This week my lifestream has been made up of twitter postings about the second file festival, reading Bell, a couple of links about cyberculture and cyberpunk saved to delicious.
More musings:
The metaphor Bell proposes in his chapter (I think it was a quote from someone esle) has stayed with me this week and that’s what my roundup is about.
He mentions the metaphorical aspect of cyberculture. How cities, when viewed from above, are like a network plan of the Internet. There are tower blocks (data warehouses), arteriel routes (backbones), traffic junctions (routers and switches) and houses (end nodes). But when you’re at street level, looking at all of these things, they are bigger than you are, imposing – perhaps even scary. Unless you learn to work with them and use them to your advantage. You can pop in and out of data warehouses, you’re routed from one place to another with ease (hmmm… thinking utopian here) and you can do all of this as a keyboard junkie, in the comfort of your own home. You can access government, anti-government (Hand), social, community and leisure. You don’t have to actively participate. When I say ‘actively’, I mean you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own armchair.
But on the other hand, Matrix style, once you understand the system, it’s there to be taken advantage of, even broken. Edupunks follow cyberpunks in subversing institutional and even governmental norms through cyberspace. The space is almost a construct – an agent – how you interact with the agencies determine your outcomes. I read Sterne’s Historiography of Cyberculture. No, THE Historiography of Cybercultre. He made some very interesting connections between shcolarly investigation of cyberculture and journalistic investigation of cyberculture. He didn’t put one over as being superior to the other. Wired had the same validity as academic journals because the authors in each medium had valid points to make. Poster left me a little cold with his somewhat outdated references in his 2006 paper – “walkmans and portable radios permit a person to listen to music regardless of location.” Come on….. Even if he penned this in 2005 he was still very much in a digital music era.
The videos of the film festival were interesting, although I have to admit to not having watched those in part three of the film festival. The Internet’s For Porn made me think of Daily Mail readers and the view of the world sold to them by the paper. I read last week that it’s the secondmost read newspaper in England behind The Sun. A paper with that kind of readership ought to be more responsible in producing unbiased, factworthy news. But then that also makes me think about the Bendito film and the media being more worshipped that the message.
So, all in all, I’m left thinking about a song. Two songs, in fact, but this one in particular. It resonated with the metaphors of using real objects to describe the virtual. And I think the Edupunks are in there somewhere, although not specifically named. It’s a street level view. I leave you with this:
