Ordinarily I'd skip the boring introductions, but it seems as though others
have been previously introduced, so maybe this will help me gain some
ground. These past 5 years, and continuing onwards, I am a "3d graphics
guy." I have invested a lot of time working on the technologies that will
bring us the distributed 3d Internet virtual worlds of tomorrow. Wish I
could say I'd pulled it off by today, but eh, there are a lot of hard
problems. In particular, there are a lot of hard problems that the VRML
people have never really taken seriously, both technological and social.
After 3 years of market-speak they are now starting to realize this, and
for their short-sightedness, many of the VRML companies are going bankrupt.
As you discuss the cultural implications of Internet spaces, I think
you'll find the technological and business history of the Internet to be
appropriate to your investigations.
I am also a traditionally-oriented visual artist, although at this point
I'm pretty much a dilettante. Long-term, I seek to combine my artistic and
technical pursuits. Finally, I have a B.A. in sociocultural anthropology
so I'm passably capable of keeping up with the academic jargon, albeit with
5 years of rust. :-)
I situate myself thusly because it's the usual way that people do it on
Usenet. Another rule of Usenet "Nettiquete" is to read the Charter of the
group, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), and to read the back-archive
of the mailing list, all before making your first post. FAQ's usually come
after the group has been alive for awhile, so no FAQ. I read the Charter,
it seemed appropriate to my interests if a bit obfuscating, so I resolved
myself to wade through 2 day's worth of posts. Couldn't be too bad, right?
Well in accessing the posts, I mistakenly assumed "sorted by date" would be
an easy way to deal with 2 day's worth of information. I think I would
have fared better if I'd picked "sorted by thread," but now I'll never know
first-hand how such a conduit would be perceived by the first-time reader.
Using the "previous... next... in reply to..." hyperlinks, I wended my way
through the text of the discussion. Sometimes with posts coherently
juxtaposed, sometimes not. My web browser systematically "greyed out" all
the posts I'd previously seen, enabling me to navigate to the "last"
message. Finally I was at a post where all links were grey. So I went
back up to the toplevel, just to make sure I'd read everything. One post
had been missed, presumably a leaf of a branch I'd passed over previously.
At this point I had a few impressions of the discussions so far:
- heavy academic subtext, both in jargon and in referants
- almost no discussion of actual Internet technologies or practices
Could it be that I'd missed the point of the forum? Had I stumbled into a
conference on architecture (of the solid building variety), with pretension
to metaphorize beyond its bounds, without observing the object of the
metaphor? Or had everyone previously established a dialogue via some other
mechanism, and I was just not privy to the terms? Wanting to be sure I'd
utilized every available contextual resource before making my first forays,
I went back to the e-mail I'd heard about the list from, and jumped
straight to http://www.documenta.de, the toplevel web page that presumably
contained the conference. Whereupon I found the most design-chic - but
obscure - set of sidebar menu choices that I've ever seen in all of webdom.
Usually when someone says "dXi!~#*>>>" with a typeface, you think they're
swearing at you. If it were not for the "revealing powers" of my Internet
Explorer cursor, its capacity to elucidate the title of a graphic object
with a mere pause of the mouse, I would have been hopelessly lost and
condemned to discovery by trial-and-error.
So, as interesting as all this is, how can we hope to discuss "netspace"
when that space has been so thoroughly obfuscated? This is not an idle
question, I hope you have answers. It is the traditional tension between
the theorist and ethnographer. What, for instance, would you do if a web
page artist settled into your midst, had no academic background, but
claimed to have relevant insight into the processes, sites, architectures,
and discourses of "netspace?"
Cheers,
Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@blarg.net> DEC Commodity Graphics
http://www.blarg.net/~vanevery Windows NT Alpha OpenGL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seattle! Join the <<<NORTHWEST CYBERARTISTS>>>. Monthly meetings at
the Speakeasy. Check out http://www.nwlink.com/cyberartists