This study examines the dynamics of critical Internet culture after the medium opened to a broader audience in the mid 1990s. It is Geert Lovink's PhD thesis, submitted late 2002, written in between his two books on the same topic: Dark Fiber (2002) and My First Recession (2003). The core of the research consists of four case studies of non-profit networks: the Amsterdam community provider, The Digital City (DDS); the early years of the nettime mailinglist community; a history of the European new media arts network Syndicate; and an analysis of the streaming media network Xchange. The research describes the search for sustainable community network models in a climate of hyper growth and increased tensions and conflict concerning moderation and ownership of online communities.
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.
This peer-reviewed volume contains selected papers from the First EAGLE International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage, held in Paris between September 29 and October 1, 2014. Here are assembled for the first time in a unique volume contributions regarding all aspects of Digital Epigraphy: Models, Vocabularies, Translations, User Engagements, Image Analysis, 3D methodologies, and ongoing projects at the cutting edge of digital humanities. The scope of this book is not limited to Greek and Latin epigraphy; it provides an overview of projects related to all epigraphic inquiry and its related communities. This approach intends to furnish the reader with the broadest possible perspective of the discipline, while at the same time giving due attention to the specifics of unique issues.
Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production shows how changes in the design of music software in the first decades of the twenty-first century shaped the production techniques and performance practices of artists working across media, from hip-hop and electronic dance music to video games and mobile apps. Emerging alongside developments in digital music distribution such as peer-to-peer file sharing and the MP3 format, digital audio workstations like FL Studio and Ableton Live introduced design affordances that encouraged rapid music creation workflows through flashy, "user-friendly" interfaces. Meanwhile, software such as Avid's Pro Tools attempted to protect its status as the "industry standard," "professional" DAW of choice by incorporating design elements from pre-digital music technologies. Other software, like Cycling 74's Max, asserted its alterity to "commercial" DAWs by presenting users with nothing but a blank screen. These are more than just aesthetic design choices. Push examines the social, cultural, and political values designed into music software, and how those values become embodied by musical communities through production and performance. It reveals ties between the maximalist design of FL Studio, skeuomorphic design in Pro Tools, and gender inequity in the music products industry. It connects the computational thinking required by Max, as well as iZotope's innovations in artificial intelligence, with the cultural politics of Silicon Valley's "design thinking." Finally, it thinks through what happens when software becomes hardware, and users externalize their screens through the use of MIDI controllers, mobile media, and video game controllers. Amidst the perpetual upgrade culture of music technology, Push provides a model for understanding software as a microcosm for the increasing convergence of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and techno-utopianism that has come to define our digital lives.
‘Being in the zone' means performing in a distinctive, unusual, pleasurable and highly competent way at something you already regularly do: dancing or playing a viola, computer programming, tennis and much more. What makes the zone special? This volume offers groundbreaking research that brings sociological and cultural studies to bear on the idea of being in the zone. There is original research on musicians, dancers and surfers which shows that being in the zone far from being exclusively individualised and private but must be understood as social and collective and possibly accessible to all. The zone is not just for elite performers. Being in the zone is not just the province of the athlete who suddenly and seemingly without extra effort swims faster or jumps higher or the musician who suddenly plays more than perfectly, but also of the doctor working under intense pressure or the computer programmer staying up all night. The meaning of such experiences for convincing people to work in intense conditions, often with short term contracts, is explored to show how being in the zone can have problematic effects and have negative and constraining as well as creative and productive implications. Often being in the zone is understood from a psychological viewpoint but this can limit our understanding. This volume provides the first in-depth analysis of being in the zone from social and cultural viewpoints drawing on a range of theories and novel evidence. Written in a stimulating and accessible style, Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity: Being in the Zone will strongly appeal to students and researchers who aim to understand the experience of work, creativity, musicianship and sport. Issues of the body are also central to being in the zone and will make this book relevant to anyone studying bodies and embodiment . This collection will establish being in the zone as an important area of enquiry for social science and the humanities.
This book is intended for applications of online digital mapping, called mashups (or composite application), and to analyze the mapping practices in online socio-technical controversies. The hypothesis put forward is that the ability to create an online map accompanies the formation of online audience and provides support for a position in a debate on the Web. The first part provides a study of the map: - a combination of map and statistical reason - crosses between map theories and CIS theories - recent developments in scanning the map, from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Web map. The second part is based on a corpus of twenty "mashup" maps, and offers a techno-semiotic analysis highlighting the "thickness of the mediation" they are in a process of communication on the Web. Map as a device to "make do" is thus replaced through these stages of creation, ranging from digital data in their viewing, before describing the construction of the map as a tool for visual evidence in public debates, and ending with an analysis of the delegation action against Internet users. The third section provides an analysis of these mapping practices in the case study of the controversy over nuclear radiation following the accident at the Fukushima plant on March 11, 2011. Techno-semiotic method applied to this corpus of radiation map is supplemented by an analysis of web graphs, derived from "digital methods" and graph theory, accompanying the analysis of the previous steps maps (creating Geiger data or retrieving files online), but also their movement, once maps are made.
This book examines manufactured waste and remaindered humans in literary critiques of capitalism by twentieth-century writers associated with the historical avant-garde and their descendants. Building on recent work in new materialism and waste studies, Rachele Dini reads waste as a process or phase amenable to interruption. From an initial exploration of waste and re-use in three Surrealist texts by Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, and Mina Loy, Dini traces the conceptualization of waste in the writing of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, J.G. Ballard, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo. In exploring the relationship between waste, capitalism, and literary experimentation, this book shows that the legacy of the historical avant-garde is bound up with an enduring faith in the radical potential of waste. The first study to focus specifically on waste in the twentieth-century imagination, this is a valuable contribution to the expanding field of waste studies.
Why does work matter? As changes occur in how work is organised across the globe, What’s wrong with work shows that how workers are treated has wide implications beyond the lives of workers themselves. Recognising gender, race, class and global differences, the book looks at three kinds of increasingly important work – green work, IT work and the ‘gig’ economy - within the context of the neoliberal society, the promises of technologisation and anticipated environmental catastrophe. It considers the ways formal work is often dependent on informal work, especially domestic work and care work. Accessible and engaging, it concludes by considering political and ethical questions in what might make work better, arguing that there is a collective responsibility to address bad work.
Every user knows the importance of the “@” symbol in internet communication. Though the symbol barely existed in Latin America before the emergence of email, Spanish-speaking feminist activists immediately claimed it to replace the awkward “o/a” used to indicate both genders in written text, discovering embedded in the internet an answer to the challenge of symbolic inclusion. In repurposing the symbol, they changed its meaning. In Interpreting the Internet, Elisabeth Jay Friedman provides the first in-depth exploration of how Latin American feminist and queer activists have interpreted the internet to support their counterpublics. Aided by a global network of women and men dedicated to establishing an accessible internet, activists have developed identities, constructed communities, and honed strategies for social change. And by translating the internet into their own vernacular, they have transformed the technology itself. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in feminist and gender studies, Latin American studies, media studies, and political science, as well as anyone curious about the ways in which the internet shapes our lives.
