<eyebeam><blast> Annotation to jodi.org's <Fr13th> message

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

Today in the mailbox were about 40 messages from people who found
themselves somehow stuck on the "Cyberstar" List and were trying to get
off - immediately!  Most were angry, some were amused, and some made
some interesting comments about what happened.  What a fascinating
situation.  Suddenly, hundreds of people across several continents were
thrown into a room together, with no idea how they got there and -- for
most -- no intention of staying.  A strange spontaneous "conversation"
resulted, a section of which is captured in 404@jodi's message. 
Sometimes it takes an emergency situation to see some of the issues
we're discussing on embodiment and information in action.  There is a
situated physicality here which erupts as if at the site of an accident,
when all of the protocols are flung out the window in the urgency of the
moment.  A scrim of social convention momentarily stripped away.  The
panic of suddenly finding oneself encased in an unfamiliar or dangerous
place against one's will (GET ME OFF!), and the knee-jerk reactions that
occur.  There are also the complex struggles that we rarely glimpse, the
kind of "thrashing about" in the strange, dis-placed social realms of
bodies, technologies, and codes, which are never really resolved in the
ways that we think they are.

And then the forms of speech, which can't be understood without seeing
the formats, their means of transmissions, and the kinds of communal
spaces encoded and enacted therein.  (postspeech?)

Checking the mail again, I realize that that spontaneous "Cyberstar"
community is gone already, it went down in a flood of subject headings
reading HELP!
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