<nettime> Re: Is nettime MEDIA-FASCIST??

[John von Seggern <johnvon {AT} digitalcutuplounge.com>]

Newmedia {AT} aol.com wrote:

>>Non-mass media?
>>    
>>
>
>Excellent!!  Now . . . what does that mean??
>

To me it means the decentralization of control.

>Is the Internet (or, more particularly, nettime) -- a "non-mass medium"??
>

The Internet, yes. As for nettime it is looking increasingly 
old-fashioned to me these days...as numerous posters have pointed out 
recently, there are many more sophisticated interfaces for online 
community interaction these days that could address some of the issues 
the moderation process was originally supposed to solve. Nettime seems 
to be overly dominated by the particular interests of its moderators and 
for me it has lost a great deal of its value as a forum. When are we 
going to move to something new? Is there any desire on the part of this 
community to keep exploring new communication technologies and network 
topologies? Or are we going to stay stuck in a mid-90s paradigm of a 
moderated listserv?

Actually I have no problem with listservs, but this one seems to have 
gotten stuck in a rut...time for a change I think.

>As we all know, new mediums usually try to "mirror" (in the rearview sense) 
>previous mediums.  McLuhan would have pointed out that OLD MEDIA is always the 
>CONTENT of NEW MEDIA -- in the beginning.
>

Yes, but if we want to know the reality of what is really going on now, 
I think it's more fruitful to have a look at the actual developing 
situation around us rather than quoting McLuhan and raving on about 
fascist radio and people exposing themselves online.

In reality, there are any number of examples of functioning communities 
on the Internet which are using the decentralized structure of the Net 
to share information and organize themselves in fundamentally new ways 
which owe little or nothing to old-media models like radio. How about 
MoveOn.org for starters, which having organized itself around the issue 
of opposition to the Iraq War is now engaged in an electronic democracy 
exercise of letting its 1.7million+ members collectively choose which 
issues they want to take on next?

These kinds of new media-based phenomena are the main focus of my own 
ethnomusicology research...here's a link to a paper I wrote in 2001 on 
the use of the Net by Chinese dance music communities for example:

http://www.digitalcutuplounge.com/newsite/jvs_papers/netfxinchina.htm


John

-- 
John von Seggern

producer - DJ - researcher

email  <johnvon at digitalcutuplounge dot com>
bio    <http://www.digitalcutuplounge.com/newsite/jvsremix.htm>
home   <http://www.digitalcutuplounge.com>
school <http://ethnomus.ucr.edu/jvs/bio.html>


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