FCJManager
FCJ-089 Repopulating the Map: Why Subjects and Things are Never Alone
Teodor Mitew PhD student Curtin University of Technology ‘What terrifies you most in purity?’ I asked ‘Haste,’ William answered. —Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose Introduction Every entity, be it human or non-human, leaves traces as it struggles against entropy. Whether an entity’s existence is projected as being, becoming, or having, it inevitably involves a spatial locatedness. That is, it can be approached as a thing leaving spatial traces, or annotations, which in turn can be observed, or tracked. Even the journey of the smallest grain of sugar, from a plant in a plantation to a human sensation in a morning coffee, is a spatial phenomenon of mind-boggling complexity, involving an enormity of other entities. Until very recently the banality of this realisation served no further purpose, as all those other entities and the logistics of their relations receded in an invisible and mute background, never to be found…
FCJ-088 New Maps for Old?: The Cultural Stakes of ‘2.0’
Caroline Bassett Department of Media and Film/Research Centre for Material Digital Cultures, University of Sussex Preface: Ubiquity Ubiquity is a key principle of ‘2.0’, that bundle of technologies, plans, possibilities, industries, codes and practices, architectures, fictions, and factions offered up as a definition of a post-cyberspace (SooJung-Kim Pang, 2007) world. This is information technologies’ second life, sometimes given to us as ‘a whole [new] way of life’, to adapt Raymond Williams’ famous definition of culture (1958/1993), so that it becomes far more than an industrial logic. And ‘2.0’ and ubiquity go together in another way too: The model is everywhere. Writing this paper, for example, I am referring to technical accounts of Web 2.0 and to various specific cultural analyses (see below), but I am also surfing a poster proclaiming a ‘politics 2.0’ and We the Media (Gilmoor, 2004) is open on my desk, inviting consideration of user generated content…
FCJ-087 The Politics of Podcasting
Jonathan Sterne, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker, Ariana Moscote Freire Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University At the end of 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) selected ‘podcast’ as its word of the year. Evidently, enough people were making podcasts, listening to them, or at least uttering the word podcast in everyday contexts to warrant the accolade. Despite occasioning a media sensation, the actual extent of podcasting is still unknown. According to a PEW Internet and American Life survey (Rainie and Madden, 2005) – still the most substantive publication about podcasting trends – approximately 6 million of the 22 million U.S. adults who own a portable audio player have downloaded a podcast. Richard Berry’s (2006) review of research in the area places the figure of podcast listeners in a similar range – between 6 million and 8 million currently, with the numbers projected to rise dramatically…
FCJ-086 A Contribution Towards A Grammar of Code
David M. Berry Department of Media and Communication, Swansea University A Turning towards Code Over the past thirty years there has been an increasing interest in the social and cultural implications of digital technologies and “informationalism” from the social sciences and humanities. Generally this has concentrated on the implications of the “convergence” of digital devices and services, understood as linked to the discrete processing capabilities of computers, which rely on logical operations, binary processing and symbolic representation. In this paper, I suggest that a “grammar of code” might provide a useful way of thinking about the way in which digital technologies operate as a medium and can contribute usefully to this wider debate. In using the term “code” I include computer software source code, associated executables, and static data structures and I want to build on previous work by authors such as Manovich (2001), Hayles (2004), Fuller (2004) and…
FCJ-085 Wirelessness as Experience of Transition
Adrian Mackenzie Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University Wireless networks are in some ways very unpromising candidates for network and media theory. They are certainly not the most visible hotspot of practices or changes associated with media technological cultures. However, wireless networks persistently associate themselves into the centre of media change. Their connectivity, intermittent, unstable and uneven as it often is, lodges in many of the overlaps, overflows and outgrowths badged as convergence, mobile media, and pervasive or ubiquitous computing. The forms of wireless convergence are various, common and familiar. They are currently occurring in the form of the so-called ‘fixed-mobile’ convergence that seeks to connect different infrastructures to each other (e.g. Wi-Fi and cellular phone networks in the form of the iPhone and many other mobile phones). It might not be going too far to say that wireless networks are the very substrate of network media convergence today. We…
Issue 13 – After Convergence
After convergence: what connects? After convergence: what connects? Making this question the subject of this special issue we set out to address two questions at once. The first was: ‘Are we after convergence?’ and by this we meant to invite explorations of the exhaustion of the original convergence model. The second was: ‘What kind of convergence are we after?’ Which is to say what kind of convergence do we want? These were at heart of our concerns in developing this issue, and, in posing them we also asked a series of subsidiary questions: What are today’s convergent processes? Is assessing convergence a useful way to map contemporary developments in ICTs, can it adequately map a process that it is never purely technical, but always techno-cultural? Addressing this requires consideration of the critical, political, cultural stakes of contemporary forms of techno-cultural innovation. This in turn means asking what convergences with what…
FCJ-084 Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory
John PottsMacquarie University, Sydney The model of medium theory, proposing that the most significant cultural and social effects of media derive from the intrinsic properties of the media themselves, has historically been viewed with suspicion within studies of media and technology, especially on the critical Left. An extensive literature drawing on political economy and critical sociology has denounced the technological determinism inherent in medium theory, advancing instead a ‘social shaping of technology’ thesis. However, the impact of digital information and networking provokes a reconsideration of the model of medium theory. Every time it is written or stated that digital convergent technology has re-shaped the use and effects of media forms, then some form of medium theory is being employed. Such widespread informal reference to the tenets of medium theory – including an element of technological determinism – makes a reconsideration of the model timely. In this paper I assess the…
FCJ-083 Tag-elese or The Language of Tags
Jan Simons Universiteit van Amsterdam Folksonomies as chaotic systems The core “meme” of Web 2.0 from which almost all other memes radiated was: ‘You control your own data’ (O’Reilly, 2005, 3).[1] Key instruments for this user control are tagging systems that allow users to freely assign keywords of their own choosing to Internet resources of their own making as well as to documents produced by others. Tags are used for making Internet resources retrievable for personal use, but in so-called social networks tags are also accessible for others. Of course, as freely chosen keywords tags do not necessarily follow prefixed taxonomies or classification systems. But going by the maxim that interaction creates similarity and similarity creates interaction, the idea – or hope – is, however, that the tagging practices of individual users will eventually converge into an emergent common vocabulary or folksonomy. (Merholz, 2004; Shirky, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005b; Mika,…
FCJ-082 The Models and Politics of Mobile Media
Gerard Goggin Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales Introduction In this paper I seek to critically evaluate the models at play in an important area of new media cultures — mobile media. By ‘mobile’, I mean the new technologies, cultural practices, and arrangements of production, consumption, and exchange, associated with hand-held, networked devices, especially those based on mobile cellular networks. These mobile phone technologies are now commonly being framed as media (May & Hearn, 2005; Nilsson et al., 2001; Goggin & Hjorth, 2007) — and so we see the appearance of objects such as mobile television, mobile film, mobile games, and mobile Internet. With its large cultural and commercial claims, this much-heralded move raises important theoretical and political questions. There is an extensive literature on various aspects of convergence, including mobiles, however systematic consideration has not been given to mobile media as a development centring on…
FCJ-081 Toward An Ontology of Mutual Recursion: Models, Mind and Media
Mat Wall-Smith English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales ‘…the ‘axioms of daily life’ stand in the way of the a-signifying function, the degree zero of all possible modelisation.’ (Guattari, 1995 : 63) The ways we conceive of minds, subjects and technics, particularly media technics, are intimately related.[1] This relation is only partly explained by the often-intersecting histories of media technologies with the philosophies of mind and cognitive sciences. On the one hand, different models of mind suggest different approaches to media forms and technologies. On the other hand, there is the ability for those forms and technologies to move the body to think, to evoke novel resonances between body and world, paired with their provision for realising and developing a calculated return to the affordances that these resonances develop. The dynamic of the relation between minds, subjects and technics, and between these and modelisations of the…
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