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Panel Title: "@Home (and Not @Home)" Panel Desription: For scholars of new media, "cyberspace" has been one of the guiding metaphors for the description of online and computer-mediated experience. Yet, sadly, this work rarely considers the more fully spatial dimensions of computer use and experience (particularly the material setting/site--mobile or stationary--where one goes "on-line") . While cyberspace is clearly an imagined space, Gibson's "consensual hallucination," digital media culture traverses many real, physical, and multifaceted cultural spaces as well. This panel explores the continuum of domesticity and mobility as a route to clearer thinking about cyberspace. In so doing, we hope to expand the range of what "counts" in a study of new media. If people are logging on from home, then we need to understand more about what exactly the home is in our current moment. If people increasingly make use of digital media as instruments of mobility, what conditions organize or make possible that mobility? The three papers comprising the panel are interested in facilitating discussion about the relation of "internet"- and cyber-technology to current conceptions and formations of house and home as well as to the condition of being "away from home" (or "not at home") and to forms of mobility at and away from home. James Hay's paper will serve as an introduction to the panel's other two papers by rethinking the relevance of Raymond Williams' conception of "mobile privatization" to the digital household (the "smart house") and by considering the relation of new and residual media to domesticity, privacy, security, and mobility. Jonathan Sterne's paper examines the ways in which new media users reorganize their own domestic space around a practice traditionally understood as outside the bounds of domesticity: home recording. He argues that home recording is part of a longer historical process where media practices help to define and redefine domesticity. Mark Andrejevic's paper directs attention to the role of digital technologies in the formation of domesticity and privacy in places that have been and continue to be understood as public and/or away from home. His paper is particularly interested in how these technologies have been deployed in order to facilitate zones of familiarity and comfort that also operate as zones of surveillance and social control.Papers:
This paper focuses on "wearable" computing, in order to re-literalize the spatial metaphor of surfing. Forms of street furniture such as "smart" billboards, bus stops, vending machines, parking meters, etc., allow us to surf physical space, but only to the extent that we are equipped with mobile smart technology. Superimposing virtual space onto real space requires not just that the physical world becomes "interactive," but that our own interactivity becomes virtualized: smart clothes, glasses, and so on will do the communicating with the awakened object world. The promise is one of domestication: we can "tag" the world with our messages (e.g., Mann's development of a device that will allow us to leave visual messages for one another in public places and that will allow us to put virtual post-its on physical objects--including people-- recognizable to the wearable computer). Andrejevic asks how these developments pertain to Walter Benjamin's conception of modernity as phantasmagoria--as commodities rising up and dancing around us and as complete externalization of the self through passive-interactive forms of surveillance: our clothes (thanks to RFID tags) "talking" to the billboards, indeed an incessant electronic chatter.
About the Author(s)Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication, Fairfield College (Univ. of Iowa, Fall 2003) Alphabetical list of papers, by author Alphabetical list of panels
Raymond Williams's account of television's emergence located television within a condition that Williams described as "mobile privatization". Hay's paper reconsiders the relevance of William's term in order to ask whether (and if so, how) "internet" technologies pertain to a new regime of mobility and privacy. As an introduction to the panel's other papers, Hay will discuss some of the past and current fashionings of house, household, and home (and of the car) in the U.S. as assemblages of media/communication technologies whose use value has developed through these technologies' imbrication in a variety of "domestic appliances" which have been integral to a new governmental rationality and moral economy of homelike. In this latter respect, Hay's paper calls attention to how these technologies have become a condition not only for "governing" house/home (an issue implied by Williams and Hay's work) and for making enhancing the productivity of homelife but also for securing house/home (an issue not addressed by Williams but that has become increasingly central to the current regimens of home-management, as well as to a governmental reasoning in the U.S. about a "home-land security"). Hay's paper argues that the recent "home-land security" policies for encouraging self-sufficient and responsible homes--new forms of citizenship and entrepreneurialism from the home--depend upon a prior technical and technological assemblage of homelife wherein "internet"-technologies came to matter.
About the Author(s)Associate Professor, Dept. of Speech Communication, Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Unit for Cinema Studies Alphabetical list of papers, by author Alphabetical list of panels
Since the explosion of cheap personal computing in the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the number of operating "home" audio recording studios. While earlier studios primarily made use of computers for MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology to manage and program synthesizers, over the last decade home studios have increasingly taken on all the functions of recording studios - from recording and editing to mixing and arranging music - and used home computers to do so. While much has been written about file-sharing as the major problematic of "Music and the Internet," this paper argues that a largely-unexamined major shift has occurred in the production and practice of music through and around the construct of the "digital home studio." To begin filling the gap, this paper tracks the mutual implications of cyberspace and domestic space in the construction of the digital home studio. It argues that in reconfiguring the home as a digital soundspace, the home studio challenges our conceptions of cyberspace as a primarily mentalist or ideational construct (i.e., "where you go when you talk on the phone"). Instead, the practices of digital home recording show us the degree to which all cyberpractices are ultimately bound up with the organization and meaning of physical spaces.
About the Author(s)Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication, University of Pittsburgh Alphabetical list of papers, by author Alphabetical list of panels
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