<nettime> candybar [Myers], gruel [Hermosillo], voice [Garrin], soup [mez]

["nettime's_digestive_system" <nettime@Desk.nl>]

Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 04:18:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wayne Myers <karaite@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Silver Plated Mars Bar: A Theory of the Internet

Suppose the Internet was a silver plated Mars bar.

The shiny metallic exterior exudes a superficial gut-level impression
of a hard money-oriented plaything for the wealthy of the world, thin
and expensive, way beyond the means of most, which serves to warn the
blind people on the left, who already know what they think of anything
that seems to be silver plated, that they don't have to investigate
the interior of the thing to know that it is worthless, parasitical
and they hate it. The blind people on the right reject the silver
plated mars bar too, but for a different reason - it is silver plate,
not solid silver, and as such, is clearly aspiring to status beyond
its station. Neither group ever gets to taste the interior.

Those that do find it rich and sugary - the interior divides into the
bit that looks like chocolate and isn't, the bit that looks like
toffee and isn't, and the bit that looks like nougat, and isn't; just
as people confuse the large amount of text available online with the
kinds of old-media texts we had before and insist on arguing the toss
over whether or not the Internet will kill books, reading, literacy or
whatever; whether or not the Internet is a 'valid' medium for
informational research; whether or not the Internet is made of
chocolate or whether it's fake chocolate. After all, if it isn't
really chocolate, it can't be any good.

The possibility that it isn't chocolate but something else altogether,
which may happen to resemble chocolate in some ways, does not occur to
the extremist chocolate lovers among us, who see anything similar to
chocolate but different from it as a threat to their long established
chococentrism.

Even so, if you have too many silver plated Mars bars, you do feel
sick. Even if you like them and don't care whether or not it's really
chocolate. Or whatever.

w

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~waz/

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Date: 02 Jul 98 11:29:47 -0700
From: "Carmen Hermosillo" <CHERMOSI@us.oracle.com>
Subject: it's about that gilded road apple text from boswell

please sir, may we have some more?

Gerard Van der Leun <gerard.vanderleun@generalmedia.com>
To: nettime-l@Desk.nl
Subject: <nettime> The Gilded(tm) Horse Apple: A Theory of the Internet

boswell the unbeliver wrote:

> Pretend the Internet can be represented by a Gilded(tm) Horse Apple (1).

 <...>

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Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 17:19:42 -0400
From: pgp@pgmedia.net (name.space)
Subject: Vote

        The Internet is unique in that everyone has a voice.

        Participate in the evolution of the Internet by casting your
        vote for new generic toplevel domains.


        http://Vote.Global-Namespace.net

        Give Independence Day a global meaning.

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Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 10:36:55 +0100
From: mez <mezandwalt@wollongong.starway.net.au>
Subject: Paramnesiac Soup Floundering 

Floundering In Paramnesiac Soup 
MA Breeze

       Postmodern discourse is replete with the notion of the 'other'. The
other//o-ther[e] has a crucial part to play in terms of PPM potentialities;
that is, in conceptualising Post-Post-Modernism [ie when PM breaches its
actual lingually defined used-by-date]. The 'other' by my definition is any
group, genre or art-practice that falls outside the boundaries of the
traditional Westernised canon - ie representative narrative driven art which
is meaning-focused and preferably consistent, or [individually speaking] a
white intellectual power driven Westernised [most probably] male.  In this
case, those who belong to the 'other' category - n-cluding women,
transgenders and various racial and economic classes and descriptors as well
as art product//ion that isn't so restricted by the aforementioned
categories - have a legitimate chance of 'b-coming' via the use of intertext
and de//reconstruction [such as cut n pasting the narrative/class
distinctions and the structural/closure requirements that go along with it].
Some may argue that postmodernism does - or at least creates the
circumstances to allow - exactly this; however, I would attest that the
heavily driven conceptual/intellectual bent present in most postmodern
discourse tends to dilute any actualised artistic or cultural embracing of
the 'other'.  As Linda Hutcheon [in _A Poetics of Postmodernism_, p.14] says:

"The very limitations imposed by the post-modern
view are also perhaps ways of opening new doors;...
I think that what we need, more than a fixed definition,
is a 'poetics', an open, everchanging theoretical structure by
which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures." 

        This open structure is already operating in terms of the art
formula//tion//cultural component that seeks to create a network of
information/nodes of interpretation; that of hypa[hyper/hype//high
performance] textianS/pace [cf Baudrillard/Jameson's idea of Hyperspace/and
good ol' Del & Guat].  HypatextianS/pace is essentially the space created in
a re/ad//view/er's mind through the use of A.V.atar n-ducing technology.
This 'space' is an area in which artforms, personas and ideas can blend into
a heterogeneous whole; and one that can broach geographical boundaries and
class distinctions [teledildonics/epigenesis/telesthenia all roll so
smoothly off the tongue, don't they?]. The phrase 'global village' - loved
by mediahacks everywhere - captures the essence of what hypatextianS/pace
can do for this category of the 'other'. Of course there are certain
restrictions inherent in the m-ployment of hypatextianS/pace eeg, that of
access. However, as technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, attaining
a state of hypatextianS/pace may be easier in the pipedream future.
   This use of hypatextianS/pace leads towards the replacement of the
postmodern via the Paramnesiac Soup Theory.  This theory arises from a
rhizomatic approach to the creation of artistic and cultural movements
evolve//ing via the use of a ne[ural]tworking/branching/cobwebbing [organic]
structures, comprised of n-formation blips that function laterally/not from
a linear hierarchical perspective.  This use of hypatextianS/pace will
hopefully promote the use of a more organic perception being applied to
future discourses, with far less emphasis on theory and archaic notions of
meaning/explanation.
   Which leads me back to the Paramnesiac Soup; if the conceptual emphasis is
to be taken away from a basic postmodernist discourse [in terms of the
de:re:construction approach] then with what do we replace it? When the year
2000 hits, will all the end-of-the-millennium hype [and the Olympics, and
the Millennium Computer Bug] all die a post-climax death? What [wo]manifests
- both culturally and hence, artistically, after the event [that is,
post-theory, post-event, or post-chronological-western-knowledge]?  If we
try to ignore past canonised modes of representation and corresponding
clueing systems that come via theoretical explanations and constant
references to History [i.e. replace that with Nostory] then how do we [as a
culture] still function?
   My answer is that we probably wouldn't, culturally speaking, for an
x-tended period of time. [Of course, the very term 'culture' may be morphed
into something else entirely, towards a more appropriately fitting
linguistic term - hifulture? cybulture? cult-or-what?]  We [meaning the
global spread/village] will operate in terms of a paramnesiac fugue state.
The term 'para' comes from the Greek prefix meaning 'besides' or 'beyond',
thus indicating a constant source of flux [in terms of a dual operating
system - simultaneously parallel to it and x-tending it]. Words such as
"parody" and "paradox" have their origins in this prefix.  Prefix it to a
word like amnesiac, meaning to loose chunks of memory or awareness, and a
sense of dual functioning results - a world where we are infomatically
connected [all nodes in a network, or producing nodal cracks] but
geographically we may be separate and remote.  Hence the rise of the
paramnesiac.  If we are allowed to float in this sea of webbing, ot-ther[e]s
electromeshed nodes in an optic-fibre network, culturally aware but
phys//psychically distant, what will result? Will we in turn seek out
established modes of theoretical preparamnesian communication as a backlash
to this freeformless state? Or indeed, sink more into the soup and become
paramodern, pararhizome, possibly even para-huma[m]nesiac?
The answer//s hopefully don't lie in research based trawling through the
paramnesiac soup.
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