#internet studies

Back in November, famous poet Ocean Vuong posted on Instagram a series of ideas about metaphor. The ideas were both smart and incomplete, the sort of theorizing that occurs among fellow artists in a small back room. Another famous poet, Matthew Zapruder, responded by critiquing Vuong’s ideas about metaphor, adding what he thought Vuong was missing: a more avant-garde conceptualization of metaphor that took into account the methodologies of surrealism. Both poets were asserting things that were extensions of their respective aesthetics. I would argue that a larger articulation of how metaphor works emerged from the combination of their ideas­—from the conversation they were having—than from either poet’s assertions taken by themselves. In a small back room—say, if Vuong and Zapruder were talking in a bar or coffee shop or someone’s apartment after a reading—all of this would be perfectly fine; this is how the world of the small back room proceeds.

But—and here’s the thing—social media is not a small back room, even in the realm of poetry. Social media gathers enough poets into one place that the interactions that occur no longer possess the intimacy and provisionality of the small back room. Very shortly after Vuong and Zapruder posited their ideas, hundreds of people immediately felt compelled to take sides. Vuong and Zapruder’s offerings quickly came to represent things well beyond what they were. For some, Zapruder’s critique represented a sort of literary revanchism of the straight white male poet trying to claw back territory from the queer poet of color who now teaches in the MFA program said white poet once attended. For others, Vuong’s assertions represented a sort of younger-generation simplicity, a lack of understanding (or inclusion) of literary history and the legacy of the avant-garde. Those who defended Zapruder were painted as reactionary or even racially motivated. Those who defended Vuong were called naïve about—or blind to—poetry’s history and Vuong’s power in the poetry world. Very little of it had to do with the substance of what Vuong and Zapruder had said.

The process can’t quell anxiety; this kind of self-expression can only intensify it, focus it onto a few social-media posts that await judgment, narrow it to the latest instances of sharing. Social media’s quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more “relevant.”

‘‘This issue is an exercise in media ecology that is paradoxically unnatural. Instead of assuming a natural connection to the established tradition of Media Ecology in the Toronto-school fashion of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and the work of scholars involved in the Media Ecology Association (http://www.media-ecology.org/media_ecol- ogy/) 5 our issue stems from another direction; its theoretical orientation is more inspired by the work of Felix Guattari and engages with several overlapping ecologies that are aesthetico-political in their nature. It stems from a more politically oriented way of understanding the various scales and layers through which media are articulated together with politics, capitalism and nature, in which processes of media and technology cannot be detached from subjectivation. In this context, media ecology is itself a vibrant sphere of dynamics and turbulences including on its technical level. Technology is not only a passive surface for the inscription of meanings and signification, but a material assemblage that partakes in machinic ecologies. And, instead of assuming that 'ecologies' are by their nature natural (even if naturalizing perhaps in terms of their impact on capacities of sensation and thought) we as- sume them as radically contingent and dynamic, in other words as prone to change.‘‘

‘’It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are ex- tremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse "social" and "natural" differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established me- dia disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment — to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago. While occasionally sympathetic, this issue of the Fibreculture Journal questions this ap- proach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws on the acceler- ated evolutions of media forms and processes, the microrevolutions in the social (and even the natural sciences) that dynamic media foster, even the way in which "new" media lead us to reconsider the diversity of "old" media species. Summed up simply here under the sign/event of the "trans," this issue catalyzes new concepts, accounts of and suggestions for new practices for working with all these processes.’’

‘‘This is a journal issue invested in remarking more than once upon the undecidability hover- ing today around our getting into contact with 'ubiquity' or 'pervasiveness' as a potential to be further actualized in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, and the cultural life worlds of information societies more generally. It could well be that you have not yet heard of ubiquitous or pervasive computing, or that you have heard of these but still remain in doubt whether there actually is or will be such a thing, in interaction de- signs or elsewhere. It could also very well be the case, however, that you both know a great deal about this as a rather momentous shift, qua a third wave in computing and associated disciplines, and find yourself engaging with it all around you in your practical life: at work, at home, in leisure activities and games, in the media art at the museum, or in the everyday culture of the public sphere. Affirming this undecidability is a necessity - since both of these alternatives are currently at stake, and since 'ubiquity' and ubicomp remain potentialities of whose actualization we are not yet sure. This undecidability may be a matter of the explicit articulation of principal ideas. At the same time, it may concern the concrete lines of devel- opment and research that make of this so many hands-on facts inherent in the interactions in our contemporary life worlds. In other words, the focus and special merit of this issue is not least to enter into the set of questions surrounding the notion of 'interaction designs for ubicomp cultures' - as something partaking of that which Michel Foucault would have called 'a history of the present.’‘

‘’The future began somewhere. The impulse behind this issue of The Fibreculture Journal was a crisis of imagination with regards to how the future might look and behave. Our starting point was the notion of post-millennial tension - the idea that in the decades following the year 2000 we find ourselves living in an era that was meant to be the future, but where many of our futuristic hopes and fantasies remain unfulfilled. Worse, our historical visions of hyper-technological futures seem to have propelled us into a perilous position where humankind may not have any kind of future at all. In the space between ever-hopeful techno-futurism and the realities of a world forever changed by the pursuit of the resources required to fuel it, we asked if the age-old concept of Utopia still has the strength to generate galvanising visions of the future.’‘