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.

I tend to agree with your comments. It would be great to hear stories from
the dot.com world. I have a story from a friend who just got fired form a
job in Silicon Valley that I will forward to people individually if they
wish. Also, I tend to agree with more contributions apart from academic or
new-media arts. It would be great if other individuals could respond to
this discourse in their own voice because it all get a bit slippery
sometimes. Context is King and most of the problems that we as individuals
and citizens exist out side of the technology and the technology merely
replicates this. The only way to understand power and how power is used and
abused is to understand context.

I think that we need to define a few key issues, political issues and
power-contexts that we can depart to a broader public so that they can
challenge and engage with the world in which we live. Information rich and
information poor is not that helpful, we need to move beyond this. What is
information and why does it make you rich? What are we as the middle-class
political elite getting from this medium that makes us rich that our fellow
citizens at Footscray meat works aren’t?

Sovereignty in Australia (where equality is negotiated) is in decline and
it is partly our fault. Sorry, I don’t have my sovereignty meter on me, but
I am taking a punt here. Middle-class people have always hated Australia,
if they weren’t sucking up to the English they were sucking up to
west-coast libertarians. There is nothing new about this. There are two
Australias’ and this medium is merely replicating this. Quiet nationalism
is the enjoyment of lots of every-day people and it has served us well. If
we understand a few of the broad strokes that make up the set of ideas that
we call Australia, then we can understand this medium and our political
goals a little more. There is nothing global about the Internet, it is
American. Every bit of this medium reeks of Yankee propaganda. Yanks are
technically sophisticated and socially stupid. We need to civilize the
bastards and their Yankee technology.

I note that this list was started with a goal of building a critical
discourse in Australia about the Internet. But what does this mean in
reality? Don’t you have to at least like Australia first and a few of the
values and achievements of this nation-state? I am not sure about what
direction to go in, there are just so few people I trust who use this
medium and every one I seem to meet is a shonkey, self-serving cretin who
sold their soul to the devil and don’t even seem to know it. Just some
ideas, perhaps self-reflexive.

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.