1. Introduction: Launching the Subject

1.1. Writing about Mediatheory: the Mediatext

Time is a resource and we're running out of time. It is necessary to travel, it is not necessary and becoming increasingly difficult to live. - William Burroughs +02.08.97

To write about media raises the question, from where scripture takes the presumptuousness to speak for other media. To write about cyberspace, cyberia and virtual reality from the vast point of view of mediatheory, cyborgology and cybersociology can only work as ambulante Wissenschaft, (intinerant/nomadic science),which floats around in the time-space-continuum of media and takes some sample-drillings in different spaces, times and theories. This mediatext cannot produce any kind of true statement in an absolute sense while truth was already long itme ago by Jean-Francois Lyotard degraded to something processual: 'truth as the seemingly unforced force of the better argument in a domination-free discourse.' It cannot even be stated, that the discourse about media, cyberspace and virtual reality is domination-free.

The body of this text cannot be viewed as something true or real. It is just one more processed collection of words, pressed into hypertextual linearity, not seeking to resolve problems, contradictions or paradoxa, but only seeking to raise and increase them, not seeking to make conclusions because this would mean the end of the text.

This theory about theory is not so much writing as processing thoughts and ideas with the help of a language machine, Heidegger's imagination that has come to presence. It is Computer Aided Theory (CAT) from the era of the wordprocessor (Wordperfect for Macintosh) transformed into hypertext by HTML-editing tools. But still, why text, why writing at all? Why not follow the proclamation of Prof. Friedrich Kittler from Humboldt University in Berlin: 'There is no software': Instead of producing text university should be already at the stage of producing software. There are two possible answers. "Language seems to be the meta-medium, that contains all coming and disappearing media. In western text-culture a phenomenon is only viewed as comprehended, when it can be seen as something like an enclosed entity. Theory has supposedly the gift to push ahead and decode a problem, whereas video and audio misses that gift."(Bilwet 1993: 13 -transl: S.J.) The second answer is writing text in a hypermedium, like this webpage here.

To write about media must settle in the network of media, because text is a medium itself. It cannot describe any kind of reality or idea outside the text, it can only speculate with chance and risk, dream and nightmare. "The mediatext does not continue to knit rhizomatically on schizoid movements and is not occupied with increasing differences either. It concentrates on the fuzziest contours to show them as sharp as possible. Its enthusiastic will to text applies arbitrary methodology on all the terms and information that blow by." (ibid.: 15 -transl. S.J.)