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FCJ-064 Some thoughts on the evolution of digital media studies
Lisa Gye, Media and Communications Swinburne University of Technology June 13, 1993 – Can you read that? in St Kilda, a somewhat run-down, turn of the century beach suburb in Melbourne – glorious architecture, too many cafes now that the intelligentsia have rediscovered its charm – and my friend is in Northcote, across town, only about 15 kilometres away but worlds apart. Northcote is north of the city and while it’s still considered to be inner-city by the real estate agents, it is only just beginning its upward spiral towards gentrification. We’re playing a networked game of Doom on our newly acquired 14400 modems and talking on the telephone. “Yes, yes, I can see you”. We’re yet to discover the inbuilt text function in the game that would allow us to dispense with the phones and chat via the screens. I’m blown away, metaphorically. And then, literally, as my friend…
FCJ-063 The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge
Darren Jorgensen Curtin University, Western Australia Amidst shifting modalities of culture, inflected with new technologies and changing social desires, university disciplines have experienced seismic shifts in focus. Literature and Cultural Studies are being superseded by Communication Studies, Creative Enterprise, Creative Industries, Converged Media and other such nominalisms. In my workplace, the structure that was inaugurated only a few years before is already looking clunky, an outdated batch of titles and course content. Is it still appropriate to be talking about ‘Multimedia’? Are ‘New Media’, ‘Digital Media’ and ‘Converged Media’ sufficiently different substitutes? Are animation and gaming the province of Multimedia, Design, Art or Film and Television studies? From the growing number of enquiries from students about crossing areas we have been forced to look at the relations between them, and yet it seems that no amount of synergy could adequately capture the multifarious interests of a wired generation. We are…
FCJ-062 Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media
Cheryl Ball, Department of English, Illinois State University Ryan ‘rylish’ Moeller, Department of English, Utah State University This in an interactive text—click here to open. Abstract This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what we think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education “writing” classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. We argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. We use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media…
FCJ-061 Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Composition, Queens College, City University of New York Prelude: Formal Anticipation and Origins[1] This middle does not play the role of an average but rather serves as the means by which life enjoys ‘the absolute speed of movement‘ (Pearson, 1999: 169) As the epigraph might be understood in the context of this essay to point to movements or to methods of composing, let us begin with the premise that Part I of this essay need not necessarily come first and that the reader might happily jump from ‘Collisions, Collusions, Compositions’ directly to Part II, ‘Composition, the Discipline, the Course and the Product.’ And of course a reversal of this premise might also possible. And yet the force to read through the form of this piece as presented and ‘from the beginning’ ‘to the end’ pulsates in the adherence to or rebellion against…
FCJ-060 Toward an Algorithmic Pedagogy
Holly Willis Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California Colleges and universities in the United States currently face a daunting challenge: how can we transform longstanding definitions of literacy to account for not only the vast social shifts wrought by the centrality of networked, visual and aural media, but epistemological shifts as well? Calls for reconsidering literacy in light of digital tools are multiple and varied in approach and orientation, ranging from the declaration that every grade school student deserves access to a computer by then President Bill Clinton in 1996 (U.S. Dept. of Education, 1996), to the articulation of multimodal literacy outlined by Gunther Kress in his seminal book Literacy in the New Media Age to the taxonomy of skills characteristic of a new generation of students who currently inhabit a digital and participatory culture listed by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 paper for the MacArthur Foundation, ‘Confronting…
FCJ-059 Domestic ICTs, Desire and Fetish
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Chris Shepherd Unviversity of Melbourne, Australia We make our objects from what we make of our world, and in return they teach us: this is fetishism’s object lesson. Ellen Lee McCallum (1999: xxii) Introduction Matthew lives alone in a run-down, one-bedroom apartment in Melbourne suburbia. Visitors to Matthew’s home are extremely rare. However, if visitors should enter the apartment and attempt to navigate through it, as we researchers did, one does so at a risk; the sides of the walls are piled ceiling-high with old technological items—keyboards, computers boxes, typewriters, monitors, amplifiers, radios, televisions, cables, circuit boards and other artefacts. Once in the living room, visitors may proceed along a narrow path between haphazard stacks to find a desk with a computer, a telephone and a stereo. Matthew sits here up to 12 hours a day, downloading from the Internet, chatting to one or two of…
FCJ-058 Contact Aesthetics and Digital Arts: At the Threshold of the Earth
Warwick Mules Central Queensland University, Australia ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable’. (Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863) Aesthesis Modern aesthetics has always been concerned with the human senses in apprehension of art objects.[1] In modern aesthetic experience something is discovered, perhaps an inner sense of harmony or proportion, or some essential function of the human mind in relation to the sensory experience itself. But, in a paradoxical way, modern aesthetics denies sensory experience as foundational for human creativity, setting up a distance between inner reflection and outward sensory perception whereby an art object might be judged.[2] The senses are treated as suspect, misleading humans away from truth and into error. As Hans Robert Jauss has argued with respect to the emergence of aesthetics in early European modernity, aesthetic experience is: a new kind…
FCJ-057 The Case of ‘Mafiaboy’ and the Rhetorical Limits of Hacktivism
Gary Genosko Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada Canada proved to be the home of the most notorious Web hacker to date, “Mafiaboy,” a Montreal teen who intermittently crippled the Web sites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, eBay, and Yahoo! from 7-15 February 2000 by means of a distributed denial of service attack in which Web servers were flooded with so many requests for data that they were effectively clogged. He was charged under subsections 342.1(1) (unauthorized use of computer) and 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) of the Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) and sentenced on 12 September 2001 to eight months detention plus one year probation (R. c. M.C., [2001] J.Q. no. 4318 (C.Q. jeun.) (QL)). Craig McTaggert (2003, at para. 81, note 112) Introductory Remarks On September 12, 2001, Cour du Québec, Chambre de la jeunesse, District de Montréal Judge Gilles L. Ouellet sentenced a 17-year old male…
FCJ-056 Cultural planning and Chaos Theory in Cyberspace: some notes on a Digital Cultural Atlas Project for Western Sydney
Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally University of Western Sydney A perennial issue for digital politics has been the debate between those who claim a liberatory role for digital technologies and those who see them as instruments for a more effective oppression. We prefer to avoid such abstract oppositions and ask more specific questions: what kind of digital technology, used in what way by whom, for what purposes in what contexts, may support the efforts of those who work for a better, more open society? To focus our enquiry we look at the intersection of digital systems and “planning”. “Planning” in a general sense is a fundamental human activity in all societies exercising the “rationality” that has come to define humanity since the ancient Greeks. Yet the dominant form of planning in western societies today employs a specific form of ‘rationality’ which has emerged only recently, labelled ‘Occidental rationalism’ by Weber…
FCJ-055 Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Erin Manning Concordia University, Montréal Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such. One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to work collaboratively with dancers such that ‘the choreographic and computational processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of the constitution of movement.’[1] A similar tendency is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must ‘delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something of the “gestalt” of movement’[2] An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter…
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