A Media Revolution?: Text and Hi-tech

This dialogue, which appeared from 2004 to 2005 in Fran Ilich's Net-film Being Boring, originally available through his website, delete. tv contains several elements that I see as characterising Northern Mexican border authors’ online work. In the film, two young women, without their television for a week, try to avoid ‘being boring’. After the exchange cited above, they take their first ‘revolutionary’ action by hitting an ‘enter’ button. The young women, like the border authors, ponder how to make their time meaningful, reflect on the power of new media, and attempt to negotiate using that power. Their conversation also signals the perplexing newness of electronic media and the strong desires involved; the concept sounds appealing, but they are not entirely sure what it is nor what to do. Finally, the fact that this film no longer exists online, due to files degrading on QuickTime, signals the ephemerality within which the new media border artists operate.

I have argued elsewhere that the narratives of better-known border writers such as Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Rosina Conde, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and Rosario Sanmiguel generate distinctive temporal representations that reflect struggles over values (Fallon 2004). Even as these authors began to establish themselves and contribute to the development of literary communities along the border, they consistently expressed concerns regarding the temporalities of the literary field itself as they felt the rise of new media threatened their work. That is, the authors showed a consistent preoccupation, both within their texts and as part of their activity in the field – their expression in newspapers and conferences, their activity as editors, and so forth – with the length of time it takes to write, be published, and gain a readership in an area with little established literary infrastructure, wide exposure to US mass media and increasing governmental support for audiovisual rather than print media. In other words, not only were the authors worried about establishing their own position in the literary field, they also concerned themselves with establishing the existence of a literary field in itself.