Art, welcome to AOIR :7. I get the feeling you're not going to get much joy from the list, for much the same reasons as we discussed last year with the war (http://www.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l/2003-March/003443.html). Although you put the case a little more bluntly, and with good reason from my POV. I enjoy these little episodes where lists are confronted with the political tensions and exclusions underlying their supposedly autopoeitic functioning. There's something about the way Internet Studies (and AOIR's promo material) emphasises its "independence from traditional disciplines" that exemplifies the limitations of late 90s techno-fetishism: the "digital divide", the "information economy", "internet studies"... all pretty much confuse the technological object of study with epistemology. From my perspective, the rather poor ability of the list to discuss politics, critique, or to position research practices reflexively can be traced to that move to be "new" and "independent". While lists like nettime have their own well-documented problems (which you know too well Art!) - at least over there I don't feel like I'm in a science fiction film where someone's burnt all the records from 150 years of social theory, leaving only hazy memories ("Hey, now this reminds me of grandma talking about, um, Cultural Studies..."). Still, I enjoy reading AOIR as fieldwork :) Regards, Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net Art McGee wrote on 1/2/04 8:32 AM:
And this clown is a professor? That's the most idiotic and duplicitous branching of logic I've ever seen from someone supposedly past undergrad. Now I understand why the field of CyberSociolology is so damn elitist and off-track, if people like this are considered respected members.
As others have already pointed out, in the context of the United States of America, which is what we were talking about, Capitalism, the all-consuming imperative for profit, perverts, distorts, and basically undermines at every point the attempt to have a truly democratic media system. This is simply a fact. It doesn't mean that in other contexts there aren't other reasons for media lies and distortions, but here, Capitalism (and for that matter Patriarchy and White Supremacy) is the primary barrier.
Art
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