/* Written 10:28 pm Nov 4, 1989 by folkets@gn.apc.org in gn:gen.poetry */ /* ---------- "The Modern Post" ---------- */ THE MODERN POST Thoughts on Computer Networks Text prepared for the workshop "Using Computers for Grassroots Efforts" at the conference GRASSROOTS COMMUNICATIONS organized by the Union for Democratic Communications, New York, October 26-29, 1989 by Mikael Book, Folkets Bildningsforbund, Helsinki, Finland (GreenNet:folkets) ARE COMPUTER NETWORKS "A BUSINESS, PURE AND SIMPLE"1. OR ARE THEY A NEW FORM OF ART? Hopefully, those of us who use computer networks will write letters, e.g. literature. Saying it in a slightly different way, I hope that we will create a new literary genre: a shared, or networked, poetry. I think that Janet Wasko and myself, among others, have seen the first signs of such a literary renaissance. Our letters to each other, two persons who met on the network (we met at one of the GreenNet "conferences", to be precise), are already a case in point. We have become friends, exchanged views, sent books to each other (by usual air mail) etc. Thus we have developed the relation between a writer and a reader, and vice versa. This can be called a literary relationship. We make ourselves visible to each other by our words, we display ourselves on the computer screens. -- Such a relation has a resemblance to a movie, or a novel... and sometimes it can be very poetic. We have started an electronic conference called gn.poems. This is one of the conferences at the APC (Association of Progressive Communications)-network which has been developed by environmental and peace movements in various parts of the world during the second half of the eighties.(In gn.poems, the "gn" stands for GreenNet, which is the "European" part of the APC; the network node, or host computer, of the GreenNet is placed in London.) The gn.poems-conference is a place where you may share poetry, which means that users are sending poems there, poems by famous poets, poems by unknown poets, poems by themselves and so on. For example I have sent there some nice short works by Claes Andersson and Gosta Agren, two brilliant poets of my own country, who write in our minority language, Swedish. Before doing this I actually made an agreement with those poets and with David McDuff, a British translator, who recently edited an anthology of Finland-Swedish poetry, that I may put some of their work in a computer network. Although not yet using computer networks themselves, they agreed that computers should be used precisely for the distribution of POETRY over the world. Mr. Ernest Lowe, who is working as a consultant on cybernetic management in Oakland (California), has sent two interesting pieces to gn.poems. One is on the massacre of the students in China (Free flying now), and the other is on communication and control (Control): these poems were translated into Finnish and Swedish respectively, and published by two weekly magazines (Vihreae lanka of the Greens, and Ny Tid of the Finland-Swedish supporters of the Leftist Union). Thus Lowe got an audience in Finland, by computer so to speak, because so far we have met the man and his poetry only at GreenNet. I have also written some lines for gn.poems, in Swedish, and then I have translated them into English. Here is one example: ATT SAMTALA CONFERENCING Begreppet att skriva The concept of writing is f|r{ndras changing liksom begreppet att l{sa So is the concept of reading f|r att inte tala om Not to speak of the concept begreppet att samtala of conferencing Samtal {r n{r bildning Conference is when education och liv and life g}r upp i varandra run together Att l{sa {r To read is att f|rbereda sig to prepare oneself f|r detta for this Behovet av skrivande uppst}r Writing will be needed n{r bildningen och livet when education and life tempor{rt have parted har tagit avsked for the time av varandra being I cannot judge myself whether my English sounds good or bad. It may even sound absurd in the ears of a person from the English speaking world, to which I myself do not belong. Of one thing I am certain, anyway, namely, that my English translation clearly deviates from my Swedish original. I believe that this is so mainly because of the word 'samtal', for which I have inserted the word 'conference'. An old English and Swedish Dictionary2 gives the following possibilities for 'samtal': conversation, discourse, dialogue, conference, parley. Of these, it seems to me that 'conversation' and 'dialogue' come nearest to 'samtal' although neither really hits the point. But then, I could not resist the temptation to use 'conference' - a word which again seems to take on many meanings. One only needs to think of "The Annual Conference of the UDC" and, notably, the electronic "conference" gn.poems itself. On the other hand, it should also be observed that my Swedish text differs in a significant way from the English translation. The reason for this is that the standard code for computer communication (the ASCII code) ignores three letters of the Swedish alphabet. In order to have these letters displayed on the screen, or printed out on paper, special preparations (in the form of computer and printer setup-commands which refer to the so called enlarged ASCII code) must be made. Thus, when it appears in the computer net, my Swedish text is handicapped by the machine, so to speak. The limitations, or faults, of my English translation, on the other hand, are purely mine. With such translation problems, and because of other difficulties connected with grassroots computer communications, it seems unavoidable that every now and then people collide, that conferencing turns into concurrence, and even into violence, although in the first hand just into verbal violence (because of the purely verbal or literary character of the communication over computer networks). Computer networks are a relatively new form of human communication. We have not yet turned it into the poetic art it should be. An example: I turned to some persons who collect pop- lyrics at the University of Massachusetts, via a gateway from GreenNet to the academic network. The "Lyrics Management Squad", as it called itself, literally told me to "go away" and to be warned "that all future mail from your address will be ignored". They might have thought that lyrics and poetry are so utterly different that we could have nothing to communicate; they said as much. -- For my part I am convinced that pop-lyrics belongs to poetry; one can often observe that vice versa is also true, e.g. in the many cases when somebody composes music so that the poetry can be performed by singers, harpists and the like. Here, by the way, is one of the roots of poetry: it is oral, or at least more oral, than the novel. Therefore, poetry fits so well into computer nets. The computer network, although mainly filled with written material - with written text(s) -, retains an oral dimension. The computer connection, after all, is established over telephone lines, and when you address a person or a public - an audience - over the computer net, you must "perform" as a writer in quite a peculiar way, especially if you write online, e.g. during the (phone) connection of your computer with other computers. To sum up: I think that the future of computer networks is in ... poetry. It is also possible that computer communication deteriorates into a business, pure and simple. The less poetic it is, the more business-like it will be. Depending on the general conjuncture it may even turn out purely commercial, and only a new way of making money. COMPUTER NETWORKS = THE MODERN POST. WHAT IS THE CONNECTION TO THE SO CALLED POST MODERN PHENOMENON, OR IS THIS JUST A GAME WITH WORDS? In my vision, the Modern Post is linked to the discussion on Post Modernism although the "post" in the two expressions are two separate categories, logically and etymologically. The link is a special interest in, or even obsession with, text. Consider the reflections by Lyotard and other interpreters of the Post Modern3 on 'stories'. His thesis is notably that Science, and Marxism, and other great systems or -isms of the modern era, now all appear to be 'stories' because we are 'post' them, which means that the belief in such stories belongs to the past. The point I would like to stress here, is that the great 'stories' of Modernity are told by/in texts, such as Principia Mathematica, Das Kapital, etc. The Modern Post (the computer networks) is also text. I mean the text of the letters which are transported by the Modern Post. The computer networks are a massive global apparatus of flashing electronic text. They are a materialization, or electronification, of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel, the 'language game'.4 But I think that the Modern Post is even more interesting and, perhaps, more important than the Post Modern phenomenon. It seems to me that the discussion about Post Modernism belongs to a certain, relatively short, period of the present world, while the old institution of the Post is permanent. Or, to put it differently, the history of Modernity is secular; the history of Letters, millenial. A COMMON LANGUAGE? Via the computer networks (The Modern Post) humankind may take a fresh approach to its division into different nations, or civilizations, and to its international unification. The Modern Post gives us new reasons to search for a common language, or at least a truly international communication. In Europe, this is presently becoming very important, once again, because of the political and economic restructuring of the old continent and of the USSR. Personally, I look at this as a member of, or activist in, the movement for European Nuclear Disarmament (END) which was born with the campaigns against the deployment of new American nuclear missiles at the beginning of the 1980s. Since 1982 there have been annual END Conventions, that is meetings of the international peace movement. And from the start, we have strived to act as if there was no political and military division of Europe, notably we have tried to foster grassroots communication over the East-West borders of Europe. The next END Convention will actually be organized as an event of East-West grassroots communication, because it is going to take place in Helsinki and Tallinn (3-7 July 1990). To be more precise, the Convention will start in Helsinki, and then, on 5 July, a thousand of the participants will take a ship called Georg Ots (the name of a much beloved Estonian singer) and go to Tallinn (the trip takes only a couple of hours). The organizers have many practical problems to solve. For instance, it is not yet (22 October 1989) possible to make a direct phone call from Helsinki (the capital of Finland) to Tallinn (the capital of Estonia in the USSR). But like so many other things which only figured in our day-dreams until the very last few years, direct phone calls will be possible in some weeks or months. Regardless of the telephone lines, we will make what we can in order to establish an effective computer link, preferably over the packet-switched network, between our Finnish preparatory committee and its Estonian counterpart. Both should have the possibility to use GreenNet or NordNet (the recently established APC-node in Stockholm), and to fully exploit the advantages of computer communications in the preparation of this important event of the peace movements. The Estonian and Finnish languages have common origins and are closely related so that we Finns quite easily understand, especially Estonian texts, if not always the spoken word - and vice versa. Also the respective national Televisions are being watched on both sides of the Finnish Gulf which is no negligible exercise in the respective languages. Finally, I want to say this: The Modern Post - the computer networks - does not yet work very well however technically sophisticated it may appear at firrt sight. It is quite vulnerable, as the damage caused on the Peacenet by the recent earthquake in San Francisco showed. And so far, too little attention has been paid to the questions of language. --------------------------------- 1The US Supreme Court declared in the Mutual Pictures v. Ohio case in 1915, that motion pictures were "a business' pure and simple". See Wasko, Janet: Movies and Money. Financing the American Film Industry. Ablex New Jersey 1982 p 14. 2Namely, the one that I happen to have in my home cf. A New Pocket-Dictionary of the English and Swedish Languages. New Stereotype edition, revised and enriched. Third impression. Leipzig, Otto Holtzes Nachfolger, 1902; Part two, p 192. 3Cf Lyotard, Jean-Francois, La condition postmoderne, 1979. (I use the Finnish transl. by Leevi Lehto: Tieto postmodernissa yhteiskunnassa, Vastapaino, Tampere 1985). Lyotard's thoughts on 'stories' seem to have been inspired, at least in part, by an essay on scientists as story-tellers, written by Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize in Medicine 1960. 4Clearly, Wittgenstein has influenced the discussion about Post Modernism. Also, one may note that his scarce sentences on "our times" in the preface to Philosophische Untersuchungen - Philosophical Investigations - express a very special mood - perhaps the mood that the post modernists are looking for? - Personally, I also believe that Wittgenstein will influence the Modern Post more than until today because the practice of communication over computer networks will make W:s central concepts, like "language game" more accessible. - Finally, it could be added that W:s own text (the above mentioned book by him) reveals his enormous labor with the TEXT although the result is not a usual text but some kind of map (?) Contact address: Mikael Book, Nastolantie 32 A, 00600 Helsinki, Finland. Phone +358-0-7570366.