Dragan
re oral cultures- as you will have seen we just issued a call for
memoirs by pioneers
in the art science technology field to document their memories of work
done before 1985
see: http://malina.diatrope.com/2014/07/02/leonardo-call-for-papers-memoirs-of-pioneers-and-path-breakers-in-art-and-technology/
in their book chapter 13 Only you can prevent the end of history (
http://re-collection.net/ )
Rick and Jon recommend to curators interviewing the artists
extensively and including these in
the archive of the work- as oral historians will tell you- the way
that memories evolve in time
requires analytic approaches of their own ( see for instance the
guides for conducting
oral histories http://www.oralhistory.org/web-guides-to-doing-oral-history/ )
one of the pluses of the digital age is the ease with which now we can
document things
orally and preserve them= it would have been great to hear leonardo da
vinci musing
on what he was trying to do
on p227 of the book rick and jon have recommendations to creators/artists on how
to document their work to improve the likelihood of their work
surving- what is missing
from these recommendations is that the artists at the time they show their work
document their thoughts at the time via podcast or u tube videos-many
artists now do this
and clearly this becomes a mechanism for creation of social memory- we
may see new
forms of oral culture and social memory developing as the born
"selfie" generation takes off
roger
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Dragan Espenschied
<dragan.espenschied@rhizome.org> wrote:
>> One of the most exciting discoveries for me in researching Re-collection
>> was finding out how extraordinarily long the time-scale of oral traditions
>> can be, thanks to what Rick and I call "proliferative preservation." I'm
>> curious if anyone else sees parallels between oral culture and new media.
>
>
>
> Hi Jon,
>
>
> as I see it there are some very specific digital cultures that have taken
> on some practices that remind of oral culture. I am thinking of 'net
> underground' communities like trolls, warez, bronies (which I picked for
> their different tacticts and perceived impact).
>
> Trolls, as very serious participants in network culture, by necessity have
> to keep their vast knowledge about effective practices alive in a space
> between social media platforms. Sometimes, if a platform requires certain
> trolling techniques or coordination, the aggregation of those will happen
> in restricted areas (if the target platform allows that) or will happen on
> a variety of other platforms. Since trolls are frequently banned wherever
> they are identified, they need a parallel identification system for their
> community members, which mostly works through cultural signifiers, a
> certain style to express themselves. They apply 'fluid insitutions', so if
> one of their hubs is taken down, they have to quickly move somewhere else
> and get the message out to their peers. Almost by definition trolls need to
> avoid repeatedly appearing personages, so they identify each other solely
> through activity. Great ('epic') victories for the cause become legend, but
> very seldomly the trolls themselves.
>
> The warez scene used to be very much like this on the 'customer facing
> side' before the MoMA of piracy, the Pirate Bay, established itself and now
> performs all these functions (risk taking and quickly moving presence) as a
> proxy for the whole. It seems quite effective, but much less interesting
> than the gazillions of websites of legacy warez groups that would
> frequently change their URLs to ever more shady looking ones. The
> information how to access those was always 'around', and contrary to
> trolling, strong brands existed and exist in the warez community and were
> even more important before the centralization. A shared set of ethics
> prevent warez actors and groups from posing as another actor or sailing
> under a false flag. It is basically an endless soap opera. On the
> 'customer' side, the required knowledge how to apply cracks, serialz,
> network filters etc is happening outside of tech or developer knowledge
> gathering and outside of most text based platforms. However, instructions
> on how to crack software is showing up in the form of youtube videos, as
> their content cannot easily be identified and sorted into the 'illegal'
> category. (Very ironic that youtube is detecting literal intellectual
> property violations, like using an unlicensed song as a video soundtrack,
> but is unable to identify the recording and teaching of activities that
> enable these and more sophisticated violations in the first place.)
>
> Bronies apply tactics similar to camp for riding a wave of another culture
> (franchise for children in this case), using a foreign but very strong and
> stable sign language to transmit their own messages. Different from the two
> examples before, there is a AFK part to this culture, but the most
> interesting parts happen online. The pony characters are used for storing a
> rich set of knowledge about how to grow up; for example established forum
> games like 'which pony from the series would you marry' allow bronies to
> explore their own and their peer's views on partnership. Via fanfic and
> fanart they have a huge set of devices at hand for making sense of the
> world.
>
>
> I am seeing different qualities of possible longevity for each of these
> cultures:
>
> Trolls are the most vivid and developed of those, since they are also
> dealing with the most eternal topics: trust, deceit, acting, identity.
> Their base tactics are quite stable, but they constantly have to adapt to
> new forms of automated and mediated forms of trust and identity, so the
> constant exchange will probably keep them afloat for as long as there is
> mediated communication. Also, the participants seem quite invested in the
> culture.
>
> Warez, much like e-sports, have stabilized and incorporated and are already
> using mainstream 'producing for the archive' practices like blogging.
> However, the culture's establishment happened in something that is legend
> now, a saga of actors like Tristar or Cosmo Connor or cracks.am ... So the
> 'consumer' side, which is not made up from computer experts, seems to be
> much more interesting. I think the plain necessity to use consumer systems
> in ways that have not been signed off by their creators will keep the
> knowledge on how to do that around, and video sharing seems to be a very
> effective way of doing so for a long time to come.
>
> Bronies are tied to a sign language that is outside of their control, so
> this particular flavor of community is tied to the franchise and its
> popularity. However, the basic tactics -- using known entities as reference
> points to shortcut initiation and building rituals around them -- will work
> with other popular franchises and already did work with for instance Sonic
> The Hedgehog, Star Trek, Harry Potter, and so forth.
>
>
> All of these cultures survive with constantly changing participants,
> keeping their key values intact, with no other authority but the practices
> themselves.
>
>
> Now how could this be applied to preserving all kinds of digital culture?
>
>
> Bests,
> Dragan
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