'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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wired pastoral
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January 23, 2008
Gerard Goggin in ‘Rural Lines of Flight: Telecommunications and Post-Metro Dreaming in Transformations writes that it is the:
vision of a wired pastoral which speaks to a tangle of desires of the traveller leaving behind the dystopian city. New spaces in rural regions are being conjured in opposition to the histories and futures of the modern and postmodern city, and the wired pastoral connects metaphorically and literally with these novel lines of flight created from this conjuncture. The wired pastoral gives a twist to one of the great topoi of Australian communications history, communications as a way to overcome the isolation of the bush
Or the coastal region in my case. However, private telecommunications companies have been slow to meet the needs and expectations of country and coastal dwellers.
As Goggin says:
In my residence only twenty kilometres away from Lismore, a medium-sized rural centre, I do not have free-to-air television, have no mobile phone coverage, and have coped over the past few years with poor quality and slow internet access via the public telecommunications network. Broadband technologies already available in cities, such as cable modem and digital subscriber line, are likely not to be available in my community for a very long time, if at all, and satellite, wireless and mobile telecommunications will remain costly and inadequate for some time to come.
Creating an information economy is long and slow. If large corporations based in metropoles have been surprisingly slow to recognise some of the possibilities for rural communications, then the local telecommunications model, which has attracted much attention, has resulted in the actual number of new infrastructure providers in non-metropolitan Australia remaining small.
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Gary,
Goggin is one of those rare birds whose thinking space sits somewhere between the optimistic possible and the empirical on communication technologies. From what I can tell he takes the same approach to the cultural aspects - how stuff actually gets used, for what purposes and the sorts of practices that evolve in the spaces new technologies open up.
If this was Europe or America there'd be the possibility of a Goggin school.