'Een hele echte' is a story told through emails that readers receive in the course of 14 days. In the story, Helen is looking online for a new bass gitar. She stumbles upon Tarak, who is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence entity. Helen experiences the enormous influence of her live on the internet, which is completely taken over by Tarak.
Zo'n coole basgitaar als ze Kim Gordon van Sonic Youth zag bespelen in een oude videoclip, die wil Helen als ze eindelijk weer muziek gaat maken. Online loopt ze Tarak tegen het lijf die virtuoos kan zoeken en haar leidt naar de overtreffende trap van de BC Rich Mockingbird Bass, namelijk het exemplaar waarop Kim Gordon speelt in die clip. De Echte!Wie zich aanmeldt volgt veertien dagen het avontuur dat Helen meesleurt tot op louche nachtelijke parkeerplaatsen achter een winkelcentrum in Sydney Australië. Tarak blijkt geen mens maar een vorm van kunstmatige intelligentie. Dat is interessant en erg handig. Tot Helen ervaart hoe de enorme invloed van het internet op haar dagelijks leven in handen valt van een wezen dat zich aan geen enkele menselijke beperking of overweging houdt. Spookachtig en vervreemdend, is zacht uitgedrukt, wat er dan gebeurt. Vragen over wat een intentie, wat contact, begrip en menselijke authenticiteit zijn als we met AI omgaan dringen zich op. En wat bezielt Tarak?De basis van het vervolgverhaal is een tekst bestaande uit emails die Helen aan de lezer stuurt. Maar de omgeving waarin die tekst verschijnt is verrijkt met real-time berichten uit newsfeeds, weer-apps, en losse chatberichten van Tarak, die zich aanpassen bij de locatie en het tijdstip waarop Helen zich in het verhaal bevindt, en bij de locatie van de lezer. De digitale alledaagse werkelijkheid van Helen en lezer is het decor waarin het vervolgverhaal zich afspeelt.
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.
A thoroughfare [] beat Across the wilderness follows speculative pathways of long-distance fiber-optic internet service provider (ISP) cabling (as studied in InterTubes: A Study of the US Long-haul Fiber-optic Infrastructure). With fiber-optic routes generally considered a state or corporate secret, this 4-year study headed by Paul Barford is the first of its kind.
The story of an activist website’s shutdown, as told by DeeDee Halleck, with interstitial e-mails.
(Source: EBR)
Kembrew McLeod, fresh from having trademarked the phrase freedom of expression®, speeds through the domain name scandals of the information superhighway.
(Source: EBR)
Caren Irr on ®TMark.com.
(Source: EBR)
Urging adaptibility and breadth, Mark Poster takes issue with the niches bored by early Internet critiques.
(Source: EBR)
David Nobes on the World Summit on the Information Society and the failure of some of its visionaries to see beyond tame and regimented applications of the Internet.
Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.
Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media.
David Nobes on the World Summit on the Information Society and the failure of some of its visionaries to see beyond tame and regimented applications of the Internet.