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“La presse, la radio, le
cinéma tendent à la ruine
de la culture. Et tous les moyens de dispersion à
base d’intensité et de vanité.
Ils sont, d’ailleurs, dominés par des fins politiques et commerciales. Politique et commercialization, ‘économie’, étant choses statistiques, et donc ennemies de
la culture. Les mesures contr’elles prises par les États dictatoriaux sont,
d’autre part, dirigées
contre la culture
hétérodoxe.” Unique networked addresses allow singular addressability. Contemporary publishing can address itself narrowly, befitting a specific moment in time, a location, a person — or any group of such identities — provided its addressee carries a unique address. The targeting possibility is effective over time: publication updates can at any moment be ported in multiple directions over a network. This flexibility of address is a main issue of the ongoing publishing revolution. After ‘content’ and the ‘medium’ having hijacked our attention, challenging our interpretation and provoking reflection, infesting discourse, today the address is the message, because content + medium + address make out the unique relational properties of any communication/publication in a contemporary media landscape. Who addresses who, what is addressed, and where? is a media-political question. Address is today’s media concern. Mass media address mass audiences: a populace, the citizen, larger groups of addressees with at best sketchy profiles. New networked media allow to recognize/target smaller groups, after gathering information on their preferences and interests. From the start of its business amazon.com offered books for sale. It did not make any profit off those transactions for years. It gained something else. Amazon.com got paid in valuable market information, client attention currency. Its information gathering databases soon addressed its customers personally. Not sure if the user of the identified computer really was the one whose profile was under construction, it greeted me also with a disclaimer: ‘if you are not Jouke Kleerebezem, click here’. Amazon’s profiling database built a strong identifying tool. It related the many pieces of information which it was addressing when users logged in and browsed their store. It stored which books went where, with which other books, later other purchases. It allowed users to write reviews, set up their own boutiques, remember their ‘wish list’ — which as an email recalls, was actually early on suggested by myself, a client hungry for information and enhanced book buying. After a while Amazon’s databases could feed back national and corporate interests in certain volumes or catalogues, suggest books that you might have overlooked or did not know about. (…) Everything which is directly addressed at us should contain vital information through which we learn — expand and deepen our knowledge, and answerability, not the neighbour’s. What we address, when and how, informs other people. Lifelong learning is no empty slogan. Hence, design to address. (…) The art of recommendation is central to knowledge development through cultural production in an information era. Often mistaken for an age of ‘disintermediation’ I contend that we are living a period of panintermediation, in which all of us are agents for everybody else — selection follows reputation. Sometimes extremely narrow shared interests bring together people of otherwise disconnected concern and preference. (…) Address – every unique body has a unique address but can guise in infinite aliases, to receive/read at, and write/send from, and ‘as if’ perform through – every unique geographic location has a unique address, but can bear infinite names to be addressed there – every automotive body can change its geographic location, while keeping its body-address(es) – body-addresses can be connected/collected in a network – a network can be functional/locational situated (e.g. geographical data; a network of places and objects, and bodies) and/or ideological/epistemological (e.g. social, in a shared interest group; a network of information and knowledge, related interests) – networks are held together primarily through interaction and communication between its nodes, of relevant data/shared interests – networks disintegrate when their nodes’ exchanges drop Presence A body of information can move from one location to the next, just like the physical body, but even more so, it ‘wants to be free’. It wants to drift, float, be vaporous. Information is hard to shut up. It can be present at multiple locations at once. The network routes around obstacles/identities and infinitely distributes. See also: Pervasive publishing, Spam canvas |
