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the interactive gambit (do not run! we are your friends!)

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Technophilia and technophobia are afflictions of the heart. The blind love of technologies, like the indiscriminate contempt for them, is built on overarching claims like space is dead. Technophiles celebrate its extinction, and technophobes mourn its loss, blaming mass media for the collapse of the public sphere. Technophiles take credit for replacing the "public "with electronic surrogates. But can the public sphere, apparently lost to media, be defined outside of the media? Have not these terms been indistinguishable since the invention of the printing press? What is this public, in whose name this binary war is being waged?

Tienimen square We're interested in the technophilic narratives of progress and the technophobic narratives of decline. Not that these -phylic and -phobic conditions are pathological and in need of normalization, but our interest lies in how these sharply divided ideological tendencies sometimes trade places with one other and how this oppositional framework reveals flip sides of the same desire.

  Take, for example, the common attraction to liveness. "Live" means simply, now, at this very moment. The term "live" came into being when broadcast media needed to distinguish actual from recorded air time. For technophobes who believe that media mediates reality, liveness is the last stronghold of real experience -- seeing and/or hearing the event at the precise moment of its occurrence. As long as time is undistorted, immediacy is not entirely lost to distance. For technophiles, liveness is the index of technology's ability to simulate the real, which is, of course, dependent on real-time computational response. Lag time, delay, search time, download time, and feedback time are all unwelcome mediations. Un-mediated and im-mediate are synonymous. Whether motivated by the desire to preserve the real or to fabricate it, liveness, as "lifelikeness" aspires to the real, and the real is an object of uncritical desire for techno-extremes.


 
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