Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. This sense affects literary creations and it affects analytical philosophical or scientific work.
— Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982. 2007.
The classic work of art is a gamble. The more is transmutes the language on which it rides, be it musical, plastic, verbal, or other, the more its author runs the risk of incomprehension and obscurity. But the larger the stake — the degree of change or fusion to which its language is subject — the greater the potential gain: the creation of an event in the history of a culture. Yet this game of language, this wager on incomprehension and recognition, is not restricted to artists alone. Each of us in our own way, as soon as we express ourselves, produces, reproduces, and alters language.
— Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Trans. Bononno, Robert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1997.
Some of the questions that artists have been asking since the end of the nineteenth century will thus become more urgent with the emergence of cyberspace. These questions are directly concerned with the question of the frame: the limits of a work, its exhibition, reception, reproduction, distribution, interpretation, and the various forms of separation they imply. Under the present circumstances, however, no form of closure will be able to contain deterritorialization in extremis — a leap into a new space will be required. Mutation will occur in a socio-technical environment in which works of art proliferate and are distributed. Yet, is it reasonable to even speak of a work of art in the context of cyberspace?
— Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Trans. Bononno, Robert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1997.
Cyberspace will assume the form of a cultural attractor, which we can summarize as follows: 1. Called, controlled, dismissed, distanced, combined, etc., no matter how they are orchestrated, messages, regardless of type, will now revolve around the individual receiver (the opposite of the situation represented by the mass media). 2. The distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activity of others (dissolution of the signature). 3. The distinction between the message and the work of art, envisaged as a microterritory attributed to an author, is fading. Representation is now subject to sampling, mixing, and reuse. Depending on the emerging pragmatics of creation and communication, a nomadic distribution of information will fluctuate around an immense deterritorialized semiotic plane. It is therefore natural that creative effort be shifted from the message itself to the means, processes, languages, dynamic architectures, and environments used for its implementation.
— Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Trans. Bononno, Robert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1997.
(…) as Ezra Pound has argued, “the artist is one of the few producers”: “He, the farmer, and the artisan create wealth; the rest shift and consume it” (1954)
— Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 1996.
As Lev Manovich notes, traditional division of art into genres according to a medium (photography, film, video) is pointless in cyberspace. Through transmitting onto the internet, everything is sampled into a digital version, which accentuates some of its attributes and other (traditional) lose significance. Hypertext, net-art and new forms of art, the process of cut, paste, rip and remix are natural information patterns of behaviour. Freedom of interconnection of anything crashes linear ways of expression and thinking. Interactivity wipes out and reverses the roles of author/audience.
— oRx-qX. “Information Nomads and Community Surfing.” Floss + Art. Eds. Mansoux, Aymeric and Marloes de Valk. Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008. 34-45.
Directly associated with these expansive qualities was the revolution in expression. Under manuscript conditions the role of being an author was a vague and uncertain one, like that of a minstrel. Hence, self-expression was of little interest. Typography, however, created a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud and bold to the word itself, just as it was possible to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked upon a pluralistic world of monastic cells. Boldness of type created boldness of expression.
— McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge Classics, 1964. 2006.
Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated. Typography has permeated every phase of the arts and sciences in the past five hundred years. It would be easy to document the processes by which the principles of continuity, uniformity, and repeatability have become the basis of calculus and of marketing, as of industrial production, entertainment and science.
— McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge Classics, 1964. 2006.
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men heterogeneously trained to be individuals. Nationalism itself came as an intense new visual image of group destiny and status, and depended on a speed of information movement unknown before printing. Today nationalism as an image still depends on the press but has all the electric media against it. In business, as in politics, the effect of even jet-plane speeds is to render the older national groupings of social organization quite unworkable.
— McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge Classics, 1964. 2006.
Without an understanding of how code operates as an expressive medium, new media scholars are forced to treat the operation of the media artifacts they study as a black box, losing the crucial relationship between authorship, code, and audience reception.
— Mateas, Michael. “Procedural Literacy. Educating the New Media Practicioner.” On The Horizon. Special Issue. Future of Games, Simulations and Interactive Media in Learning Contexts 13.1 (2005).
