Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword: Latin American Cyberliterature: From the Lettered City to the Creativity of its Citizens
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I Cyberculture and Cybercommunities
- 1 The New New Latin American Cinema: Cortometrajes on the Internet
- 2 Cyborgs, Cities, and Celluloid: Memory Machines in Two Latin American Cyborg Films
- 3 The Cyberart of Corpos Informáticos
- 4 Latin American Cyberprotest: Before and After the Zapatistas
- 5 Body, Nation, and Identity: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Performances on the Web
- 6 Cyberspace Neighbourhood: The Virtual Construction of Capão|Redondo
- 7 Literary E-magazines in Latin America: From Textual Criticism to Virtual Communities
- 8 Negotiating a (Border Literary) Community Online en la línea
- II Cyberliterature: Avatars and Aficionados
- A Cyberliterary Afterword: Of Blogs and Other Matters
- Conclusion: Latin American Identity and Cyberspace
- Suggested Further Reading
- Index
8 - Negotiating a (Border Literary) Community Online en la línea
from I - Cyberculture and Cybercommunities
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword: Latin American Cyberliterature: From the Lettered City to the Creativity of its Citizens
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I Cyberculture and Cybercommunities
- 1 The New New Latin American Cinema: Cortometrajes on the Internet
- 2 Cyborgs, Cities, and Celluloid: Memory Machines in Two Latin American Cyborg Films
- 3 The Cyberart of Corpos Informáticos
- 4 Latin American Cyberprotest: Before and After the Zapatistas
- 5 Body, Nation, and Identity: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Performances on the Web
- 6 Cyberspace Neighbourhood: The Virtual Construction of Capão|Redondo
- 7 Literary E-magazines in Latin America: From Textual Criticism to Virtual Communities
- 8 Negotiating a (Border Literary) Community Online en la línea
- II Cyberliterature: Avatars and Aficionados
- A Cyberliterary Afterword: Of Blogs and Other Matters
- Conclusion: Latin American Identity and Cyberspace
- Suggested Further Reading
- Index
Summary
‘What can we do to stop being boring?’
[…]
‘Start a media revolution!’
[…]
‘But … what is a media revolution?’
‘Well, I don't know.’
Ilich 2004aA 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.
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- Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature , pp. 161 - 176Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007