Digitize This Book!: the Politics of New Media, Or Why We Need Open
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DIGITIZE THIS BOOK! Electronic Mediations Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors 24 Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now Gary Hall 23 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Lisa Nakamura 22 Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors 21 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker 20 Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overfl ow Victoria Vesna, Editor 19 Cyberspaces of Everyday Life Mark Nunes 18 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander R. Galloway 17 Avatars of Story Marie-Laure Ryan 16 Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi Timothy C. Campbell 15 Electronic Monuments Gregory L. Ulmer 14 Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 13 The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory Thomas Foster 12 Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory Peter Krapp 11 Biomedia Eugene Thacker 10 Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism Ann Weinstone 9 Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society Steven Shaviro 8 Cognitive Fictions Joseph Tabbi 7 Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet Diana Saco 6 Writings Vilém Flusser 5 Bodies in Technology Don Ihde 4 Cyberculture Pierre Lévy 3 What’s the Matter with the Internet? Mark Poster 2 High Techne¯: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman R. L. Rutsky 1 Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality Ken Hillis Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now GARY HALL Electronic Mediations 24 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have been previously published as “The Cultural Studies e-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy),” Culture Machine 5 (2003); “Digitize This,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 ( January–March 2004); and “IT, Again: How to Build an Ethical Virtual Institution,” in Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber, eds. Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Copyright 2008 by Gary Hall Produced by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Copyediting by Nancy Evans Design and composition by Yvonne Tsang All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Hall, Gary, 1962– Digitize this book! : the politics of new media, or why we need open access now / Gary Hall. p. cm. — (Electronic mediations ; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8166-4870-2 (acid-free paper) — isbn 978-0-8166-4871-9 (pbk. : acid- free paper) 1. Open access publishing. 2. Scholarly electronic publishing. 3. Communication in learning and scholarship—Technological innovations. 4. Internet—Political aspects. I. Title. Z286.O63H35 2008 070.5´7973—dc22 2008011042 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction Another University Is Possible 1 Metadata I Notes on Creating Critical Computer Media 19 I. INTERNETHICS 1 Why All Academic Research and Scholarship Should Be Made Available in Online Open- Access Archives—Now! 39 2 Judgment and Responsibility in the Wikipedia Era 55 Metadata II Print This! 80 3 IT, Again; or, How to Build an Ethical Institution 88 II. HYPERPOLITICS 4 Antipolitics and the Internet 105 Metadata III The Specifi city of New Media 151 5 HyperCyberDemocracy 167 Conclusion Next-Generation Cultural Studies? 187 Metadata IV The Singularity of New Media 208 Notes 217 Bibliography 271 Index 292 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m going to keep this short and simple. A lot of people have provided me with help and support of one kind or another during the writing of this book. Among them, I’d especially like to thank Doug Armato, Clare Birchall, Dave Boothroyd, Paul Bowman, Timothy Clark, Jeremy Gilbert, Henry Giroux, Steve Green, Lawrence Grossberg, Ian Hall, Sigi Jöttkandt, Kembrew McLeod, Angela McRobbie, David Ottina, Paul Patton, Mark Poster, Nina Sellars, Steven Shaviro, Stelarc, Sandy Thatcher, Joanna Zylinska. This one is for Ian (the original digitizer). vii This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Another University Is Possible University-Generated Media What kind of university is desirable, or even possible, in the age of dig- ital reproduction: CDs, DVDs, cell phones, computers, laptops, print- ers, the World Wide Web, the Internet, e-mails, text and picture mes- sages, e-books, open-source and free software, blogs, Google, MP3 fi les, BitTorrent, podcasts, Bluetooth, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Kindle, and so on?1 It is an understatement to say that many of the changes introduced in the university in recent years have met with a fairly unfavorable response from both academics and nonacademics alike.2 These changes include: • The establishment of an internal market within higher educa- tion, as different institutions, and even different courses within the same institutions, are forced to compete nationally and inter- nationally for limited resources in terms of faculty, staff, students, funding, and more • The increase in student numbers, as well as faculty adminis- trative, bureaucratic, and managerial responsibilities and work- loads • The further concentration of research in a small number of older, prestigious (some would say more conservative), “research- intensive” institutions: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cam- bridge, Melbourne, and so forth3 • The declining security of university employment via the increase in fi xed-term and hourly paid contracts—something which, alongside the concentration of research in fewer institutions, is turning many academics into “precarious” and “semi-precarious” proletarianized laborers, often forced to work for free both within 1 2 INTRODUCTION and without the institution in order to carry out the kind of re- search that interests and excites them • The introduction of a host of micromanagement practices such as audits, inspections, monitoring, league tables, and performance- related pay, all designed to ensure economic effi ciency and “value for money”4 • The lack of support for, and in some instances eradication of, departments, disciplines, and areas of study that have as part of their tradition the critique of capitalism, or (even worse) that are not easily commercially exploitable: cultural studies, English lit- erature, philosophy, medieval history, and so on • The conversion of students into customers, not least by coercing them to exercise consumer choice over the cost and place of their education5 • The use of students—who need either to pay off the debts in- curred during their time in college by taking out loans, or to at least to keep their debts to a minimum—as a reliable source of cheap labor for other parts of the economy Yet for all the introduction and subsequent pushing through of these reforms, and the very real sense of disappointment and frustra- tion that has on occasion been engendered by what we might call this “neoliberal turn” in higher education, I am convinced that the univer- sity remains worth defending.6 In fact, it is precisely because of these devel- opments that I want to reaffi rm a commitment on my part to the idea of the university: not only because “there is nothing outside the univer- sity,”7 but also because, if universities are to continue to be capable of functioning “albeit in conditions of adversity . as places of dissent” (although universities are of course not the only such places), then we need to defend them, in some form at least (McRobbie 2000, 219). The problem is, if we disagree with the way in which the forces of capitalist free-market economics are increasingly transforming higher education into an extension of business, and at the same time do not wish to propose a return to the kind of paternalistic and class-bound ideas associated with F.R. Leavis (1943), Matthew Arnold (1868), and John Henry Cardinal Newman (1858) that previously dominated the university—ideas that view it in terms of an elite cultural training and reproduction of a national culture, with all the hierarchies and exclu- sions around differences of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth INTRODUCTION 3 that those terms imply—then how do we want the university to be? Moreover, how is it possible to defend the university without appearing to advocate one of these two models? This is an extremely important question—all the more so consider- ing that the inability to articulate an effective alternative vision for the future, for all their criticisms and complaints in the media, higher edu- cation press, and scholarly research literature, appears to have left the majority of academics and institutions with very few options for resist- ing or even redirecting such changes (other than saying “no” from time to time). So how do we want the university to be? We need to explore and experiment with this question if we are to challenge what Bill Readings (1996) so memorably characterized as the University of Excellence. It is this question—how is it possible to defend the university, and to do so without advocating one of the above two models?—that I have been creatively exploring and experimenting with in my work for some time now. Obviously, I have not been able to experiment with new forms of academic institutions by establishing my own university, my own “counter-institution,” as it were.