[Nettime-bold] nettime 3000?

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.org>]

Right at the time when nettime reached the arbitrary yet symbolic number of 
3000 subscribers, the number of error messages flooding the nettime system 
reached such proportions (several hundreds a day) that we were finally forced 
to go through the boring process of unsubscribing those addresses that were 
clearly broken. Within days, nettime got purged of 10% of its subscribers.

All in all, this was an utterly unspectacular process, spring cleaning if you 
will, but makes me wonder, nevertheless, what kind of community is this in 
which 10% of the 'members' are dead, so to speak.

So, what kind of community is it? Clearly, it's no longer the hybrid 
structured by the two intersecting vectors of online exchanges and off-line 
events, back-packing on the European media festival circuit. These ain't the 
90s anymore. Rather, the last time (as far as I know) a significant number of 
'nettimers' were physically in the same place -- at the WOS II in late 2001 
in Berlin -- was a non-event. Just a bunch of people happening to be together 
drinking beer in clubs where one could not communicate with anyone who was 
more than 1 meter away. There was no sense of being a group, rather 
communication unfolded as a series of friendly, or disinterested, individual 
encounters. Physically, there was no many-to-many communication, just 
one-to-one.

At the same time, nettime in terms of its online exchanges is doing quite 
well. It's a stable, reliable, perhaps a bit predictable (the flip side of 
reliable), long-term project. I personally don't know of another list that is 
comparable in terms of breadth and quality of content.

It seems that, as a community, nettime has been moving in the opposite 
direction of what is usually understood as the normal 'maturing' process of a 
virtual community, namely, that on-line exchange sooner or later create the 
desire for off-line meetings. For nettime, off-line events -- meetings, paper 
publications -- were crucially important initially but steadily declined to 
the point that when the last nettime publication appeared (as part of Vuk 
Cosic's Biennale catalogue) only a fraction of list subscribers (perhaps not 
even all of those whose texts were reprinted) even noticed.

A lot of this has to do with the subscriber base becoming more diverse 
(geographically, socially, intellectually), the early enthusiasm wearing off 
and the distributed, non-ownership, volunteer model showing its conservative 
tendencies. This needs to be qualified. Ownership here is not understood in 
these sense of being the property of someone, but in the sense of 'taking 
ownership' and assuming responsibility.

Who is responsible for nettime? Of course, there are some responsibilities. 
If the email server goes down, the phone at The Thing will ring. If something 
on the web server needs to be changed, the action is in Amsterdam. And the 
moderation does daily maintenance work.

But responsible in the sense of being able to make decision beyond minor 
tinkering is no-one. So, things stay the same as far as the technical is 
concerned. Nevertheless, socially, things have changed quite a bit, the 
community has become more virtual in all senses.

Perhaps, this has to do with the relative maturing of other networks, say 
social forums, art festivals or conferences, which are more efficient at 
providing real meeting places for more narrowly defined (but more populous) 
groups whose sense of community is more comprehensive. In a way, nettime has 
always defined itself negatively. Being sponsored by art institutions, but 
not being an art project itself. Having lots of intellectuals on board, but 
being non-academic. Having a strong political slant, but not being affiliated 
with any particular segment of the multitude.

In a time where institutions enjoy a new found respect, nettime, once again, 
goes against the trend, becoming more virtual, more distributed, more 
ephemeral. This process is not explicit, but it's clearly felt, as could be 
witnessed by the last major discussions one the list which, by no means a 
co-incidence, was about the institutionalization of rhizome. A discussion 
that, from the outside was supremely absurd -- after all, how important is a 
$5 membership fee, really -- but from the inside, it seemed to touch a 
strange cord, but one that indicate that nettime still has a sense of self, 
which, not surprisingly, is still defined negatively.





----+-------+---------+--- 
http://felix.openflows.org

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold