NOTES: |
| Return to part I |
| Return to part II |
| Return to part III |
1. Joseph Lockard, "Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of Virtual Community," Internet Culture, David Porter, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): 220. Lockard asserts this ideology of cheapness "ignore[s] the gateway stratification and maldistribution of access incorporated in the current regime" (221).
2. Sanjay Khanna, "Out of the Blue," 21.C, Scanning the Future #25 (1997): 17.
4. Richard Metzger in an interview with R. U. Sirius, "Media Prankster . . . ," ibid., 51.
5. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (eds.), Explorations in Communication (Beacon Hill, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960): x - xii.
6. McLuhan, "Classroom without walls," ibid., 4.
7. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964): 75, 111.
8. John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: a Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 105. Docker firmly rejects the Greenbergian/Leavisian modernist separation of our socius into two mutally opposed camps -- mass culture and elite culture; he chides those techno-nay-sayers who "argue that the ceaseless flood of media images overwhelms and destroys the real, the rational, older firmer bearings, older maps and charts of the mind, a mythical past where all apparently was comprehensible" (150). Also see Bruno Latour's scathing critique of Modernist analysis in his We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993).
9. Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the theory of the virtual class. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994: 142-143.
10. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1979): 69. One gets the gist of Giddens's mediating thought, his attempt to straddle the razor's edge between phenomenology and structuralism, in the following excerpt: "An author is neither a bundle of intentions, nor on the other hand a series of 'traces' somehow deposited within the text" (43).
11. Michael Heim as cited in Mark Nixon, "Michael Heim's Technojectory," 21.C, Scanning the Future #25 (1997). Heim, a phenomenologist interested in subjective experience, is more enthusiastic about the possibilities of virtual reality, likening the ultimate virtual reality to the Kantian sublime.
12. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1970): 41.
13. Ibid., 128-129. For an excellent discussion of early electronic populism and computers as an antidote to centralized technocratic elitism, see chapter seven, "The Computer and the Counterculture," in Theodore Roszak's neo-Luddite text The Cult of Information (2nd ed., 1994) where Resource One and Community Memory, computer data-bases for the San Francisco Bay area community that were set up in the 1970s, are discussed. Also see Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's Fire in the Valley (Berkeley, CA: Osborne/ McGraw-Hill, 1984) for an insight into this early hacker culture.
15. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986; reprint 1994): 146-148.
16. Ted H. Nelson, Literary Machines (Theodor H. Nelson, 1984): 2, 7.
17. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1991): 25.
18. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997): 3-4.
19. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994): 89.
23. See Alan Artner's review "Jno Cook takes a wry trip down the 'information super-highway'," Chicago Tribune "Art," sec. 7, 54 (September 20, 1996). Artner sees Cook's sensibility as premised by the dictates of "traditional caricature," a Daumier of the computer-age.
24. McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet Books, 1964): 153.
25. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, TheCultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1992): 20.
26. Downloaded from the web from "Catalogue for NO CARRIER," Jno Cook (1996).
31. Joseph Tabbi, "Reading, Writing, Hypertext: Democratic Politics in the Virtual Classroom," Internet Culture, David Porter, ed., 1997: 235, 237. Also see Tabbi's Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995).
32. Michael Menser and Stanely Aronowitz, "On Cultural Studies, Science, and Technology," Technoscience and Cyberculture, Aronowitz, et al, eds. (New York, London: Routledge. 1996): 14.
33. In "An Invitation to Get Real, Artists," FYI 13:4 (Winter 1998): 1, Homer Jackson, writing in this organ of the New York Foundation for the Arts, critically comments on the art world's persistent focus on funding issues, seeing the main issue as a more basic problem of how artists are perceived by our society: "For me, however, the central issue is the arts community's denial of its problems. When the crisis in the arts is framed as the financial and funding challenges of arts institutions, artists and our issues are jettisoned from the national culture debate. . . . Artists, who should function at the center of the society, dwell on the lowest rungs of the food chain." Of course, this entails another problem: Why are artists perceived as such? Lately, the scapegoat has become alleged art world elitism. The issue came to a head in Judith Miller's New York Times (October 13, 1997) cover story "Study Links Drop in Support to Elitist Attitude in the Arts" wherein she cites a 193 page NEA report called American Canvas: An Arts Legacy for Our Community (1997) that hold artists themselves responsible for the growing alienation it sees between the public and the arts, a gap that supposedly made recent cuts in arts funding credible to large numbers of the electorate.. Yes, this observation from the NEA, not from conservative Congressmen. See critic Bruce Hardy's response to this in Time (November 3, 1997) in "The Arts Are Charged With Being Out of Touch -- This Time By The NEA . . . Duh!" Personally, given the nature of our contemporary society, isn't a sign of the health of the arts that they are alienated from kind of unhealthy society we have produced in this country?
34. Hirsch, "Points of Friction: Artists Critique Technology and Science," Exposure 31:1/2 (1997): 41. Hirsch curated, along with Sean Donaher and AnJanette Brush (now at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago), an open national call for artwork in line with this concept that was shown at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY. The artists Hirsch champions in this regard are: Paul Berger of Seattle, WA; Diane Bush and Steven Baskin of Buffalo, NY; Kathleen Campbell of Sugar Grove, NC; Chet Elkind of New York City; Peter Goin of Reno, NV, Carol Selter of Soquel, CA; and Jo Whatley of Oakland, CA.
35. Sharon Traweek, "When Eliza Doolittle Studies 'enry 'iggins," Technoscience and Cyberculture, 37.
36. Arthur Kroker, "Virtual Capitalism," Technoscience and Cyberculture, Aronowitz, et al, eds. (New York, London: Routledge. 1996): 168.
37. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 28.