Electronic Writing (C.R.E.W.) Electronic Poetry Center events, festivals, congresses The Turing Galaxy tree fiction poetic of links network-culture nettime mailinglist
It is true that the telematic utopias resemble all too closely the promises of the free market, free elections, or media feed-back mechanisms such as reader submissions, listener telephone calls, questionnaires: "minimal effort on the part of voters/viewers" (Enzensberger 70, 161), whereby, however, the answers are already present in the questions. A subversive "critical" application of the media reaches its strategic limits where the form of the media is no longer questioned, and the reference systems on which the technological connections are based remain intact. The telematic-cybernetic illusion: everyone can switch from the status of recipient to the status of transmitter, to become the active operator of their mental constructs! However, the model of social mass communication doesn't change at all if the users of telematic networks can only alternate from the status of recipient to the status of transmitter, without destroying the immanent implicit reference and code structures of media systems. (Therefore, hypertext-systems that only allow for stripped-down, read-only versions of electronic documents are also completely unacceptable. This implies the complete disposability of all texts in the network for our writing project: Everyone can enter at any point, delete, enter text, interconnect...)