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An Introduction to
NMEDIAC, The Journal of New Media and Culture
- Jonathan Lillie, Managing Editor
Welcome to the first issue of NMEDIAC, the Journal of New Media & Culture. NMEDIAC has adopted the mission of
publishing
peer-reviewed
papers and audiovisual pieces which contextualize encoding/decoding environments and the discourses, ideologies, and human
experiences/uses of new media apparatuses. In relation to previous work, NMEDIAC will provide an intellectual canvas where the
cultural
spaces and experiences of new media are theorized and rigorously explored within both global and local contingencies of the
present and past.
In particular, we will publish articles that take Cultural Studies and 'critical Internet Studies' approaches to analyzing new
media.
In addition to publishing scholarly articles that address the theme of new media & culture, NMEDIAC will also solicit
and
publish audiovisual new
media art and presentations. Some of these pieces will incorporate scholarly analysis, but others will 'stand alone' as
expressions that
contextualize and comment on general or specific themes and issues that new media technologies bring us up against -- such as
new media as
experienced culture.
This idea of merging academic and artistic explorations has certainly been influenced by Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckrey's
book,
net_condition_art and global media (2001). In this work, the writing of a diverse range of contemporary cultural
theorists and
new media artists
are arranged within 450 pages of glossy photos, collages, and screen shots. The combination of media and author orientations
toward the
object of new media as art, as cultural, and as socio-cultural articulations supply an amazingly diverse contextually which
may also be attempted
and published via the multimedia capabilities of the Web.
In industrialized countries we are living in an interesting period in media production. Specifically, in some respects, the
practices and innovation
cycles for digital production for certain media like Web multimedia are very much in their infancy. As Lev Manovich points
out, the boundaries
between new media art and design, artisans/designers, are very much blurred. Furthermore, we are at a moment when the 'Old
Net' of closed
community networks, MUDs, Usenet, and euphoria for horizontal communication has been mostly engulfed by the Web : both
technologically and
in discourse. This transition Tetzlaff writes, "directly correlates to the Web becoming a safe home for capital…a mass medium
for a fragmented
postmodern culture" (2000, p. 102). While, the discursive field of cyberculture and new media has not been totally usurped by
the techno-evolutionary
discourses of the new economy and high-tech liberalism, counter articulations are still greatly needed. Recognizing this,
Manovich, Levy, and
others argue for new media art as resistant discursive strategies that can positively influence the development of mainstream
new media
production practices while creating alternative spaces of signification. Thus, NMEDIAC seeks to encourage (a) new media art as
articulated
practices, and (b) articles which explore new media art within its multiple contingencies.
In this first issue we offer three teasers of what is to come with regard to new media art: “Superstitious
Appliances” and
"in an unrelated sequence comes" by Jason Nelson, and Thomas
Swiss/Motomichi Nakamura’s poem
"Hey Now."
Jennifer Ley, in her
introduction to Nelson’s work, notes that this author’s use of Flash to create new media poems “draws us into his
own comforter and couch
cushion fort of language,
symbol, sound and meaning. His work speaks the tongue of people, not trends, fads or fetishes” all too customary within online
programming communities. Megan Sapnar familiarizes us with “Hey Now” by discussing how the
aesthetic possibilities of new
media poetry are addressed in
the tone and inspirations for Swiss/Nakamura’s piece. Similarly, the aesthetic and textual issues of new media poetry also
emerge in George
Hartley’s review of Loss Pequeño Glazier’s forthcoming book, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. “Mobility,
transitivity, manipulability,
interactivity, programmability, hyperactivity,” Hartley writes, “are the qualities of Glazier's ideal Web poem, a kind of
anti-text that moves from
context to dystext.” In an attempt to expand on the issues and expressions explored in Loss’s book and the poems and articles
of this first issue,
the Fall 2002 issue of NMEDIAC is being set aside as a special issue focusing solely on new media art and featuring Thomas Swiss as Guest
Editor.
Beyond offering space for the consideration of new media as art, NMEDIAC is also an attempt to refocus scholarly practice
around and within
the diverse history of inquiries into the nature of technology and culture, which includes the work of scholarly
celebrities
like McLuhan, Innis,
Ellul, Heidegger, Leo Marx, Foucault, Raymond Williams, Barthes, and many others. Herman and Swiss note in their introduction
to The World
Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory (2000) that “the Web can be understood as techne in Martin Heidegger’s (1977)
sense
of the
term; that is, as a technology that is simultaneously an instrument and an activity through which the self and world are cast
into sense, thereby
transforming ‘being’ in the world” (p. 1-2). The increasingly widespread use (and cultural perforation in the collective
imaginary and narratives) of
networked information and communication technologies represents discursive and physical human engagement with an ever-changing
media
apparatus and within complex processes of globalization. In giving NMEDIAC the subtitle of “The Journal of New Media &
Culture,” we thus take
culture to be the broad, but very real object of study -- as the partially open field of articulation, contestation, and
change -- and as being the
contingency and texture of lived experience. The current state and future discourses of new media are global phenomena that are cultural and
mediate how culture is lived.
With this outlook, NMEDIAC seeks avenues of analysis which create new knowledge and commentaries on and within this terrain.
To begin the
articles in this issue, in
Party
Over, Oops, Out of Time’: Y2K, Technological ‘Risk’ and Informational
Millenarianism
Kavita Philip and Terry Harpold
analyze Y2K as a discursive event that simultaneously mediated and created the crisis of what turned out to be a
non-event due to the
failure of disaster and apocalypse to materialize as society and computer systems rolled-over into the new millennium. In her
essay,
Computer
mediation and postmodern narrative practices:
computational narratives in Mason&Dixon, Miriam Fernández Santiago looks at
novelist Thomas
Pynchon's most recent work as an example of postmodern narrative, paralleling organizational logics which permeate and
influence narratives of
computer technology. Megan Sapnar considers how the online community of Flash developers influences the ‘look and feel’ of
interactive
multimedia interfaces on the Web in, From
Text Effects to Canned Goods:
Identity Construction and Visual Codes in the Flash Development
Community. Brian Walsh’s
Media
Literacy for the Unconscious Mind is an
entertaining survey of carefully crafted tactics for
capturing our
unconscious attention in the modern phenomena of the Western shopping mall.
Heidegger, Martin. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York:
Harper.
Herman, Andrew, and Swiss Thomas. (2000). The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge.
Tetzlaff, David. (2000). Yo-Ho-Ho and a Server of Warez. In Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (Eds.). The World Wide Web and
Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge.
Weibel, Peter, and Druckrey, Timothy, Eds.(2001). Net_Condition: Art and Global Media. MIT
Press.
Jonathan Lillie, Managing Editor
jlillie@loyola.edu, http://www.ibiblio.org/jlillie/
Jonathan is an associate professor of digital media and online journalism at Loyola University Maryland. He was a Park Doctoral Fellow in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests include online journalism, the cultural uses of Internet technologies, new media, 'information society' discourses, and web pornography. |
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