In your article on Donna Haraway and cyborgs ("The Unlikely Cyborg", Wired 2.12), you confuse Descartes' rationalist credo - cogito ergo sum - with social community. Descartes was looking for ultimate knowledge, epistemologically, which rejected the uncertainty of knowledge derived from the senses, empirically. This was self-centred, trimmed to methods of reason alone, although not solipsistic, unlike the empiricist Bishop Berkeley's credo: to be a physical thing is to be perceived (esse est percipi), which discounted the existence of objects unseen - unknown - by the subject.The cyborg notion and network would have been familiar to Descartes and more so to his acolytes (Gassendi et al) who believed the lack of soul in animals made them automata. Ideas of the machinery of the body have a long tradition in Western thought. Harvey's discovery of blood circulation provides other examples. Current and undoubtedly future technology will enhance these traditional concepts. The qualitative difference between Descartes and our own cyborgs is understanding and knowledge of brains; or the place of the soul as Descartes would have understood it.
Knowledge gained and exchanged through networks and communities does not alter the Cartesian need to underpin our epistemology for the network to exist.
Guy Cranswick
GCranswick@aol.com
In your piece on Page's Bar ("Beer Me Up, Scotty", Wired 2.11) - I noticed you put the Star Trek Pub in Kensington - when it is, in fact, in Pimlico. Obviously hadn't locked your phaser on properly, or another case of sloppy reporting, or perhaps you were too busy with the Kai's Power tools again to notice. I'm still waiting for the Scratch 'n Sniff issue.On another note, Lee Marshall's "Code for a Grecian Urn" (Wired 2.09), was very informative, if a bit too hip for my liking. But I do agree that the curators have got to get it together or others will do it for them. Here's a story:
Our primary school is the nearest to the British Museum and I wanted to see if there were resources on the Web when doing a project on Ancient Greeks for the National Curriculum. So last October I went down there and all the educational materials available to schools were just a few manky worksheets and a ten-year-old video on the Olympic Games - great!
So after going in a few times with my class I grabbed my SLR, some extremely fast slide film and a monopod, and shot a heap of images and got them processed on CD-ROM and put them on the Web (www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/allsouls/bm/ag1.html). When I approached the BM all the response I got was, "Oh, our outreach team was thinking along those lines." Since then, no reply. Meanwhile our site has grown to 150 pages and is quite popular with many schools in the States who are using it for their Western Civilisation classes. The kids are now going to put up their responses in the Agora section - Foucault would have been proud.
If it ain't there, create it. Now if anyone wants to give me a Mac and some Virtual QuickTime and that stitching software....
Leon Cych
school@poetry.demon.co.uk
I have been reading Wired for five issues now, and it seems that in every one, someone whines on about how the design interferes with the information in the magazine. To those people I say that magazines have moved on, and so have their readers.Magazines are no longer just about imparting information, they are an experience, that includes both text, pictures and graphic devices. The artistic appreciation of a magazine is integral to its overall experience, and should add to the value of the content. Wired's design complements its content and presents it in way that enhances its value.
As readers, we too should have moved on. We are now much better at processing large amounts of information at fast rates, and filtering noise from signals. So, as a modern reader of a modern magazine, if you can't separate the information from the entertainment, perhaps you should go back to reading Janet and John books.
If you are frightened of progress, or just can't handle it, what are you doing reading Wired in the first place?
Michael Townshend
bluepear@intonet.co.uk
I am glad to see that you've had a couple of articles on electronic art in Wired - Hari Kunzru's "Two Tribes" (Wired 2.11) and James Faure Walker's "High Culture Meets Mall Culture" (Wired 2.12).Both were interesting but I am a bit disappointed that they were both a bit downbeat - it would have been good to analyse the positive aspects of EA - arguments about the real contribution of these artists to envisioning our future use of technology.
In Faure Walker's article, there is a factual point you should perhaps undo - he says that "our art schools do not teach electronic art". This is not true. I know of at least two places in the UK that have successful degree programmes: Centre for Electronic Art here at Middlesex University, and the Fine Art Research Centre at University of Wales College of Art.
Matt Jones
m.jones@mdx.ac.uk
After reading Tom Loosemore's piece on email directories ("Directory Webquiries", Wired 2.11) I started contemplating how much longer we can hold out against "direct marketing" email becoming commonplace on the Internet. The email directories' approach to data privacy is interesting, but if they don't make the information available, would-be marketers will find it another way.I have to admit I have a vested interest in this issue as I work for a direct marketing agency, but the point is this: if companies send me email about products and services about which I might be interested, just as they send letters now, that must be useful to me. I find it hard to believe that nobody has received at least one piece of useful direct mail; as such, aren't you glad you were sent it?
Direct marketing is all about identifying your potential customers and communicating with them, to the exception of anybody else. By registering with email directories, and perhaps indicating your areas of interest, companies can target you with relevant communications, and better still, filter out irrelevant ones. This is a fairly primitive form of intelligent agent, but it works. "Filtered junk mail", as Tom puts it, is not so much an oxymoron as another term for "direct mail".
Simon Daniels
Planning and Technology Manager
FFwd Precision Marketing Ltd
sdaniels@ffwd.co.uk
I was both amused and dismayed by Hari Kunzru's article "The Final Frontier" (Wired 2.12). While its light-hearted analysis of British and American attitudes to the Net rings true, it contains one fatal flaw. There are indeed limits, boundaries and frontiers in cyberspace. Hari is right - the rhetoric of expansion and colonisation should have no place on the Net. But wake up: they do. There is a battle going on, an ideological battle over our ideas of cyberspace. We must understand that there is no limitless virtual world to explore, but rather a limitless void in which to create our vision of cyberspace - these ideas, these conceptions represent the territory of the Net.Hari says that cyberspace has no borders and that it routes around attempts to erect them. But in the real world enclosure starts with ideas, with ideological territory and with the legitimacy of some to control others. Putting up walls and fences is the last thing that is done - it's just the physical confirmation of ideological control.
And the fences will come. Not big crude obvious things like the censors of Singapore - these are easy to route around. No! They will be subtle, insidious - fences in the mind that limit our potential by limiting our horizons.
To naively believe that the Net is an endless space of free and happy surfers is to make a dangerous mistake. Where we go (in real or virtual worlds) has always depended less on where we can go and more on where we think we can go. This is the limit, the boundary that is already being demarcated, and within this enclosure you can bet that the big boys will maximise their control.
The Net is highly political. Its anarchic nature threatens the age-old monopolies of information, money and power. Do not believe that these monopolies will roll over and die that easily. They will fight tooth and nail to develop tools - cultural, ideological or technological - to wrestle this anarchic beast to the ground, sit on its chest and pin it down.
Such tools are already being used to enclose and limit cyberspace. You may not be able to shut the castle doors, as Mr Kunzru rightly asserts, but you can put neon on the turrets and persuade everyone that your castle is the only one.
Peter Blake
studio@shoevegas.com
What is the message behind the growing calls for censorship on the Net ("How Safe Is Safety-Net?", Wired 2.11)? Essentially it is that we can't be trusted to decide for ourselves what we can read or view. The assumption is that we need to be shielded from the likelihood of reading or seeing any offensive views or images, be they the rantings of a right-wing extremist or "accidentally" accessing a tacky pornographic image.Contrary to many people, I have enough faith in human nature to believe that people are quite capable of making their own decisions about what they can read or view without any so-called guidance from a bunch of busybodies who deem themselves the arbiters of what is and isn't acceptable. There are those who oppose direct cen-sorship but advocate voluntary controls and self-censorship. Protocols such as PICS have been mooted as a means for individual Net users to devise customised screening for what they view to weed out any material that may be unacceptable. In this case the software fails miserably to match that most trusted of screening mechanisms: conscious choice by rational human beings.
What about children and access to the Net? Any discussion of censorship to shield children from offensive images assumes that parents are unable to control their child's use of the Net. This demonstrates a low opinion of the ability of parents to organise their lives, and of people in general. I'm not prepared to tolerate the assumption that I need help to control my child's access to the Internet.
The Internet is a fantastic development whose potential is only just starting to be realised. Yet in a sad reflection of the times, there are many people who, far from seeing the Internet as an opportunity, see it and the people who use it as a problem. This reflects a very downbeat view of humanity which needs to be challenged and fought every step of the way.
Dave Amis
kam76@dial.pipex.com
Your article about Net censorship in Singapore ("Slinging Singapore", Wired 2.12) stated that the Net community should retaliate by placing "The Government of Singapore Sucks" on their Web pages. It is nobody's business what a country lets in or out of its borders, be that physical material or intellectual. The writer of this article has no right to criticise the workings of a perfectly sound and working democratic system.If more people actually looked into their own backyards instead of little countries like Singapore, maybe the world would be a better place. If you want free flow of information, fine, go and get it, but don't start condemning other countries for not allowing it - fix the problem here in Britain where there are so many people who do not know what the free flow of information is, or how to access it.
Santiago Guerrero
GUERREROS@pluto.richuish.ac.uk
Could you stop splitting the articles up? It can be hard to keep with the flow of a piece. Simon Davies' article in the October edition ("Big Brother plc", Wired 2.10) really suffered. By the time I had tracked the missing link from page 61 to page 87 via pages 90 and 88, I had totally lost the thread.Mark Smith
msmitha@cix.compulink.co.ukWe inadvertently dropped a link from Simon's piece. Our apologies for the wild goose chase.