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THE PHALLACY OF JOURNALISM
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Topic 423 THE PHALLACY OF JOURNALISM 1 response
visionary cyberculture zone 4:51 PM Aug 13, 1994
(at peg.UUCP)
From: <peg!visionary>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 19:54:37 -0400
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: cybermind@world.std.com
END AND BEGINNING OF THE PHALLACY OF JOURNALISM 101
_Who / Why / Where / When / What / How:_
Who: Who is on the Net? To whom am I speaking? Ontological problems
intervene immediately after demographics, and demographics themselves
aren't reliable.
Why: Purpose is often at variance from stated purpose; performatives
are often skewed, producing intended results elsewhere or beyond their
ostensible content.
Where: Where is often untraceable, single or double blind, with or with-
out the appearance of tracking.
When: Arrrivals and departures are announced, re-announced, and over-
determined.
What: The ostensible content is the surface communication of the post.
This may be interrupted by jargon, visible or invisible code.
How: The transmission-mechanisms and their layering remain invisible
as well.
The news story is produced out of an Enlightenment classicist environ-
ment in which it is assumed that space-time is locally fixed and stable.
The Net post, communication, or artwork, appears out of an information-
flux which is ominous to some extent: On one hand, it utilizes an over-
abundance of headers, and on the other, it is deeply sourceless. The
header is the hysteria of space-time, its fetishization, but the speci-
ficities of the route lose themselves in planetary echos, bounces, and
various forms of interference. It is not that the environment is no
longer classicist; it is instead an _absence of environment_ coupled
with a problematic ontological/epistemological regime. 'Environment'
almost always implies analog extension, a smooth manifold capable of
manipulation (as in Piagetian experiments with children). But the Net
or NII environment is at best that of the local node, the projections
and introjections associated with the terminal screen itself.
The screen is the _tracing_ of the absent environment, not its manifes-
tation. And as such it is the _nostalgia_ for the absence as well; it
is always already a memory of the excessivity or surplus of the real.
Barren, it can never answer the Question who, what, why, etc., although
the Net can _construct_ or _locate_ a nearly-infinite number of answers
(infinite for all 'practical purposes'). Full, it is representative of
the psyche itself, dream-states reordered as insubstantial, the imposi-
tions of spaces and times which automatically perform themselves. (For
there may well be no backdrop to the dream, no dream-screen or maternal
breast - there may only be _laminar inscriptions_ channel-surfing
through reconstructive memory. This is _near_ but not equivalent to the
Net, in which such channel-surfing is ruptured and fragmentary.)
One must _devour_ or _swallow_ the Net to realize it, present its com-
munication on the level of the _throat_ which is vulnerable and suscep-
tible to disease of all sort. The real of the Net may well lie in
disease, physical and mental, disease extending itself in and out of the
communicative environment - _dis-ease_ which discomforts the body and
flattens the screen. From the _terminus, appearance itself is dis-ease,_
the interpenetration of the real of the other, which is the exhaustion
of the real, all the real there is. For the Net is never other, always
_something else_ beyond or elsewhere than language, in spite of its
harboring of language.
The W-questions wobble on the Net, are played-with, a form of inundation.
They carry the cartesian body into cyberspace where both collapse; still,
in the midst of chaos, they remain the final signifiers of inhabitation,
of dwelling, hearth, and home...