8
theory on demand
Internet research is faced with a dilemma: it does not seek to glorify high tech or (post-) dotcom business models, nor does it buy into the cynical reasoning that in the end everything will remain the same. The critical history-of-the-present approach proposed here operates in an elective affiliation with “media archaeology.”12 Media archaeology is first and foremost a methodology, a hermeneutic reading of the “new” against the grain of the past, rather than a telling of the history of technologies from past to present. No comprehensive overview of the media archaeology approach is yet available, but we could mention a few scholars, such as Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Werner Nekes, Jonathan Crary, Katherine Hayles, Werner Künzel, Avital Ronell, Christoph Asendorf, Erkki Huhtamo, Paul Virilio and others. Although I do not trace Internet culture back to the 19th, 18th or even 17th century, I see a Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity) between my research and the media archaeology approach. The dynamics of social networks on the Internet need not be reduced to models from existing disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and ethnography. They are as much a part of the history of the medium itself as the heroic tales of its inventors. “Whatever thing I name exists” (Toni Negri). New concepts open up dialogues and imaginative spaces, be they in the past, present or future. But all too often history is used as a strategic weapon against concrete work by new-media practitioners. It may be a truism that the uptake of media takes a cyclical form, from avant-garde to sellout and back to the spotlight of obscurity. Nothing is as easy as turning history against the Internet. Artists, academics and other intellectuals who have felt threatened by the power of the rising medium have tried to prove that there is nothing new under the sun. They want to make their audiences believe that the Internet’s fate will be the same as those of radio and television: to be tamed by national regulators and the market. There is an iron law that after an invention has turned into a mass product, early adopters drop the fad in search of the next one. It may seem like a historically inevitable process, but that does not make the passions and interests of the players involved any less real. In the case of the Internet, “Net criticism” is one such player – and a passionate one – though its existence may not yet be well known outside certain circles. The call for Net criticism should not be read as yet another obsession to carve out a terrain.13 There are enough churches and cults. Instead of stressing popular cycles, attention should focus on the marginal status of critical Internet culture, a more urgent danger. After a decade of great excitement, the outside world remains by and large unaware of new-media culture and, because of its relatively small size, can ignore it, treating it as the activity of a “mafia” that talks only to itself and curates its own artworks. Self-referentiality, a precondition necessary for any culture to flourish, is becoming a major obstacle for growth and transformation toward a next stage. Because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge. Internet research, Net criticism, technocultural studies and media philosophy are still in their infancy.14 Often the object of study has already disappeared before the study of it is finished. But that doesn’t make the issues irrelevant. Critical Internet research must distance itself from vaporware and accept its humble role of analyzing the very recent past. Internet researcher David Silver has distinguished three stages. During the first stage, which he calls “popular cyberculture,” Internet research is marked by its