Special Issue on Revisiting Digital Media Technologies? Understanding
Technosociality

http://www.communicationsonline.eu/

Content:

Kate O’Riordan
Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st
century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The
primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows:
First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the
spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these
spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital
bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday
communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the
process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through
personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of
biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned
from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together
is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through
the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture
and high-tech spectacle.

Gemma San Cornelio and Elisenda Ardévol
Practices of place-making through locative media artworks

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows have made it
possible to instantly connect location dependent information with
physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the
representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools
and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a
critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based
applications, or in other words, “locative media”, provide an
interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our
understanding of space and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the
uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with
people’s sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary
theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus
on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these
theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal
Accessible (2006), Bio Mapping (2004), Disappearing Places (2007), and
Coffee Deposits (2010). We contend that locative media artworks act upon
distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current
place-making practices.

Susanna Paasonen
Revisiting cyberfeminism

In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical
analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology –
especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as
something of a “mass-medium”. Scholars, activists and artists interested
in media technology and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and
groups. Consequently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term
cyberfeminism that ranged in their take on, and identifications with
feminism. Cyberfeminist activities began to fade in the early 2000s and
the term has since been used by some as synonymous with feminist studies
of new media – yet much is also lost in such a conflation. This article
investigates the histories of cyberfeminism from two interconnecting
perspectives. First, it addresses the meanings of the prefix “cyber” in
cyberfeminism. Second, it asks what kinds of critical and analytical
positions cyberfeminist networks, events, projects and publications have
entailed. Through these two perspectives, the articles addresses the
appeal and attraction of cyberfeminism and poses some tentative
explanations for its appeal fading and for cyberfeminist activities
being channelled into other networks and practiced under different names.

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
Studying the interpretive and physical aspects of interactivity:
Revisiting interactivity as a situated interplay of structure and agencies

The concept of “interactivity” has routinely been used to differentiate
older analogue media and newer digital media. In this usage,
interactivity has come to be defined as primarily a physical behavior
from the person, as dictated by the media product, which has
technological and/or content features that enable, promote, and require
specific types and amounts of such activity. However, physical
behaviours are only part of the processes involved in engaging with a
media product. These also involve cognitive, affective and interpretive
behaviours. Additionally, what are considered the most important
behaviors may vary in any given media reception situation. This paper
reports on a study that considered interactivity as involving
interpretive and physical behaviours together. In interviews about
people’s engaging with new and old media products, the processes of
interactivity were mapped for their interconnected components. The
results help illustrate the complexity of the concept.

Phil Ellis
reenacttv.net <http://reenacttv.net>: re-working the site(s) of new
television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and
the archive

This article investigates the potential for new television as arts
practice. It explores this potential by revisiting acts and sites of
television’s history through processes of enactment, specifically the
reenactment of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, the first drama
broadcast by John Logie Baird (with the BBC) in 1930. This took place in
Baird’s studio at 133 Long Acre, London. The article outlines key
features of various possibilities for a “new” television and a new
television arts practice and considers how reenactment as an arts
process might address the “trace” of historical television’s archive,
and in doing so also give it a particular contemporary relevance.
Theorists of memory and storage (Ricoeur and Derrida) are drawn upon to
develop forms of thinking about television and performance as archive
which are then drawn on to consider the prospects for reenacttv.net
<http://reenacttv.net>. Reenacttv.net <http://Reenacttv.net> is an art
and television history project which will reenact The Man with the
Flower in His Mouth in the summer of 2011.

Abstract keynote speaker Rosalind Gill, King’s college, London

This talk has three aims. Firstly, it will review “what we know” about the features of cultural and creative work, discussing issues such as precariousness, bulimic patterns of working, and the intensification and extensification of work over time and space . It will consider how these now ‘well-established’ ‘facts’ about creative work may be being challenged by co-creation. Is this the ‘ultimate’ in exploitation of ‘free labour’ or a harbinger of a different set of participatory ethical practices in the cultural sphere, a democratization of who gets to ‘make culture’?
Secondly, it will explore the notion of “self exploitation” that has emerged as a key term for theorizing the labouring conditions and subjectivities of workers involved in the cultural and creative industries. Whilst this originated as a critical term from a Foucaultian tradition concerned with theorizing new modalities of power and discipline, its usefulness both as an analytical and political tool will be interrogated. Has it become another neoliberal term of abuse–blaming workers for their own exploitation and rendering invisible the structural conditions in which work is carried out? Why has the word exploitation only become speakable when it prefixed by the notion that we are somehow doing it to ourselves? What would it take for us to start talking about exploitation again? Do we need a new vocabulary to think about labour – especially in the context of co-creation? And what kind of resistance is possible without recourse to this vocabulary?
Finally, the talk will raise questions about what still remains a largely silenced issue in debates about the conditions of cultural workers–inequalities between workers. I will develop from the notion of “unmanageable inequalities” to explore how gender, race and class inequalities have become not simply unmanageable but unspeakable in cultural work–even by those most adversely affected by them. How do we begin to challenge the toxic myths of egalitarianism and meritocracy that circulate in the cultural and creative industries–and in much writing about them? And how can we make sure that questions about inequality are on the agenda of a politics that seeks to challenge and resist contemporary labouring conditions – whether this is the labour of freelancers of employees or of hobbyists who give their time ‘freely’.
The aim of this talk is to stimulate discussion and raise questions in the early part of the workshop.

Este artículo pretende reflexionar sobre las posibilidades que abre Internet para el estudio de la cultura visual contemporánea a la vez que plantea una serie de cuestiones teóricas, éticas y metodológicas sobre la fotografía digital y su uso para la investigación antropológica. Internet puede considerarse actualmente como uno de los mayores archivos de fotografía o como un banco de imágenes inmenso al cual podemos acceder instantáneamente desde cualquier buscador. Sin embargo, esta perspectiva supone la descontextualización de las imágenes, que aparecen así de un modo revuelto; alteradas.

Palabras clave: Fotografía digital, ética, etnografía, antropología visual.

Digital Culture: Innovative Practices and Critical Theories

ECREA Digital Culture and Communication 3rd Workshop

Barcelona, Spain, 24-25 November 2011

This workshop seeks to explore innovative perspectives on digital culture and the study of digital culture. Our concern is to focus on developing forms of theorizing, critiquing, understanding and researching digital culture, forms and practice. Our intention is to contribute to emerging work responding (1) to ‘new’ new media technologies of all kinds, and (2) to respond to developments in media research on technology and innovation.

The workshop is co-organised by the ECREA Digital Culture & Communication (DCC) section, Arts and Humanities Department and Information and Communication Sciences Department Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, with support from the Centre for Material Digital Culture (DMDC), University of Sussex, UK, and it is coordinated by Elisenda Ardèvol (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Caroline Basset (Universitat de Sussex) and Gemma San Cornelio (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).

The venue of the workshop will be the Centre d’Estudis i Recursos Culturals (C/ Montalegre, 7, Pati Manning, 08001 Barcelona).

http://www.digitalcultureandcommunication.blogspot.com/

June 21 · 4:00am - 7:00am

Tecnologías y sociabilidades basadas en categorías identitarias sexuadas
Begoña Enguix,
Estudis d’Art i Humanitats, UOC

En el seminario se presentará una investigación en curso sobre la incorporación de las tecnologías digitales en la conformación de formas particulares de sociabilidad y asociacionismo basadas en las categorías identitarias relacionadas con la sexualidad.

Adolescentes, Jóvenes y tecnología
Dani Aranda y Jordi Sanchez-Navarro
Estudis de Comunicació i Informació, UOC

En el seminario se presentarán los resultados de un estudio
cuantitativo y cualitativo del uso de la tecnología digital por parle
de adolescentes y jóvenes españoles en su tiempo libre. Del estudio se desprende que los menores españoles usan la tecnología como espacios de sociabilidad, ocio y aprendizaje.

Narcís Pares, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Jaume Ferrer, Grup de recerca mediaccions, UOC.

Els Interactive Playgrounds, espais lúdics per a nens i joves on els mitjans digitals interactius canvien les velles formes de joc o bé directament en plantegen de noves, constitueixen un camp de recerca encara relativament nou on dissenyadors de sistemes interactius, investigadors socials i usuaris participen en la definició de futurs entorns orientats a promoure el desenvolupament, la propiocepció, l’activitat física i la socialització, entre altres. Es presentarà la perspectiva dels dissenyadors i la perspectiva dels usuaris a partir d’un treball de recerca etnogràfica en curs.

Interactive Playgrounds
2 de Juny, 2011
MediaTic UOC-IN3
C/ Roc Boronat

Sala 6C  16-18h.

The workshop is preceded by an ongoing debate on the blog.  The organizators have invited guest authors to collaborate to a common reflection about different perspectives on the topic. The centre of attention is the role of social media in the Arabian Spring, with the post of Mark Allen Peterson who express:

Egypt is currently in just such an experimental moment. It is not merely that social innovators have found many new politically powerful uses for digital media; the mainstream media finds itself in a period in which the political order that governed it for so long in gone, and no firm new order has yet emerged. Many social actors seek to organize a new national mediascape as close as possible to the old, while others seek to innovate, to borrow practices from elsewhere in the global mediascape and localize them. New narratives, and counternarratives of revolution are everywhere, and the shape of the new order remains ambiguous, unpredictable and shaped by the very narratives the various media produce out of their own uncertainty.

Annabelle Sreberny ask if we can talk about a Social Media Revolution and says that:

It is evident that both new and old media have played significant and fascinating roles in the recent insurrections to topple autocratic regimes from Tunis to Cairo and beyond. New media can no longer be considered the epiphenomena of political movements but are rather significant tools of political mobilization.

Other authors examine the “silent” social change, that is social change as a long-term social process that take place in everyday practices, such as Raquel Recuero, examining  Social Media in Brazil:

 Because Brazilians are using social network tools so strongly, this is leading to social changes in everyday life, politics, education and other fields. The emergence of online social networks has changed the way information circulates within the country, creating more awareness, actions and change.

Mark Hobart poses a warning related to the abuse of metaphors when studying Media and Change, because “how durable arguments are depends in large part on how theoretically rigorous they are rather than how fashionable their metaphors”:

The obverse face of emancipatory technologies is the link between capital, surveillance and power. Nowhere is such techno-utopianism more evident than in exaggerated claims for new media in development. One response is from anthropologists who study the social practices and relations of knowledge/power through which information becomes meaningful, and from cultural studies scholars who analyze how articulatory practices produce hegemony.

In a contemporary context (audio)visual and digital media are ubiquitous in the ways everyday lives are lived and increasingly implicated in social research methods. Moreover it is increasingly redundant to speak of visual media without referring to digital technologies. However alongside these developments remain a series of issues and questions concerning: the multiple ways visual and digital materials and methods might be integrated in social science research, how we use visual media in face-to-face fieldwork, how we go about online fieldwork and digital data collection and the ethical questions surrounding these processes.

This workshop explores recent developments though four presentations of work that is engaged with the analysis of everyday life (broadly defined) through the use of visual and digital media. This includes, using digital video in the production and dissemination of research materials, using mobile phones as research tools, analysing visual images and the analysis or use of web platforms that use photography and video.

In addition to the four presentations we invite researchers who are developing visual and digital research but do not yet feel ready to give a full presentation to present their work in the form of a one-screen discussion ‘poster’ to be brought to and displayed at the workshop on a laptop. We will tour and discuss the ‘posters’ with their authors during the coffee break. ‘Posters’ should not represent a finished piece of research, but can be a proposal, an idea, images based on work in progress, or a problem encountered during research in progress that you are trying to solve.

The workshop is not simply a series of presentations of finished works. Rather, it aims to be a forum to discuss the most recent innovations that we are developing as researchers. We hope the presenters and participants will generate new insights together and leave the event with new ideas, understandings and inspirations and that this event will generate on-going dialogues. The event will be limited to 30 participants.

Note that the languages of the workshop will be Spanish, Catalan and English .

Programme

15.00    Introduction and welcome

15.15    Sarah Pink – Visualising practices and places: images in and of the everyday  

16.00    Joana Conill – Researching new economic cultures and the making of the documentary “Homenatge a Catalunya II”

16.45    Coffee and viewing of poster presentations

17.15    Elisenda Ardevol and Edgar Gomez – Visual practices and Ethnography on-line: methods and proposals

18.00    Roger Canals -Dioses de tarifa plana: visuality and new media in the everyday religious practice of African Amercians in the diaspora

18.45    Group discussion: key insights, inspirations and ideas (with coffee)

19.15    Summing up of comments from groups and ideas for the future

20.00    We will be going out for some informal drinks and to eat in a local bar or restaurant: you are welcome to join us!

Note that places will be limited so advance registration is required.

To register for this workshop: Please send an e-mail to: Montserrat Mir Buxalleu [mmirb@uoc.edu] giving your name, title and academic affiliation

If you would like to give an electronic ‘poster’ presentation please inform us at the time of registration. The ‘poster’ should be brought and shown on your own laptop.