Publicly Sited

Media, Technology & Culture 07 (3rd Edition): Embodied Technologies

Media technologies today seem to be everywhere. Assisting us in – or invading – each and every corner of our daily existence. We have already discussed how this ubiquity is embedded into a huge range of physical infrastructures; environments where media technologies surround us. And yet, we also increasingly carry media around with us, in our pockets, hands, ears, across our eyes, around our wrists. We wear media like clothes – and we may soon implant media within our bodies. This need not be seen in the guise of science fiction. It is more interesting to see it as really quite ordinary. For a long time, we humans have shared an intimacy with media technologies. They not only affect how we see ourselves, but modulate and help produce who and what we are. In this episode, we will begin our exploration of media as embodied technologies with the humble mobile phone. Through their aestheticisation, practical uses and technological development, mobile phones were an important precursor to the myriad mobile devices we know today. Contemporary embodied technologies however go beyond being portable, or affording wireless access to online content. They are increasingly built into and for our bodies, and modulate our interactions with environments: giving tactile responses through screen interfaces, automatically detecting one’s geographic location and orientation, or one’s bodily temperature and heartrate, or the ambient sound and lighting in a room. Ultimately, we ask why we have such intimate embodied relationships with media: the answer, in part, relates to how media are entangled with our identity.

Thinkers Discussed: Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (Life After New Media); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordon Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces); Erving Goffman (briefly); Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken (Bodies and Mobile Media); Sherry Turkle (The Second Self / Evocative Objects); Harvey May and Greg Hearn (The Mobile Phone as Media); James Miller (The Fourth Screen: Mediatization and the Smartphone); Ian Bogost (Apple's Airpods Are an Omen); James Gilmore (Everywear: The Quantified Self and Wearable Fitness Technologies); Adam Greenfield (Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing); Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel and Tero Karppi (Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device); Michel Foucault (Technologies of the Self); Judith Butler (briefly); Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity); Daniel Palmer (iPhone Photography: Mediating Visions of Social Space).

Media, Technology & Culture 06 (3rd Edition): Infrastructural Technologies

We have already discussed the importance of paying attention to how media technologies are powerful when they are ordinary and relatively invisible. When they work like ‘appliances’ in daily life. This was the key message of McLuhan’s ‘medium theory’ as well as theories of media domestication. These perspectives tend to imagine media technologies individually: the television, the radio, the smart home assistant. They rely on an image of artefacts showing up in our home or office as specific ‘things’. As individual, user-friendly objects which extend our contact with others, or provide us with certain experiences. But these media appliances not only depend on us forgetting them as part of our daily tasks and routines. They also depend on various large-scale infrastructures, both physical and non-physical, which make their operation possible, as mediums of communication or experience.These infrastructures are also something we tend to ignore, but not because we treat these infrastructures as appliances. We tend to ignore media infrastructures because they are technical and boring; or often beyond, below, or even above our immediate reach. If we were to push the boundaries, we could point to all kinds of infrastructural dependencies related about by media: electrical power; water networks; or the mining or rare metals. In this episode, we focus on the internet as a technological infrastructure. This is perhaps the only case where it might make sense to refer to ‘the Internet’ as a proper noun, or a specific thing, with the ‘the’ and capitalised ‘I’. Thinking of the internet as an infrastructure takes on obvious importance when we look at its history, from its inception as ARPANET, a cold war project in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, to its more complicated interweaving with other technologies and ideas in subsequent years. While many still tend to describe the internet as an intangible or ‘virtual’ space, we will show that it in fact material, physical, fragile, environmentally consequential, and the focus of many political and economic struggles.

Thinkers Discussed: Lisa Parks (‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Towards a Theory of Media Infrastructures); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Jo Pierson (Digital Platforms as Entangled Infrastructures: Addressing Public Values and Trust in Messaging Apps); John Durham Peters (The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media); Michel Callon (Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay); Susan Leigh-Star (The Ethnography of Infrastructure); Manuel Castells (The Internet Galaxy); Lori Emerson (Other Networks); Laura DeNardis (The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch / Hidden Levers of Internet Control: An Infrastructure-Based Theory of Internet Governance); Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle (The Internet of Things); Joana Moll (CO2GLE); Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing).

Media, Technology & Culture 05 (3rd Edition): Computational Technologies

Most people know very well that social and cultural transformations are complex. And yet, we often seem prepared to think of individual media as bringing change. We believe that there was a situation before this or that media, and then another situation after. Sometimes there are worries about this subsequent situation; or nostalgia for how things were before. In other instances, people wager hope that novel media might bring positive or empowering changes. When media technologies are seen as transformative, they have often been described as ‘new media’. The term ‘new media’ began to acquire some currency in the 1960s, in the age of television. But its use exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Why? Many used the term around this time to refer to a broad range of emerging media, often without giving its precise meaning. It was used to encompass the internet, interactivity, multimedia, mobile devices, user-generated content, and more. Some scholars observed, however, that all of these various new media had something in common: their relationship with the longer-term and more general development of the computer as a media technology. The computer was not just another individual media technology. Rather, it embodied the emerging backbone for potentially all mediated communication and experience. In this episode, we look at how this argument is exemplified by the work of digital media theorist Lev Manovich, who suggests that what makes new media ‘new’ is its creation, storage, distribution and display via the language (i.e. software code) and hardware of digital computation. On a basic level, computational media all share a basic metabolism of binary code: ultimately describable with nothing more than 1s and 0s. The question, however, is broader than this: beyond previous media formats becoming absorbed into the medium of the computer, are we seeing the rise of a specifically ‘computational’ culture?

Thinkers Discussed: Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media / Software Takes Command); Mark B.N. Hansen (New Philosophy for New Media); Alexander Galloway (The Interface Effect); Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Remediation: Understanding New Media); Jonathan Sterne (Analog); Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda (A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective); Lewis Mumford (Authoritarian and Democratic Technics); Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism); Laine Nooney (The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal); Jennifer Light (When Computers Were Women); Mar Hicks (Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing); Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (Personal Dynamic Media); David Berry (Against Remediation).

Media, Technology & Culture 04 (3rd Edition): Live Technologies

It is often said that media technologies provide us with a window on the world, beyond our own experience. A window not only connecting us to distant or past worlds, beyond our immediate reach, but also to worlds we feel can join into, and share simultaneously. One term for describing how media afford this latter window on the world is ‘liveness’. The word ‘live’ might most immediately bring to mind live news coverage: journalism that is valued because it’s on location, at the event, brought to you the viewer live. But liveness is not just live coverage, whether that be of breaking news, sports or a programme like the Academy Awards. It refers to a more basic quality of mediated experience: that of placing a priority on the value of ‘now’ over later. In this episode, we explore liveness first via a vignette into the experiences of broadcast journalists covering the prison transfer of presumed Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who along with their viewers, abruptly found themselves witnessing a televised murder. From there, we will consider different approaches to liveness. These approaches have in the past been rooted in the study of radio and television. But the streaming comments, images and increasingly video of social media platforms clearly demand we revive and reimagine the concept to understand new kinds of networked real-time-like or live experience.

Thinkers Discussed: Karin Van Es (Liveness Redux: On Media and their Claim to be Live / The Future of Live); Philip Auslander (Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture); Nick Couldry (Liveness, 'Reality', and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone); Annie Van den Oever (The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and their Dialectics); Joshua Meyrowitz (No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior); Paddy Scannell (Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation); Ludmilla Lupinacci (Phenomenal Algorhythms: The Sensorial Orchestration of ‘Real Time’ in Social Media); Esther Weltevrede, Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz (The Politics of Real-Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines).

Media, Technology & Culture 03 (3rd Edition): Domesticated Technologies

By now, you will have noticed we are not spending much if any time trying to understand media technologies in isolation. Instead, we have been and will keep putting media technologies into the settings on which they depend as well as help shape. One prominent academic concept for scholars seeking to understand media technologies in such settings is that of ‘domestication’. This refers to how media technologies – and really technologies in general – become more and more adapted to fit into everyday life. Sure, when media technologies are new, they tend to be seen as disruptive or threatening. But in time, they usually become just another ‘appliance’ used in our everyday existence, something utterly unremarkable, ordinary, even boring. In this episode, we consider this by exploring how the phonograph and early radio were intimately incorporated into social practices, structures and places, in the process shaping the nature of the media technologies themselves. Along the way, we will also consider the more recent arrival of newer digital technologies, such as smart speaker assistants and streaming services based on recommendation systems. Is a concept like domestication fit for purpose when it comes to understanding ubiquitous, algorithmically- and data-driven digital media technologies?

Thinkers Discussed: Martin Heidegger (briefly); Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life / Domesticating Domestication); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-games); Lisa Gitelman (Always Already New); Alexander G. Weheliye (Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity); Shaun Moores (Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society); Stuart Hall (Encoding and Decoding); Paddy Scannell (Radio, Television and Modern Life); Michel Foucault (briefly); Saba Rebecca Brause and Grant Blank (Externalized Domestication: Smart Speaker Assistants, Networks and Domestication Theory); Ignacio Siles Johan Espinoza-Rojas, Adrián Naranjo, and María Fernanda Tristán (The Mutual Domestication of Users and Algorithmic Recommendations on Netflix).

Media, Technology and Culture 02 (3rd Edition): Located Technologies

A conventional narrative in many historical accounts about the arrival of new media technologies is that media technologies have oftentimes made possible forms of communication in which physical co-presence is less and less necessary. Early media technologies like print allowed for unprecedented communication across distance, albeit with a time lag. But as time has gone on, mediated communication at a distance has become increasingly instantaneous. These kinds of narratives feed into a popular imaginary of media technologies progressively disconnecting us from localities or places. In this episode, we explore an alternative way to think about this: for sure, media technologies radically alter how we experience time, space and distance. Yet when we look a little closer, we can see that media technologies – in how we encounter them, in their sheer materiality – always depend on local circumstances.

Thinkers discussed: Harold Innis (The Bias of Communication); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Myth); Doreen Massey and David Harvey (briefly); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); David Morley (Communications and Mobility); John Thompson (The Media and Modernity); Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer (The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network); Jonathan Sterne (Thinking with James Carey); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form).

Media, Technology and Culture 01 (3rd Edition): Cultural Technologies

Technological talk is everywhere nowadays. All manner of novel developments, good or ill, are associated with the supposed impact of technology. But when we invoke the term ‘technology’, whether in relation to media or in general, just what do we mean anyway? Do technologies drive human history? Or are technologies just tools, extending deeper social, economic, political or cultural structures? In this introductory episode, we consider different scholarly takes on how we might understand and conceptualise media as technologies. We start with one of the most famous ‘technological’ understandings of media: that of Marshall McLuhan, whose catchphrase ‘the medium is the message’ asserted that the historical or long-term effects of particular mediums were of greater significance than media content. Detractors of this assertion, such as cultural theorist Raymond Williams, argued McLuhan’s brand of ‘technological determinism’ put forward a crude and politically naive way of understanding media culture. As we'll see, though, the most useful position is probably somewhere in-between: of course technologies are cultural; but culture is also inherently technological.

Thinkers discussed: Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Raymond Williams (Keywords / Culture is Ordinary / Television: Technology and Cultural Form); David Edgerton (The Shock of the Old); Ursula Franklin (The Real Life of Technology); Stephen Kline (What Is Technology?); Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto); Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time 1); N. Katharine Hayles (How We Think); Michael Litwack (Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/Insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory); Sylvia Winter;  Armond Towns (Toward a Black Media Philosophy); and Sarah Sharma, Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan).

Publicly Sited Update: New 3rd Edition of the Media, Technology and Culture podcast

In this short update, I'm announcing the new third edition of the Media, Technology and Culture podcast series coming out tomorrow. This is not a sequel of all new topics, but it is a complete re-recording with new elements and tweaks to go along with the new academic term. It also includes two refocused episodes: one on located technologies, and the other on predictive technologies.

The Mediated City 09 (Re-release): Platform Urbanism

If you have been fortunate enough to travel to new cities, in countries other than your own, it is more than likely your travels in and through this new city was mediated. Not just in the myriad ways we’ve been discussing so far in this series, but increasingly through a specific kind of media form: ‘platforms’. Your accommodation and sightseeing arranged through Airbnb or TripAdvisor; your local travels negotiated with the help of Google Maps or Citymapper; rides hailed through Uber or Lyft; evening meal delivered via Grubhub or Just Eat. When you are in your own city or locale, you probably use some of these platforms, alongside many others. What exactly constitutes a platform, in general, and in relation to urban life specifically, is somewhat up for grabs. In this episode, we explore different perspectives on platforms as new forms of urban media, whether that be as a form of communication, a type of service, a business model, an infrastructure, or even an institution. The popularity of such platforms is clear, and it is not a stretch to say residents and visitors alike find such media useful for grappling with urban complexities. But platforms have disrupted cities too, whether that be their housing markets, transportation services or local businesses. And this disruption seems to brought forth a situation in which platforms are becoming indispensable infrastructures, and maybe even emerging institutions, of urban life.

Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Negotiating the Platform Pivot: From Participatory Digital Ecosystems to Infrastructures of Everyday Life / Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Emily West (Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly); Frank Pasquale (From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon); Jathan Sadowski (Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty); Lizzie Richardson (Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal); Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham (The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction); John Bull (Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis); Niels van Doorn (A New Institution on the Block: On Platform Urbanism and Airbnb Citizenship); Douglass C. North (Institutions); Benjamin Bratton (The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

The Mediated City 08 (Re-release): Networked Location

It’s an entirely banal and simple act for many contemporary Londoners: to type, or even dictate, an address or location into a service such as Google Maps, or Citymapper, and be presented with a series of route options: walking, cycling, public transport, driving. And not just these options, but their predicted duration, based on for instance real-time traffic data, and also, perhaps, whether the intended destination will still be open at the predicted time of arrival. User of such services do not tend to reflect on how they are being delivered this information, and when do, they more likely think about the locative service or app. It us less likely they will be aware of the considerable organisational and technical complexities involved in pinpointing geographic location, or the other urban data which allows the city to appear digitally in these ways. In this episode, we explore the complexities involved in the networking of urban location, including but also beyond such simple acts of digitalised, mobile navigation. We will also think through how, experientially, we know urban locations or places via an increasingly digital and networked technological background, including for example search engines, neighbourhood social media, or the act of taking selfies. Such technologies are part of longstanding processes of technological change, through which we have learned and relearned to care for where we are, our place, in the city.

Thinkers discussed: William Gibson (Neuromancer); Mark Graham, Matthew Zook and Andrew Boulton (Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code); Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”); Matthew Wilson (Location-Based Services, Conspicuous Mobility, and the Location-Aware Future); Jordan Frith and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Jordan Frith (Smartphones as Locative Media); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Rowan Wilken (Communication Infrastructures and the Contest over Location Positioning); Gerard Goggin (Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life); Shaun Moores (Media, Place and Mobility / Digital Orientations: Non-Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-Representational Theories of Practice); Germaine Halegoua (The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)