[Air-l] Oh Dear, there goes scholarship.

[Lachlan Brown]

was Re: my email archives

> I'm not quite sure what you mean by "archiving." <warschauer>

>anyone else archived all their incoming and outgoing emails, <hunsinger>

>How do we keep it secure (both in the 
sense of "private" and in the sense of "safe")? How do we think about it, if at all, right now? 
That is, I suspect we all have this sense of the "stuff" that we have 
on our disks and hard drives, but how does that intersect and 
interplay with how we feel about the box of letters we keep in the 
closet? Will we encrypt stuff, or keep it open? Will we erase some? <jones>

>One day no doubt the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. <cubitt>

I doubt the world will mourn, Sean, the loss of your ‘juvenilia’, as long as it did not 
and does not impact the rights of others.

Forgive me for crashing in, but a little 
bird told me I should take time out of my 
intervention in Nettime (I think I have pitched things about right over there), to
check to see what AoIR was doing under the
duress of contemporary cultural ‘events’ and
the impact of ‘emergency’ legislation.

 I sense unease.

This ‘e-mail archive’ thread reads a little 
like an annual general meeting of the ‘Intellect and Imagination Temperance Society’ and I would remind 
you four of your duties and responsibilities not merely as scholars, but 
as members of an international intellectual community. 

After seven or eight years in which questions of archival, catalogue, 
identity, access and availability of information and knowledge,
gender, ethnicity, uneven distributions of information, uneven 
accumulations of knowledge, new relations of distribution of 
media and communications and new relations of 
mediation in a tremendous cultural contest that 
cast new perspectives on the nature of governance, 
institution, scholarship, democracy, not to mention an economy 
led like a pig with a ring in its nose by the mere ‘idea of Internet’, 
you’d think we’d have got a little further along 
in an understanding of technology in contemporary 
culture.

What, one wonders, have you all been doing?

Yes, I kept all of my files and email communications 
1993-present. Saved, time-locked, stored, periodically. 
I thought this was a simple matter of research scholarship, 
quite in line with the Social Sciences Methods and 
Approaches course I took at Goldsmiths College as 
a requirement in undertaking PhD work. Given the 
intense contests already apparent in 1993-94 – 
perhaps rather more apparent then than they are now 
-- around the meanings and governance of the technology, 
I would have been remiss in my scholarship to not do so. 


>>>It was easy to imagine a scenario in which, say, The National Security 
State employed archives to influence government, 
commerce and public opinion to help render compliance to the agenda 
of the National Security State, alternatively imagine a situation in which 
commercial or alternative interests employed these archives to the same 
end. Or rather, easy to anticipate the nature of a contest between these 
interests (it’s called “the pretzel debate” apparently’) and you, pretty much,
have something closely resembling contemporary culture
>>>


Lachlan


Lachlan Brown
Thirdnet Ltd


Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths College
University of London
Toronto: M.(416) 826 6937
         VM: (416) 822 1123
         lachlan at london.com

http://third.net 
 

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