The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

* THE INTERNET AS A SUSTAINED DIALOGICAL SPACE THROUGH CULTURAL PRODUCTION

The movement to merge art with daily social life is the legacy of the revolutionary avantgarde, a legacy that is bound to the rise of technological invention in modern society. Print, photography, the telephone, radio, film, video and the Internet have each awakened a vision of artistic production embedded in the broad social fabric of the public arena. The tendencies of the technologically driven avant-garde, in its latest incarnation, have been socialist--aiming to debunk the art object from its pedestal through mass production and perhaps more importantly to release electronic media into a dialogical public sphere.

In his 1974 essay/manifesto "Constituents of a Theory of the Media,, (23) Hans Magnus Enzenberger presents the following table to summarize the social dichotomy of media:

Repressive Use of Media

Centrally controlled program One transmitter, many receivers Immobilization of isolated individuals Passive consumer behavior Depoliticization Production by specialists Control by property owners or bureaucracy

Emancipatory Use of Media

Decentralized program Each receiver a potential transmitter Mobilization of the masses Interaction of those involved, feedback A political learning process Collective production Social control by self-organization

If we apply Enzensberger's set of emancipatory objectives to the Internet, it does indeed represent a dialogical vehicle more so than any other media. However, if we allow corporate surveillance and federal policies to perform an even greater monitoring of cyberspace, the Internet's dialogical potential will be consumed by a decentralized global panopticon. The public sphere no longer implies only the embodied spaces of social geographies--it now encompasses the virtual spaces of the Internet. Hence, new forms of cultural production that make use of emerging technologies must assimilate and subvert the corporate and governmental means of documenting, indexing and monitoring the public domain to enact contestation. Brooke Singer's "SPV2" and the Institute for Applied Autonomy's "iSEE" present two alternative uses of the Internet and the database as tools that provoke and enable constructive social critique through independent production and dissemination.

NOTES

(1.) The Internet has become the fastest growing electronic technology in world history." From The Pew charitable Trusts Web Site, www.pewtrusts.com/ ideas/index.cfm7issue=10, January 2002.

(2.) Brian Winston documents the early history of the Internet in his book Media Technology and Society (London: Routledge. 998).

(3.) Mark Poster elaborates on "Cyber Democracy" as a space where "individuals construct their identities...a 'democratization' of subject constitution because the acts of discourse are not limited to one-way address and not constrained by the gender and ethnic traces inscribed in face-to-face communications." What's the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 184.