Culture Machine, 13: Paying Attention (2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · attention, attention economy, floss, labour, networks, production, software
“This issue of Culture Machine sets itself two interrelated tasks in response to the scope and implications of these interrelated positions concerning attention, consciousness, culture, economics and politics. Firstly, it interrogates the notion of attention as it is elaborated in approaches to the attention economy and to media as forms of attention capture. The essays by three leading contributors to thinking in and around these themes, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and Jonathan Beller, have such an interrogation as their principal task. They develop different, overlapping and sometimes contrasting perspectives on how a critical reposing of the question of attention might reframe its purchase on the central themes of the relation between interiority and exteriority, minds and media, economics and culture. The interview with Michel Bauwens, and the essays by Ben Roberts and Sy Taffel, are also working toward this end in that they identify various limitations and exclusions of the predominant articulation of the attention economy and move toward alternative, more productive, ethical or socially just formulations.
The second task of this issue is pursued in the essays of Tania Bucher, Martin Thayne, Rolien Hoyng and the three contributions to the additional section of the issue. These three – from Ruth Catlow, Constance Fleuriot and Bjarke Liboriussen – represent less scholarly but no less acute strategic inquiries into the thinking and re-making of what Stiegler calls attentional technics. Together, these contributions address particular instantiations of media forms, design practices and phenomena – from Facebook and Second Life to pervasive media design and Istanbul’s digitally mediated City of European Culture project – as a way of exploring and critically inflecting the implementation of the attention economy. This second mode moves from material phenomena to theoretical analysis and critique, while the first goes the other way. As we have argued, however, the necessity of the traffic between them is a central tenet of how we endeavour to pay attention to contemporary digital technoculture in this issue.” (from the introduction)
Edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley
Publisher Open Humanities Press
Open Access
ISSN 1465-4121
PDFs (updated on 2019-5-8)
Comment (0)Fibreculture Journal 20: Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures (2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · liberation technologies, networks, technology, utopia
“This issue of The Fibreculture Journal has brought together studies in networked communities with novel, historical and creative approaches to utopia in order to examine the productivity of future-thinking from our present location. Reading through the essays collected here it becomes clear that framing utopia in the future, endlessly deferring it until a ‘perfect’ world emerges, is a perfect way of never doing anything at all. More immediately, the events of the Arab Spring, the rebuilding of Christchurch, and other examples of activism and community work documented here reframe the future through the present, reminding us that the actions we take today open up new possible futures. Indeed this is the message of the ‘risk subject’ described by Levina, in which the future perfect self is created by the choices of the present. Many of the essays published in this issue interrogate the relationships between hopeful imagining and action. In looking for utopia they acknowledge the value of hope, but recognise that ‘networks’ need to be active sites of engagement, critique, and risk, not simply an abstract idea, or ideal. The network alone will not get us there. As a whole this issue exposes and critiques the casually utopian use of the network as a synonym for open, free, egalitarian and participatory. In retaining the paradox at the heart of the term “networked utopias” we have opened up a dynamic, messy, imperfect arena of hopeful action and collective speculation.” (from Editorial)
Articles on: The material substrate of networks; the Arab Spring; re-imagining mobile communications via encounters with a neolithic village; the ‘freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge’ events that have taken place between Spain and Morocco; utopias and political economies of networks, space and time; networks and health; networks and food; and Montréal residents’ appropriation of train tracks.
Issue Edited by Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, July 2012
ISSN: 1449 – 1443
Daniel Kreiss: Taking Our Country Back? Political Consultants and the Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (2010)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · internet, networked politics, networks, politics, social movements, united states
While many scholars argue that the falling cost of producing and disseminating digital information drives new forms of collective political action, this dissertation reveals how digital tools, practices, and cultural processes together shape electoral campaigning. In the process, this research shows that digital technologies are not the primary drivers of changes in political practice and networked politics is not as radically democratic as many scholars suggest. Through open-ended interviews, archival research, and participant observation this work shows how until the 2003-2004 presidential election political consultants used the Internet as mass medium. During the Howard Dean campaign, however, consultants deployed a set of Internet applications that enabled citizens to work together on tasks such as voter mobilization and fundraising. As these new media staffers drew from their corporate experience to build these tools they described the campaign as a technologically-empowered, 1960s-style social movement. The dissertation concludes by showing how after the campaign these staffers founded political consultancies and brought these tools, techniques, and claims to many other sites in electoral politics, including Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. While telling this history, this dissertation shows how social formations and cultural work together shape the uptake of tools in electoral campaigning. Meanwhile, in contrast to many accounts of democratizing ‘Web 2.0’ technologies, this dissertation reveals that digital media vastly extend the power of campaign consultants to motivate, channel, and control electoral work.
Dissertation
Department of Communication, Stanford University, 2010
251 pages
The thesis was later published as a book, author, publisher
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