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FCJ-039 tsk tsk tsk & beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics
& beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics Darren Tofts Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Connectivity, interactivity and displacement have accelerated situations of difference. The social concept of networked communities, which preoccupied us in the ‘90s, has its correlative in a particular strand of aesthetics. Distributed and distributable media have made a significant impact upon the way we think about aesthetic practices generally. The have been especially pivotal in drawing attention to the possibility of different conceptions of participation, of different relations between art work and audience. Online forms of distribution, exhibition and interaction, such as net art and collaborative multi-user environments, are important in that it they have modified the spatial and temporal dimensions of what constitutes an art event and an experience of it. They have been particularly affective in temporal and differential terms, in that the diffusion of location, of both art work and participant, has multiplied the indeterminacy of…
FCJ-038 Women’s Creation of Camera Phone Culture
Dong-Hoo Lee University of Incheon, Korea Introduction Mobile phones have extended human activities beyond the constraints of time and space by increasing mobile communicability en route and real time interaction. These devices have evolved into multi-functional media that can function as camera phones, camcorders, MP3s, PDAs, wireless Internet and so on, and have constructed and reconstructed people’s everyday experiences. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of mobile phone users in South Korea grew rapidly. As the information and communication technology sector has been promoted as the nation’s new growth engine during this period, South Korea has become a global trendsetter, with one of the world’s highest mobile phone penetration rates and competitive infrastructure. By 2004, 36.1 million people out of Korea’s total 48 million population carried one or more mobile handsets, meaning that more than 75% of the total population had taken advantage of mobile phone technology….
FCJ-037 Cute Boys or Game Boys? The Embodiment of Femininity and Masculinity in Young Norwegians’ Text Message Love-Projects
Lin Prøitz Institutt for Medier og Kommunikasjon, University of Oslo, Norway Introduction The time will come, when Mrs. Smith would spend an hour with Mrs. Brown very enjoyably cutting up Mrs. Robinson over the telephone. (de Sola Pool, 1977: 33, cited in Due, 2003) The telephone was launched in the late 19th century, accompanied by the idea that ‘friends will whisper their secrets over the electric wire’ (in Due, 2003 [Kingsbury, 1915: 32]).[1] However, as Beathe Due (2003) notes in her compelling analysis of gender-discourses and telephone-usage in Norway, because of already existing social, cultural and economical bourgeois etiquettes, these discourses were transferred into perceptions of correct usage of the telephone by those who could afford to use and own a telephone. Brief and formal business-related conversations were soon initiated by the bourgeois class. (see also Martin, 1991) In the wake of these etiquettes, a gender-dichotomised discourse of telephone-usage became…
FCJ-036 From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the Transformation of Place
Rowan Wilken University of Melbourne Introduction Place is a much maligned notion within contemporary critical discourse. It is criticised for its lack of definitional precision; it is linked to strategies of exclusion; it is seen as marginal to modernist considerations of time and space; and with the emergence of cyberspace and virtual community, it is said to be left behind or reduced to the status of metaphor. Yet, place is a resilient notion and persists in the face of all these continuing challenges. But what relevance, if any, does place have in the context of networked mobility? Does mobility render notions of place obsolete? Or does place persist? And if the latter, what happens to the common conception of place as a ‘proper, stable, and distinct location’ (Morse, 1999: 195) as a result of mobile practices? This paper responds directly to these questions. It examines the notion of place in…
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…
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