On Friday, the session was split up into two chunks: one, a discussion of our manifestos in the light of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and two, a discussion of a Hito Steyerl’s Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?
In the first part, our group was asked to wrestle with some of the larger aims of our zine and manifesto as a real object and publication-like the Whole Earth Catalogue. We were asked, what are three main aims of our zine? We had some trouble with that because it forced us to call into question our own voices and our responses to the problem of content/screen addiction. Were we experts? Could we make people make changes? Does saying we want to make people do something actually ever work? Who are we to say we have any kind of authority on the subject?
We all had done research, and we all had an idea of what we wanted the zine to look like and a general idea of the kind of individual responses we wanted to make. However, the mission of the zine as a whole was still a little unclear. Perhaps it contrasted to our manifesto, which was very poetic in nature.
We were asked to create three main aims for the manifesto, and in our first attempt, we realized that our aims were doing very similar things, so we had to re-think the impact that we wanted the zine to have.
We realized that the main conceptual aim of our manifesto was to provoke questions and raise discussion about phone use rather than to outright condemn and pathologize a population of phone users. At first it seemed like this created a little less of a sense of urgency around the issue. However, we decided that leaving it up to the reader to come to their own conclusions based on the picture we are creating with our zine creates a more impactful punch, if it lands.
In terms of other aims, we want to make our zine accessible and interesting to phone users of a wide-range of ages. We plan to do this by making the zine interesting to touch and look at by pirating design tropes from Apple products to subvert the expectation of encountering the hallmark designs. However, we plan to do this sustainably, which is our last aim.
After creating aims, we attempted to break our zine content into different categories, but we couldn’t find something that really worked. By the same token, the exercise did help us to think about our zine and our responses from different angles.
After a while, we realized we weren’t getting anywhere with trying to find categories to create a scaffolding for our work. Our individual responses seemed pretty clear cut at this point, and they follow a natural dialogue, so we decided we would take a retroactive approach to grouping them after our responses materialized more substantially.
We did compile a mini-zine of images from our research, however.
The second half of the day was really important after getting ‘stuck’ in the task of trying to find a set of categories to structure our zine. We had a conversation about conversational space, which was very important given the variety of first-languages that are in our cohort and in our individual manifesto groups. I needed to take a step back and acknowledge that I take up a lot of the air-time real estate as a native English-speaker, one who is terrified of silence at that. I was challenged to pause, think, and synthesize–to strive to be proactive in provoking conversation from everyone, especially when we are talking about complicated concepts.
After this conversation, we got to practice with the aforementioned text, which was something that had to potential to have us conversationally ‘stuck’ once more. It posed a question that it didn’t quite answer: ‘Is the internet dead?’ This suggested a yes or no, but it provided much more of an exploration of the idea than a definite conclusion. My interpretation was that she ultimately saying that the internet is not dead, but that is has transformed from its original iteration to grab other functions and explore other spaces beyond screens. This makes sense to me as something that is inherently plastic in an ecology that is rapidly evolving, human interface, and Steyerl explores that beautifully, and semi-abstractly.
Even though pieces of it were largely inaccessible, moments of clarity provided relatable footholds within the text by which people could speak to their own experience. Everyone in the room has anecdotal experience with the internet and watching how it has changed over time, so there were a wide array of unique takes to the original question and the pieces of historical and contemporary evidence Steyerl uses in order to substantiate her claim. Perhaps not every discussion point was entirely related to the text, but the text provided a means of creating an interesting discussion, and that momentum was key.
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