Fibreculture Journal Launched
30 01 2004Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations.
The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of::: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture, and
:: new media arts
Thansk for the link Jean. I just read Esther Milne’s article, Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment in which she looks at the different types of presence and intimacy afforded by the writing of letters, postcards and email - and I wonder where blogs fit in?
Anne, that’s a good question - the fantasy of a present audience whose number and social identity can only ever be approximated is always there when we write, isn’t it, but I think more so when we write online, and especially when we write on our weblogs. Not to mention the way we “feel” the immanent presence of the personality behind blogs we *read*, in a way that isn’t true of printed material…Has anyone written anything yet on “liveness” (or presence - whatever) and the weblog genre??
I’m sure you must have had some thoughts on this, or you wouldn’t have posed the question?
Believe it or not, I most often ask questions because I don’t know the answers and I’m curious
And I can’t recall reading about presence and weblogs anywhere …
At first glance, most weblogs employ the performativity associated with being on stage - my friends refer to my blog as my “Look at me, look at me!” project - and some blogs seem caught between the intimacy of personal letters and postcards.
Your friends are kinder than mine!
I think if we compare your blog with a livejournal that we can see the mistakenness of referring to weblogs as a genre in the first place - it would be like referring to a multi-track computer disk audio recording as a genre of music. Hmmm…but I guess the genre boundaries between kinds of blogs are very blurry as compared to, say, books, where you have a whole range of production and consumption practices, institutional locations, marketing strategies etc. that define each genre…which is a bit removed from what we were talking about in regard to intimacy and presence, but interesting nevertheless.