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| LitPeejster | Aren't those ads supposed to be, uhm, *gone*? | Discussion Forum | 2 | Mar 19 2008, 12:53 PM EDT by LitPeejster | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 19 2008, 11:24 AM EDT
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Kevin, you contacted wetpaint about our being an "education" wiki, right? I'm curious about why I'm seeing banner ads in the left column...
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| CodexFetishist | Cyberpunk. Or maybe not. | Project methodology | 2 | Mar 18 2008, 1:01 PM EDT by kevin_of_los_angeles | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 18 2008, 12:24 PM EDT
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Your reference to Bruce Sterling's novel as "cyberpunk" is a bit problematic, considering that it is a term with which Sterling himself has taken issue. In "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (see links above), Sterling writes,
"Public disavowals are useless, very likely worse than useless. Even the most sweeping changes in our philosophy of writing, perhaps the weird mid-life-crisis conversions to Islam or Santeria, could not erase the tattoo....Seen from this perspective, "cyberpunk" simply means "anything cyberpunks write." And that covers a lot of ground. I've always had a weakness for historical fantasies, myself, and Shiner writes mainstream novels and mysteries. Shirley writes horror. Rucker was last seen somewhere inside the Hollow Earth. William Gibson, shockingly, has been known to write funny short stories. All this means nothing. "Cyberpunk" will not be conclusively "dead" until the last of us is shoveled under. Demographics suggest that this is likely to take some time." According to Sterling, cyberpunk as "a voice of Bohemia--Bohemia in the 1980s," and many of the techno-social phenomena it could only have imagined--or equally alarming phenomona it couldn't imagine--have now come to pass. For this reason, it may be more useful to think of cyberpunk fiction as a literary movement lasting from 1985-1995, and the former cyberpunks, once again, simply as writers engaging their world and imagining new ones.
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| WikiDerrida | Solipsism | A Cheap Narratology Trick | 0 | Mar 18 2008, 4:05 AM EDT by WikiDerrida | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 18 2008, 4:05 AM EDT
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Much later in the book (much later than I suspect you were able to keep up your note-taking kevin_of_los_angeles), Valparaiso scolds Dr. Penninger and the rest of the remaining scientists at the Collaboratory thus:
"even though you are both directly responsible for the catastrophe that our society is undergoing, you are both incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims. You both whine and moan endlessly about how nobody else is cool enough or smart enough to understand you. And you both never clean up your own messes. And you both never take responsibility for yourselves" (373). Valparaiso, here speaking about scientists in 2044, could easily be speaking about humanities scholars at the beginning of the twenty-first century (much of the richest allegorical content of the novel is contained in the discussions of “science"). More particularly, Valparaiso uncannily describes precisely the dynamic of what has occurred in this essay: you narratologists are directly responsible for the “catastrophe” the closed system of your reading of this novel is undergoing, yet you are “incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims.” When will we ever break this discursive self-destruction written under the sign of truth? For more perspective on the matter, you might take a look at Alan Liu’s THE LAWS OF COOL. Liu argues rather compellingly that the New Critical gesture toward paradox is inextricably bound in "a slant version of truth according to which the very action of gesturing was as dogmatic as any attempt by orthodoxy or heterodoxy to point to polemical versions of truth" (38). In any event, I am stunned by the degree to which you neglect the format of the wiki in this essay that, according to your editing history, you seem to emphatically support elsewhere. You and your rhetorical questions. How could anyone ever attempt to revise this solipsistic text?
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| cyborg_not_a_goddess | I am the "author function" writing | How to read this wiki | 0 | Mar 17 2008, 11:03 PM EDT by cyborg_not_a_goddess | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 17 2008, 11:03 PM EDT
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If we are to consider this site under the tag "media ecology," what might the map of the ecology look like? Would the various links be considered places on the map (points of entry) and the threads within them as spaces that shape the particular place? Or do the various "authors"--the wiki identities on the site that make up various "ideological figures"--comprise the wiki map? Are the creators the mapmakers or the protectors of this particular ecology? Are they the activists?
I am trying to imagine this map as similar to the unconventional mapping imagined by Bruce Sterling, in a world where space is no longer flat, but multi-dimensional. In a world like the wiki, where the map is navigated not by looking at a stable two-dimensional scene, but is constantly in motion, can we call it a mapping at all? I would love to hear anyone's ideas on this (especially the creators). Please add to the "map." |
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| CodexFetishist | Medium, Shmedium | Project methodology | 2 | Mar 15 2008, 11:27 PM EDT by cyborg_not_a_goddess | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 11 2008, 12:52 PM EDT
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Wouldn't a project like this be more effective as a printed essay? Something you could actually publish? I mean, seriously. I know you're interpreting a science-fiction novel here, but isn't the Wiki form just a technological gimmick? The form-content conversation has never been able to keep the attention, let alone influence the methodology, of the academic sphere in any serious way. Leave that to the creative writers, I say. I don't see how you can make any concrete, sustainable claims, at any rate, when any non-credentialed activist can come in and modify the text of your project. With state-budget crisis after state-budget crisis threatening to shut our humanities departments down, the last thing we need are scholars and grad students in our own departments opening the door to our last closed space: our writing.
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