Editorial
Andrew Murphie
New media/information technologies, practices and processes have
undoubtedly made a huge difference to our traditional understanding
of media. The crucial question - one that perhaps underlies so many
other important questions, from shifting relationships to the new
terrors and new wars - is, of course, what kind of difference. Yet
the question of what this difference is remains unresolved. After
at least a decade of serious debate about the defining qualities
of new/digital/networked media, we are left with the perhaps more
exciting task of engaging with the specificity of events as they
emerge. Indeed, this seems the point. The intensity of differentiation
intrinsic to media seems somewhat hostile to stable media/information
technologies, practices or thinking. A more pliable thinking about
media/information events is now required than one constrained by
the traditional divisions often still found in academic, media,
information, computer sciences and related industries. At the same
time, media differentiations are not easily disengaged with the
past, although the specificity of media events complicates their
relations to the past. A challenge to contemporary thinking also
has to account for the persistence and mutation of the past, as
if refracted by shattered glass, in the current divergence of media/information
events. As Trebor
Scholz notes in this issue of the Fibreculture Journal,
'there is no such thing as one stable new media industry and the
required skill sets are constantly shifting. A fixed identity of
the artist as it may have been possible for filmmakers, for example,
is no longer possible. In new media job opportunities drift from
the VJ turntable, VR lab, and the local non-profit organisation
to the theatre stage'.
All this is reflected in Issue 3 of the Fibreculture Journal.
We are very pleased to publish not only an appropriately diverse
series of articles in this general issue for 2004, but also a series
of articles that attend in some detail to diversity as an issue
itself. The articles here do not just consider diversity as a pre-existing
collection of different forms, but pay attention to ongoing processes
of formation, divergence and mutation. Belinda
Barnet's interview with the well-known evolutionary biologist
(and cornet collector!), Niles
Eldredge, concerns 'the dynamic at work behind cultural evolution'.
Eldredge and Barnet discuss the differences between biological and
techno-cultural evolution, giving some valuable insights into the
specific dynamics of the latter. Trebor Scholz discusses the promotion
of different forms of "free cooperation" – collaborative
processes, structures and technologies that allow for a socially
responsive diversity to emerge outside of the corporatisation of
education and social engagements. Describing a series of practices
from his first-hand experience of promoting new forms of collaboration,
Scholz wonders how we can 'invent our own future', with 'more independent
learning projects that orient themselves towards radically new configurations
of communities based on sharing and cooperation'. This is a take
on education and technology very different to the homogenising corporate
and governmental mentalities of 'audit culture' (Strathern). In
a slightly different register, Phillip
Roe problematises a number of concepts central to new media/information
theory. In particular he critiques the notion of "reading"
the interface. He argues that this notion is based upon a print
model of textuality, and seeks to begin to define a 'post-print'
model. He writes that, 'What is obscured in the naturalisation of
the print model of textuality are the technological dimensions of
textuality: that all textual models are technologies. This print
model has become so naturalised that it "disappears"'.
This naturalisation avoids both what he calls the 'dis-ease' in
the interface, and the possibilities of the post-print model (for
example, in three-dimensional immersion). Séamus
Byrne gives a detailed analysis of the informational side of
this 'post-print' model, celebrating that which makes some uneasy.
He describes the struggles involved in the google bomb, the attempt
to influence rankings of search topics within google. He argues
that we should be less anxious about this kind of event, instead
celebrating it in terms of 'the widely accessible power that still
exists on the web for those who care to engage with it'.
Several articles concern the way that media/informational divergences
and mutations have allowed for changes in important cultural practices.
José van Dijck
asks whether 'lifelogs and blogging [can] be considered the digital
counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing'.
Her answer to this question is subtle, hinged as it is upon a refined
understanding of the already intense relations between the private,
the intimate and the public or communal in the diary.
Although this is perhaps intensified further in lifelogs and blogging,
blogs do not simply replace the singular or the private with the
interactive and communal – there has always been an interplay between
them. In a somewhat similar vein, Kylie
Veale's 'Online Memorialisation' reminds us just how far cultural
processes have moved onto the Internet, with a detailed description
of online practices of mourning and remembering the dead. Veale
attends to what is different in these practices, but also to what
is brought across from the offline. This is a significant development
for Internet culture (there's no culture without the dead). Veale
also reminds us that in 'a society that is increasingly fragmented
and where families and friends, often separated by significant distances,
cannot actively participate in physical memorialisation', the online
provides a useful form of adaptation, not only for information about
the dead, but for the affective expression of the persistence of
the past, even in the rapidly differentiating present. In 'The Online
Body Breaks Out', Jonathan
Marshall develops the concept of 'asence', a real condition
of the body somewhere between presence and absence. Marshall also
provides a detailed critique of assumptions about the body online,
as well as an anthropological description of what really happens
regarding the body in networks. Again, the differentiating series
of processes that involve the body online still calls for concepts,
but perhaps for more contingent concepts that are themselves in
some ways 'asent'.
The Fibreculture Journal is once again grateful to those
who continue to contribute to its smooth operation: those who have
submitted material, those who work on the editorial committee and
board and, of course, those who have given their time and expertise
to the process of refereeing.
The Fibreculture Journal has an ambitious year planned for
2005, with 6 issues. The themes are: Mobility, Precarious Labour,
Contagion and the Diseases of Information, Distributed Aesthetics,
Games Networks, and we hope New Pedagogies for New Media. If it
is true, as Bernard Stiegler has suggested, that the globalisation
of media/information technologies is providing an unprecedented
series of interventions in the basics of democracy, education, thought
and memory, we take it as our task to continue explaining this intervention
in the future. More than this, we hope that you will come with us
in attempting to intervene in these interventions.
References
Strathern, Marilyn. Audit Culture: Anthropological studies in
accountability, ethics and the academy (London: Routledge, 2000).
Stiegler, Bernard. 'Our Ailing Educational Institutions', Culture
Machine 5, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Stiegler.htm
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