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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…