Browse

A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. This book is the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), and it examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

Bioethical dilemmas, including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion, have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, and among the public, professionals, and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media is the transformation of the very notion of life. This book examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, it goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose an “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the non-human (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. The author describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac’s infamous fluorescent green bunny. The book addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, the author makes the case for a new non-systemic, non-hierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography, which can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. This book moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political, and moral aspects of pornography to address online pornography in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, it addresses experiences of pornography, largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. The author links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online pornography and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. She discusses the development of online pornography, focusing on the figure of the pornography consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur pornography. The author maps out the modality of online pornography as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. She also analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornography, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of pornography. The book’s analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that pornography takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.

This book draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. The human body is placed at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing. The author asks what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this. The book offers a reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies. After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, the author applies the phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.

If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influencing learning and teaching in ways previously unseen. Social media is transforming sectors outside education by changing patterns in personal, commercial, and cultural interaction. These changes offer a window into the future(s) of education, with new means of knowledge production and reception, and new roles for learners and teachers. Surveying the uses to which social media has been applied in these early years, we see a need to re-envision education for the coming decades. To date, no book has systematically and accessibly examined how the cultural and technological shift of social media is influencing educational practices. With this book, we aim to fill that gap. This book critically explores the future of education and online social media, convening leading scholars from the fields of education, law, communications, and cultural studies. We believe that this interdisciplinary edited volume will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to understand the opportunities for learning and education that exist at the intersection of social media and education. The book will examine educational institutions, access and participation, new literacies and competencies, cultural reproduction, international accreditation, intellectual property, privacy and protection, new business models, and technical architectures for digital education.

This book explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The author shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational—from a “ballet of objects and lights” staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary, technologically enabled “responsive environments”—have been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. The author examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theatre, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders. Each chapter in the book focuses on a different form: theaterscenography, architecture, video and image making, music and sound composition, body-based arts, mechanical and robotic art, and interactive environments constructed for research, festivals, and participatory urban spaces. The author shows that the survey and analysis of performance traditions have much to teach other emerging practices—in particular in the burgeoning fields of new media. Students of digital art need to master not only electronics and code but also dramaturgy, lighting, sound, and scenography.

Video games have a bad reputation in the mainstream media. They are blamed for encouraging social isolation, promoting violence, and creating tensions between parents and children. In this book, Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee offer another view. They show that video games can be a tool for connection, not isolation, creating opportunities for families to communicate and learn together. Siyahhan and Gee offer examples of how video games, like smartphones, Skype, and social media, help families stay connected. Further, they describe how families express their feelings and share their experiences and understanding of the world through playing video games like Sims, Civilization, and Minecraft. When designed intentionally to support families, video games can also create conversations around such real-world issues and sensitive topics as bullying and peer pressure. Siyahhan and Gee draw on a decade of research to look at how learning and teaching take place when families play video games together. With video games, they argue, the parents are not necessarily the teachers and experts; all family members can be both teachers and learners. They suggest video games can help families form, develop, and sustain their learning culture as well as develop skills that are valued in the twenty-first century workplace. Finally, Siyahhan and Gee share recommendations for educators and game designers who are interested in supporting intergenerational play around video games.

A guide to the nature, purpose, and place of public service television within a multi-platform, multichannel ecology. Television is on the verge of both decline and rebirth. Vast technological change has brought about financial uncertainty as well as new creative possibilities for producers, distributors, and viewers. This book examines not only the unexpected resilience of TV as a cultural pastime and aesthetic practice but also the prospects for public service television in a digital, multichannel ecology. The proliferation of platforms from Amazon and Netflix to YouTube and the vlogosphere means intense competition for audiences traditionally dominated by legacy broadcasters. Public service broadcasters — whether the BBC, the German ARD, or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are particularly vulnerable to this volatility. Born in the more stable political and cultural conditions of the twentieth century, they face a range of pressures on their revenue, their remits, and indeed their very futures. This book reflects on the issues raised in Lord Puttnam's 2016 Public Service TV Inquiry Report. With resonance for students, professionals, and consumers with a stake in British media, it serves both as a historical record and as a look at the future of television in an on-demand age.

Eastern Europe's historically unprecedented and accelerated transition from late communism to late capitalism, coupled with media globalization, set in motion a scramble for cultural identity and a struggle over access to and control over media technologies. This book examines the corporate transformation of the postcommunist media landscape in Eastern Europe. Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and nostalgic projections of a simpler, better media world under communism, it argues that the demise of Soviet-style regimes and the transition of postcommunist nation-states to transnational capitalism have crucial implications for understanding the relationships among nationalism, media globalization, and identity. The author analyzes situations in which anxieties arise about the encroachment of global entertainment media and its new technologies on national culture, examining the rich aesthetic hybrids that have grown from the transitional postcommunist terrain. She investigates the gaps and continuities between the last communist and first postcommunist generations in education, tourism, and children's media culture; the racial and class politics of music entertainment (including Roma Rap and Idol television talent shows); and mediated reconfigurations of gender and sexuality (including playful lesbian media activism and masculinity in “carnivalistic” post-Yugoslav film). Throughout the book, the concepts of play and games as metaphoric and theoretical tools are used to explain the process of cultural change— inspired in part by the increasing “ludification” of the global media environment and the emerging engagement with play across scholarly disciplines. In the vision that the author offers, political and cultural participation are seen as games whose rules are permanently open to negotiation.

We are surrounded by images as never before: On Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; and in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today’s information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This book offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and analytical approaches to the visual. It examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and the impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.

The perpetual connectivity made possible by twenty-first-century technology has profoundly affected instruction and learning. Emerging technologies that upend traditional notions of communication and community also influence the ways we design and evaluate instruction, and how we understand learning and learning environments. This book offers a multidisciplinary analysis of the dynamic relationship between technology and learning, and describes how today’s ubiquitous technology conflates our once-separated learning worlds—work, leisure, and higher educational spaces. The author reviews the ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation about learning with technology and distance education, and examines a dozen models of instruction and learning with technology drawn from peer-reviewed research. Taking an integrative approach to design, he offers a framework for everyday instructional situations, describing five interdependent dimensions: Learner background and knowledge, learner tasks and activities, social dynamics, instructor activities, and learning environment and artifacts. The technologies that distribute today’s classroom across time and space call for a discussion about what we value in the traditional classroom. The book lays the groundwork for the long-term multidisciplinary investigation, which is required as researchers and practitioners shape and extend the boundaries of this emerging field.

The sites of major media organizations—CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others—provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine this gap and consider the implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age. Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture. They show that it narrows in times of heightened political activity (including presidential elections or government crises) as readers feel compelled to inform themselves about public affairs but remains wide during times of normal political activity. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein also find that the gap is not affected by innovations in Web-native forms of storytelling such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Keeping the account of the news gap up to date, in the book’s coda they extend the analysis through the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Drawing upon these findings, the authors explore the news gap’s troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.

This book explores the changing social ideas that have determined wages for women during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The struggle between the concepts of identity, traditional gender roles, and the workforce has historically led to much conflict as women tried to gain first a minimum wage, and then equal pay for equal work. Even today, the debate still exists concerning women, work, motherhood, and careers. This book investigates how wage exists as a social construct that influences the way women are compensated for their work, creating the boundaries between what is deemed appropriate for women to earn in comparison to men. The book calls attention to the role gender has played in the economy and proposes a new understanding of a “social wage” as a way to erase the differences between a man’s and a woman’s wage.

The new media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: From celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing, etc. This book argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability, and discusses the assumptions of source code and logos and making computers more productive by exploiting the potential of source code. New media rapidly advances to “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, and for a general logic of substitutability. The book furthermore argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: Who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet’s prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s, the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and its ultimate success depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who do not need it or on technical workarounds that could, in turn, create a new set of concerns. This book examines what is at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Its key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. It intersects with topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. The author offers recommendations for Internet standards governance based on technical concerns and on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.

This book offers a philosophy of movement, challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, it argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—the author develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates the relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, she describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply by stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. The author examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson’s idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, she proposes a theory of prearticulation, claiming that the language’s affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. The book takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead’s importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century–Deleuze and Guattari in particular.

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. This book provides views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. It offers commentary from experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing. The projects described range from the development of a national virtual observatory for astronomical research to a National Institutes of Health funding program for major multi-laboratory medical research; from the deployment of a cyberinfrastructure to connect experts in earthquake engineering to partnerships between developed and developing countries in AIDS research. The chapter authors speak frankly about the problems these projects encountered as well as the successes they achieved. The book strikes a balance between presenting real stories of collaborations and developing a scientific approach to conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating such projects. It points to a future of scientific collaborations that build successfully on aspects from multiple disciplines.

This collection of short, expository, critical, and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software. Computing and digital media are essential to the way we work and live, and much has been said about their influence. But the very material of software has often been rendered invisible. In this book, computer scientists, artists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others from a range of disciplines each take on a key topic in the understanding of software and the work that surrounds it. These include algorithms; logical structures; ways of thinking and doing that leak out of the domain of logic and into everyday life; the value and aesthetic judgments built into computing; programming's own subcultures; and the tightly formulated building blocks that work to make, name, multiply, control, and interweave reality. The growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural theory that can explain the politics of pixels or the poetry of a loop and engage in the microanalysis of everyday digital objects. The contributors are both literate in computing (and involved in some way in the production of software) and active in making and theorizing culture.