FCJManager
FCJ-096 The Digital Given: 10 Web 2.0 Theses
Ippolita Italy Geert Lovink University of Amsterdam Ned Rossiter University of Nottingham, Ningbo 0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years? 1. News media is awash with ‘economic crisis’, indulging in its self-generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks…
FCJ-095 Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis
Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University 1. Web 2.0 and its Critical Contradictions At the 2007 International Communication Association Conference, Web 2.0 was highlighted as an emergent topic of research with a keynote panel entitled ‘What’s so Significant about Social Networking? Web 2.0 and its Critical Potentials’. One of the thought-provoking moments during the panel was the juxtaposition of two very different and at first, contradictory theoretical approaches to the relationships between Web 2.0 and user-generated content. While Henry Jenkins focused on the democratic potential of online participatory culture as enabling new modes of knowledge production, Tiziana Terranova argued for a post-Marxist perspective on Web 2.0 as a site of cultural colonization and expansion of new forms of capitalization on culture, affect and knowledge. The juxtaposition of these two very different critical approaches did not simply rehash the old divide between cultural…
FCJ-094 Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Scholarship
Professor Ien Ang Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney Dr Nayantara Pothen Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney Introduction The Internet has been a popular method for communication and collaboration across far-flung sites for some time, and its potential for enhancing participatory democracy has been much commented on. With the emergence of so-called Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005), the interactive and collaborative capabilities of the Internet have greatly increased, with still uncertain social, political and intellectual effects. This paper emerges out of an interest in exploring the possible implications of Web 2.0 for the practice of humanities research. Scholars in the humanities have traditionally been dependent on the written word—on the production of intellectually dense discourse—and, in this producerly mode, they tend to be individualist, sole researchers. How can they respond to the challenges posed by Web 2.0 and its seemingly irresistible promotion of a participatory, expressive,…
FCJ-093 Beyond the ‘Networked Public Sphere’: Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0
Dr Ben Roberts, University of Bradford School of Computing, Informatics and Media, University of Bradford In some ways discussion of the political implications of Web 2.0 reinvigorates a debate about the democratising nature of the Internet that began in the 1990s. The concept of participation is at the heart of many current debates about politics and technology. There are two main reasons for saying this. On the one hand is an ongoing and increasing concern about public participation, or lack of it, in modern (predominantly Western) democracies. This participatory deficit is to be seen in falling voter turnout at elections, public apathy on key political issues and scorn or indifference for elected political representatives. On the other hand, there is a wave of optimism concerning the potential of new technologies, particularly the web, to enable new forms of participation in economic and public life, to transform political debate and citizenship…
FCJ-092 Dreams of a New Medium
Aden Evens Assistant Professor of English, Dartmouth College Early on with the first Apples, we had these dreams that the computer would let you know what you wanted to do. — Steve Wozniak Digital and Medial Wozniak’s nightmare endures; still we dream of the computer that already knows what one wants. If only we could eliminate the clumsy interface, all that clicking and typing, the computer would at last become equal to the will of the user. Fully adequate to Marshall McLuhan’s description of technology as an ‘extension of ourselves’, a transparent interface would bypass the senses to transcend medium altogether. Problematic at best, the desire for a transparent interface nevertheless drives much of digital culture and technology. But not the Web; or at least, not Web 1.0. Thoroughly commercialized, comfortably parsed into genres, serving billions of pages of predigested content to passive consumers, the World Wide Web as developed…
Issue 14 – Web 2.0
web 2.0 is a doing word. Although Tim O’Reilly famously declared in 2005 that ‘Web 2.0 is not a technology, it is an attitude’, in 2009 it’s clear he’s grammatically incorrect (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 is not an “is”, or not only this. Web 2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught us in primary school, it’s a doing word. Here’s a list of some web 2.0 things to do: apping, blogging, mapping, mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching, shopping, sharing, socialising and wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list goes on it becomes apparent that part of what web 2.0 does, while doing all the things on this list and more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems that there is no part of networked thought, activity or life that is not now web 2.0. To draw up another kind of list, a list of ‘things’…
FCJ-091 Making Games? Towards a theory of domestic videogaming
Helen Thornham, Research Assistant AHRC/BBC, Graduate School of Education, Bristol The debates which have marked videogame theory to date are wide ranging. However, the explicit focus on the medium of the videogame and the attempts to verify it as an idiom worthy of study, has tended to result in a technologically-determined account of gaming which underplays, even ignores, the longevity and lived practice of gaming on the one hand, and a textually determined approach which does much the same thing on the other. While attempts have been made to look at the wider culture of the videogame (and here I am thinking of Cassell and Jenkins 1998, Newman 2004, Carr 2006, and Dovey and Kennedy 2006) and assert the importance of thinking about the industry in its entirety, these debates are relatively small by comparison to the better known debates within the field. Indeed, whether we refer to the ‘narrative…
FCJ-090 Proliferating Connections and Communicating Convergence
Aylish Wood School of Drama, Film and Visual Art, Rutherford College, University of Kent Over the last few years debates about digital technologies and moving imagery have often evolved around the concept of convergence. By now a powerful term, convergence continues to have a purchase on moving image media. Since it has been a point of reference for many discussions of digital media, convergence has, in a sense, set the context with which academics in the field have had to engage. To explore the pressure the concept of convergence exerts over our understandings of changing expressive practices following the emergence of numerous digital technologies, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s approach to communication. My claim will be that in its current form, convergence privileges either the human users of technological platforms, or the combination of aesthetic conventions from different media. These two understandings of convergence propose that connections through the process of…
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…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
