weekly INCITE

Just out!

Many thanks to Shadey and Seabird for giving me permission to use these pictures of them ‘doing wireless’ on the cover of Mel and Gerard’s new book.

Add comment December 2nd, 2007

Whoah!

Next week I’m in Sydney to do more on this.

Must pack:
- questions
- consent forms
- camera
- mp3 recorder
- microphone
- 30+ sunscreen and hat

Add comment November 17th, 2006

multi-tasking.

Me seeing if it’s possible to take photos AND help build volunteer community wireless network APs at the same time.

Add comment November 16th, 2006

Aoir 7.0 – Brisbane, QLD

I’m currently in Brisbane. I primarily came here to attend AoiR [the association of internet researchers conference] but it was also a terrific excuse to spend valuable time with Mel Gregg from the University of Queensland, whose research around new media’s impact on gender and labour politics intersects in many ways with the one year INCITE/Intel research study I am doing about wireless tech in Australian homes. Through Mel I also got the chance to meet and talk with UQ’s MACS [media and cultural studies] group about working with industry.

One of the main reasons I attended the conference this year (even though I didn’t submit a paper to it) was to gain exposure to Australian researchers and their work. So often these types of conferences are held in North America or the UK and the cost and time required to travel such a distance inhibits many southern hemisphere researchers so I thought it might be a chance to immerse myself in local internet research. AoiR 7.0 definitely delivered on this. Aussie accents and interests abounded.

Highlights:

Jean Burgess’ panel on Creativity and its discontents: Critical perspectives on the cultural economy of new media with Mel Gregg UQ• Sal Humphreys UQ • Christina Spurgeon QUT

In recent years there has been a growth in ‘cyberbole’ that insists that the increased availability and power of digital technologies for production and distribution represent a revolution that will allow ‘everyone’ to be an active and creative media participant, This panel aims to provide detailed accounts of the limits of these discourses. We will examine the complexity of agency and the constraints on it within the cultural economy of new media, particularly in relation to neoliberal economics and what ‘creative industries’ and their users, consumers, or co-creators are actually doing.

The forgotten ‘have-nots’: Refugees and the legacy of techno-utopianism
Linda Leung • University of Technology Sydney, Australia

The paper discusses the author’s recent work with refugees in Australian immigration detention centres. It explores the range of technology available to detainees to communicate with the outside world as well as the constraints in the ways that they can be used. Specifically, it interrogates the policy of prohibiting access to the Internet while allowing a variety of ‘old media’ to be used by detainees. What does this intimate about the perceived dangers of ‘new media’?

The work of Annakarin Nyberg of the University of Umeå, Sweden, was also interesting to me in relation to the INCITE/Intel study. Anakarin explored use and non-use of tech in domestic contexts and articulated the oscilation between the two as a form of friction that people deliberately attend to in their everyday lives.

IT use in everyday life and the importance of friction
Annakarin Nyberg • University of Umeå, Sweden

This paper advocates a need for a more nuanced understanding of non-use of information technology and suggests an alternative understanding. This thought is based on the idea that with the technology’s entrance into more private settings, such as our homes, it has given rise to a rich variety of both new use and non-use patterns that make the traditional dichotomy questionable. As a consequence, the paper argues for the fact that people’s striving towards controlling and restricting forms of information technology should be regarded as aware efforts to add friction into their lives, rather than something negative and based on fear and lack of knowledge.

It was also interesting and odd to meet the people behind the blogs I read regularly and find those who knew me in similar text/visual form before the conference. There is something simultaneously unnerving and comforting familiar about these kinds of interactions. I like them, overall. It’s just that they throw you just a little, and you can see the same happening to those you confront with “hang on… you aren’t the so-and-so blogger are you? oh, i read you all the time.”

Midlights:

There was of course a flip side of the abundance of Australian and Asian researchers and research at the conference. There were far fewer US, UK and Euro participants this year in comparison to my experience of the last two – in Chicago (US) and Sussex (UK). I guess this is the nature of international conferences, but I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of the disappointment that local (ie. Australasian) researchers might feel. I began to realise how much I take for granted the many geographically ops available to me because I’m (generally) located in London. I became conscious of what it must mean not to be able to see, present, discuss and draw on work from a diverse range of open and discursive forums and communities like this one. It’s not that AoIR 7.0 wasn’t valuable, rather it was just very different in terms of exchange. I know many talks inevitably become papers available in printed and online journals, blogs and the sort which is very useful for those unable to attend, but it’s not the same as being part of an live event where ideas are new and delicate and taking shape. For a short while I glimpsed a little of the isolation that academic life in Australia might hold for some.

Then again not everyone likes a conference and not all conferences are the same…….

Add comment October 9th, 2006

More abandoned tech.

I was actually searching for discarded cycles for another project and was amazed to see so many abandoned computers.

Add comment September 3rd, 2006