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

[Sean Cubitt]

Hey Lachlan

Yes but

1. there  are engines for the storage of our missives that we wot but
little of (I'm constantly ego-surfed by students checking my credentials
who then ingratiate themselves by quoting 'publ,ications' I never knew I
had, a common enough thing, and) as Cap'n Beefheart once said I'd like to
give my music away for free, it didn't cost anything where I got it from.
The internet is a self-archiving entity by nature, so why privatise memory
when it can be socialised?

2. the privilege of the personal archive reduces to one thing only: the
right to erase. Exercise of this right reveals only a hankering for a
pre-modern Enlightenment privacy. Unless of coursxe you are an Enron
executive, member of the unelected government of the USA, recovering
alcoholic in charge of genocide against the Palestinians or otherwise
disgraced person, in which case you have forfeited the right to be treated
with the usual ethical obligations reserved for mammals

3. The contemporary culture is intensely ephemeral. Those dull Derrideans
who wrte endless preambles to the foreward before the preface believe they
are writing in the sprit and style of the events they understand to be
a-foundational. Perhaps we shd on principle delete everything in the intray
on the principle that because it is in the intray it is obviously
out-of-date (incidentally a phrase which first appeared in popular
journalism circa 1896 . . . )

Now keep out of trouble, and delete this message

s



Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
seanc at waikato.ac.nz
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/

Digital Aesthetics
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
The Dundee Seminars
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html