science

Nettime

Nettime is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Nettime rather than just read about it. In short: Nettime is an internet mailing list proposed in 1995 by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz (then half-jokingly called "the nettime brothers") at the second meeting of the "Medien Zentral Kommittee" during the Venice Biennale. Since 1998, Ted Byfield and Felix Stalder have moderated the main list, coordinated moderation of other lists in the nettime "family," and maintained the site as their nexus.

Nettime — illustration

Key takeaways

Nettime belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Nettime to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Nettime from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Nettime is an internet mailing list proposed in 1995 by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz (then half-jokingly called "the nettime brothers") at the second meeting of the "Medien Zentral Kommittee" during the Venice Biennale. Since 1998, Ted Byfield and Felix Stalder have moderated the main list, coordinated moderation of other lists in the nettime "family," and maintained the site as their nexus. The name nettime was chosen as a statement against space metaphors such as cyberspace, dominant at the time.

The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, with condensation and extractions, segmented by social events like conferences and little meetings, and text gatherings for export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more than transmitted via waves of light. Nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks go. Everyone who programs or often sits in front of a screen knows about the phenomena of being out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwidth, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asynchronous network of synchronized time zones. Nettime has been widely recognized for its seminal role stimulating and disseminating ideas about Netzkritik or Net Critique, net.art, and tactical media and pioneered practices such as "collaborative filtering". For example, in 2004 nettime was nominated for an Ars Electronica Golden Nica award. However, the moderators refuse to speak or act as representatives of an organization, preferring instead to serve inasmuch as possible as coordinators of a loose or "headless" collective. The list and related meetings were a strong influence on Bruce Sterling's 1996 science fiction novel Holy Fire. Initially, it was both part of an early wave of, and served as an inspiration for, a number of related efforts such as Blast (1995–1998), Rhizome (1996–present), Fibreculture (2001–present), Faces-l and -empyre- (2002–present). Unlike these other efforts, which typically sought to affiliate themselves with institutions in order to become institutionalized, nettime has remained independent — at times fiercely so. Thus, unusually for a mailing list, the family of lists has successfully migrated across a series of hosts — many of them culturally significant in their own right — including in-berlin.de, desk.nl, material.net, thing.net, De Waag kein.org, bitnik.org, and servus.at. From the beginning, the aim has been to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets, focussing on longer, substantive, yet non-academic writings and discussions. Nettime served early on as a pre-publishing and discussion platform to give critical thinkers and writers an international reach. Due to its particular political style, it was often seen as a European online salon, even though it had from the beginning strong non-European, mainly North-American participation. The list, once called "the world's most world list" by Bruce Sterling, has been characterised by pragmatic approach with relatively little change to its format over the years, which has proven to be resilient and durable. The expansive projects of building a web-based platforms, reacting to and generating growing controversies, were unsustainable. The original, mainly English-language mailing list (nettime-l) has spawned several other, more local lists better suited to specific regional and or linguistic contexts, including nettiime-ann (announcements), nettime-fr (French), nettime-lat (Spanish and Portuguese), nettime-nl (Dutch), nettime-ro (Romanian), nettime-see (southeastern Europe), and nettime-zh (Chinese).

Meetings Additional Nettime meetings were held during events like HackIt, (Amsterdam) the Chaos Computer Congress (Berlin), ISEA, the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), The MetaForum Conferences (95-96) in Budapest. Nettime's one unique event was the Nettime May Conference - Beauty and the East, organized by Ljudmila (Ljubljana). The Hybrid Workspace drew heavily from Nettime during the Documenta X in Kassel.

Publications Proceedings of the mailing list were periodically collected in print form, with limited editions of xerox copies and in connection with a related conference or event. In 1999, nettime contributions were anthologized in a book form published by Autonomedia.

ZKP1 The Next 5 Minutes (2) Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 1996 ZKP2 Cyberconf 5 Madrid, Spain, June 1996 ZKP3 Metaforum III Budapest, Hungary, October 1996 ZKP3.2.1 ZKP4 The Beauty and the East Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 1997 ZKP5: ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999. 556pp. ISBN 1-57027-089-9 Online Version ZKP6 Catalogue of the Slovenian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2001.

Notes

References Arns, Inke (2002). Netzkulturen. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. p. 76. ISBN 3-434-46107-8. Byfield, Ted (2012). "nettime— Fortsetzung folgt...," in Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, eds. Vergessene Zukunft: Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript Verlag. pp. 39–46. ISBN 978-3-8376-1906-5. Bosma, Josephine (2011). Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art. Rotterdam: NAi/INC. pp. 133–136. ISBN 978-90-5662-800-0.

External links Nettime mailing list

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Nettime

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Nettime claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Nettime before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Nettime ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Nettime

In research: Nettime appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Nettime in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Nettime is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Electronic mailing lists, Internet culture, Internet properties established in 1995, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Nettime outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Nettime in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Nettime means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Nettime out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Nettime in simple terms?

Why does Nettime matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Nettime?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Nettime.