Connection in Visibility
Reconnecting the Space of Flows Unplugged
Eric Kluitenberg

Locative media as an artistic and cultural practice can be seen as a more sophisticated way of addressing this complexity of how the geography and the (wireless) electronic networks interweave. At the very least it heightens the experience of a new hybrid spatial sensibility. But these practices do not contribute self-evidently to countering the paradox of isolation in visibility in public space – I can be very isolated in the singular concentration on my geolocative contraptions. The question remains how to design more radically public interfaces for these media in order to engage people actively in a social, and therefore, by necessity, political process.

“Content Flatrate” and the Social Democracy of the Digital Commons
Rasmus Fleischer

Recently, the communities of IP critics and P2P filesharers has been hit by a wave of demands for an “alternative compensation system”. June 2004 was a month of European breakthrough for the idea of “content flatrate”, as a solution intended to save filesharing, whilst “compensating” copyright holders who feel that their traditional means of income are slipping out of hand due to technological development. Here I will discuss this new tendency, its premises, weaknesses and its relation to anti-copyright-activism, polemically arguing that “flatrateism” is a mistake. My observations are based mainly on German discussions, but also on Swedish, French and American proposals of “alternative compensation systems”.

The Social Construction of Blogspace
Ryan Griffis

The situation of mediated contact, or interface, between the individual and the “public,” places the blogger in a position of an intermediary or mediator. For de Certeau, the transmission of communication through a network involves three levels: intermediaries, original sources, and the practices of circulation and transmission. Bloggers map quite well onto de Certeau’s loose schema as mediators - those “who decode and recode fragments of knowledge, link them, transform them by generalization.” These individuals are further defined as “linking agents” and “amateur mediators” who “distinguish themselves by the very particular interest and razor sharp attention that they bring to the slightest issues of life.”

Three Proposals for a Real Democracy
Information-Sharing to a Different Tune
Brian Holmes

The apparent audacity of ideas like the information commons or the guaranteed basic income – their apparent lack of “realism” – merely underscores the crying absence of the political in today’s debates. There’s more at stake here than a catchy tune, or a pill to make you dream. Only an ambition to change the rules of the economy and, ultimately, the existing form of state, can supply the oppositional force that is needed in the early twentieth-first century. Yet the proposals above, inspired in part by the “digital revolution,” indicate pragmatic changes which are already underway; they do not depend on electoral victories for their realization. Rather than a complete, finished program, they point toward an exodus from the present impasse. Semiotics with material consequences. Information-sharing to a very different tune.