Dear Alan,
citing a poem of Rose (Mulvale) today i could not resist shortly google-ing cybermind and stumbled upon your 2023 blog attempt with the generous offer to contact you (implying it would be a wise thing to do).
So I do.
You might not remember me. I was young, ill read and follish (but extremly curious) when I joined Cybermind in 1994. So far its been the best thing the net has given me (and I am not short of extremly exciting experiences with and in it). Sometimes I whish it could browse Cyberminds endless stream of consciousness again. Some might be still (unrecoverable) in the piles of backups of mine.
If you care to know I have tried to channel my own stream into my blog (sorry, mostly German) since 2010
(which is, as I only discovered today, to a large degree influenced by my Cybermind-exposure).
I have no intension with this e-mail then letting you know you (plural) are not forgotten and to connect me with my own past. So no need to reply – but if there is anything you consider worth sharing with a stranger around the globe I would love to hear from you. I am still my follish, ill read but curious old self open to adventures of the mind and body.
Thanks for everything!
Carsten
I recieved this shortly after:
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Background Info:
Alan Sondheim is a poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace from the United States. […] Sondheim co-moderates several email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sondheim
Cybermind is an Internet mailing list devoted to “the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace”.
It was co-founded by Alan Sondheim and Michael Current in mid-1994 to explore, exemplify and discuss multiple aspects of cyberspace, both from theoretical and experiential perspectives.[…] In more recent years discussions have become more general, but the list still has members from its founding period. Michael Current died shortly after the founding of the group.
List discussion has resulted in books, articles, conferences, more than one academic thesis, a group novel (now available through Lulu.com), and a strong ongoing community. Cybermind itself has been the subject of academic research, including an anthropological doctoral dissertation by Jonathan Marshall at the University of Sydney, which has now been published as the book Living on Cybermind. The book details the life of people on Cybermind over the period from 1994 to 2006 and uses many quotations from list members to analyse the ambiguities of net presence and absence (which is called asence), the paradoxes of the public/private divide, difficulties arising around authenticity and aggression, netsex, net-politics, and the construction of ‘community’.
The other major gathering of writing about Cybermind is a collection of online essays about gender online and its role in the group’s life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybermind