Quotes I can’t fit in my review, contd.

Posted on | May 2, 2007 | No Comments

Email occupies a paradoxical relation to space… marking distance as both necessary and irrelevant; dispatch and destination must be noncoterminous, but the distance between termini must be more virtual than actual. (86)

While simulating a network of determinate, point-to-point contact, email also sets up a social space that is more distributive than connective. (87)

To the extent that email presents a familiar mode of communication, it does so by taking part in the production of modernity’s dominant social space of the network. The “digitization” of the letter, delivery route, and mailbox, then, is somewhat unimportant to the production of the dominant social space of modernity, as long as it continues to articulate a lived space of rapid point-to-point exchange. Such practices suggest that the social space of email is nothing new, but, rather, a culminating expression of desire for the immediate delivery of missives from dispatch to destination (91)

In this history of the modern network, then, email provides an intensification of modernity’s social space, not a rupture. With email, the network itself becomes foregrounded as space of everyday life, articulated through a cluster of practices involving dispatch, delivery, and (im)mediate exchange (93)

At times, this dispatch functions more like a message in a bottle than a “true” postal envoy: something cast out at a distance in the hope of some (random) response (95)

The immateriality of the electronic letter “materializes” a certain poststructuralist insight on writing: that the letter always disseminates (95)

The form of electronic writing, then, emphasizes dynamics rather than permanence, transmission instead of stasis. In both private communiques and public discourse, the electronic writing space is not occupied by the text; rather, the letter harbors in this space (97)

…mediation is always a risky business, though as techne;, it seeks to erase the marks of risk through claims of immediacy and transparency (98)

The computer, rather than figuring as a device that alienates its user and isolates her from the world, becomes instead a means of personal contact (106)

While, on one hand, email articulates a lived space of intimate exchange, it at the same time takes part in the articulation of spaces of control governed by a performativity principle of efficiency and speed. Here, communication serves as a relay of information. Intimacy implies a space of interiority, a privacy shared or secreted. Immediacy, in contrast, suggests not only rapid exchange but also a shared medium or middle ground. It is a matter of interface rather than interiors.

… with email it is not the object of the letter that matters, only its exchange (106)

Such lived practice privileges immediacy above reflection. That is not to suggest that email necessitates immediate response [but that] each letter… stands less as “legible gift” than as a potential for reply, immediacy played out in archival space. (107)

– Mark Nunes, ‘Email, the Letter, and the Post’, in Cyberspaces of Everyday Life

Category: Reading, Research, Web studies

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