The paper analyses wireless networks in terms of a concept of experience drawn from the work of William James. James' account of experience focuses closely on the effects of ongoing change, and this is particularly useful in thinking about media change. The specific experience in question here is 'wirelessness,' an experience that envelops many media, infrastructures, practices, and processes today. The paper argues that a concept of wirelessness uniquely connects together a set of perceptions, representation, materials, problems and events associated with ongoing change in contemporary media and information cultures. In analysing wirelessness as form of experience, the article examines how those feelings of ongoing change shape and inform experiences of self, otherness, place and sociality in technological-informatic environments. In describing different infrastructural and commercial dimensions of wirelessness, it pays close attention to how ‘conjunctive relations’ (James’ term) such as ‘with’, ‘between’, ‘near’, and ‘inside’ arise in wireless networks, and how different kinds of intimacy and distance stem from conjunctive relations. The paper explores how wirelessness embodies and organises networked places. In this respect, the paper inverts conventional understandings of the network as ground or platform. It treats the under-represented yet highly significant embodied experiences of relations as generative of information infrastructures.

David M. Berry - A Contribution Towards A Grammar of Code

Over the past thirty years there has been an increasing interest in the social and cultural implications of digital technologies and ‘informationalism’ from the social sciences and humanities. Generally this has concentrated on the implications of the “convergence” of digital devices and services, understood as linked to the discrete processing capabilities of computers, which rely on logical operations, binary processing and symbolic representation. In this paper, I wish to suggest that a ‘grammar of code’ might provide a useful way of thinking about the way in which digital technologies operate as a medium and can contribute usefully to this wider debate. I am interested in the way in which the dynamic properties of code can be understood as operating according to a grammar reflected in its materialisation and operation in the lifeworld – the discretisation of the phenomenal world. As part of that contribution in this paper I develop some tentative Weberian ‘ideal-types’. These ideal-types are then applied to the work of the Japanese composer, Masahiro Miwa, whose innovative ‘Reverse-Simulation music’ models the operation of basic low-level digital circuitry for the performance and generation of musical pieces.

Jonathan Sterne, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker and Ariana Moscote Freire - The Politics of Podcasting

Hailed as a revolutionary new transmission technology in 2005, podcasting has to date received relatively little scholarly attention. This essay sets out some basic points of departure for critical analysis of the phenomenon by considering some key aspects of podcasting’s short history. We first analyse the origins and emergence of the word podcasting among the press and the digerati. We dispute the standard argument that podcasting’s main innovation is a marriage of RSS and Apple’s iPod by presenting podcasting as a practice that arose from a network of actors, technologies and behaviours. In the second section, we discuss how podcasting works and why we need to look beyond distribution to understand its historical emergence. In the third section of the essay, we connect podcasting with the development of affordable and easy-to-use consumer audio production software and hardware, technologies that are necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions for podcasting to offer greater access for audiences and producers than traditional models of broadcasting. We conclude by examining the implicit contrast between “podcasting” and “broadcasting” in order to trouble the commonsensical definition of broadcasting and thereby reopen some basic questions about who is entitled to communicate and by which techniques. While podcasting is neither a complete break from broadcasting nor part of any kind of revolution, it is the realisation of an alternate cultural model of broadcasting. The practice of podcasting thus offers us an opportunity to rethink the connections between broadcasting and other kinds of media practices and to re-examine the political and cultural questions broadcasting presents.

Caroline Bassett - New Maps for Old?: The Cultural Stakes of '2.0'

Convergence theorists explore/predict the fusion of a series of previously discrete forms, a process that might be viewed as un-problematically centripetal. This is the longstanding view of the information industry. It produces a particular outcome - there may be local difficulties, but the perceived ontology of information is towards total convergence. Focussing on the socio-cultural diffusion of information cultural theorists have offered a different account of technical convergence where the stress has been on the centrifugal as much as the centripetal, so that not only what is pushed together through information but also what is forced apart, becomes significant. Jameson’s 1980s account of schizophrenia as the cultural logic of information capitalism is an example of this – and is written about the same time Negroponte set about founding/defining future media at MIT. Forcing these different accounts into relation with each other is productive, revealing lacunae not only in technical accounts of convergence but in critical accounts of informational culture, and exposing a naturalized set of alignments which might be questioned; to read the centrifugal moment of convergence as the technological moment and as the enlargement of a form of social control, and the centripetal moment as the cultural moment and as a form of evasion of control, can be problematic. In this context this article (i) explores the contemporary relationship between ‘2.0’ (read as essentially industrial account of convergence) and Henry Jenkins’ account of convergence culture as post-resistance culture and (ii) explores the potential for understanding contemporary convergence processes and the forms of participation they entail across a series of axes which together might provide a different and more multi-dimensional form of mapping.

Teodor Mitew - Repopulating the Map: Why Subjects and Things are Never Alone

This article engages the controversies surrounding locative media projects from the perspective of two spatial projections termed as ‘unveiling’ and ‘attaching’. The positions are illustrated with projects from locative media and counter-cartography. It is argued that a spatial projection approaching networks as a priori convergent topoi makes itself blind to the entities and logistics performing the effect of convergence and homogeneity. It is suggested that the controversy around locative media can subside only when mapping efforts concentrate on tracing the intensities of performativity, rather than mistaking its effects for an already present context.

Aylish Wood - Proliferating Connections and Communicating Convergence

In this paper I use the work of Niklas Luhmann to explore what pressure the concept of convergence exerts over how we communicate about the changing expressive practices of digital games following the emergence of digital technologies. My claim will be that in its current form, convergence privileges either the human users of technological platforms, or the combination of aesthetic conventions from different media what connects is either the user or the aesthetic code. While neither of these two positions would be likely to deny a reliance on the interplay between humans and technologies, such an interplay is taken for granted rather than explored. By using Luhmann’s version of systems theory, I argue that we can more effectively grasp the interplay of human and technological participants by understanding their combined roles in changing expressive practices.

Helen Thornham - Making games? Towards a theory of domestic videogaming

This article is concerned with the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming - the where, when and with whom gaming occurs. It follows David Morley’s suggestion that we need to decentre the media from our analytical framework in order to grasp both the relations between new and ‘old’ media, as well the way we live with them. It is an argument taken literally in this article, where an alternative framework of ontological narrative is developed as the primary means through which an understanding of the relationships between gamers and technology is reached. It focuses on interviews with gaming households and is interested in the ways gamers actively narrate gaming experiences, their gaming selves, and the gaming technology. Using ontological narrative as a central signifier facilitates discussions of the relationship between technology and the social which go beyond what the technology ‘itself’ can offer. It also insists on a socio-political context for the discussion itself. Through a more ontological narrative approach, videogames are framed as agents in negotiations with the power dynamics of the house, but their agency is complicated through issues of performativity, pleasure and identity. Finally, this approach allows for a much more nuanced understanding of the way games and the meanings they hold for the gamers are enmeshed in the everyday.

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