<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.3636" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY id=role_body style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"
bottomMargin=7 leftMargin=7 topMargin=7 rightMargin=7><FONT id=role_document
face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>
<DIV>Dear All I want to second Sean's statement
below I especially want to thank Trebor for
bringing us together. I too missed a lot of the
presentations but found those I heard provocative,
demanding rethinking our conceptual
frameworks while getting the details and specifics in
sight. I wondered most about the place of the
digital in theorizing generally. How do we put the digital in
a larger frame . We certainly do think of political economy
and governance but how would we rethink the social, the body, the
aggregate and the questions raised in the round up session on
difference race gender sexuality. Should digital be
central to rethinking other aspects of social and cultural criticism
and how? Well I look forward to ongoing
conversation. Thanks again all Patricia </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 11/19/2009 8:38:48 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
scubitt@unimelb.edu.au writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 0px"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>Dear
Distributed Collaborators<BR><BR>First thanks Trebor: the event was everything
the discussions had made us<BR>expect. <BR><BR>Second, like everyone else, I
desperately wanted to attend everything, and<BR>of course missed many
things<BR><BR>Our thinking is thinking - live, changing, active,
participatory, dialogue.<BR>The concepts rise and fall. This is good. I
admired Jon beller's insistence<BR>on the actually-existing Armageddon of the
global poor; and henry warwick's<BR>insistence on the environmental limits to
digital media. One points to the<BR>failure of the current regime to address
poverty, pandemic, war, climate<BR>change and toxic waste. The other suggests
that as long as we keep thinking<BR>of sustainability as a matter of
sustaining human development at the expense<BR>of non-human, nothing is
sustainable. Other speakers raised the paucity of<BR>address to other human
subjects: well, I suppose we couldn't all of us speak<BR>of everything in
conference papers, but it is right to hear these arguments.<BR><BR>I greatly
enjoyed the empirical papers, like hector's, which dragged the<BR>hi-falutin
theoreticism of mine back to the grounds of real lives. Achieving<BR>the
articulation between the specific and the general is a challenge which
I<BR>take away from the conference as a critical one - for any of
the<BR>methodologies, from political economy to actor-network theory, that we
heard<BR>addressed. It is the key to understanding how to manoeuvre between
the<BR>pessimism of the critical tradition and the optimism - without which
nothing<BR>changes - most articulately voiced by Michael
Bauwens.<BR><BR>Penultimately, we do need the vocabularies developed as a
trade shorthand<BR>for internal discussions, but we also need to think how -
at the very least<BR>in words, but also in diagrams and images of all kinds -
to speak in ways<BR>that the interested public can latch onto. I feely admit
that without<BR>clarity of thinking, there is little chance of clarity in
language, and we<BR>are all trying to make sense of something which neither
matches our old<BR>habits of thought nor sits still long enough for us to form
new<BR>familiarities. <BR><BR>Last: My own paper is a case in point: at 10
thousand words, it testifies to<BR>the difficulty of thinking clearly and, in
my case, a failure to do so. (the<BR>last version of my paper is no longer the
draft posted on Slideshare but<BR>sitting
here:<BR>http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/talks/index.html)<BR>Perhaps it
is too early for clarity, but then again, perhaps this is exactly<BR>the
moment when clearly stating the problems is the best thing we can do.
So<BR>here goes: The current system is failing and has been failing the poor,
the<BR>homeless, the migrant, the imprisoned and the planet since Bretton
Woods.<BR>There are forces - political, technical, economic - striving to
bring to<BR>birth an alternative. There are traps for the unwary, but there is
also the<BR>opportunity now, perhaps for the first time since the formation of
the UN<BR>system, to think that a roots-up alternative might be emerging.
The<BR>challenge for the emerging thing, whatever it may turn out to be, is to
be<BR>better than the existing regime in terms of human conditions, and
planetary.<BR>The fact that we concentrate on internet suggests we should look
to<BR>technologies as the key to how this might happen, though we know that
they<BR>are not autonomous - in fact they are enslaved. The problems are too
great<BR>for solo research - this also we learn as the capacity of networks.
How we<BR>set about change changes the change we bring about. This event was a
great<BR>signpost towards collaborative work to open up the
future<BR><BR>sean<BR><BR><BR>Prof Sean
Cubitt<BR>scubitt@unimelb.edu.au<BR>Director<BR>Media and Communications
Program<BR>Faculty of Arts<BR>Room 127 John Medley East<BR>The University
of Melbourne<BR>Parkville VIC 3010<BR>Australia<BR><BR>Tel: + 61 3 8344
3667<BR>Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494<BR>M: 0448 304 004<BR>Skype:
seancubitt<BR>http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/<BR>http://www.digital-light.net.au/<BR>http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/<BR>http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/<BR>http://del.icio.us/seancubitt<BR><BR>Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Book
Series<BR>http://leonardo.info<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>iDC
-- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
(distributedcreativity.org)<BR>iDC@mailman.thing.net<BR>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<BR><BR>List
Archive:<BR>http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/<BR><BR>iDC Photo
Stream:<BR>http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/<BR><BR>RSS
feed:<BR>http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc<BR><BR>iDC Chat on
Facebook:<BR>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647<BR><BR>Share
relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>