At the small press festival on Saturday Oren, our dear friend Oren, got confrontational with Lori’s husband, Ben, over (it seemed) the differences between what the Internet professes to be and what it actually is. Is it a space where the copyright laws are nullified by open source code? Or is it still commodified by software companies and internet providers? (Wait for the day when Google buys Comcast. Mark my words…)
This little flare up at the small press fest has sparked a little debate among our MFA circles, based mostly around trying to figure out what liberalism is. The simple definition, it seems, is the belief in liberty and equal rights, which is a broad definition that almost doesn’t get us anywhere at all. What constitutes freedom on the Internet? Is it access to digital art or is participation a requirement? If it lies somewhere in the middle of those two, how does one discern the gradient between access and full participation? A Flash piece for instance, like YH Chang, is access with no participation, while Brian Kim Stefans’ Letter Builder is all participation, with the access being pointless without movement from the reader.
As the person in the back said, we must remember that most of the world doesn’t have access to a computer or the Internet and the software to make digital art is even more prohibiting. But I hate that statement. A lot of people in the world have never heard of James Joyce, but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about him until everyone has read Finnigan’s Wake. We work in a very privileged field, but it is still a field that raises a lot of questions and needs a lot of answers. It is not pointless, in other words, and the question of whether the Internet is actually free or not lies at the core of that Marxist-like class argument of who has the means? I don’t see the Internet as exclusionary, even though lots of people are excluded from it. But it does not exist because people are excluded from it, unlike democracy (although that seems like a stretch too). It is theoretically possible for everyone to have access to the internet, even though it probably won’t happen. But there is all the difference in the world between “probably won’t happen” and “impossible.”
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Hey Todd. I didn't mean for there to be a flare up with Oren. I hope he wasn't bothered by me. I have a big, oldest-brother kind of mouth.
ReplyDeleteThat said, when I referred to liberalism I was referring to the idea of inclusiveness, which is an idea that comes from the context of humanist/liberal theory. Liberalism in this sense is about a LACK of regulation and a free market which everyone may join. Democracy can't be universal. The demos is, by definition, exclusive. More, democracy is supposed to be difficult. You don't HAVE to know anything in the US to vote (and I don't want there to be literacy requirements or anything like that, to be clear). But MERELY voting is not participating in a democracy. Neither Toqueville nor Thoreau (nor others) felt/feel that voting was a hallmark of democratic institutions. Toqueville was enamored of the jury, in which citizens could debate and deliberate and take part in forming and interpreting law. Such debate is the hallmark of democracy, and to enter it one needs to understand the terms involved. Liberalism has no such entrance requirement.
My poorly made point was that a language like Processing is democratic because it give us access at a basic level; it gives us access to its principles. It allows us to make law (err, tools) rather than just choosing among pre-defined options (as voting). What it requires, however, is knowledge, an understanding of the terms involved. Conversely, while Flash may have a lower entrance requirement, it only lets us "vote," which is to say it only lets us choose from a number of possibilities, even if that number is very large (with great expertise one might hack Flash, as has Strickland, but most people don't have the chops to hack the code or the law & circumvention should not be necessary to participate in democratic structures). Whatever we draw or animate in Flash can only become according to the principles laid out ahead of time, according to a Constitution that we cannot access much less change. So, while it may be inclusive (the only thing you need is the money for it and a computer to run it on), it is NOT democratic.
Regardless, these terms get thrown around too often in this context anyway. Mostly by people like me (and I'm not even certain they're valuable in this debate).
Ben