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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">Dear
Trebor and iDCs,</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">Before
commenting on the CPA thread, I should introduce myself to the list. I
am a teacher/writer on media. I teach at the University of
California Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media and started chairing
the MFA Program in Digital Arts/New Media this Fall. I have
written Virtualities, a book on the passage from electronic to digital
media culture, among other things.<br>
<br>
Michel convincingly distinguishes information overload from continuous
partial attention convincingly and Tom brings in "blanking' and
provides more tips on how to control the "eleash."
I too have experienced jitters from CPA and information load--but I
can't give any tips on email management. (My inbox has stuff in
it going back to 2004.) I also regard spending many hours at the
keyboard a physical and mental health problem. In 2000 I wrote
something about my experience on Jordan Crandall's eyebeam listserve
and how it differed from my experience with email in general in an
essay called "Alien Intercourse: The Erotics of a Listserve
Conversation." I offered the listserve itself as a place
where conversation as an art form is practiced as an antidote to
overload/CPA . I won't copy the essay here-why -more overload--but
I'll note some points and post an excerpt. </font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">Some of
what I had to say was all too obvious, such as the autotelic nature of
conversation as an activity, a form of "social sculpting"
that constructs community, drawing on Williams, Beuys, Foucault,
Buber, Goffman, etc). I note that conversations in physical space are
no less flawed by the enunciative fallacy (conflating the "I"
in speech or writing with the speaker/writer) than virtual
conversations. What matters is that conversation is crafted and
taken seriously. In this excerpt, I describe the loss of the
"float" and how conversation restores the
interval:</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
"Imagine sitting in a lonely cubicle, writing letters that are
exchanged so quickly, it is virtually now. (Posters have time to
think, time to compose, but not much.) Some posts allow a
glimpse of a computer in another place--a vista of tundra, carneval in
Rio, an atelier in Paris. In daily intervals, group email from
strangers in six continents accumulates rhythmically in my inbox.
Attention to the quantity and pacing of posts restores the sense of an
interval, rectifying one of the most onerous aspects of the virtual
life--speed-up or loss of "the float" (a financial as well
as oceanic metaphor). Something akin to a conversation begins to
take place in many threads that build from reply to reply,
accumulating meanings, revealing personalities. Writing like
this seems to look inside the mind of the other, but in a very
different way than novelistic fiction. We can read the thoughts
of a fictional character without personally confronting them.
However, the poster of email is both author and character speaking as
"I" to "you," the reader. The reader
sometimes thinks she understands the other, and, after she has posted
and received an answer, sometimes she also feels understood. Such a
heady, albeit ephemeral experience of mutuality has a lightness or joy
to it. In<i> "The Lady of the Camellias</i>," Roland
Barthes found the desire of Marguerite Gautier for recognition quite
pathetic. Yet, who or what could be subject of a sentence
without it? With it I am a subject and subjected, creator and
created. I am an artist, and my material is invisible, links
between subjects in the vast hiss of information that is not there for
me and you. Such intersubjective recognition, be it a rare or
ordinary occurrence, is part of the tacit dimension of life where core
values reside. <br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>It is not by chance that the
participants in this virtual conversation are strangers. As
Bakhtin put it:<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>'In order to
understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands
to be<i> located outside</i> the object of his or her creative
understanding--in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot
really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no
mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and
understood only by other people, because they are located outside us
in space and because they are<i>
others</i>.'" </font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"> <br>
Further on, I discuss responsiveness as "calling to
account":<br>
<br>
<b><x-tab> </x-tab></b>"Far from being anonymous, these
virtual strangers in conversation have the power of names, countries,
continents and experiences to challenge each other. There is an
odd pleasure in gaining an unseen or disavowed bit of ourselves, when,
in dialogue, we are called to account. (I am always surprised by
my own or my students' gratefulness for a critical challenge to a
statement, that is, provided that we sense there is good faith and
feel that we have been understood.) I rely again on Bakhtin to
explain the desire to be "called to account":<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>'Thus, all real and integral
understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other
than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it
may be actualized.) And the speaker himself is oriented
precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He
does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak only
duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects
response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth
(various speech genres presuppose various integral orientations and
speech plans on the part of the speakers or writers). '
" </font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">My
subsequent idea, that such a conversation requires a somehow contained
space and time doesn't exactly fit an ongoing, open format like iDC.
However, Trebor, in your capacity as moderator , you provide the
possibility of recollection and reflection that also narrativizes and
frames our posts. Your review of conversation in 2006 is one
example.</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"><br>
So,what I am suggesting is that a listserve as conversation is itself
a way of containing what would otherwise be a glut of input without
shape or continuity. So, when I am engaged in a form of
responsiveness, I am not managing my email as a consumer of
information or trying to stay on top of trends. </font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">This seems
like a chicken/egg problem--how can one concentrate versus merely
exist in a state of constant distraction (with its own pleasures as
well as dangers). Personally, having a clean in-box doesn't get
me there. I can concentrate when I am called to respond.
If this amounts to Althusser's being "interpellated," at
least it is more than being inserted, when it is "calling to
account." I fear these remarks may be embarrassing and old
fashioned; nonetheless, they draw on my own experiences in situations
similar to this one-on listserves.</font></div>
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color="#000000"> </font></div>
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