Digitize This: The Cultural Studies E.Archive Project.
A couple of years ago I placed a challenge for Cultural Studies to engage more whole-heartedly with the technlogies that they critique. The result is the E Archive Project (see article by Gary Hall)
My challenge to those that use Derrida or Bey or Adorno or Bourdieu within their disciplinary frameworks to advance our understanding of new media, is can you enact the ideas of these thinkers in a sophisticated way through new media, or can it only be done through writing books about books? I challenge cultural studies and new media theorists to produce a Derrida engine or a Bourdieu database or a Bey GIS map. I am not aware of any major contribution that cultural studies has made within this medium beyond using it as a publishing and networking mechanism, and beyond writing innumerable valuable books to critique it from a distance. We need more people engaged in building academic resources on-line that help us to look at things in new ways.
Craig Bellamy, “The Milk Bar Challenge,”
posted on the fibreculture mailing