<amarc-1> a contribution

[Allan Siegel <allanjay@worldnet.att.net> (by way of Bram Dov Abramson <bram@tao.ca>)]

[This brief essay appeared in the e-zine U-TURN.  Allan Siegel was a
founding member of Newsreel and member of Third World Newsreel.  He
currently teaches at The School of the Art Institute, works at public
access in Chicago, Illinois, USA and makes films and videos. --bda]

We are at one of those paradoxical moments in time in which corporate
control of the means of communication is becomeing even more fiercely  and
intensely concentrated.  Within this context, pre-existing and  evolving
avenues of communication define a contested frontier in which the media
barons are trying to shape the landscape based on the distorted priorities
of a global consumer economy.

It is within these shifting boundaries that we are facing both old and new
questions  regarding the right to communicate.  My brief essay is offered
as a way of approaching some of the issues that we are currently facing.

SOMMAIRE
1. Web Sites, Cyberspace and the Internet
2. The Discursive Locales that Populate Cyberspace...
3. Nomads and Settlers; Colonizers and Natives; Outposts and Hamlets...
4. Architectural Configuration of a New Era of Media Gentrification
5. Net as Commercial/Military Enterprise or as Communication Environment?
6. Cyberspace's Connection to Already-Existing Discussions
7. Pedagogy to Formulate Paradigms and Advance A Praxis
8. Internet as Part of the Public Sphere


1. *Web sites, cyberspace and the Internet. an initial effort to define a
pedagogy. *

The inquiry begins with the data, images and sounds that traverse the
Internet and continuously populate and shape cyberspace. Not only the
specific visible locales, the Web sites and bulletin boards etc. that one
confronts in cyberspace, but also the social spaces within which these
encounters take place. This could be the space in a home or a neighborhood
ATM machine; it could also be in the cockpit of a jet flying across the
Pacific Ocean. Cyberspace is a social space contiguous with other social
spaces. Though it generates its own particular etiquette and rules of the
road, and maintains its own unique qualities, it connects with and
influences other social spaces. 

Cyberspace consists of a multitude of forums where discussions take place
and ideas are exchanged; it contains sites where information is received
and given. The discussions can describe complex scientific processes and
military operations; OR, can seek to comprehend the social impact of the
concentration, control and distribution of information.   Not symbolically,
but concretely, cyberspace represents the infrastructure of an immense
transportation network; a superhighway whose main cargo is the data and
information integral to the economic viability of global commerce.   


2. *The discursive locales that populate cyberspace play a new and
increasing role in affecting public opinion.*

The various realms of CMC are elements in a vast global communications
landscape. These realms developed because of corporate, educational,
governmental and individual initiatives. The diverse components of CMC are
driven and affected by exigencies that are long term and impersonal as well
as immediate and intimate; they reflect the practices of public and private
institutions. Like television, radio, the cinema and other forms of media,
CMC and its institutional components are fluid, dynamic systems that
facilitate and shape processes that influence the spatialization of social
reality and can inhibit, generate or sustain a wide range of discursive
practices.  

Channels of discourse crisscross cyberspace augmenting and facilitating
existing forms of communication.  They form conceptual layers and provide
new animated perspectives of social reality.   These channels are not
consigned to simply mediate the raw cargo of information; they fulfill
additional purposes.  They reconfigure learning environments and alter the
abstract processes within which opinions are shaped and formed. They are
channels of discourse that delineate new spacialized arenas in which
aspects of social reality are validated and contested.


3. *Throughout the existing realms as well as the uncharted territories of
cyberspace there are nomads and settlers; colonizers and natives; outposts
and hamlets as well as information and data megalopolises.*  

The pedagogy provides an overview of the Net's history and outlines  the
social, political and economic forces that continue to shape its evolution.
It includes an examination of the various sites and practices that form the
topographies of cyberspace. It describes a  panorama where there is no
ecological balance nor is one preordained. Here some territories are
hidden, purposely obscured, restricted; dominions known only by their
rulers. There are alleys that invoke danger and intrigue, pleasure. Other
remote regions seem to be pristine and bucolic. There are charred
battlegrounds, an infinite array of commodities, buoyant images of the
present and the blurred outlines of the past.  But, within the global
networks of cyberspace, history has little purchasing power. 


4. *Words such as "explorer" and "navigator" have become encoded with new
meanings; as signifiers of power in cyberspace: they represent an
architectural configuration of a new era of media gentrification.*

To wander in cyberspace one roams through territories that have been
charted and demarcated by institutions and individuals whose perspectives
are framed by formulations that color the environment and delimit the
horizon of  possibilities.  One encounters pundits who describe cyberspace
as a virtual world free from or inherently separated from the political and
social realities of another non-virtual world. They cloak their positions
in vistas of plenitude. Their visions are little more than a quickly fading
solipsistic gestures. In less casual attire, they assiduously fashion theme
parks encased in ideological bunting; they promote drive-through urban
sectors cleansed for photo ops and town hall meetings; hot spots for
fetishized, ephemeral encounters with "real issues." On their information
superhighway the public pays for "the experience" of democracy. 


5. *There is a persistent tension between the Net as a commercial and
military enterprise and as a communication environment that increases
public accessibility to information and enhances definitions of community
and civic space.*

Whether originating from within the environs of a commercial enterprise, a
top secret military installation, a government agency, an educational
laboratory or the privacy of a home, CMC encompasses and reflects distinct
and often contradictory mandates, desires and activities. As such it needs
to be viewed from a perspective that perceives communication and media
infrastructures as interactive and potentially volatile elements within a
landscape that can either foster or restrict discourse. 

"The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature
'dirty.' That is part of their productive power." -- Hans Magnus Enzenberger

In cyberspace, the exercise of power and the logistics of control are not
simply distorted by the invisibility of electronic networks, they are often
hidden away, made invisible, by the same forces that affect the more
tangible surfaces of social reality. 


6. *Making sense of cyberspace means affirming its connection to already
existing discussions; it means continuing to assert and define its
historical context.*

Pedagogical issues that relate to the Internet and cyberspace are
extensions of already existing discourses.  The motivating factors and
social forces that propel these discourses do not evaporate in cyberspace.
It is not colorblind, genderless, or class free. While it crosses national
boundaries with an apparent sense of impunity, it does not neutralize or
diminish the impact of political and social struggles.  Behind the gloss of
cyberspace is a continuation of the debates, social theories, ideological
assumptions, and philosophies that exist in other discursive realities.  


7. *An objective of this pedagogy is to formulate paradigms and advance a
praxis; to conceptualize practices that can enhance the nature of everyday
experiences.*

"In contemporary high-tech societies there is emerging a significant
expansion and redefinition of the public sphere and... these developments,
connected primarily with media and computer technologies, require a
reformulation and expansion of the critical or committed intellectual."
--Douglas Kellner, as quoted by Jim McGuigan in _Culture and the Public
Sphere_.

A pedagogy is about learning; it is not simply about the mechanics of
wielding the tools of image-making; it is also about enabling an awareness
or consciousness of those self-reflexive moments during which ideas take
shape, are formulated and exchanged. To organize and gather the tools
necessary for this investigation it becomes useful to draw upon and
scrutinize both new and seemingly dated concepts.   To examine the
assumptions that underscore many current theoretical premises that have
attained a certain purchasing power simply because of their ability to
circulate as intellectual commodities. This pedagogy should question
premises whose validity has never been interrogated by the demands of a
practice that reaches beyond the boundaries of a secure academic milieu.  


8. *How the Internet can function as a part of the public sphere?  Is it
possible to extend and update definitions of the public sphere to include
the Internet?*

Included in the pedagogy is an overview of ongoing investigations of the
public sphere; it depicts the markers of its present-day characteristics.
It includes a discussion of the viewer/user/audience relationships that
arise from CMC and the new configurations of social space that these
associations imply. 

In her Forward to _Public Sphere and Experience_ by Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge, Miriam Hansen states that, "For [Walter] Benjamin, the
ability to gauge the distance between past and present was synonymous with
the ability to imagine a different future... For Negt and Kluge, 'the
assault of the present on the rest of time' (Kluge) is a key problem of the
public sphere because it erodes the temporal matrix of the horizon of
experience, the possibility of collective memory, which is the precondition
for any counterhegemonic politics."

Hansen then asks the timely question, "How do people make sense of the
arbitrarily intersecting parameters of everyday life, individual life story
and history?" 

The question has a certain urgency because of its startling clarity. Its
objective, the trajectory that it implies, and the goal, to "make sense,"
seems so filled with pathos.  It suggests a process that is ongoing and
diligent. In this context, the content and goals of a pedagogy that
maneuvers through cyberspace,  and contextualizes the multi-faceted realms
of the Internet can only be introductory, tentative. After all, this a
medium still in its infancy. Tentative also because this is only a
preliminary outline that attempts to call attention to conceptual gaps and
determine where they lie. It projects a terrain that has only been
partially traveled.  It sketches a map that hopefully can invigorate the
contours of existing discursive practices. A pedagogy can only serve as a
guide, a compass that enables the cyber traveler to penetrate the
technological gloss, the fog of techno-babble, that enshrouds the
Internet's, as Hansen states, "horizon of experience".

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