FCJManager
FCJ-035 Locating Mobility: Practices of co-presence and the persistence of the postal metaphor in SMS/ MMS mobile phone customization in Melbourne
Larissa Hjorth RMIT University, Melbourne Domesticating cartographies Introduction to mobile telephonic practices and spaces As a vehicle arguably furthering the collapsing between work and leisure distinctions, the mobile phone is a clear extension of what Raymond Williams dubbed ‘mobile privatization’ (1974). Here one can still be physically within the home and yet, simultaneously, be electronically transported to other places. According to Wajcman et al’s study of Australian mobile telephony, the transformation and diffusion of boundaries between traditional private and public spheres (2004: 9) – as signified in Williams’s prescient ‘mobile privatization’ – sees mobile telephony penetrating ‘new geographic spaces that enable the consumption and communication process to be applied in new social, cultural and psychological spaces’ (2004: 12).[1] At the heart of Williams’s notion is the extension and re-articulation of domesticity beyond simple physical place, into co-present practices of place Doreen Massey calls ‘locality’ (1993). In this there are many…
FCJ-034 Gestures Towards the Digital Maypole
Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea School of Art History, Cinema Studies, Classics & Archaeology, University of Melbourne If a network forms a social relation between gestural beings, then that same network must also connect our dissatisfactions of broken relations and our hopes for their renewal. The elliptical gap that generates this frustration is encircled by clusters of geo-gestural behaviour. The framing of the question “network?” does not account for these movements and gestures, but how they come to form a pattern around the communicative material that can produce both satisfying and sad affections. The network is a maze; it has designated fissures and portals. Using the neologism of the digital maypole provides us with a conceptual tool for thinking through the various indices of cultural life; the digital maypole is a measure of the degrees of gesticulated manifold twists. In the sense of Deleuzean multiplicité, the maypole expresses the network’s…
FCJ-033 Beat me, Whip me, Spank me, Just Make it Right Again: beyond the didactic masochism of global resistance
Scott Sharpe School of Physical Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, Australian Defence Force Academy Maria Hynes School of Social Sciences, Australian National University Robert Fagan School of Environmental and Life Sciences, Macquarie University While the term ‘information super-highway’ might be making a bit of a comeback in a sort of retro-camp lexicon, those who place faith in the internet’s radicalising potential are a little more subdued in their claims, than were its early champions. The idea of the internet as a novel means of making political causes noticeable has been undermined in part by the very success of the network itself. While cheap and ready access makes the internet a plausible way of bringing political discourses and actions into the public domain, the sheer proliferation of information threatens the conditions by which noticeability might be obtained. This is not a ‘version of the overload of information syndrome’ (Ribeiro, 1998: 110) but…
FCJ-032 Mobile Technosoma: some phenomenological reflections on itinerant media devices
Ingrid Richardson Murdoch University, Western Australia Portable media devices and ‘wearable’ communications technologies are becoming both increasingly ubiquitous and personalised, penetrating and transforming everyday cultural practices and spaces, and further disrupting distinctions between private and public, ready-to-hand and telepresent interaction, actual and virtual environments. Such devices range from the standard mobile phone – which itself is exceeding its role as a communication device – to highly sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, personal media centres and handheld networkable game consoles. This article presents some initial thoughts pre-empting a bigger research project on mobile connectivity and media, and their emergence as portable microworlds or pocket technospaces. The project en large aims to investigate the emerging socio-cultural and techno-corporeal effects of mobile interactive media, and how they are changing the ways people interact with both their digital interfaces and each other, altering the shape and meaning of community and…
FCJ-031 Gendered, Bilingual Communication Practices: Mobile text-messaging among Hong Kong College Students
Angel Lin Faculty of Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong Mobile text messaging—variously known as SMS (short message service), text messaging, mobile e-mail, or texting—has become a common means of keeping in constant touch, especially among young people, in many parts of the world today. The research literature abounds with studies on the social, cultural, and communicative aspects of mobile text messaging in different sociocultural contexts in the world. In the following sections, current theoretical positions in the research literature on mobile communication will be summarised and then findings of a pilot study on the mobile text-messaging practices of university students in Hong Kong will be reported. Implications for emerging bilingual and bicultural identities and gendered sociality practices among Hong Kong young people will be discussed. Major Theoretical Positions on the Impact of Mobile Communication Technologies: Optimism or Pessimism on Human Connectivity? In contrast to the general celebratory optimistic tone…
FCJ-030 Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity *
Judith A. Nicholson Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montréal. The first flash mobbing is legendary now, though not uncontested. It happened in Manhattan, New York, between 7:27 pm and 7:37 pm on June 17, 2003. Summoned by text messages, emails and blog banter, a crowd of approximately 100 people gathered in the home furnishing section of Macy’s department store. The crowd surrounded a rug with a $10,000 price tag. Participants, soon to be known as ‘flash mobbers’, were instructed beforehand by ‘moberators’ to tell the salespeople that they all lived together in a free-love commune and that they wanted to purchase a ‘love rug’ (Bedell, 2003; Cotroneo, 2003; Shmueli 2003; van Rijn, 2003). According to several accounts, the mob dispersed rapidly after spending ten minutes discussing the rug among themselves and with salespeople. Other flash mobbings followed in quick succession in cities around the world. In Rome, over 300 flash mobbers…
Issue 06 – Mobility
Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of technical mobility has always created new intensities within the social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it might be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural practices and social forms are challenged. The contemporary mobility of digital networks is no exception. This issue of the Fibreculture Journal is concerned with documenting, and beginning to think through, the new mobile intensities allowed by digital networks. “Intensity” here refers not just to the ubiquitous nature of mobile networks, or to the frequency of use of mobile communications. New intensities are like new forces erupting within the old – taking the social somewhere it has not perhaps been before. At the least, these intensities give established orders new energies to either resist or attempt to fold…
FCJ-029 Dawn of the Organised Networks
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter At first glance the concept of “organised networks” appears oxymoronic. In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles. Think also back to the early work on cybernetics and the “second order” cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the “constitutive outside” of feedback or noise.[1] The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as political agents. Why should networks get organised? Isn’t their chaotic, disorganised nature a good thing that needs to be preserved?…
FCJ-028 Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations
Paul Newfield and Timothy Rayner ‘When capital invests the whole of life, life appears as resistance’. Antonio Negri The concept of the “learning organisation” plays a pivotal role in contemporary management theory and practice.[1] In the idealised view of its advocates, the learning organisation is a mobile, self-deconstructing system, perfectly suited to the unstable environments of “post-industrial” or “informational” capitalism. Flexibility and innovation, in this system, are achieved by reversing the traditional top-down flow of information from managers to workers. Workers use their “tacit knowledge” of processes of production and market activity to autonomously transform their conditions of work. The practical question for contemporary management and human resources (HR) theorists is how to create the kinds of workers that are capable of accumulating tacit knowledge and using it in the service of the organisation . This is a problem of control; it is not without its paradoxes. This paper takes…
FCJ-027 Speculations on a Marxist theory of the Virtual Revolution
Bob Hodge and Gabriela Coronado Everyone engaging with the theme of this special issue would agree on two premises: the post-Fordist global economy is radically new, with profound impacts on social organization and forms of consciousness; and new information technologies play a major role in this newness. In our article we will not add to the set of case studies in particular areas, or develop a new theoretical argument, as others in the issue will be doing. We believe there is space, with so new a phenomenon, for a more speculative form of enquiry, digging around the roots of these basic premises to ask some open questions: how new is this new information era, and is it so radically different? Is it useful to call it a “revolution”, using the term in the considered sense it had for Marx, however much it has been over-used and trivialized by later thinkers?…
Future Issues and Archives
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