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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…
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…
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…
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