[iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure

[Judith Rodenbeck]

Trebor,

Did I call for a moral ban on lengthy posts? I don't think so. You might
call this a "slow" response to the "continual partial attention" thread.

Yes, I recall an earlier discussion about gender and participation. I've
been on and off lists since about 1991, the pre-Spoon days of deleuze.
Gender has always been a problem. So has post length. This isn't to say one
shouldn't have an innie or an outtie or even a mix-and-matchie, or one
shouldn't send long or short posts but it is to say that both those sets of
properties need to be foregrounded as problematics of this medium. (I'm
leaving aside the question of professional/non-professional investments,
which are also germane.) In this regard, actually in both regards, I think
Alan Sondheim's work for the last 15 years and the discussions around it
(including the last brouhaha on nettime, the feints and spams, the trolling,
the marshalling of authorities, the unsubs and the forwardings, the egos and
hystrionics--on all sides) have been exemplary even if the discussion never
seems to move forward very far, at least for its major protagonists...

What I was pointing out was something a bit more intensive, if you will,
that has to do with gender and labor. I suggested that continual partial
attention has long existed as one of the determining conditions of a
feminized underclass (which I hope I don't need to unpack here)--which
Frazer and Warren rightly link to domesticity. To see it described as
something "new," then, is to see a gendered history rendered invisible; and
then to see it take on a positive valence--"data obesity=good!" "ADD=good!"
"mega-connectivity=good!"--is disturbing. As some blogger noted happily of
the new Mac iPhone, (paraphrasing) "I can make a phone call when I'm
asleep!" (b/c the phone feels your face or something). For many, these are
the real life conditions that steadily render our fleshly life less present,
conditions of constant laboring and the low intensity conflicts that
continually suppress bare life in favor of "connected" life, in fact that
implicitly privilege "connected" life over those other, "slow" things. Any
"ethics of participation" has to take that into account. 

Judith


> -----Original Message-----
> From: idc-bounces at bbs.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces at bbs.thing.net] On
> Behalf Of Trebor Scholz
> Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 5:14 PM
> To: IDC list
> Subject: [iDC] Re: The Ethics of Leisure
> 
> Thanks, Judith and Frazer.
> 
> There are varying intensities of participation and degrees of belonging--
> from reading, and forwarding, to bookmarking (as in: "digging it") on to
> more intensive and time consuming
> activities like writing and moderating. Inviting people to join a group
> (welcome to all the new subscribers) is not a call to light-hearted
> discursive entertainment that runs like a babbling
> brook in the background. I do think twice about which "club" to join and
> did kiss goodbye several of lists before the New Year.
> 
> Frazer, I am reading about 50 blogs every morning and dedicate one hour to
> this activity. These weblogs focus on my research area of sociable web
> media. I don't read through each and
> every post. But I do read the articles that are relevant to me. I mention
> such pesky technicalities because they are increasingly important. Even
> the filtering tools matter when it comes to
> working with little spare time. In this world, burdened with data obesity,
> it becomes more crucial than ever to make good judgments about whom to
> listen to, whom to trust. Surely
> similar narratives circulated during the advent of the telephone and other
> communication technologies but now we are having potential access to
> higher numbers of people. Selective or
> "slow participation" (I loved your term) is paramount and the recent
> thread on continuous partial attention included many useful
> recommendations for that.
> 
> Judith, I was also stunned by the valorization of continuous partial
> attention and I of course agree that participation is gendered: we did
> ponder these questions here; finding even partial
> answers, however, is not easy. Morally banning long texts is not the right
> response. There are, of course, women and men who read these rants. I can
> see it all the time-- they forward
> them, blog them, use them for their syllabi or quote them in their books.
> 
> Given all this, where do we go from here?
> 
> Trebor
> 
> PS: Margaret Morse' moderation period starts today.
> 
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