Re: <nettime> a new definition

["David Golumbia" <dgolumbi@panix.com>]

This discussion is starting to get interesting. I too agree with Florian and
disagree with Olia that Olia's text is not as good as the texts Olia replaced. I
also do not think Olia is keeping to Wikipedia's goal of "neutrality." In fact,
many Wikipedia entries fail to achieve "neutrality."

Perhaps as interesting, as a scholar I find Olia's position argumentative and the
previous entries not argumentative and not "bad." Much of Olia's defense is
argumentative, which is out of keeping with Wikipedia's stated goals. If I refer
to Wikipedia in a published work, I would have no reaso= n to expect the Wikipedia
entry to change, and certainly not so dramatically, and certainly not on the
authority of one person.

Despite all this, THIS IS WHAT I LOVE ABOUT WIKIPEDIA. There *are* more and less
neutral definitions in the world, but they are unstable and unreliable and likely
to be overtaken by more opinionated advocates. The Britannica illusion of stable
definitions is false and always has been false--a temporary consensus that
projects the appearance of permanence. It never has been permanent. Wikipedia
helps us see that, if we are willing to accept the constraints it makes visible in
discourse.

Which is also one of the reasons why the very term "new media" is so
intensely problematic--something none of these versions really touches on=
.
Whose new media? New compared to what?

>Olia wrote:
>
> Sorry to insist, but this text is "bad".
>
> The first two sentences can sound reasonable in the context of media
> study,
> communicating that -- in the opinion of media study -- the New Medium W=
WW
> and the
> New Medium Video Games have mass media potential. The following very
> abstract
> "interactive media and other forms of multimedia" are meaningless
> satellites of
> the term without any connection to mass media.
> It is not a confusion, it is my statement, that the term New Media as a
> name for a
> field of studies is the only meaningful appearance of this term.





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