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

Photographs in Common

Oh, I’m also going to be in Philadelphia in early October at the American Studies Association annual conference, doing something like this. Anyone else going to be there? Anyone want to come? America was once British.

I hate the genre of the paper abstract. When am I going to figure out how to write one that I like?

Add comment September 10th, 2007

I guess you could call it old

I ran into this the other day (thanks Lauren): Josephine Berry Slater’s Phd thesis on net art. It’s good. One of the best things I’ve read on media arts. She frames her discussion with the concept of site-specificity. And if you want to know what else is going on these days with that concept, look here. Kwon’s book, and Slater’s thesis, do the brick by brick historical and conceptual work you want them to do, but then open the concept up to address new work and new conditions. Useful. I didn’t mean that to come out sounding like a book review.

Add comment September 10th, 2007

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

Census night tonight.

The Australian Census is the largest annual statistical undertaking by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). It’s compulsory, it’s the fifteenth ever, it’s done every five years and this is the first year you can submit your info online (via the …..wait for it, eCensus). They are expecting one million people to use the website tonight and a spokesperson on the radio assured the public that there would be “regular automatic saves” during the process so no info would be lost. There are several new topics introduced in the 2006 form; the themes of which are no doubt triggered by our aging demographic and the economic urgency to populate that infuses much political rhetoric.

Need for assistance: Need for assistance questions will cover the areas of self care, movement and communication. Reason for need for assistance or supervision will also be asked.

Unpaid work: This is being asked for the first time. These questions will include unpaid domestic work, unpaid care due to a disability, long term illness or old age, unpaid child care and voluntary work.

Number of children ever born: This question is asked every ten years to help calculate measures of lifetime fertility, including average number of children born to women and childlessness.

This is also new.

Dwelling internet connection: The answers to this question will be used to measure how widespread household access to the Internet, both broadband and dial-up, has become in Australia.

In 2001 people were asked to “indicate whether, in the week preceding the Census, they had used a personal computer at home and whether they had used the Internet at home, at work or elsewhere”. Despite the new focus in this Census on different types of internet connection I am still surprised how little is asked about new technology ownership and use in the home. Under this question (which happens to be the last one) “Can the internet be accessed at this dwelling?” the choices are pretty brutal with no separation of types of broadband connections in the choice of answers.

- No internet connection
- Yes, broadband connection (including ADSL, Cable, Wireless and Satellite connections)
- Yes, dial-up connection (including analog modem and ISDN conneciton)
- Other (include internet access through mobile phones etc)

Curiously they encourage respondents to “include any internet service regardless of whether or not paid for by the household” which probably boringly refers to a work supplied connection but I’d like to assume it conveniently covers those who regularly access their neighbours WiFi. Shame there is no way of tracing it.

Moreover there is ambiguity in the clarification ‘If more than one type of connection in dwelling, mark the higher type”. What is the higher type when you use fixed and mobile wireless internet at home? Are they talking about speed, cost, strength, a device hierachy, convenience, reliability, use, stress levels….?

Am I the only person who has read the 2006 Census form and accompanying materials this carefully?

Because it’s statistically unlikely that anyone is still reading at this point here’s a bit of Census baby trivia: Nearly 20,000 children under the age of five were forgotten by their parents in the 2001 Census. To combat this ABS distributed ‘I just made the count’ T-shirts to hospitals around the country to remind new parents. AND Tonight a radio talkback host passed on a listener’s question to an ABS official “What language do I list for my baby in the Census?” His answer? The parents could probably speculate on what language the child is likely to learn because they shouldn’t write “Baby” on the form.

Add comment August 8th, 2006