net critique

Again, I received a list of seven interesting questions via email, this time from Germany. It’s my habit to get rid of these email interviews immediately. Here it is. This time Jan-Peter Wulf of the Node trend watchers newsletter raised the issues of my specific blog theory, the relatively skeptical response in Germany to the whole blogging phenomena, the reluctance of German public broadcasters, and German academics, to really engage with the Internet.

In the May 12 2008 edition of the Brazilian weekly Epoca there is a two page interview with me, conducted via telephone from Sao Paolo by Peter Moon. You can find it on their website too but I saved a copy on my pages, in case Epoca takes it down. Epoca looks a bit like the German weekly Fokus, or the US-American Businessweek. I was in full awareness of the fact that the devil himself, the media giant Globo, is the publisher of this weekly. The piece briefly touches topics such as internet governance, the dominance of Google, Internet growth in countries such as India, China and Brazil, the global blogging picture and my ‘nihilist’ thesis in Zero Comments. Some people in Brazil did not like my closing remarks in which I criticized the ‘ideology of the free’. Giving away your work for free might be a good move for programmers who have money jobs and clients anyway, for most creative content producers it is a bad move, in particular on the long term. In an email exchange Felipe Fonseca responded:

“I prefer to think of multiple intermediate models, and free software is one of them. In Brasil, it is better than the alternative - 100% mainstream-industry-copyright and no space for independent creative people anyway. The thing is, in Brasil there is not a significant creative ‘market’. Either you live in precarity or you sell out to corporate media or government. The only people who earn money with music sales are the intermediaries and few big-shots such as the minister of culture. Free licensing brings some fresh air into that. Have you watched “good copy bad copy”? Musicians in Belém giving away ‘content’ for free in the form of CDs with their music, earning a living from gigs.”

I understand the argument, but only see this as a short-term solution. It is up to the new media culture that we shape and represent, to come up with long-term sustainable models so that content providers will be able to live from their content, if they wish so. Amateurism should be a choice, not the default option. Bands can’t always be on the road, and even less so can writers or designers. It is time to unravel the good intentions of FLOSS from the bad consequences the ‘free’ has for independent content producers and to start imagining, in a collective fashion, how alternative flows of money could be facilitated. A way back to the mainstream record companies and media industries is not a option– but neither is the floss model.

The Danish journalist Stirne Bjerre Herdel (www.kontrabande.com) sent me some questions. He is writing an article about the “development in political dialogue in social media on the web.” It is for the Højskolebladet magazine (meaning hogeschool/hochschule/polytechnic).

SBJ: When it comes to politics the parties seem to loose members but people haven’t lost interest in politics. In stead of showing up for political meetings they gather on the internet in big or small groups or communities. They blog and they arrange activities, they discuss. What is this form of political communication? Does it contribute to democracy and the political debate or does it undermine serious politics with endless gibberish in niche groups that will never be heard anyway?

GL: With the millions of users we can’t really look down on the Internet anymore. I just read that Denmark got the most dense and effective network economy. It is indeed true that we are living in the Age of the Long Tail. Business begins to see this as opportunity and translates this in to economic models, but the political class is nowhere near ready to engage with the idea that we have left behind representative democracy and its inherent push to create majorities. When it comes to politics we have to think big and better vote for a hand full of parties. In many Western countries there is still only a choice between two or three parties. In terms of prosperity that would be comparable with the consumer goods on offer in a Cuban state supermarket. In fact, as you indicate, the ‘popular’ parties of the past struggle with a steady decline of membership. They have compensated their lack of proper representation with an increase of PR means. Politics has become a business opportunity for spin doctors. We do not need to repeat the Situationist critique of the society of the spectacle here. It would be much further build on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum and how this disembodied archipelago of signs called mutates when it enters the Web 2.0 age.

SBJ: What can citizens get out of this form of communication when it comes to democracy in political influence?

GL: Let’s start with the observation that the Internet itself has become less and less democratic. This may be unavoidable as millions of ordinary users do not want to get involved in complex issues around (global) internet governance. The very idea that the Internet itself could be new digital public domain, like squares in the past, or the fourth estate in the age of the industrial revolution, does only exist on the level of tiny content particles. Increasingly users delegate power and responsibility over the network architecture into the hand of large firms such a Google where they trade their privacy against the free use of incredible web services such as Google Earth and YouTube. Let’s face it: there is less and less autonomous infrastructure, in a time when it is so cheap and easy to run a web or email server from your own bedroom. This lack of self-organization has an impact on the structure of the online political interventions that you asked about. We can hardly speak anymore of ‘tactical media’ in this respect. Even do-it-yourself is no longer an appropriate image. What we see happening is extremely fluid and instable ’smart mobs’ (Howard Rheingold) that gather, connect, act, and then disappear and dissolve the built-up structure. I would not say that politics have become immune yet against the speedy activism. Quite the opposite. As long as the medium or platform is new, like Hyves, MySpace, Studie-VZ or Bebo, one can generate a lot of media attention, but these windows of opportunities close down soon so one has to be constantly on the move.

SBJ: How can/should politicians use this development?

GL: Really, as an autonomous anarchist I should be the last to consult politicians what they should, or should not do. The political class figured out quickly how to create a presence at the social networking sites. Look at how US presidential candidate Barack Obama is using YouTube. It’s all pretty obvious. Is this innovative or even subversive? I doubt. Will it reach a few more young voters? Perhaps. This is not the political change that many hope for. We should not mix up PR strategies with a genuine form of dialogue and debate. Politicians still have so much to lose, publicity-wise, that they cannot simply effort to join debates online. They will be slaughtered. Without the constant protection of their PR-people, spin doctors, policy advisors and lawyers they cannot go anywhere, say anything. This harnessing of the political class is going in a completely opposite direction as Web 2.0–and that’s what makes their appearance in this networked environment so predictable and hypocritical.

SBJ: Have social medias taken over the political debate and activism or do real life debates and organisation still serve a purpose–and if so which?

GL: Taken over? No, there isn’t any statistical evidence for that. Television, assisted by newspapers and radio, are still dominating the political agenda. The Web is playing a strange, new role in all this. For many, Internet is the perfect place to hang out and escape the boring, pre-programmed world of the ‘old media’. Simultaneously, society is moving into the Internet at the same time, just think of the re-invention of advertisement out there. What we see happening is not an easy convergence of media. Real and virtual mix but in unexpected manners. That’s the fun of it. However, the current crises are not properly addressed either in cyberspace. It’s really questionable to think that the paperless Internet is contributing in a positive way to the global warning and environmental pollution that we have in China as the place of production and Africa as the waste basket. But I remain positive. Remember that all these hyped-up self-important dotcom people in the late nineties had no idea about their own upcoming crash, let alone about the social aspects of Web 2.0. This makes me optimistic about Web 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Why won’t some Afro-Brazilian consortium draw up the principles for the Internet architecture in 20 years time?

On Monday March 31 I gave at the Future of the Internet conference, organized by the European Commission. As Slovenia is holding the EU presidency in this term, the event took place in Bled, the Northern part of country, on a picturesque lake in the Alp region. The conference hall was packed with 250 officials, mostly senior computer engineers who are running the big IT research program we mostly only read about. To give you an idea: Europe has committed 9.1 billion Euros for ICT funding in the next so-called Framework Program Seven (FP7) period. I was the only non-technical, non-commercial, humanities person to speak during the opening session, after the keynote of William Dutton, a social scientist and director of the Oxford Internet Institute. After briefly having gone through some of the INC projects I explained the key ideas behind ‘net criticism’ and the unique mix of critique and creativity that in my view is possible if you involve artists, activists and humanities scholars in the discussion about the core architecture of the internet. Arts and humanities should get rid of their e-syndrome and disassociate themselves from the ‘cultural heritage’ industry that is merely interested in digitizing the past. There is a ‘digitally native’ next generation of young researchers/artists now, fully capable of keeping up with the geeks that is capable of not only intervene in the current but also shape the future architecture of the net. If you’re interested in the audio-visual archive of the event, here it is. It is not enough to criticize, research and reflect. What we need is a metadisciplinary and planetary culture of ‘critical anticipation’.

I just got back from two intense days in Spain. On Thursday March 28 2008 I gave a talk in a series on Open Knowledge at the Circulo de Bellas Artes the impressive old style Madrid art institution, right in the centre. Before the event I gave a number of interviews that will be published over the next period. I spoke with Laura Corcuera from SINC, an online magazine on recent developments in the sciences. You can find the email interview that I did with them, here, on my pages. The Spanish translation is here, on the SINC site.

After a trip on the high-speed train I visited Seville where I was amazed to see the temporary media lab that the Zemos98 festival set up for five days in order to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Instead of doing an ordinary video/new media festival, the Zemos98 collective decided to select ten topics, invite ten ‘professors’ (workshop leaders) and then opened up the workshop to up to ten participants each. Twice a day there were plenary lecture sessions for all hundred participants. The festival was organized in an 18th century monastery that had been converted into an arts centre. The recent history of this centre wasn’t very fortunate but the Zemos98 was a blast. Please look around the Flickr pages and see what the architect did with card boxes in order to transform the large, high spaces into creative workspaces. The unique character of this format is the five days parallel programming of the ten workshops, combined with collective sessions. Usually the workshop either run one after the other (as we have done in Kassel during Documenta X with Hybrid Workspace and the Temp Lab in Kiasma), or the workshops are additional to a conference or festival.

Speed Interview with Geert Lovink for Digimag Magazine #32, March 2008
By Maresa Lippolis (NABA, Milano)

Italian translation: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1085

English email conversation: http://espanz.noblogs.org/post/2008/03/07/i.iv-geert-lovink

During the January session of Video Vortex, organised by the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam, a big community of networkers met to discuss how video and contents are being shared nowadays through the internet. Participation, sustainability and new interaction ways for artists, producers and audiences were the main topic discussed. Piracy was also at the margin of the conference peeping and blinking to someone’s eye. Of course mine was one of them, so I decided to interview on this topic Geert Lovink, who was one of the main curator of the event and author of Zero Comments edited in Italy by Bruno Mondadori, to focus more of the peer production and on its network.

espanz: You’ve been studying networks and how people collaborate into networks, how do you describe, in your analysis, p2p, their communities, and the new production of sense they are developing?

GL: We need to make a distinction between the official P2P ideology, in which I also participate, and the dirty reality. There is a multitude of reasons why people participate in P2P networks. Also politically there is a interesting range of people involved in P2P, from the post-modern poor, driven by a lack of cash to techno-anarchists to capitalist pro-market libertarians. In that sense P2P is deeply human. It’s like sex. There is so many ways of doing it, and the reasons and intensions are so different, each time, even within one person. I am not saying the situation is complex. I do not mind to explain, and defend, the idealistic version of exchange, anti-copyright, sharing and so on. The fuzzy everyday use of P2P exchange networks is largely happening outside of any discourse. I see P2P networks as a temporary autonomous zones, as described by Hakim Bey, as they are bound to disappear (in order to reappear elsewhere). I do not think it is useful to argue that they should be legalized. Maybe this is because I am from Amsterdam where we have made a lot of interesting experiments with phenomena that happen in the grey zone between legality and illegal practices. We have often seen that half-way tolerating illegal activities is generating interesting situations. Elias Canetti’s descriptions of how crowds gather and fall apart might help in this context. Complete legalization often kills the activity and neutralizes the problematic field up to the point of disappearance. Legalization of exchange of copyrighted material is not the way to go. What we instead need is an alternative economy, one in which artists and creative producers are financially rewarded directly, without ‘middle men’, for instance through micro-payments.

espanz: In your essay The Principle of Notworking (2005) you say that propaganda is not as effective in networks than in other media. Do you still think that’s true, even considering the extend web 2.0 is growing? Is it possible that p2p could be a good instrument to empower people and develop new channels to distribute sense?

GL: You are right that we witness an unprecedented ‘massification’ of web platforms with up to 100 million users of a single website. Average social networking sites have somewhere between 1-5 million users. However, they are not online all the time. At any given moment in time there are around 40.000 people inside Second Life. These numbers might grow and look different at peak times. Still, they are not grouped together. I believe that we have left behind the television age where we sit around the fire together, as Marshall McLuhan once described it. With the exception of moments like the Olympic Games the Long Tail is bound to get longer. We will have to get used to this and reconfigure our understanding of what power consists of in the distributed age. Power as such does not disappear, neither does propaganda. What diminishes is the spectacular, celebratory aspect of it. The trend of indirect, invisible ideology further continues. It will become really difficult to detect present forms of subliminal indoctrination. There is a still a great desire for consumer capitalism, in particular when it is glamorous and wild. P2P networks are not a serious counter force in this game. The fact that one collaborates and exchanges doesn’t make you a Gutmensch, let alone a revolutionary. For me it is not enough to ask the question of empowerment. For what? It’s the same with this abstract (but appealing) demand for ‘change’? Change in what direction?

espanz: During Video Vortex 2 in Amsterdam Florian Schneider focused his speech on the idea of imaginary property. He said that in the digital age property shifts from the Marxist concept of fetishism towards the idea of social relations. To own an image or a medium means to define social relations and a network. Do you think this can also be applied to P2P communities? How could use value and exchange value being rediscussed in this case?

GL: I am not on top of the P2P debate about value. If you follow interesting forums like iDC on this you would see that Michel Bauwens, Franz Nahrada and Adam Arvidsson have a lot of interesting insights. Five years ago it was a German list community called Oeknonux that discussed these issues. Oekonux as a project got really far into the debate but then stalled because the founder and moderator, Stefan Merten, wasn’t able to let go of the project and so the context dried up. I can only make some meta observations. Ever since Baudrillard and others of the 1960s generation we have seen a further acceleration of the whirlpool of concepts that were once developed in the time of Smith, Ricardo and Marx. The political economy during the late 20th century has not developed a convincing critical vocabulary of its own, so we’re still in the midst of the debates around the different definitions of value, use value, exchange value, surplus value, price, wealth, and so. If we discuss the economy of free software/open source and peer2peer networks it makes more sense, as Arvidsson and others suggest, to investigate ‘accumulated affect’ and ’sociality’ that result in an economy based on ‘ethical value’ (driven by brands). I can see this point and do believe that it contributes to a more equal and sustainable society. It will also mean more media madness, not less. What I would contribute to the debate (I am not an economist) is the ‘free cooperation’ concept from Christoph Spehr. This brilliant essay just came out in an English translation. For me the sociality of the net has to be free in that there has to be a way to opt-out. There should not be a compulsory element. Contributing for no money has to become a free choice, not the default setting.

espanz: You address a sharp critique to Lessig’s creative commons production model. How can collaborative free networks bring about new forms of production?

GL: I can see the point of Lessig and his creative commons model. Realistically, it’s something content producers like me can work with. What I do not agree with is the emphasis in the cc rhetoric on the innocent amateur. In my view the amateur is a. not innocent but guilty. There is a pleasure in downloading and sharing illegal material. I wonder if Slavoj Zizek has already written about this. And b. the amateur should at least be given the option of participating in the money economy. If the amateur, who earn money with some other job profession in the day time, feels that he or she want to contribute and share for free, then that’s fine. At the moment the amateurs are blocking the careers of entire generations of young professionals. With this the rich knowledge of professions is threatened to disappear (for instance those doing investigative journalism). We have to stop this talent drain and not create economies that have to live off charity. Free networks should take themselves more serious. The first step to get there should be to critically investigate the ‘ideology of the free’. New forms of production, as you call it, cost money. We need to circulate money so that it can flow into those circles that have taken up the task to seriously construct tomorrow’s tools.

http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/
http://www.hva.nl/lectoraten/documenten/ol09-050224-lovink.pdf
http://www.oekonux.org/

Today I presented the oulines of the booklet that Jodi Dean and I are writing about ‘blog theory’. I am at a conference on The Truth of Illusion at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, south of Berlin. I spoke here before, at the Future of Character conference in summer 2007, where I heard Eva Illouz speak for the first time. I dedicated my lecture to Jean Baudrillard’s ‘vital illusion’ notion and showed fragments of the ouinon.net map of the French blogosphere in the background (transformed into a mesmerizing ppt by Sabine Niederer).

I blogged Frank Hartmann’s lecture, the media philosopher from Vienna. The last interview I did with him was in January 2004. Hartmann spoke about the rising power of audience rating, and rating in general. What if those who watch to be measured simply walk away? For the post-World War II generation of critical thinkers television was the perfect control medium. Hartmann refers to Günter Anders’ early critique of television, Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize, in his magnus opus Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen from 1956 (also see Hartmann’s German online txt). Instead of an increase of the critical attitude, as Adorno hoped, it is society that organizes itself according the laws of simulation and infotainment.

Hartmann reviewed two TV studies in German Die TV-Falle from Roger Schawinski and Walter van Rossum’s case study of a 15 minutes German news show, Die Tagesschau. The book is called Die Tagesshow. There is also a German feature film about this topic, Free Rainer. The blurb reads: “Frustrated, because he is forced to produce bad TV-shows, a manager of a TV-station, enters the station and manipulates the ratings, to initiate a TV-revolution.” I bring this wave of popular television criticism in relation to the 2006 Dutch account of the mainstream media coverage of the Middle East conflict They Are Just Like People by Joris Luyendijk (title of the German translation: Von Bildern und Lügen in Zeiten des Krieges, Tropen Verlag, 2007).

Media, so Vilem Flusser, are a “continuous stream of unlikely images.” What is the use, so Hartmann, to deconstruct the technical media with a deterministic method a la Friedrich Kittler if we insist on illusion. Freedom is the freedom to object audience rating. Media art and media activism could show us help us in this effort to formulate media criticism. The problem that we face is the real, the hyper-real character of the televisual image. The impossibility to distinguish between Sein (being) and Schein (illusion). There is a pleasure, so Hartmann, to appear as a phantom, and intellectual are called upon to acknowledge their pleasure in media appearances so that we can come to a second-order media critique. Hartmann delivered a legitimate ‘global cultural studies’ call, from continental Europe, to overcome the traps of 20th century media theory.

The British writer Jeanette Winterson recently gave the Belle van Zuylen lecture in Utrecht (NL) on December 13, 2007 entitled The Cup, the Knife, the Compass, the Remedy. She was the third one, after Nelleke Noordervliet en Hans Magnus Enzensberger. You can download the MS-Word file of the lecture here. There is also a Dutch translation available. On January 5, 2008 the Dutch liberal newspaper NRC-Handelsblad published a shortened version of the lecture. I have written a response and posted here, on my pages. I can’t figure out precisely why this text, and author, intrigues me. Perhaps an astrologist can help out: we were born in the same week.

After a preparation from over a year, the Videovortex conference took place from January 17-19, 2008. Here at the Institute of Network Cultures we’re very glad with the outcome. The project already started in Brussels, on October 5, 2007, with a one-day conference, co-organized by Argos (video documentation). It then moved on as a series of exhibitions in the Amsterdam ‘Montevideo’, the Netherlands Media Arts Institute. Now we’re ready to take it elsewhere. Most likely we will produce the fourth (free) INC reader about the state of the art in online video that will come later in 2008.

You can read reports of each session on the collaborative Masters of Media blog of the University of Amsterdam students. One of them, Anne Helmond, did a perfect job as a photographer. You can find her fli collection here in the flick pool. The video and audio archive of all lectures will become available shortly.

A key element of concept, the database nature of online video, didn’t work out as Geoffrey Bowker wasn’t able to make it due to personal circumstances. We’ll keep that for next time. The Amsterdam edition had a strong emphasis on art practices and online aesthetics and less so on the Henry Jenkins-type fan culture, with which YouTube usually is associated. The event showed that we’re in the midst of the video online boom. It was impossible to keep track of the different platforms and channels that are out there. That’s a good sign and shows that it was justified to use the event subtitle: ‘responses to YouTube’. Online video culture has been in the making for a decade but turned into a mass practice only one or two years ago. Videovortex asked the question what the specific characteristics of online video are, different from television, offline video or film. Was will Onlinevideo? It’s early days for the development of critical concepts, but we made a good start!

This weekend the database of the Dictionary of War project has grown again with 25 entries to 125 concepts. I attended the fifth Novi Sad edition. It was my first encounter with the format. Here a few observations.

• Dictionary of War ought be positioned within the theatre context and is a critical cultural project, not academic or scientific in nature. The sessions take place in theatre spaces and are ’staged’. It is notable that there is no real space for questions from the audience.

• As a new media project it deals with online video content with the larger v2v video syndication network. It’s idea is that ordinary users will, at some point, adopt the peer-to-peer paradigm. The project is ‘post-streaming’ in that it no longer concentrates efforts to be ‘live’ on the internet.

• As an audience you get the feeling of watching a television show recording. Here in Novi Sad, the technical crew that ‘capture’ the concepts built up their video editing gear on the right side of the stage, thereby stressing the fact that we are attending a public video recording session. The studio setup is used for realtime editing. After coding the video files are uploaded to the Internet, days after the events.

• There was few local audience in the big hall. This may have been different in Berlin or Munich, I don’t know. What is clear is that the speakers are addressing the virtual Internet audience and that this act of contributing to the dictionary is visually explicit. We are Working for the Database.

• Unlike conferences and festivals the organizers were in no rush to suggest continuity between the different presentations. What counts is a flawless technical presentation. Each time there were breaks of 1,2,5, 10 and 15 minutes. This created a relaxed ambiance. This unlike the conference format that works with blocks of 1.5-2 hours. In part it is also related to the length of the recording session. It is unrealistic to continuously entertain an audience for eight hours.

• What made the Serbian edition so interesting was the mix between critical work from the ‘region’ and concepts from elsewhere in Europe (St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, London). Most presentations dealt with historical reconstructions of events related to the Ex-Yugoslav wars (1991-1999). It was a relief to attend a multi-lingual event — a rarity these days.

• Branka Ćurčić of kuda.org was hosting the show, introducing each presenter. It was great to each time hear her announcing the next ‘conceptual person’. Such an honor!

The Liberation interview has triggered more media interest for my work in France. On my pages I posted another speed interview, this time with the Technikart magazine for a piece on micro celebrity. This is remarkable as none of my books have been translated in French (only one or two essays).

At the moment I am in Novi Sad for the fifth edition of the Dictionary of War. The material will be online within a week. The concept (Begriff) that I will be talking about is ‘digital despair’, using material from the Streamtime Iraqi Blogs Support Campaign. Together with Cecile Landman, who runs the aggregator metablog, I prepared a presentation about the faith or demise, if you like, of the Iraqi blogosphere, five years after Salam Pax started his blog, still writing under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Another note: on Thursday January 31 I will be on the German television in the 3SAT cultural program called Kulturzeit. The program will be recorded a couple of hours before in Amsterdam. The topic? You can guess by now.

Cyrill De Graeve of the French magazine chronic’art sent me five questions. I tried to answer them as good as I could, given the time restrictions, in the midst of the last preparations of the videovortex event that starts tomorrow, here in Amsterdam. You can find this next in a series of ’speed interviews’ here on my pages. She wrote me: “I’m contacting you because chronic’art is making a special report on “Netocracy”, the book by Alexander Bard & Jan Soderqvist that will be published in France in February. “I’m sure you know Netocracy - and I think you are, in some ways, a real netocrat.”

Before the end of 2007 I did a lengthy email interview with Marie Lechner for the Ecrans supplement of the French newspaper Libération. The interview appeared in the January 12, 2008 edition. On my pages you can read the original (not copy-edited) version in English. The main part of the dialogue deals with blog theory, at the moment my main occupation. Here is the actual French version that was published in the newspaper.

The MyCreativity conference, organized in November 2006 by the Institute of Network Culture, brought together scholars from around the world who are doing critical research into ‘creative industries’. The event generated so much interesting material that Ned Rossiter and I, who put together the program, decided to bring out a reader. We sent out a call and approached authors. The project got delayed because of the huge task to copy edit essay of non-native English speakers. Finally we found Michael Dieter in Melbourne who did a marvelous job. You can order the reader, for free, by sending an email to Marije van Eck (marijevaneck at networkcultures.org).

You can read the introduction to the MyCreativity reader also here in my pages. A pdf of the entire reader will be available soon on the INC website.

In response to a request to write an essay, I agreed to answer to answer a few questions. The context was an event in Vienna, on November 8 2007 entitled „Towards a European Public Space“. You can find the question of Julia Rosch (BPB) and my answers here in the ever-growing ‘pages’ section of my blog. In a little while it will be published on the Eurotopics website. The speed interview covers topics such a the status of user in the age of Web 2.0, Habermas’ notion of internet as a secondary public sphere, the difference between Murdoch and Google, and Europe’s EasyJet culture. For the first time I have used a new genre (at least for me). I interviewed others inside an interview with me. Enjoy.

In preparation of Videovortex 2 (Amsterdam, January 18/19) I sent the video activist and artist DeeDee Halleck (Paper Tiger TV) from New York a few questions. I love her blog named after her book Hand Held Visions, have you read it?
GL: How do you look at YouTube from your long media activist perspective? So much of the earlier dreams seem to come true.

DDH: Yes, more people are able now to share their stories in electronic form from many corners of the globe– which enables more connections to more places. But I have an inherent suspicion about the contract one agrees to on the corporate sites– youtube or even blip. After you post, you are giving up your right to determine the use. Who knows how your creativity, your hard work, the good-hearted collaboration of your friends/subjects will be used in the future? You won’t have any say in that! Is this autonomy? That’s why I hope the transmission folks come up with a good interface and some huge servers.

GL: Can we speak of a pleasure to roam around such large video databases? Do you enjoy the abundance after so many years of hardship (little money, heavy equipment, difficulties with distribution)?

Occasional pleasure, maybe. but overall a sort of slot machine. The jackpots are far between. Distribution is still difficult. The infrastructure for non-commercial media is under siege all the time now. The great experiment in media democracy–public access– in the US is about to be legislated out of business by the Verizon and ATT lobbyists.

The whole so-called public interest infrastructure in the US is full of mine fields– or perhaps it’s more like a field of hungry replicant ghouls. From the art centers to alternative media channels to the whole media education system. Take USC for instance. There we have an educational institution that feeds the creativity of its students to the military machine. The Department of “Defense” has taken over the centers of media experimentation and development– MIT and USC and many others are basically branches of the military now. Homeland security is using PEG gov channels to promote their snooping. See anything suspicious? Public access channels now have news programs and recruitment promos from many branches of military. Join the coast guard and secure our borders! The educational channels are running programs for Bush’s abstinence initiatives.

GL: From the conservative perspective we hear complaints about copyright abuse and futility of the amateur. One could say that there is not enough activist video out there. But is this really true and would such a critique make sense?

DDH: Copyright? Well if the corporations own the distribution system who’s to worry? What ever brings eyeballs is what they count on. They can take it down when the initial attraction is over. My step son in law is a stand up comic who is sometimes on jay leno, etc. his fans tape him and everyone loves it. it’s the best publicity Jay Leno ever had. They take it down when the hits level off. No, it’s not the futility of the amateur– the amateurs are the utility of the professionals. It’s really a form of feudalism. We’re the serfs. They get a big percentage of our crops. The biggest problem is the isolation of this stuff. It is so addictive and comforting to have your PC on your lap. How are we going to get people into the streets?

GL: Thanks, DeeDee.

(in a separate mail she sent me the link to this YouTube video, a message to a soldier in Iraq:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Remd2KYmW7Q)

The year is getting to an end and I am wrapping up unfinished texts. The interview with Caroline Nevejan is one of them. She got her PhD in April, I sent the first round of questions, and as it goes, things drag on. Over the last two weeks it suddenly progressed and here it is.

A one page interview with me has been published this week in the December 19 2007 edition of the German weekly Die Zeit. The interview was conducted, in German, by Thomas Gross, in the Amsterdam INC office, some weeks ago. You can read the text as it appeared in Die Zeit here on my blog and here on the site of Die Zeit. The interview, for the most part, deals with blogging and the rise of uncontrolled content that goes beyond the ‘news’ paradigm.

The Web 2.0 debate in Germany has intensified over the past few months. The ‘rise of the amateurs’ is pissing off traditional newspapers. The hegemonic position of ‘old media’ journalists is particularly strong in this country. Whereas Internet usage is intense, the news media only now start to feel the heat. The radio and television systems are particularly old-fashioned in their understanding of ‘cross media’ solutions. The panic to put material online and deal with users and their unpredictable opinions is widespread.

Read it, if know German. It seems the duty of the European Intellectual (what a role…) to emphasize the dark sides of religious messages. German reporters can’t get enough of it. A great question: will Web 2.0 set us free?

A few passages have been translated into by Sumiko, blogging from Sudan:

http://morino.twoday.net/stories/4561774/ 

For those who read German, here are some blog responses:

Duckhome: Die Zeit barmt um die bedeutungslosen Blogger

Gegenglueck

Reader comments on the website of Die Zeit

The Technology Panel (Friday, October 26, 2007)

It’s always hard to blog the panel you’re on but I have nonetheless tried. We sat in a spacious lecture hall of the Irvine IT engineering faculty. The group had shrunken to 40 participants but the level of the presentation remained high.

Session VIII of the Global Conversations conference in Irvine presented a contemporary blend of possibilities and limits of new media as a democratic empowerment tools and was chaired by Barbara Cohen. Elman Gheytanchi from Iran, now living in L.A. spoke about the variety of Iranian blogs, both inside and outside the country. She presented a nuanced picture in which the question if Iranian bloggers, currently seen as freedom fighters are already politically co-opted. Beside the amazing blog culture there are also the YouTube videos of ‘infidel’ women being beaten up on the streets. Iranian bloggers are still censored and have to come up with creative ideas how to change their IP addresses, where to reappear in the blogosphere and how to redress their mask–and still be recognizable. At the end of her presentation Elman Gheytanchi showed the Zolf bar baad YouTube clip from the Iranian dissident underground singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, now living in Amsterdam.

Susan Harris started her presentation of the Words Without Borders website with depressing statistics about the inequality between translation to and from English. Less than 1% of US-American publication are translations of more or less literary material (the definition of literature has even been stretched here). In response to growing cultural isolation the Words Without Borders was founded. Its first monthly edition came online in August 2003 and since then the database has been filled with around 700 unique contributions. Words Without Borders has also produced book anthologies (such as one on literature from the ‘Axis of Evil’) and already played a role in a number of book deals.

Tom Keenan gave an update of his ungoing research into the online world of Jihad videos. This is not a world of bloggers that create a presence on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. A key role here is played by web forum software as developed in the mid-late nineties, multi-threaded, polyglot conversations in a multitude of major languages that one has to get familiar with in order to find your way. Within the forum image links are traded (comparable to the Japanese Otaku culture), links to the latest video of Osama Bin Laden, pdfs of speeches and pointers to audio archives of sermons, delivered by remote and largely unknown Imans. There is nothing marginal here. There are no barriers in terms of digital divide. Tom Keenan noted that we should consider this an “authentic public space”, much in spirit of earlier expectations of ‘global civil society’ and international NGOs, with the only difference that these informal exchanges should be seen as part of an anti-political, deeply anti-democratic project.

In my presentation I started off with my blog theory and raised the question how a quest of general theory could be complemented with culturally specific data and concepts from specific language regions. Blogs have established web cultures in languages outside English in a way that has not yet been properly thought through. AtGlobal Conversations you got a clear sense that, from the perspective of ‘marginal languages’, the Internet is still a revolutionary tool, full of unexploited potentials. However, critical theory has moved on and is now exploring ‘techno-populism’. As Tom Keenan also mentioned, there are user cultures that operate beyond Good and Evil and are out there, in the Big World, utilizing easy to use software and protocols irrespective of the intentions of the libertarian geeks, early adapter circles, ‘civil society’ or post-dotcom entrepreneurs.

As examples I used three distinctive blog cultures: the shocklogs in the Netherlands (see the postings on the Masters of Media blog), the debate around the presumed German reluctance to start blogging (see my previous ZKM posting here) and the emerging Hindi blog culture in India, a research that Ravikant presented at the Pedagogical Faullines workshop in Amsterdam on September 22 2007.

The Closing Panel

Satochi Ukai, who perhaps refused to travel to the USA as a tourist, and had to acquire a visa to enter, and whose case was upholded by the U.S. embassy in Tokyo as being serious, could not attend the conference. Instead, Gayatri Spivak read his text. In it, Ukai talks about the survival of Korean and Okinawa languages during colonial domination of the Japanese state. Ainu language in Hokkaido has been even more so marginalized. These are so-called languages without writing, which is questionable if we follow Jacques Derrida’s On Grammatology (by now the hall has filled up with audience). This is why the aboriginal people feel more comfortable with the digital (online) realm because of its soft fusion of narration/writing and the oral tradition.

Achille Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, referred to earlier remarks on the relation between language and freedom. In the past it was an act of resistance to appropriate the language of the colonizer and to target it against itself. That strategy is no longer working. The South-African constitution now recognizes 11 official languages. India has 24 (says Spivak). There are ‘linguistic human rights’ (think of the Kurds). Remember that the 1976 in Soweto started around the issue of language regimes, in this case Afrikaans. How do we share? What is common and what is not? Deweaponize is necessary. The power of enfranchise is what we need. Can theoretical qualities of one language be translated into another. What is needed is the accumulation of linguistic or expressive capital. Mbembe lived for four years in Dakar where urban Wolof is used to grow linguistic capital of its speakers.

Gayatri Spivak started with complaining about the World Social Forum, not being an instrument for change. She would not tell stories about her own, so she promissed. “I could get up and sing but I won’t do that this time.” There is a language we learn first. That’s the Mother Tongue. When we learn a language we try to access its deep archive. No just world is coming from the North. This is why we look into the dialog between languages beyond the situation of a small group of migrants in European cities (referring here to Balibar).

We have to think of translation as an active practice. It is not something you learn and then apply. We should break through the custom that the North brings in theory and the Global South experience. However, wonderful the experience is of presenting a poem in our Mother Language, this fact alone will not change the world.

Some closing remarks: code switching could be a good tactic to make differences visible. Hybridity is the strategy of the in-between people, for example the urban Africans. Who can make the cross-links? We do not have to speak in tongues. It is enough to recognize the creolization or lexicalization that is happening around us. To mix three language is a sign of competence. Emerging creols are particular language mixes that can be used–and dropped. What needs to be recognized is multilingualism as a lived reality of the billions, a basic right, virtue –and strategy.

There is always a sense of sensation when one enters a new intellectual terrain. In this case it is a group of global scholars that work on ‘languages’ from a post-colonial perspective. Much unlike the ordinary believe I am convinced that internet culture is heading in this direction. Much of the conversations here revolve around the status of the ‘non-native speaker’ and the problematic status of English as the dominant language of the colonizer.

As so often with US-American conferences, there is a lot of work put in the preparation of the event to get the best international researchers and to arrange their trips. Yet, the event fails to even reach the immediate environment of the university campus itself, let alone the general public. The audience consists of the speakers with a hand full of graduate students and staff of the organizing faculty. This sad situation is made worse by the absence of recording/webcasting equipment. How to overcome this is another matter and asks for a complete re-imagination of the public and the public sphere.

Here some quotes and phrases for those who can deal with zipped material:

“The job of the translation is to make (sensual) sense. Translation requires a sympathy to words on the page. They know better than you do.”

“Translation express agreement with the colonizers and are limited cultural artifacts. The aim has to be dialog, and translation can be a modest contribution to collaborative efforts.”

“Sometimes I got fed up talking English, it is so easy.”

“The word resistance is missing because most of the time we are afraid of resistance and politics.”

“If only one zillions of a percentage of the 600 billion dollars spent in Iraq could be spent on the teaching and study of North-American indigenous languages.”

“The heart of resistance is poetry.”

“When two languages meet, they kiss and quarrel. They achieve a tacit understanding on the common grounds of similarity and convergence, then negotiate, often through strident rivalry and self-preserving altercations, their areas of dissimilarity and divergence.” (Niyi Osundare)

Several African speakers warned for the devestating consequences of the abolition of education in the native African languages in the first years of school. A range of African elites forbid the use of local languages.

Warning: marginalization can also happen through benign policies. Most languages die through assimilation, not through the physical extermination of their speakers. Creating archives is the most powerful way to save languages that are in urgent need of disappearing.

“Foreign languages offer no immunity.”

“Our Mother is always our truth.”

There is a lack of confidence that African languages can express complex concepts. They only way to tackle this prejudice is by proving the opposite.

Remember the Against All Odds Conference in Asmara (2000). Remember African self-reliance.

Please visit: http://www.gatua.com and the first Gikuyu blog: http://gigikuyu.blogspot.com.