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Gold Rush
Travelling across relatively harsh, isolated country in search
of an ideal, material or not, has long fostered romance.
Swarming across an expanding tele-frontier into cyberpsace in
search of a virtual community, to construct an idea, is just as
hopelessly romantic. The world has become as portable as the
many devices used to depict it.
.
The race to get on-line in 1993 was 6 times greater than the peak
of the last great Gold Rush rush 99 years ago when that metal was
found in the sediment at Rabbit Creek in the Yukon (later called
Bonanza Creek).
The World Wide Web grew 341,000% last year. An impetus for this
mad info-rush may well be grounded in a euphoric fear that a
lack of Internet presence means communications flow in the near
future will be designed to be primarily downstream, meaning that
services and entertainment are piped into the home in one direction,
pre-empting more than a dribble of traffic back upstream to other
netizens, required for any effective information democracy.
Our travels through the Klondike, a spectacular land that once
boomed with the greatest gold rush of all time, is no coincidence.
Aside from choosing the Great North for its vast naturalness and
remoteness, its unspoken visual rhetoric against technology, a
parallel with the pandemoniac fervor of a recently surging info-
rmation allowed us to repeat the handwriting-on-the-wall that
history has shown us without saying it. The lesson was already
spelled out in the 1970s by the pioneer media-artist Les Levine
as: "a bio-tech rehearsal for leaving the body". Should techno-
logical positivism and utopian strategies prevail, and they boast
a dangerous lead, then the provisional shanty towns being thrown
up by nomadic virtual communities will resemble ghosttowns in no
time.
Links
Background Info II, "Virtual Realists", February-May, 1995
Background Info III, "Cultural Alchemy", February, 1996.
"Die Arktis und das Internet", Siemens Media Lab Talk, July 1995
"email reading", Ars Digitalis, HdK Berlin, April 1996
"Medium bedeutet Mitte", Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Munich, July 1996
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copyright 1995-96 felix s. huber, philip pocock