IMG 2/26/97
Chris/Ben/Xin-Wei/Ann/ Laura/Helga/ Chris

An analysis of WIRED magazine as an expression of a new medium

Ann reads from WIRED about push and pull media. We talk about drag- swipe media (where you can just swipe your credit card)
New media---personalized experience that is not bounded by a page... quote.  
Immersion/ information coming at you. push media arrive automatically 
feeding the couch potato in all of us......

How to make money off it? by charging you when you loook at it...the retinal swipe....

We talk about the feeling WIRED creates with this kind of article: enthusiastic embracing of the new technological world, the new creativity, the new moneymaking schemes.
Which then gets opposed to the good olfashioned face to face...with the en effect of subsuming face to face under the new way of being in the world.
BEN: want to keep my dignity, so bring you own sandwiches.Take what you want from popualr culture.
Chris: If they only admitted that all they are after is making money.  ...
Kris:  But people can transform the pieces from popular culture into their own creation.

Ann reads on: incredibly simplicistic view of media development. extend - unify, extend....  comment: replacement for sex. 
Critique of the whole magazine: look at the pseudo-hip presentation, then 2nd page has Calvin Klein and BMW advertisement....

Ben: tells the story where the media tried to create a frenzy over OJ Simpsons trial and failed to do so.  (I remember the hype about telecommuting in companies which was largely created by the media- and succeeded to create a trend for a time)

Xin-WEi talks about JAVA and the disadvantages/ advantages of restricting the applications that can run on your machine. Dos not think that this push-pull media is touching upon this thing at the right level.
Dont think that many people make a lot of money with online services.  Internet is at the moment not self-supporting- lives on venture money right now.  CD Rom for example, was a flop after they had poured millions into it. 
Ann brings up VR as one example of what people think the internet is about.  Question: what it is really about? Maybe these attempt to get more perfect in presentation actually accomplishes the opposite.
Xin-Wei: this is the mimetic fallacy...to try and imitate what thy think the world is like, the photorealism does not make an experience rich and authentic.  
Is it about making stories? About style?  Chris hurls an objectile...book about Earth moves: furnishing territorities written by a student of Deleuze.
Functions like a modern drug, LSD,..the Leary comment.
Laura: is about eliminating the body.  May the body reappear at the other side of this disembodiment?  Our culture is already biased to removing the body:  keeping the body still, emphasis on vision;
really very ancient- this hate or fear or dismissal of the body.

IS the body made into a mystic/ mystifying substance? maybe as a countermove to the above tendency.
Advertisement and consumption become form and content. Value ..?Concern for.... is lost.  Fetishism....
Yet does not exclude that this medium is also put to other use.

Ann feels that the magazine itself is the BODY, is forming a body into which the reader wants to become incorporated...immortality is really what we are after in the contact of these medium.

Design of magazine: very middle-class, not very stylish, crude.
Where is the power of the individual. Ann remembers an advertisement of father and son sitting in office with each powerbook on thie lap..title You Will...the will to consumption as the expression of the individual? The vision of the new push media even does away with using choice as an advertising move.  Basic move:  you are freed from having to make choices. 
All creative acts are thereby pushed aside..
Still there is the suspicion that hidden in the presentation of the thrill ofthe push medium is an appeal to the individuals (choice?or being chosen? for chosen to consume?i.e. for being actively passive)
Only comparable to this machinerie is the Hollywood industry or the games industry...
Ann: What is forgotten about the Web is the enormous resurgence of the letter writing culture....
Xin-WEi talks about Gabriele: his experience of school is to sit next to other kids, not a electronically mediated contact.  This will not change, but of course the experience of Saturday TV, cartoons, games, etc. has its impact.

Transcendent approach to technology:  ...the desire to replace our bodies with technology
Other approach is that the medium is an extension; the expressive powers of the medium itself to extend our bodies...

Each computer as a material object that allows one to lock into the sublimity of this culture, into its technological prowess, its physical power,  productive perfection, etc...this accounts for the addictive quality of the web?  
Immersion has a very different quality...immersive experiences are somehow always social experiences.....Why not explore the interpassivity as a way to create a place....
IDEA: to create a place out of our interpassions.....

Proposal:  we all are strong personalities with our personal takes on the world... could we create a landscape of our positons/ places...with social interference suits we could imagine  such a landscape as afield of issues and relations and fieldlines.

- HW