was Re: my email archives
One day no doubt the world will mourn the >loss of my juvenilia. <cubitt>
I doubt the world will mourn, Sean, the loss >of your juvenilia, as long as it did not and does not impact the rights of others.
Turn yourself in Cubitt and stop babbling. You are distracting, but then this is your ideological function in the field of new media and digital culture, the purpose of my intervention in AoIR. 1. The Primary producer has a right to the fruits of his or her labour. We cite sources in scholarship for a range of reasons that I am sure scholars of AoIR would like to list. 2 Yes, erasure is an art of power. However the trace of erasure leaves an impression that has permanance. My research has teased out instances far more remarkable than any you may presently have in mind. So, shut up and let things unfold. 3. Contemporary Culture is a wee bit less ephemeral than you might like it to be, matey. There are memories, there are histories and as I am sure you will dimly recall, there is foresight. I shall introduce myself to the scholars of AoIR. Shut up and sit at the back. Lachlan Brown
Hey Lachlan
Yes but
1. there are engines for the storage of our missives that we wot but little of (I'm constantly ego-surfed by students checking my credentials who then ingratiate themselves by quoting 'publ,ications' I never knew I had, a common enough thing, and) as Cap'n Beefheart once said I'd like to give my music away for free, it didn't cost anything where I got it from. The internet is a self-archiving entity by nature, so why privatise memory when it can be socialised? 2. the privilege of the personal archive reduces to one thing only: the right to erase. Exercise of this right reveals only a hankering for a pre-modern Enlightenment privacy. Unless of coursxe you are an Enron executive, member of the unelected government of the USA, recovering alcoholic in charge of genocide against the Palestinians or otherwise disgraced person, in which case you have forfeited the right to be treated with the usual ethical obligations reserved for mammals 3. The contemporary culture is intensely ephemeral. Those dull Derrideans who wrte endless preambles to the foreward before the preface believe they are writing in the sprit and style of the events they understand to be a-foundational. Perhaps we shd on principle delete everything in the intray on the principle that because it is in the intray it is obviously out-of-date (incidentally a phrase which first appeared in popular journalism circa 1896 . . . ) Now keep out of trouble, and delete this message s Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies Akoranga Whakaata P=FCrongo The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 seanc@waikato.ac.nz http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html was Re: my email archives
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "archiving." <warschauer>
anyone else archived all their incoming and outgoing emails, <hunsinger>
How do we keep it secure (both in the sense of "private" and in the sense of "safe")? How do we think about it, if at all, right now? That is, I suspect we all have this sense of the "stuff" that we have on our disks and hard drives, but how does that intersect and interplay with how we feel about the box of letters we keep in the closet? Will we encrypt stuff, or keep it open? Will we erase some? <jones>
One day no doubt the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. <cubitt>
I doubt the world will mourn, Sean, the loss of your juvenilia, as long as it did not and does not impact the rights of others. Forgive me for crashing in, but a little bird told me I should take time out of my intervention in Nettime (I think I have pitched things about right over there), to check to see what AoIR was doing under the duress of contemporary cultural events and the impact of emergency legislation. I sense unease. This e-mail archive thread reads a little like an annual general meeting of the Intellect and Imagination Temperance Society and I would remind you four of your duties and responsibilities not merely as scholars, but as members of an international intellectual community. After seven or eight years in which questions of archival, catalogue, identity, access and availability of information and knowledge, gender, ethnicity, uneven distributions of information, uneven accumulations of knowledge, new relations of distribution of media and communications and new relations of mediation in a tremendous cultural contest that cast new perspectives on the nature of governance, institution, scholarship, democracy, not to mention an economy led like a pig with a ring in its nose by the mere idea of Internet, youd think wed have got a little further along in an understanding of technology in contemporary culture. What, one wonders, have you all been doing? Yes, I kept all of my files and email communications 1993-present. Saved, time-locked, stored, periodically. I thought this was a simple matter of research scholarship, quite in line with the Social Sciences Methods and Approaches course I took at Goldsmiths College as a requirement in undertaking PhD work. Given the intense contests already apparent in 1993-94 perhaps rather more apparent then than they are now -- around the meanings and governance of the technology, I would have been remiss in my scholarship to not do so.
It was easy to imagine a scenario in which, say, The National Security State employed archives to influence government, commerce and public opinion to help render compliance to the agenda of the National Security State, alternatively imagine a situation in which commercial or alternative interests employed these archives to the same end. Or rather, easy to anticipate the nature of a contest between these interests (its called the pretzel debate apparently) and you, pretty much, have something closely resembling contemporary culture >>>
Lachlan Lachlan Brown Thirdnet Ltd Cultural Studies Goldsmiths College University of London Toronto: M.(416) 826 6937 VM: (416) 822 1123 lachlan@london.com http://third.net -- _______________________________________________ Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup 1 cent a minute calls anywhere in the U.S.! http://www.getpennytalk.com/cgi-bin/adforward.cgi?p_key=RG9853KJ&url=http://...