issue03
FCJ-017 Material Cultural Evolution: An Interview with Niles Eldredge
Belinda Barnet, Swinburne University of Technology Niles Eldredge, City University of New York Niles Eldredge is good at collecting things, particularly fossils. He is Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology at the City University of New York, and has been a palaeontologist for nearly forty years. His personal specialty is trilobites – a group of extinct arthropods that lived roughly 540-245 million years ago. Eldredge examines the fossil record of trilobites to determine their evolutionary history, demarcating lineages based on the way their form has changed over time. His ultimate goal is to develop a better understanding of how the biological evolutionary process works to produce the patterns of history he sees in his trilobites. Collecting fossils is a passion. In 1972, Eldredge developed the theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’ with Stephen Jay Gould. This is a revision of Darwinian theory that debunked a reigning assumption in paleontology at the time;…
FCJ-016 The Online Body Breaks Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics
Jonathan Marshall University of Technology, Sydney [1] Representations of the online body seem constantly involved with issues of imprecise, crossed or broken boundaries. Online boundaries, both personal and group, appear especially fluid when contrasted with moves towards establishing impermeable boundaries offline. This contributes to perceptions of disembodiment or potential unity with machines. Online bodies are thus described in terms reminiscent of other constructs such as ghosts – partly because experiences of materiality can be described in terms of boundary issues, and partly because it is difficult to bring offline bodies to bear. From another angle, gender, when constructed as a polarity, also serves to “ghost” experience. However, online bodies are also connected to constructions and feelings of offline bodies to reduce ambiguities and to establish authenticity online. For example, mood, as sustained by the offline body, acts as a framing for communication in netsex, mourning and flame. Another popular body…
FCJ-015 Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Google-Bomb
Séamus Byrne School of Media and Communications, UNSW Google. That the noun has rapidly become a verb speaks volumes for the influence of this search engine. Powered by PageRank, the accuracy of its results has done more than make Google the premiere search application – it has moved web search into the realm of ‘killer app’ alongside e-mail. When über.nu columnist Adam Mathes tested his theory of the ‘Google Bomb’, he may have realised the potential of his actions, but he perhaps underestimated the power of the pure idea itself. The fashion in which Google could be manipulated highlighted many questions about the nature of the web and its network of linkages. Deleuze and Guattari would see such activity as not only exemplifying the web as rhizome, but that it also demonstrates their conception of the refrain. Google Bombs demonstrate how web link ecologies, particularly those of blog linkages, influence…
FCJ-014 Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead
Kylie Veale Curtin University of Technology Introduction “The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.” Cicero In the last ten thousand years, our deceased antecedents are thought to number over one hundred billion (see Davies, 1994). Not much has been recorded about them, unless they were famous, rich or fortunate enough to have been catapulted into the memory of others. It was therefore up to the general public to ‘individualise’ the deaths of the rest through mortuary ritual, an accomplishment to which archaeologists and our cemeteries can attest today. Individualisation via memorialisation has become a way for past and current societies to commemorate life on the event of a death. To that end, memorialisation provides one of a group of artefacts used by historians, genealogists and the like to document history and family links. [The] memorialisation of departed loved ones seems to be…
FCJ-013 It’s New Media: But is it Art Education?
Trebor Scholz Institute for Distributed Creativity There is a crisis in new media arts education. Yet there has been surprisingly little debate about it until recently, despite the widespread emergence of new media arts programs and massive student interest all throughout the North American university landscape. The current crisis is only now starting to get widespread acknowledgment from new media educators in the United States, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and beyond. Fields of conflict range from undergraduate students exclusively demanding vocational training, to the lack of advanced debate about new media artwork, and the media-specific orientation of departments. Once beyond the certainty of technical instruction new media arts educators on many campuses experience a crisis due to the unbearable lightness of their topical orientation. In addition, it is an almost impossible challenge for a single human being to keep up with all technological advances. And last but not least, there…
FCJ-012 Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs
José van Dijck University of Amsterdam Introduction A recent cartoon from a Dutch newspaper shows a man and a woman lying in bed, trying out the best delta-8 vape carts apparently after having sex. ‘Do you keep a diary?’ asks the man to his partner, and upon her negation, he comments: ‘Good. I don’t like it when a woman immortalises her intimate experiences with me on paper.’ In the last frame, we see the woman sitting behind a computer screen and typing ‘Dear weblog…’, while the man snores away on the bed behind her. In this short cartoon, we can detect a number of assumptions about diaries and weblogs, but the clue to this joke is the paradox that the weblog is considered a digital equivalent of the diary and yet it is not. For centuries, the diary has been characterised as a private, handwritten document that chronicles the experiences,…
FCJ-011 Textual Dreaming: Dis-Ease in the Interface
Phillip Roe Central Queensland University New media presents us with a diverse range of texts which tend to manifest through the centrality of the interface. The interface is often argued as the most important part of any digital application (i.e. Bolter and Gromala 2003: 11). It becomes the surface upon, or perhaps through, which a range of forces and discourses converge and intersect. It can also be argued that these discourses are subsumed within a particular idea of the interface, and in some instances can efface what is at stake in new media texts. In particular, and what this paper investigates, is the question of textuality itself, the limits and liberties of textual models. This paper problematises the notion of the interface with a notion of models of textuality, and considers some of the implications for the future of reading. A model of textuality is not a natural thing; it…
Issue 03 – General Issue
Andrew Murphie Editor New media/information technologies, practices and processes have undoubtedly made a huge difference to our traditional understanding of media. The crucial question – one that perhaps underlies so many other important questions, from shifting relationships to the new terrors and new wars – is, of course, what kind of difference. Yet the question of what this difference is remains unresolved. After at least a decade of serious debate about the defining qualities of new/digital/networked media, we are left with the perhaps more exciting task of engaging with the specificity of events as they emerge. Indeed, this seems the point. The intensity of differentiation intrinsic to media seems somewhat hostile to stable media/information technologies, practices or thinking. A more pliable thinking about media/information events is now required than one constrained by the traditional divisions often still found in academic, media, information, computer sciences and related industries. At the same…
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
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- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
