interwebs lecture

I am currently writing a guest lecture for the unit in which I am tutoring at the University of Sydney. The lecture is on the internet, new media and participatory publics. I am having fun with how much of my own prejudices get written into the lecture with the structure. I begin with a history of the net and some brief understandings of different perspectives and terms.

I locate Bolter and Grusin’s remediation thesis as being part of the second period of the internet (what I am calling the ‘Cyberspace’ period). Essentially I argue that ‘remediation’ is a compensatory discourse for those who want to locate the ‘internet’ in a longer history of the media. Their core problem is the relation between immediacy and presence, and where medium and content are understood as separate. I take a post-cyberspace view of the internet where the core problem is the network. Both are important in the internet-centric event of sense — one is text-based, the other demands an understanding of how the meaning of such texts is distributed, or not, according to networks of subject-object relations. Remediating content is fine, but it means nothing unless connections are made… If content is privileged over medium in the analysis, then the ‘immediacy’ (or not) of the network becomes a poor relation to the function of immediacy (or not) of the content. The ‘remediation’ thesis basically needs to be ANT’d.