Sheldon Renan
Biography
Sheldon Renan is an American writer, film historian and consultant. A graduate of Yale University, he received a Rockefeller Grant that enabled him to write An Introduction to the American Underground Film (Dutton, 1967) — the first history of American experimental cinema, and still a standard reference for the period.[1] He founded the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, and has lectured on media at museums, colleges and conferences internationally.
Career
Renan began writing advertising for large firms in New York and Tokyo. A move into film, television and interactive videodisc led to an assignment writing the script for Intel's launch of its 486 processor; Intel subsequently used him to write speeches and strategy for what became "Intel Inside," and brought him back in 2000 and 2001 to help create a technology vision for the coming decade.
He has written and consulted for corporations including Intel, Xerox, SAP, AT&T, IBM, Apple, Sony and BearingPoint, and for public sector clients ranging from the US Military Health Service and Department of State to the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida. He is particularly known for writing speeches for chief executives and public figures — he has written for every CEO of Xerox since 1990 — and for keynote addresses at conferences including PC Expo, MacWorld, Comdex and DRUPA. While leading the communications company Clarity in the 1990s he served as creative director for major technology and product launches. Themed entertainment clients include Disney, Universal Studios and Busch.
He remains an active member of the Writers Guild of America. His film and television credits include the film Lambada, the colour The Untouchables series, the PBS series The Japanese Film (co-written with the US Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer), and episodes of Hercules, Xena and Murder, She Wrote for Universal Studios. He has served on the advisory board for eComm, an annual conference on emerging communications.
Netness
Renan's contribution to this site's vocabulary is the concept of netness — a measure of the degree to which something is connected, distributed and networked rather than centralised and self-contained. His argument is that netness is the variable that increasingly distinguishes systems that thrive from systems that fail, across domains that appear unrelated: military organisation, disease transmission, criminal enterprise, film production, disaster response and corporate structure. The framing treats connectedness as a quantity that can be increased or decreased deliberately, rather than as a condition that simply obtains, and asks what an organisation would look like if it were designed for high netness from the start.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Renan is an unusual figure to have in a reference of this kind: not an academic but a professional writer of the language in which technology explains itself to the public. Having written the launch material for products that shaped a decade — and, in "Intel Inside," one of the most successful marketing campaigns in the history of technology — he is both a source on how that language is made and an instance of it. His netness concept is also a rare piece of vocabulary produced from inside industry rather than from the academy.
Related Reading
External Links
References
- ↑ Renan, Sheldon. An Introduction to the American Underground Film. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967. Internet Archive.
