Re: <nettime> Request to Nettime to be part of DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY online forum with Eyebeam

[christine park <powcp@yahoo.com>]

I have been reading quietly in a corner of my own, all
of these responses to the original request posted to
nettime from eyebeam's beth.

The thread is remarkable for qualities that include:

the fact that no one really knows what kind of a
social structure nettime really has.  To say that it
is a de-centered community, is a perspective upon its
structural face.  To say it is a centered
technological structure , is true too, if only for a
moment before redistribution.  To say it is a bunch of
preachers all standing on the same soapbox--is also a
possibility.  To opine it's an audience that addresses
itself--true true as well.  There are a lot of
opportunities for interaction that nettime creates for
its members.  The list of descriptive analogies is
limited only to the imaginations and numbers of people
who voice an opinion, and the amount of memory on the
server.

We could get all structuralistic, and seek the
"communityness" of community.  Then apply some sort of
Occam's Razor to simply identify that which is a
common attribute to all Nettimers.

Well, here's one. 

Simply, it is one email address, that serves to reach
a great many people, who voluntarily signed up to
receive the emails sent to that address.  Is a message
board in the middle of a town square a community?  

No, it is not.  

For the plain and simple reason that people define
what happens with that message from its posting
onward.  Some people from Nettime, for example, delete
all the messages, and forgot that they signed up in
the first place.  I hate to confuse the channels of
public interaction with the will of the people.  Is
television a community?  Perhaps.  It involves a great
many people, but there is no interaction. We all have
our own sense of what the rules of engagement are here
(if here is how we think of it) and we all have our
own notion of what we seek from nettime, and what we
bring to its table.  Whether we voice them, or act on
them tacitly, the way we use nettime is unique to each
individual.

We are bound by the technology and other resources
available to us.  So in a sense, we have some common
parameters to deal with. And yes technically speaking,
we are also all mammal.  Let's stay away from the
obvious ones.

A listserv is simply that.  A listserv that deals with
ideas about technology, art,and culture, and whatever
else gets past the moderators--if they can be gotten
past.   Well, that would be nettime, and some others. 


This isn't particularly complicated.  If people
hearing about the eyebeam event on nettime go, then
they go.  If they post to the forum, they post.  If
the moderators listen to the people they serve, then
they strike me as being fair-minded people, with
humanist/populist leanings.  The whole gumball?  Is
very sticky, and would be impossible for one person to
chew.

But to fetishize the political nature of a nettime
interaction, and what that means is to obfuscate its
true value as a listserv.  Its an open channel of
communication--to anyone who wants to hear or speak of
these matters. Its everyone's own choice--to see it as
one kind of conversation in parallel with many others,
or as THE conversation that particularly best
addresses their own leanings. Or anything else.

Hell, I say its all of the above mentioned and then
some, for myself personally.  The rest of you?  I say
to each and everyone of you, you're on your own
sweetie. Its your choice, and I would say,
responsibility & privilege.  How you want to deal with
eyebeam--via nettime--is up to you.

Best,
Christine

> If nettime is a community 'with something in common'
> - it remains to be
> seen what that is. On one level, it's the
> configurable structure of the
> listserv itself. On another, it's the somewhat
> loosely defined concerns of
> the participants - and that's actually true of other
> lists as well.
 <...>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net