Politics of a Digital Present: an inventory of Australia net culture criticism and theory
Eds Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh and Michele Willson
fineArt forum, 2002

In their introduction to Politics of a Digital Present, the book's editors comment 'so be it' to the proposition that the essays in the anthology are 'a bit academic'. There's a discomfort in such a comment, a kind of resignation that says something or many things about the state of academic discourse and the rhetorics of the essay in Australian intellectual life. For sure, these essays contain various tropes and orthodoxies of academic writing and some are more academic than others assuming such a quantitative assertion is possible. But generally, these pieces are more reflexive than we (or I) might expect from an academic essay. Critical distance is a myth and many writers seem utterly and intimately involved with and integral to their texts. There is pleasure in these writings - pleasure in writing and pleasure in reading - which belies the staidness or rigidity of (some) academic writing.

Established in January 2001, fibreculture is a forum for Australian net culture and research, encouraging critical and speculative interventions in the debates concerning information technology, the policy that concerns it, the new media for(u)ms it supports and its sustainable deployment towards a more equitable Australia. fibreculture is committed to fostering and promoting open, independent, critical, participatory and sustainable forums. In this collection, which documents the proceedings of the Inaugural fibreculture Conference held late last year, something has happened to academic writing. The anthology is punctuated with reinventions of the academic text and academic discourse. Perhaps this is attributable to the abrasions and slippages between cyberculture and other academic disciplines. Perhaps it is attributable to the nomadic involvements of the 33 contributors: artists, theorists, critics, journalists, activists, policy developers, media producers, information workers as well as academics. Perhaps it is attributable to the writers' participation in the discussion list fibreculture and their engagement with a collective/connective process prior and during the writing of these pieces. There is pleasure in chatting, connectivity and exchange too. As Sean Cubitt says in interview, "there are periods in the life of any listserve when it becomes absolutely the place you want to be; days when a particular lab is the focus of the universe." [1]

Having lurked on the fibreculture discussion list since just after the project was instigated, I've watched these papers take shape at varying degrees of intensity, through short sharp bursts of debate as well as through in-depth, meandering and lengthy discussions. In this context, there's a certain availability of the texts which would not ordinarily be open to scrutiny. There is an experience of the process and the labour implied, but rarely seen, by writing and the dialogues which envelop it. Donna Haraway reminds us that all writing and intellectual work is fragmentary, flourishing in webs and comprised of conversations and connections. [2] According to the editors (after Régis Debray), the project's method is digital mediology: "a politics that consists of writing within the media architectonics of an Internet listserve, in the time of the present, in the space of the social. It is a politics of writing the social in the abstraction of a code, and of contesting the codes in which the social is read." [3] Sectioned into five, the book's inventory is organised under the topics of Theory, Politics, Policy, Arts and Education. This inventory and digital mediology approach has an interrogative and connective drive: within the myriad voices of the essays uncertainty seems to ripple through them. They accelerate debates rather than posit certainties and we are discursively entwined in those uncertainties. This again leads me to the unpredictable, polyvocality of electronic environments, virtual communities and discussion lists in which anticipation fills every screen. Anticipation for what? Or who? A reply, a trajectory, an other.

In the discussion list, as in the anthology, there is a sense of temporality and duration shared by readers and writers alike. Media support their own speeds: the works were developed electronically then reproduced in print. Some pieces are more urgent than others and this is apparent in the first essays grouped under the heading 'theory'. Texts by McKenzie Wark and Anna Munster both engage a seeming urgency in net culture, illusions of speed and time and the quandary of 'real time'. Wark's manifesto-like essay, Abstraction, addresses the emergent hacker class as the 'producers' of a new abstraction. Comprised of 24 numbered fragments, it's as if he's counting down, marking off time. David Cox's The Lens of Images draws on a different lexicon in his celebration of fragments. Also deploying the trope of the 'hacker' (together with collage and Napsterisation), Cox's media savvy essay slips between rapid-fire slogans and culture jamming.

Munster reflects on September 11 and temporalities of reporting and response. Her first person, ficto-critical narrative examines multiple mediaspaces and she calls for "a mode of thinking and deploying the abstract on and in net time that takes account of the laborious amount of time required for thinking, posting, emailing and all the other modes of informatic dispersal in which we engage." [4] Other essays too call for varied, differentiated and new modes of thinking and writing net culture and criticism. For example, Ned Rossiter writes, "there is need for a mode of reflexive positionality whereby theoretical frameworks, institutional interests and academic conditions ... are recognised for the ways in which certain objects or areas of study are privileged over and above others, and that such privileging in turn overlaps with larger political economic interests ... as well as processes by which knowledge production is a pseudo-corporate and commercial activity." [5] From these (and other) astute propositions for net criticism, it is apparent that the contributors to Politics of a Digital Present are endeavouring to renegotiate some of the inflexibility and intractability of academic and media research cultures.

NOTES
1 David Teh, Ephemeral Pieces: An interview with Sean Cubitt, Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh and Michele Willson (Eds), Politics of a Digital Present: an inventory of Australian net culture criticism and theory, Melbourne: fibreculture Publications. 2001. 162
2 Donna Haraway, Acknowledgements, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, London: Routledge. 1997. vii
3 Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh and Michele Willson, Listing Media in Transition: An Introduction to fibreculture, Politics of a Digital Present. op.cit. v
4 Anna Munster, Net Affects: Responding to Shock on Internet Time, ibid., 17
5 Ned Rossiter, Networks, Postnationalism and Agonistic Democracy, ibid., 49