Abstracts
Phillip Roe -Textual
Dreaming: Dis-Ease in the Interface
New media presents us with a diverse range of texts which tend
to manifest through the centrality of the interface. The interface
is often argued as the most important part of any digital application
– it becomes the surface upon or through which a range of forces
and discourses converge and intersect. It can also be argued that
these discourses are subsumed within a particular idea of the interface
which in some instances can efface what is at stake in new media
texts. In particular, and what this paper investigates, is the question
of textuality itself, the limits and liberties of textual models.
This paper problematises the notion of the interface with a notion
of models of textuality, and considers some of the implications
for the future of reading.
José van
Dijck - Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs
Can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart
of what used to be paper diaries and diary writing? This article
examines three dimensions of this phenomenon in conjunction: the
diary/lifelog as a cultural form or genre, as a material and technological
object, and as cultural practice. Tracing the transformation of
personal logs in the face of new digital technologies, it is argued
that lifelogs and blogging are not outcomes but rather signifiers
of cultural change, as they both reflect and construct new epistemologies.
The current emergence of weblogs indicates a transformation of important
cultural notions such as individual and collective, privacy and
publicness, and memory and experience.
Trebor Scholz - It's
New Media: But is it Art Education?
There is a crisis in new media arts education. Education, like
public broadcasting, should not be afraid of low ratings and small
profits. The current crisis is starting to find widespread acknowledgment
among new media educators from the United States, Germany, Finland
and Australia and beyond. The unbearable lightness of topical orientation
and the tension between vocational training and education are some
of the core frictions. Navigating between Futurist narratives of
progress and the technophobia often encountered in more traditional
cultural theorists Scholz aims to show positive models for a future
of pedagogy in new media arts.
Kylie Veale - Online
Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For
Remembering The Dead
Memorialising the dead is an integral part of human nature that
can be traced back to the dawn of civilization. With the advent
of the Internet however, a new space, or cyberspace, allows the
living to remember the dead in geographically diverse and interactive
ways. Using a unique model based on the motivations and characteristics
of physical memorials, this paper investigates how one part of cyberspace,
the Web, is used for memorialisation practice. It also attempts
to discover why memorialisation may have been adopted online, in
addition to possible links between the remembrance of the dead in
the physical space and online, before finally discussing the Web
as a collective memorial landscape.
Séamus Byrne - Stop
Worrying and Learn to Love the Google-Bomb
While the ‘web as rhizome’ is widely understood, this
is rarely demonstrated more clearly than through the link ecologies
of blogs. Yet another concept from Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain,
could be in many ways as influential in understanding the nature
of the web, particularly how the web is invoked through search engines.
As Google’s PageRank algorithm is the most effective method
of invoking a useful web hierarchy today, it has become both a practical
and theoretical focus for the nature of the web itself. This paper
aims to show that when blog linkages are used to intentionally influence
PageRank, we find we are granted a clear and temporal demonstration
of both rhizome and refrain.
Jonathan Marshall -
The Online Body Breaks Out?: Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity
and Politics
Online bodies, or cyber-bodies, seem to be constantly involved
in issues of boundaries. This paper explores some of those issues.
A brief outline of some offline boundary anxieties is given, such
as being overwhelmed by germs, work or the foreign. It is then argued
that boundaries online are even more porous and unclear. The term
'asence' is introduced to point to an existential anxiety about
the ambiguities of being suspended between presence and absence.
It is shown that asence and the problems around the sustaining of
mood, explain some aspects of online life including flame, netsex,
and the intensity of mourning. A sense of online presence may only
be able to arise through asencing of the offline body and its discomforts.
Ethnographic examples come from the Mailing List Cybermind. The
vagueness of the virtual body is compared with other common western
constructions of virtual bodies such as ghosts, and it is suggested
that such constructions still have strength despite widespread cynicism
about mind (online) and body (offline) splits. Computers seem to
have become a place for haunting and disembodiment, which produces
confusions when it becomes time to act offline. Other useful metaphors
may not be able to be used. Haraway's model of the Cyborg is often
claimed to overcome these problems, collapsing borders between human
and machine, human and animal, sentient and non-sentient, female
and male. However it seems to fail in these tasks because the cyborg
myth has its own directions independent of our intentions, and this
myth is directed by the discourse of techno-capitalism. It may prove
more useful to strategically exaggerate oppositions, or to explore
their ambiguities, than to dampen them by theoretical hybridisation.
Belinda Barnet &
Niles Eldredge - Material Cultural Evolution: An Interview with
Niles Eldredge
This article is the edited version of a discussion that took place
between Professor Niles Eldredge and Belinda Barnet in March 2004.
Niles is one of the world's most accomplished scientific thinkers
in the field of evolutionary biology, and in this discussion he
relates his ideas on the mechanisms for change in material cultural
systems for a lay audience. The utility of comparing material cultural
and biological systems is also discussed, and opportunities opened
for further cross-disciplinary discussion between the social sciences
and evolutionary biology.
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