[spectre] TODAY LIVE: Geert Lovink & Armin Medosch at De Ballie

[Tania Goryucheva]

>
> and as the project curator, what have you found?  what methods of  
> mediation were most effective?
> can you outline the model that you're finding most successful, or  
> interesting, perhaps?

I'm afraid of, not yet, we have just launched the project. And I  
suspect, that whatever we happen to find out or fail to achieve, will  
be neither a perfect solution of the addressed problems, nor a bold  
prove of one "truth" or another about media. Personally I'm not  
interested in mega-prophecies, generalised diagnoses and search for  
salvations, but rather in escaping superimposed schemata, which often  
determine both our experience and attitude to media. In this sense  
Cool media hot talk show project in its essence is hands on  
experiment aiming at breaking certain conventional patterns,  
including the idea of participatory media platforms like the one  
which you outlined. Why for example "good" or successful  
participatory media should be necessarily related to communities  
building and establishing "positive" comfortable social  
relationships? I'm interested in how driving force of conflict of  
visions, interests and motivations can be used in developing  
participatory media scenarios aimed at production of polemical, or  
agonistic, inter/cross-cultural in a way public discourse rather than  
manufacturing communitarian consent or simulating multicultural quasi- 
dialogues in the "best" traditions of neo-colonialist paternalism  
(which mediatory institutions so prone to).

Mailing list, I find, to be a very successful public communication  
tool which, on the one hand, allows different modes of communication  
and participation (i also don't think that many announcements and  
lurking are bad or contra-productive), and on the other hand, through  
gathering people around common, shared, agenda it enhances the self- 
articulation, inclusion, cooperation. Syndicate/Spectre has done and  
does great job in this sense, it literally has played very important  
role in my life and carrier (can't miss here a chance to say Big  
Thanks to Inke and Andreas for keeping it up).
But the strength of mailing lists is their weakness at the same time.  
They tend to homogenise discourse, naturalise promoted underlying  
agenda. I think, one of the reason why announcements dominate  
discussions on Spectre at the moment, is that quantity and disperse  
character of activities of subscribers, while being based on more or  
less the same premises, make it difficult to generate strong focal  
points for an engaging discussion outside of one's work, project...,  
which would not be read as self-promotion.

>
> this is not a rant against wikipedia.  it's a question about how  
> the mediation works, and in what context it is most appropriate.   
> systems like wikipedia seem dangerous tools for public dialogue  
> because opinion parades as fact by virtue of the mass of  
> contributors. it may be public discourse, or it may be a tyrany of  
> the majority.  i

Wikipedia is so far probably my favourite internet project. I see the  
positive sides of its "authority" in the very logic of knowledge  
production it proposes: open to contributions and questioning of  
those contribution, open-ended representation of knowledge which can  
be modified, distributed through numerous references, put in a  
relational on- and off-line context. Of course, it's not perfect. Why  
should it be? I go to wikipedia not to grasp a complete and right  
definition of a term, the pretence upon which traditional  
encyclopedias based, but to assist myself in contextualisation and re- 
integration of bits of knowledge I'm dealing with.

Btw, I have never had any troubles with posting announcements on  
Spectre from my subscribed address.