<nettime> Once Again, Online Communications are Heroic

[Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>]

Dear nettime - Here is the start of a piece I am thinking about partly to
quell a tide of rejection of online learning delivery by art students,
professors, and the elsewise “real” community which has been demonstrating
a customer-mentality towards the shift online - and missing the point of
the overall deep and lasting value of online communications - as a medium
of embodied human interaction, correspondence, VOIP, video streaming etc

Suffice to say, without online communications, many more might be ill with
coronavirus, or dead, unemployed, or driven into life-threatening isolation
or total ignorance. Better and frequently easier to access than more
traditional information, the spread of vital, lifesaving public data,
commentary, directives has not only been possible, but plentiful.

Online communications have provided a datum of consistency and community in
a time of strife. So much is nearly f2f or Aldo streaming that it’s not a
bad substitute for live acts. But, Moreover, because online life is global,
in a global pandemic - we can “reach” our fellow humans and understand
information coming from others in the global analysis of a deadly disease.
Our current commonality is to ride it out; to not engage in infecting
others. Will this bring global harmony? Will nations regroup in the future?
Will capitalism crumple and reorganization take place? Maybe. Uncertain.
Seems a good opportunity for billionaire corruption to root more deeply and
authoritarianism to flourish, but also for people’s government to grow
strong.


I’ve gotten no further. But I want to write something which acknowledges
the value of this medium - as no other- as I’ve been appalled by art
students feeling they aren’t getting what they paid for with online
teaching and the lack of interest in surviving worse disasters with the
incredibly “resilient” set of tools at their disposal or at least the
recognition of art history in which human life events have and will
radically alter the way in which art gets made. Maholy Nagy wrote in The
New
Vision essay that a camera would be more important than a pen for future
generations. Perhaps the massively disgruntled student/customers of
pay-for-name degrees should put down their brushes and chisels. Bad for the
environment. Regroup. Rethink.
-- 
molly hankwitz



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