Together on a list
Article (1998) by Marie-José Klaver on the Nettime mailing list.
About every subject people communicate with large or small groups via
E-mail. Some of those groups grow out to be communities who visit each
other also in real life. On the mailinglist of Nettime 850 scientists,
artists and journalists from twenty countries change their thoughts
about the Internetculture in the broadest sense of the word.
Everything
of what has been written in this exceptionally productive list the last
one and a half year has been published in a 550 pages counting
compilation READ ME! in bookform. "With some of the Nettimers I have
more often contact than with people from New York," says Ted Byfield a
freelance journalist from New York at the presentation on the Dutch
Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) in Rotterdam.
The rule of Nettime
is that only the members can send articles. Discussions, which had the
result in other mailing lists that ended in interminable drivel or
arguments, have to be held by personal E-mail or on other lists. The
result is a high level and a close electronic community who see each
other regularly also in real life at organized meetings. Members of the
list travel the world to be there. In Rotterdam were about 100 members
present.
The science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling also a member
of the list based his cyberpunk roman 'Holy Fire' (1996) on this
traveling Nettime-community, digital artists who travel from one country
to an other to meet each other.
The thing Nettimers connect is
the love-hate relationship with the computer technology. Every one
believes in the Internet and the net, but the uncomfortable feeling
about the by Microsoft or Netscape and AOL dominated society is big.
Also
the rejoiced way of the American Internet magazine Wired that is
declaring the digital revolution since 1995, is regularly the subject of
criticism of Nettime. When in March 1997 Wired lost completely sight of
the difference between journalistic independence and commercial
interests in a pages long editorial comment about the blessings of push
media (a in the meanwhile past hype), the Dutch media critic Geert
Lovink reacted with criticism which was followed over by a couple of
American newspapers. Wired declared the HTML (the language of the
construction of WebPages) unnecessary, because the new push-technique
would bring the new to the user. People didn't have to look for it,
Wired and CNN would from now on deliver the news at home.
Nowadays
Nettime is also the victim of the fashionable opinions about
unnecessary technology. At the presentation of READ ME! the German Pit
Schultz suggested to scrap the mailinglist. He had the opinion that
majordomo, the program on which the mailinglist runs, is to old.
According to Schulz one of the founders together with Lovink, Nettime
should be a three dimensional space on the web. This will be at the cost
of the speed and the accessibility of the list.
Schulz his
proposal didn't get much support. The almost free program majordomo from
1992 takes care of the electronic mail to the members of the list, it
has been the driving force behind the community. "Old is not per
definition the same as outdated", mails Lovink from Japan. "We al have
much to thank to majordomo, especially the people who have less
connectivity to their disposition. Nettime and many other lists would
not have existed without that software".
