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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'>Dear all,<BR>
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My name is Kate Eichhorn. I'm an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Department at The New School and Adjunct Professor of Communication and Culture at York University. <BR>
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My research focuses on book and media history and contemporary innovative writing. I’m currently completing a book on archival genres, which include everything from Renaissance commonplace books to various contemporary platforms. I’m interested in how archival practices have and continue to structure compositional practices, as well as how they provide a way to think about some of the continuities linking communication practices from the incunabula to the present. Understanding the archive as a practice of everyday life, most of this book focuses on texts and objects made by anonymous or at least unknown creators (fortunately, this means that I can bid for many of my research materials on eBay and as I’ve discovered, I’m not the only researcher doing this). <BR>
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It’s worth noting here that most of the texts I write about, including those from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, were user generated and the product of very complex relationships with commercial printers and news services. Commonplace books and other encyclopedic forms in the 16th century would regularly go through multiple editions, often with substantial additions and corrections provided to printers by readers/users. Reflecting on how readers/users were directly involved in generating content for printed commonplace books, encyclopedias, scrapbooks etc. in previous eras also seems essential to understanding “interaction labor” in the present. Of course, labor and capital were understood along completely different lines in the 16th century so one needs to avoid any simplistic analogues here, but I do think that print culture’s collaborative genres are relevant to this discussion. I’d argue that interaction labor is not new but simply happening on a different scale in our current economy. <BR>
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</FONT><FONT FACE="Arial">For this conference, I’ll be present as a curator. I’m proposing to organize a reading/performance/panel with three or four contemporary writers who are using commercial platforms, such as Facebook, SL, Google and Amazon, in their creative practices. I know many poets in the avant-garde community who work with these platforms, but Trebor and I were wondering whether any poets or conceptual fiction writers are using Yelp, eBay or Wiki? I’ve put the word out on the poetics list but if anyone here has interesting examples of writers deploying these platforms to produce digital or print-based works, I’d love to hear about them.<BR>
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Look forward to more here. <BR>
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Best,<BR>
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Kate<BR>
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</FONT><FONT FACE="Arial">Kate Eichhorn <BR>
Assistant Professor<BR>
Culture and Media<BR>
The New School<BR>
65 W. 11th St., New York, NY, 10011<BR>
<a href="eichhorc@newschool.edu">eichhorc@newschool.edu</a><BR>
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