprising for rest of the world to learn, and for some
Australians, that in the industrialised world, Australia is one of the most
urbanised societies. Most Australians live in large cities with 64% of the
population in the capitols cities, 17% live in rural areas, and the rest in
large towns. At the time of Federation, it was almost exactly the opposite
with most of the population living in rural areas. During the 20th Century,
rural employment dramatically declined and industry and people flocked to
the cities. The cities became vibrant booming industrial hubs that
attracted immigrant workers from all around the world. In the post-war
period, Australia doubled its population in a generation, bringing migrants
from England and Ireland, Greece and Italy, and later Asia, creating
perhaps the most multi-cultural society of all the advanced industrial
economies.

The demographic realities of Australia are often in stark contrast to our
resilient popular identity. This identity, which circulates in our popular
media and press, is one that insists that we are a still a masculine,
Anglo-Saxon, and laconic people who live an idealic and relaxed lifestyle
in wide-open spaces. From Patrick White to Frederick McCubbin, from Banjo
Patterson to the movies that spectacularly broke into the US and European
markets in the 70’s and 80’s, the mythology of an Australia connected to
the bush is as resilient as a frill necked lizard baking itself in the sun.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s under Federal Labor with Paul Keating and
Bob Hawke, the ‘idea of Australia’ became a vigorous national debate that
centred on multiculturalism, deregulation, republicanism, and the dalliance
with ‘the world stage’. We opened our industries to international
competition, deregulated our currency and financial system, sold off nearly
all our public industries and through our arts bodies and galleries,
attempted to foster a new more inclusive national culture that recognised
the many faces that make up our national neighbourhoods.

What resulted is an Australia of the late 20the and early 21st that is
radically different to the country that characterised us for most of the
last century. It resulted in a much more ‘global nation’, one that no
longer seemed to suffer from a ‘tyranny of distance’ much more open to the
rest of the world and one with a number of new domestic frontiers.

The frontier, as articulated in the Bernard Salt Report, The Big Shift, is
no longer the great post-war middle suburbs based on material and social
egalitarianism. The middle suburbs are where masses of people settled
during the long post-war boom, from the second world war to the early 70’s.
The long boom, so well articulated by one of the great historians of the
20th Century, Eric Hobsbawn, was a period of growth that the world had
never known. The output of manufactures quadrupled between the early 1950’s
and the early 1970’s and world trade in manufactured items grew tenfold.
Australia became during this time perhaps the world’s most middle-class
society with over half our population situated in the middle strata.
Working people for the first time had a disposable income and skills that
could afford them a place in the middle class. An income that could buy
cars and a brick-veneer house in the suburbs, clothes and even luxury food
items imported from half way across the globe. In another generation, this
would have only been a dream.

“What had once been luxury, became the expected standard of comfort, at all
events in rich countries: the refrigerator, the private washing machine,
the telephone”.

The image of Australia in the long boom of 1950’s and 60’s is one of
prosperity and comfort, of conservatism and ‘wake in fright’ conformity, of
high-tariffs, restrictive censorship, and extraordinarily bad public
architecture. It is a time when people moved out of the inner suburbs in
their droves, from the damp and cramped houses of the inner-city ’struggle
towns’ so well documented in Janet McCalman’s oral history of Richmond, to
the spacious comfort of the suburbs.

However, in the Australia of this century, the frontier is no longer the
middle suburbs of Barry McKenzie or the bush of Paul Hogan. The new
frontiers are at the fringes (or the ‘edge city’, as described by Joel
Garreau)) and the inner-cities. Bernard Salt goes as far as to assert that
we are entering a ‘third Australian culture’ or a country defined by the
new demographic of the beach, the inner-cities, and the fringes.

This project in a small way seeks to comprehend one of these new frontiers.
This frontier is in the oldest suburb in one of the countries largest
cities. The suburb is Fitzroy in Melbourne, the cities first suburb.
Fitzroy, like Sydney’s Marackville, or the West End in Brisbane, is
arguable one of the country most diverse in terms of lifestyle, income
distribution, and ethnicity. They are areas with stark contrast between old
economies and new, between small ethnic business’s described in Jock
Collins (et.al.) seminal study of small business in Marackville A Shop Full
of Dreams, to the new middle classes living in the perfumed remains of the
industrial era.

Like the broader city and country in which it is situated, Fitzroy is a
suburb with many beginnings and many identities. For many new migrants,
Fitzroy is the initial encounter with Australia. First, it was the Italians
and Greeks, and then it was the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Africans. During
last century, the idea of Australia became one as a destination for all
comers from all parts of the globe. Stuart McIntyre one of the countries
most pre-eminent historians claims that a multiplicity of beginnings
“further undermined the foundational significance of 1788″.

“The blurring of origins turned Australian history into a story of
journeyings and arrivals, shared by all and endlessly repeated”

Fitzroy is a suburb with many beginnings, now in its third century. It has
changed from its roots as a somewhat rough and insular working class suburb
into one of the countries most diverse, tolerant, unequal, and curious
suburbs. Dennis O’Rourke in his recent documentary Cunnamulla (2001)
portrays an outback town as the very embodiment of Australian contemporary
history. In another generation, perhaps this was true. The bush and rural
economies have taken an inordinate share of domestic economic restructuring
linked to globalisation. This has resulted in rural decline and the rise of
the far right in the Australian political scene. The inner cities are
another country, a country for better or worse that increasingly looks like
the rest of the world.

What is Globalisation

It is perhaps a long bow to draw, to leap between local experiences within
an inner-city Australian community to the global discourses that are the
historical definitive ideas of our time: to leap between local economies
and day-to-day human interaction, to that which effects a good deal of
humanity. However, the argument could also be made that it is impossible to
do one without the other, it is impossible to understand the global without
understanding to some degree your own relative cultural and geographical
viewpoint. It is within local communities in which most of us live and
globalisation needs to be understood in human dimensions.

As the meta-structures of the history of a nation slowly erode, we are left
with small histories and a myriad of voices. As Richard Falk, the author of
Predatory Globalisation asserts, the long period of Westphalia
international relations is nearing an end, and we need to understand the
forces beyond the nation state. Globalisation is not one thing, nor is it
mono-directional; it is a convergence of forces, both local and national,
both policy driven and technological driven, both corporate driven and
community driven.

This is not of course the first time the world has witnessed large global
movements as there was the free-trade movement emanating from Britain in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and colonialism and
socialism were enormous globalising forces. Before the first world war,
Western Europe controlled most of the world’s landmass, and after the
second world war; communism controlled two thirds of the world’s people.

The dominant characteristic of today’s globalisation is free trade, the
liberal democratic, capitalist mode of production, new communication
technologies, and the ascendancy of large multi-nationals. Globalisation is
heavily driven by the developed world’s private sector, and a shift from
the nation-state sovereignty to transnational actors from both
non-government and the private sector. The United States defines the
ideology of globalisation and Corporations are the main catalyst. Many of
these corporations are involved in cultural production thus creating their
own world culture and value system. This value system is based on
consumerism and the triumph of the individual over society. There is
likewise a growing interdependence between nations as they are drawn into a
global economy and culture.

It must be reiterated that globalisation is not an umbrella term, but is a
very specific thing that is the direct result of a number of government
policies and technological innovations. The policies by national
governments from the early 70’s helped the spread of globalisation and many
argue that this has resulted in a number of the sovereign powers of the
state being supplanted by transnational forces. Capitalism has always been
international and relied on internationalism to expand, but this has
entered a new stage. As Morley argues “maintenance of national sovereignty
and identity is becoming increasingly difficult, as the unities of economic
and cultural production and consumption become increasingly transnational”.

<stop>

I have a few thoughts on email lists, and email, and information, and too
much of all the above. I wonder just how ‘democratic’ the world will become
when everyone has email and everyone can publish? If everyone talks at
once, then no one can hear. There are already too many books, too many web
sites, and too many lists. Too much information means no time to think and
no time to think means no knowledge. Just cause someone publishes, does it
means that we all have too? This is the American individual view of
democracy. There are just so many assumptions being made about the Internet
and democracy that we need to sit down and have a glass of whiskey and
think about it. Sure, it doesn’t take a genius to ask who decides who
publishes, but it is also equally naive to assume that the free flow of
information is leading towards a more equitable existence. The opposite
true. The world is more unequal now than it has ever been in history,
perhaps 200: 1 from richest country to poorest country (say Switzerland and
Mozambique).
Now that I told you this (I am not a theorist so it is true, I have
evidence What are you going to do about it?

Information obesity is like hamburger obesity. It is American.

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, 10:30:36 AM

Subject: Me and Charlie Darwin are Mates..

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Dear Fellow Un-evolved Rock Apes,

Of course factions of the web community think that the web is ‘the natural

evolution of human knowledge”…they get paid for it and they have a great

investment in convincing the public that they are ‘intelligent’. There is

no such thing as natural evolution of human knowledge. Try convincing the

Australian Tax payer who pays for your education of this. What is “natural

evolution” when attached to commercial technological innovation? I call it

fascism. DVD was released about 15 years ago. Is this ‘natural evolution’

or the pitfalls of sales and marketing. How can ‘evolution’ drive

technological innovation? Who are the web’s greatest thinkers? Perhaps you

are a genius Damian but seeing as though we aren’t allowed to contextualise

or “…limit….our understanding of these terms to such outdated

interpretations” we will never know.

I will send all those stupid and outdated book writers around to see you

one day and you can seduce them with your

voodoo and incense sticks. Perhaps we can all get naked and chant praise to

the great god Macroman who is at the cutting edge

of human knowledge and doesn’t need to contextualise himself because he is

beyond this.

Anyhow, I am a more evolved species than you anyway. I am bigger and

smarter and braver and better looking so it is me and my work that is

really the best and the most evolved and the evolution of all human

intellectual endeavor so you better be careful. My

milkbar is going to take over the world and everyone’s brain and then I

will be the great god Macroman and revel in the fact that I

am smarter than everyone else because me and Charles Darwin are bed buddies.

Date: Monday, December 6, 1999, 4:19:48 PM

Subject: Macromedia and the 20th Century…

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Punters,

As fascinating and innovating as Macromedia’s web technology is, I always

find it quite frightening the language that is used to describe

technological innovation. How can a web site ‘evolve’ like biological

systems? Either this means that the author has little or no understanding

of how Darwinian thought has been abused this century (ie. by a certain

mid-century, mid-European man with a little moustache), has never met a

biologist, or that Macromedia has fascistic tenancies. No sure, but

perhaps if I was as ‘intelligent’ as a web site then I could use reductive

empirical observations and essentialise these to vast bodies of

intellectual enquiry in which I have little understanding and even less

respect.

Perhaps there is little or no room for humanism in understanding

technological innovation, but biology, give me a break. This 2001 Space

Odyssey Hal taking over the world narrative is over 20 years old now. The

Web is wonderful, but the multi-media god in g-strings hanging out with a

mobile phone, surfing the web for stocks, drinking beer in the London at

Beaconfield cove with early 90’s Manchester haircuts. The future looks bright!

(I hear that Macromedia’s new green web site is called photosynthesis).

Date: Monday, December 20, 1999, 3:04:40 PM

Subject: : Re: Y2K Paranoia..

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Seems as though Melbourne Uni is getting very paranoid about Y2K

Seeing as though technology is enculturated, the vital questions to ask is not if technology will perform its correct function over the next few weeks, but what are people saying and doing about Y2K. The Y2K bug is voodoo, magic, paranoia. It is political, economic, gendered,so don’t worry about technology, worry about the boffins who are controling it. Keep your eye on your bank manager, keep your eye on overly ambitious (and paternalistic) university administrators.