University College London, July 08
This evening, hours after having written the post below, I read this in the library:
Network culture is not, to my mind at least, the same as networked culture, which is quite a different thing, less projective, more conventionally social. Network culture is an othermindedness, a murky sense of a newly evolving consciousness and cognition alike, lingering like a fog on the lowlands after the sweep of light has cleared the higher prospects. The same or a a like fog increasingly seems to cling in the folds of the brain. We ache with it, almost as if we could feel the evolution of consciousness in the same way a sleeping adolescent feels the bone ache of growing pains as if in a dream.
[...]
To say that network culture involves a newly evolving consciousness and cognition is not to make a claim for technological determinism. We make the world new as we see it, but we increasingly see it in devices that seem (or seek) to contain us. Nor is it to give over the closed-circuit determinism of the evolution of machine consciousness in devices that contain latter-day versions of themselves, implicit in the evolving network of the web, explicit among researchers involved in A-life (artificial life). Yet we will increasingly have to contend with claims for distributed life and consciousness even as we struggle to understand what that might mean for our own prospect and continuity.
[...]
The value of our presence as human persons in real place continues as a value not despite but because of the ubiquity of virtual spaces. Our embodiment graces actual and virtual space alike with the occasion for value.
-Michael Joyce, Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture, The University of Michigan Press, 1999.
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Musical Network Culture for Beginners: ladies and gentlemen, cosmic techno cowboy and International DJ gigolo maestro Carlos Abraham Duque Alcivar, big honcho of the now-legendary Tension Records and now Abe Duque Records, style masta of Hollis, Queens, Nueva York, teacher and padrino of all of us mere mortals, underground musical genius… respect!
One of the best things I have done in my humble life is having invited him to play in Mexico City three times… (1995, 1996, 200[1? 2?]) Those were the days!
