Category: media theory

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A dream of an algorithm – Agnieszka Zimolag

Photo by: Agnieszka Zimolag
Photo by: Agnieszka Zimolag

A compelling piece on the Institute of Network Cultures‘ “long forms” website by Agnieszka Zimolag entitled “A dream of an algorithm” explores “our” relation to “technology, or (to my mind) technics as the co-constitutional (and originary [not essential]) relation between what we call, in common sense terms, “the human” and”technology”.

Technology is my reflection. Just as if I never see myself unless I look in the mirror, the same goes for technology. Once I plug, once i turn on the devices, I look at my comforting reflection, I can finally become one with my own image. The perception of the self becomes a continuum, a reassurance of my own existence. Zimolag

It’s a beautiful essay and well worth reading/ looking at in full – the images are lovely and there’s some thoughtful prose reflecting upon this relation. I guess where I’d differ from Zimolag is her implied assertion that the technology, what it does/can do somehow comes after ‘the human’; that technology does something to “us” (humans) that alters us. I can see why, in the face of rapid technological change, we might figure things in this way. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to insist that there never was a “human” somehow separate from “technology”. We have an ‘aporetic origin’ in Derrida & Stiegler’s terms, we continually perform the coming to being of “the human”.

As I’ve observed elsewhere, the theory of technogenesis offered by a range of anthropologists and philosophers is the idea that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other. Humans are irreducibly distinct because of the reflexive transmission of complex cultures made possible by technics and the ‘exteriorization’ of thought. Both Stiegler and Derrida argue that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior: our conscious self-knowledge is only possible with the ability to exteriorize thought as a trace, commonly as language and gesture. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin as a paradox: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, p. 141).

Technics can be thought of as a technogenetic ‘double-bind’ between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’. The interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted and continue to be so.

In opposing ‘technology’ and ‘the human’, the apparently immaterial ‘algorithm’ and apparently concrete human, we either oppose technically mediated experience to other forms of experience or we oppose our technical life to other, apparently ‘natural’, forms of exis- tence. Either way, we risk reasserting old, problematic binaries: human/technology and nature/society.

To bring this back to ‘algorithms’ and their devices, following Zimolag – they are not our ‘others’. these technologies discussed and depicted in Zimolag’s beautiful essay are materially of and with us, they are perhaps not so much the ‘reflection’ she asserts (above) but rather a mirror that we ourselves have crafted through which to look upon ourselves, but, precisely in doing so, the “we” is irrevocably altered to include the mirror. The knowledge born from coming to know our own images, in Zimolag’s metaphor, is irreducibly tied to technics.

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Behaviourism, productivity & the ‘quantified self’

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Steven Poole, in the New Statesman, on “How the craze for Apple Watches, Fitbits and other wearable tech devices revives the old and discredited science of behaviourism“:

Arguably, this authoritarian strand of behaviourist thinking is what morphed into the subtly reinforcing “choice architecture” of nudge politics, which seeks gently to compel citizens to do the right thing (eat healthy foods, sign up for pension plans) by altering the ways in which such alternatives are presented.

By contrast, the Apple Watch, the Pavlok and their ilk revive a behaviourism evacuated of all social concern and designed solely to optimise the individual customer. By ­using such devices, we voluntarily offer ourselves up to a denial of our voluntary selves, becoming atomised lab rats, to be manipulated electronically through the corporate cloud. It is perhaps no surprise that when the founder of American behaviourism, John B Watson, left academia in 1920, he went into a field that would come to profit very handsomely indeed from his skills of manipulation – advertising. Today’s neo-behaviourist technologies promise to usher in a world that is one giant Skinner Box in its own right: a world where thinking just gets in the way, and we all mechanically press levers for food pellets.

Echoes a common trope of theorising “subjectiv(is)ation” as a process (often labelled “neoliberal”, for good value) that gets done to a being/person… which gets entangled in an all-encompassing ‘labour theory of value’ but that’s a longer discussion…

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CFP> “Countercultures of Data” – Special Issue of Philosophy & Technology

Another interesting CFP and goodness knows this needs doing(!) I look forward to seeing what comes of this, should be great!

CFP: “COUNTERCULTURES OF DATA” – SPECIAL ISSUE OF PHILOSOPHY & TECHNOLOGY

Call for Papers for Philosophy and Technology’s special issue on Countercultures of Data

Guest Editor – Anna Lauren Hoffmann, School of Information – University of California, Berkeley

Journal cover featuring white text on blue backgroundAbout the Issue
25 years ago, Sandra Harding–in her influential book Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives–detailed and extended critical debates surrounding knowledge production and practices in science and technology. Collectively, these “countercultures of science” confronted the “problematics, agendas, ethics, and consequences” of scientific and technological production head on. Today, these same perspectives offer insight into the realm of data science, as philosophers, scholars, and practitioners alike grapple with ethical questions in a world where discourse, design, and governance increasingly revolve around “big” data and quantifiable knowledge.

This special issue will bring together rigorous conceptual and theoretical perspectives on what might best be called–following Harding–emerging “countercultures of data.” In particular, this issue will further critical and philosophical thinking about the theories, methods, institutions, and technological arrangements that underwrite or support data science in various industries and forms. Combined, contributions to the special issue will put forward a more realistic assessment of possible futures for a data driven world.

We invite submissions related (but not limited) to:

– Race and Data Science
– Theories of Property, Labor, and Data
– Political Economies of Data
– Data and Imperialism
– Feminist Perspectives on Data Science
– Data, Bodies, and Disability
– Data, Infrastructure, and the Environment
– Data, Philosophy, and the Law
– Communities and Data
– Data and Queer Subjects
– Data and/as Human Subjects in Research
– Data Science and Epistemic Justice

Timetable for Submissions
October 24, 2016: Deadline for paper submissions
December 21, 2016: Deadline reviews papers
February 6, 2017: Deadline revised papers
2017: Publication of the special issue

Submission Details
To submit a paper for this special issue, authors should go to the journal’s Editorial Manager http://www.editorialmanager.com/phte/
The author (or a corresponding author for each submission in case of co- authored papers) must register into EM.

The author must then select the special article type: “COUNTERCULTURES OF DATA” from the selection provided in the submission process. This is needed in order to assign the submissions to the Guest Editor.

Submissions will then be assessed according to the following procedure:
New Submission => Journal Editorial Office => Guest Editor(s) => Reviewers => Reviewers’ Recommendations => Guest Editor(s)’ Recommendation => Editor-in-Chief’s Final Decision => Author Notification of the Decision. (The process will be reiterated in case of requests for revisions.)

About the Journal
The journal addresses the expanding scope and unprecedented impact of technologies, in order to improve the critical understanding of the conceptual nature and practical consequences, and hence provide the conceptual foundations for their fruitful and sustainable developments. The journal welcomes high-quality submissions, regardless of the tradition, school of thought or disciplinary background from which they derive. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief is Luciano Floridi (Oxford).

Contact
For any further information please contact: Anna Lauren Hoffmann – annalauren [at] berkeley [dot] edu

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CFP> Feminist Media Studies Special issue on Online Misogyny: Call for papers

I saw this on Twitter via Huw Davies last night. Looks like a really interesting call:

Feminist Media StudiesSpecial issue on Online Misogyny: Call for papers

Deadline: 1 October 2016

Edited by Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera

In recent years, online misogyny has become a major concern for women. As a new wave of feminist / female bloggers, journalists, activists and gamers have attempted to assert their presence on the internet, there has been a concerted backlash against both feminism and women generally. This special issue of Feminist Media Studies seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. How have the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses been transformed by the technological affordances of the internet and social media? How are they being articulated and reproduced in diverse cultural contexts and / or transnationally? Are they borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism or to what extent do they articulate a different constellation of social, cultural and gender-political factors?

Despite growing social concern about online misogyny, discussion and debate of this issue has been primarily journalistic to date. Moreover, the focus has been strongly western-/anglo-centric, and has tended to revolve around certain ‘flashpoint’ events. There is a need, therefore, for greater representation of how this phenomenon operates globally across contexts from non-anglophone, technologically advanced cultures to countries in the Global South. It is important to ask, for example, how internet access and local gender landscapes complicate our understanding of this subject. In addition to the more high-profile, anonymous attacks covered by the western media, there are also reports of intimate partner and acquaintance abuse online, which often takes the form of ‘revenge porn’ or unauthorized distribution of sexts by men known to their victims. Moreover, misogyny can and does operate in the more formal contexts of the technology sector. All of these examples should alert us to the importance of progressing academic inquiry on this issue not from a point at which we assume online misogyny to be a stable, recognisable phenomenon but rather by inviting contributions that will expand current knowledge and understanding beyond western experiences, gender-political contexts and epistemological frameworks.

What is significant about all of these phenomena is their very real impact on the lives and safety of real women, as well as their success in deterring women from expressing their opinions or putting their work online. Despite this, online misogyny remains under-researched in academia (Jane, 2014). There have, however, been important activist interventions such as #everydaysexism and #freethenipple as well as a raft of feminist groups organizing online to highlight and challenge misogyny. Given that activists, journalists, gamers and filmmakers have effectively led this charge, we consider it important to ask whether these new, more popular expressions of digital feminism are reaching new audiences and shaping new publics, and what impact this might have on theoretical understandings of feminism. Moreover, while it is important to consider the new misogyny in relation to older theorisations of anti-feminism (Faludi, 1991; Kimmel, 1995; Messner, 1997), it is also crucial to build reflexive criticism into narratives that have hitherto excluded non-western cultures as well as other, related forms of online hate speech such as racism, homophobia and transphobia.

Online Misogyny aims to give this increasingly important area of enquiry the impetus, attention and theoretical cohesion it requires. The increasingly amorphous and anonymous nature of online misogyny and the fluid and dynamic nature of online communication pose considerable challenges for data capture and analysis, and we expect methodological innovation to be a key element of this special issue. We also hope to publish at least one contribution from an activist, artist or non-academic.

Possible topics in relation to this theme may include (but are not limited to):

  • Online misogyny and feminist media theorisations
  • Forms of online misogyny  (including threats, abuse, ‘revenge porn’, creepshots, sexting, slut-shaming, technology-enabled intimate partner and acquaintance violence, and others)
  • Sites and contexts of online misogyny
  • Discourses and visuality of online misogyny
  • Global contexts and online misogyny
  • Transnational travel / global pathways of misogyny
  • Online misogyny’s articulations with racism, homophobia and transphobia
  • Technological affordances: the role of algorithims, anonymity, governance, technical design, platform politics, etc.
  • Social, political and personal impact of online misogyny
  • Women’s / feminist responses to online misogyny
  • Performative responses to online misogyny
  • The role of social media corporations and community managers
  • Workplace and institutional misogyny: misogyny in the technology / gaming / journalism sectors
  • Legislation and corporate policy
  • Digitally networked publics: the impact of online misogyny on democracy and the public sphere
  • Online misogyny and the post-feminist context

Aims & Scope
Feminist Media Studies provides a transdisciplinary, transnational forum for researchers pursuing feminist approaches to the field of media and communication studies, with attention to the historical, philosophical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions and analysis of sites including print and electronic media, film and the arts, and new media technologies. The journal invites contributions from feminist researchers working across a range of disciplines and conceptual perspectives.

Peer Review Policy
All research articles in this journal undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymous refereeing by at least two scholars.
Submission Instructions

Please submit a 350-word abstract as well as a short (1-page) CV to Debbie Ging (debbie.ging(at)dcu.ie) and Eugenia Siapera (eugenia.siapera(at)dcu.ie) by 1st October 2016. Authors whose abstracts are selected will be notified by 15th January 2017 and asked to submit complete manuscripts by 15th June 2017. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication of the paper, which will be subject to peer review.

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Algorithms and their others, or disciplining ‘algorithm studies’

Canny commentator and provocateur Prof. Paul Dourish has a relatively recent piece in the journal Big Data & Society concerning the fashion for ‘algorithm studies’, the definitional wrangling that has ensued (i.e. people arguing over what the word means) and some proposals for what he suggests is an alternative approach

“which might put aside the question of what an algorithm is as a topic of conceptual study and instead adopt a strategy of seeking out and under- standing algorithms as objects of professional practice for computer scientists, software engineers, and system developers.” (p. 9)

Dourish proposes a kind of Foucauldian STS-style strategy for sketching out what Doreen Massey might call the ‘geometries of power‘ of specific instances of what gets called algorithms, and what kinds of power the idea of ‘algorithm’ does or doesn’t have in those (for want of a better term) institutional assemblages.

The article is an incisive and authoritative overview of the contemporary interdisciplinary debates around ‘algorithms’ and deftly outlines the frictions and tensions between the current fashion for ‘algorithms’ and the other terms that may or may not be important to the study of the phenomena we mean when we use that word. In this case Dourish offers some discussion of (software) architecture, automation, code, (big) data structures, and programs. This is a really thoughtful exposition of the stakes of the debate and a level-headed attempt at moving on the discussion. Useful interlocutors (to my mind) throughout are Alexander Galloway and Adrian Mackenzie, references to whose work are present at key points in Dourish’s discussion. This is a really clear article and probably should be an essential read for those concerning themselves with ‘algorithms’.

A really important point, which isn’t often considered, that Dourish makes very clearly is that:

One reason that an algorithm can be hard to recover from a program is that there is a lot in a pro- gram that is not ”the algorithm” (or ”an algorithm”). The residue is machinic, for sure; it is procedural, it involves the stepwise execution of one instruction followed by another, and it follows all the rules of layout, control flow, state manipulation, and access rights that shape any piece of code. But much of it is not actually part of the – or any – algorithm.
…

An algorithm may express the core of what a program is meant to do, but that core is surrounded by a vast penumbra of ancillary operations that are also a program’s respon- sibility and also manifest themselves in the program’s code. In other words, while everything that a program does and that code expresses is algorithmic in the sense that it is specified in advance by formalization, it is not algorithm, in the sense that it goes beyond things that algorithms express, or even what the term ”algorithm” signals as a term of professional practice. (p.4)

I suppose the one point of caution I’d suggest is that while excellent, Dourish’s article highlights to me the narrowness of the discussion – the relative closeness (and perhaps closed-ness) of those involved and the ways in which ‘discipline’ (and I suppose, then, ‘authority’) might thereby becoming enacted. Indeed, following Dourish’s strategy it might be (ironically) interesting to chart the forms  of ‘professional practice’ through which ‘algorithm studies’ take place. The list of people and institutions Dourish acknowledges at the close of his article offer a possible starting point…

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Another AAG CFP: work & digital stuff

Following on from the proposed AAG annual conference 2017 sessions on ‘robots’, there’s another proposed set of sessions about labour/work and ‘the digital’… all the de rigueur concepts are in there*, yet it strikes me as a weird curious distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘human’, but there you go…

Tbh, readers of this blog have probably already seen the CFP but – anyway the whole thing is on Prof. Gillian Rose’s blog… Here’s a snippet:

digital \\ human \\ labour | session at AAG conference 2017

With Mark Graham and Jim Thatcher, I’m convening four sessions at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers, which will be held in Boston, 5-9 April 2017.  The tile of the sessions is digital \\ human \\ labour, and here is the call for papers:

The proposed Digital Geographies Working Group of the RGS/IBG and the proposed Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG would like to invite submissions to a series of paper sessions and panels for the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. Reflecting the shared interests of these groups, and their mutual desire to facilitate conversations between a wide range of geographical scholarship, this call is for papers exploring specifically the various intersections of ‘digital’, ‘human’ and ‘labour’.

We will also convene a concluding panel session, and encourage interested participants to submit abstracts for any of these three paper sessions:

1 the human labour of digital work
…
2 the digital labour of being human
…
3 the algorithmic labour of being
…

Read the whole CFP on Visual/Method/Culture.

 

* mais tout va très bien madame la marquise.

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New book: Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

Saw this via Twitter:

Looks interesting, includes chapters from Johanna Drucker, Katherine Hayles and  Bernard Stiegler…

Blurb:

Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

edited by Roberto Simanowski

digital-humanities-and-digital-media_cover_200x300.jpg

There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin, will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud. Permanent recording and automatic sharing will provide unabridged memory, both shareable and analyzable. The digitization of everything will allow for comprehensive quantification; predictive analytics and algorithmic regulation will prove themselves effective and indispensable ways to govern modern mass society. Given such prospects, it is neither too early to speculate on the possible futures of digital media nor too soon to remember how we expected it to develop ten, or twenty years ago.

The observations shared in this book take the form of conversations about digital media and culture centered around four distinct thematic fields: politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art and aesthetics, as well as media literacy and education. Among the keywords discussed are: data mining, algorithmic regulation, sharing culture, filter bubble, distant reading, power browsing, deep attention, transparent reader, interactive art, participatory culture. The interviewees (mostly from the US, but also from France, Brazil, and Denmark) were given a set of common questions as well specific inquiries tailored to their individual areas of interest and expertise. As a result, the book both identifies different takes on the same issues and enables a diversity of perspectives when it comes to the interviewees’ particular concerns.

Among the questions offered to everybody were: What is your favored neologism of digital media culture? If you could go back in history of new media and digital culture in order to prevent something from happening or somebody from doing something, what or who would it be? If you were a minister of education, what would you do about media literacy? What is the economic and political force of personalization and transparency in digital media and what is its personal and cultural cost? Other recurrent questions address the relationship between cyberspace and government, the Googlization, quantification and customization of everything, and the culture of sharing and transparency. The section on art and aesthetics evaluates the former hopes for hypertext and hyperfiction, the political facet of digital art, the transition from the “passive” to “active” and from “social” to “transparent reading”; the section on media literacy discusses the loss of deep reading, the prospect of “distant reading” and “algorithmic criticism” as well as the response of the university to the upheaval of new media and the expectations or misgivings towards the rise of the Digital Humanities.

Contents

Roberto Simanowski Introduction

Johanna Drucker At the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities

John Cayley Of Capta, vectoralists, reading and the Googlization of universities

Erick Felinto Mediascape, antropotechnics, culture of presence, and the flight from God

David Golumbia Computerization always promotes centralization even as it promotes decentralization

Ulrik Ekman Network Societies 2.0: The extension of computing into the social and human environment

Mihai Nadin Enslaved by digital technology

Nick Montfort Self-monitoring and corporate interests

Rodney Jones The age of print literacy and ‘deep critical attention’ is filled with war, genocide and environmental devastation

Diane Favro, Kathleen Komar, Todd Presner, Willeke Wendrich Surfing the web, algorithmic criticism and Digital Humanities

N. Katherine Hayles Opening the depths, not sliding on surfaces

Jay David Bolter From writing space to designing mirrors

Bernard Stiegler Digital knowledge, obsessive computing, short-termism and need for a negentropic Web

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Reblog> Yuk Hui @digital_objects at Birkbeck on ‘For a Realism of Relations: The Case of Digital Objects’

via Scott Rodgers –

Yuk Hui – For a Realism of Relations: The Case of Digital ObjectsThe Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck is pleased to welcome Yuk Hui on 17 June, 2016 (3pm to 4pm in the Birkbeck Cinema)

In this talk, Yuk Hui will discuss his recent book On the Existence of Digital Objects, which is an investigation of digital objects in light of the proliferation of computational ontologies, and situates this phenomenon within both the history of philosophy and computation. This central thesis of the book is to develop a theory of relations in order to understand objects and to politicize the existence of digital objects, by drawing from Simondon, Heidegger and Husserl.

The talk will be followed by a response from Vasari Research Centre director Joel McKim and a Q&A with the audience.

Yuk Hui is currently research associate at the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of Leuphana University Lüneburg; previous to that, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He is editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/yuk-hui-for-a-realism-of-relations-the-case-of-digital-objects-tickets-25647236575

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Reblog> Bite Size Theory [on the presence/absence of mobile phones]

via Pop Theory:

“The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional worlds is going to be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Because so much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them, with getting people together in the same room or holding them apart. If, all of a sudden, everyone has access to more or less everyone else – electronic access, that is – what becomes of all that plotting?”John Coetzee, in Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, 2013, Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011.

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Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission – Deborah Withers

I don’t really know why I haven’t seen this before today(?!) but just wanted to flag this really interesting book by Deborah Withers, which I will be ordering ASAP…

Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission argues that despite the prevalence of generational narratives within feminism, the technical processes through which knowledge is transmitted across generations remain unexplored. Taking Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the already-there as its starting point the book considers how the politics of transmission operates within digital culture. It argues that it is necessary to re-orient feminism’s political project within what is already-there so that it may respond to an emergent feminist tradition.Grounded in the author’s work collecting and interpreting the music-making heritage of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, it explores how digital technologies have enabled empassioned amateurs to make ‘archives’ within the first decade of the 21st century. The book reflects on what is technically and politically at stake in the organization and transmission of digital artifacts, and explores what happens to feminist cultural heritage when circuits shut down, stall or become diverted.

And here’s some praise from Patrick Crogan, whose opinion I trust:

A substantial, judicious, and highly effective mobilisation of key tenets of Stiegler’s work pertaining to memory, technology, and cultural transmission. Withers develops a cogent political reformulation of questions of memory, heritage, and archival matters of preservation and access in the digital age in this book project. Her use of Stiegler is central to this, and indeed represents an important introduction to his philosophical critique of the digital mediated world to an area where his ideas have particular relevance but are under-represented.

Patrick Crogan, Associate Professor of Digital Cultures, University of the West of England